Since I wrote about him last year for Air Mail, I’ve been putting together a portrait of the Jean I knew, as a teenage classmate at City-as-School, and then again catching up with im a decade later. In part, it’s a question of responding to Jean’s own revisionism.
Here’s a little sample:
“Over the 1977-78 school year, Jean’s CAS career went downhill. He was stoned even more of the time and stayed above water in only two classes.—each term we took four or five. An advisor described Jean ‘the darling bad boy’ of CAS; he didn’t expect that there would be a point of no return beyond forgiveness. Early in June, as graduation day approached, he was dismissed from CAS. He had been there two years, which was as long as any student was supposed to be, and he was still far short of the credits needed to graduate.
On CAS graduation day later in June 1978 came an incident cited over and over again in profiles of Jean—Jean himself cited it as the reason he left CAS. I refer to him throwing a whipped cream pie at CAS principal Fred Koury. Jean subsequently spun that incident, recalling that after that ‘there was no point in going back.’ But he had already been dismissed.
Jean’s fury is understandable, but Koury, although a feisty character was by no means an enemy. Personally, I liked him. He was discretely, but not furtively gay. He liked ballet. I would discuss ballet performances he’d seen twenty years earlier. As it turned out, Jean in fact did go back the day after he threw the pie. Approaching a sympathetic CAS advisor: he ‘was very solicitous’ she recalled. She suggested he go in and speak to Koury. ‘I’m sorry I hurt your eyes,’ Jean said to him. It remained a sore spot, a tender memory with Koury, who never mentioned it again to her; as a champion of Jean, ‘I was in a funny position,’ she told me.”