The Westborough Crusaders and the Boy Who Wrote It Down

In 1982, a sixteen-year-old boy in the Midwest sat down and wrote eight episodes of a television series about teenagers running a school newspaper. The characters drank in darkrooms. They brought guns to school. They had bone cancer and absent fathers and substance abuse problems that no adult in the building knew how to address. One of them wore orange overalls and ordered a razor from a magazine that promised to scrape away the dead sensuality, uncovering your natural, animal instincts. The blades cost seventy-nine dollars and eighty-eight cents. The razor cost three dollars and eighty-seven cents. That detail is the kind of thing only a teenager would write, because only a teenager understands the specific economics of being cheated by the adult world before you are old enough to know the word for it.

That boy was me. And for over four decades, those scripts sat in a drawer, and then in a file, and then in the particular purgatory of work that matters to its author but has not yet found its form.

Today I want to talk about what happens when you go back.