October 6, 2007 (revised February 15, 2008)
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After my parents had driven me to Henning University and helped me move into Spruger Hall that day in September '79, they dragged me down to the lobby and insisted I genuflect with them before my father's picture. They always called it his picture, as if he were the only one in it. It was a nine-by-twelve, black-and-white photo that hung near the snack machine and showed the dorm's ribbon-cutting ceremony from 1955.
The dorm was named after the school's most famous graduate, Ed Spruger, a.k.a. Professor Balderdash, that radio comedian famous for maybe four seconds in the 1940s. ("You pass, Fenton!" was his big catchphrase, if anyone remembers.) In the photo, Spruger holds an oversized pair of scissors about to cut an oversized ribbon attached to two of those velvet-rope poles from movie theaters. To his right stands my father, the first student assigned to live in this dorm. My father wears a merciless crewcut, a baggy blazer, and a tie that looks like regurgitated linguini. He's only 18 but looks older that the middle-aged nobodies surrounding him, including Spruger. Everyone smiles for the camera.
"Your father looked so handsome then," my mother said.
"Cut the crap," my father said.
Gerald's parents had attended that school; they wanted to start a family tradition and thus gave him no choice about attending. He himself decided to attend only because the school's 220 miles from home.
After his parents leave, he meets his roommate Peyton Hunt, a player on the university lacrosse team. Peyton used to play lacrosse in high school. He also used to drink heavily.
"I'm on the wagon," he told me. "Drinking was affecting my performance on the field, and not for the better."
I didn't drink, either. I don't know why. I might have fit in better if I'd boozed it up regularly. Or had done drugs. Almost everyone else on campus drank or did drugs or both, student and faculty alike. In fact, it was unwritten school policy not to hold classes on Mondays, because people needed to recover from a weekend's worth of serious partying. The weekend would start early Friday afternoon, with underage students openly sipping bottles of beer on campus, specifically on the quad, that rectangular patch of lush grass surrounded on each side by a graffitied sidewalk and an Eastern Bloc-style blocky building. No one drank from beer cans; bottles were more high-class.
I attended a few parties with Peyton my first month there, off-campus bashes in cramped apartments, the same few rock records blaring: Jay Stone, Gunter Haze, Westfield Junction, the soundtrack to Move It and Groove It 2. Music so aggressively unmemorable that I've never even heard it on any of those basic-cable Seventies nostalgia shows my girlfriends (born in the Eighties) tend to watch for ironic laughs.
Anyway, I'd attend those parties more out of some ill-defined collegiate duty than out of any sincere interest in my fellow students. Unlike in high school, the other partygoers�the rich, good-looking ones�tended not to harass me; most of them had moved on to more mature activities such as getting wasted or chatting up potential sexual partners. Grown-ups didn't pay attention to chunky dweebs like me. Well, a few girls would stare at me with nervous smiles and walk away. I didn't even bother trying to approach those girls, even when I found them attractive; they gave off radioactive don't talk-to-me vibes.
I would leave these parties after maybe an hour, not bothering to say goodbye to Peyton, who by this time would be chatting animatedly with a group of his lacrosse teammates, a clear plastic cup of something presumably nonalcoholic clutched in his hand.
But I didn't spend all my time going to parties. No, I actually took some classes. I'd chosen each one by closing my eyes, opening the university course book at random, and stabbing at a course listing several times with my upraised middle finger like in the shower scene from Psycho. I hadn't decided on a major, so I didn't really care what classes I took as long as my parents paid for them.
The classes I took that semester:
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD GEOGRAPHY�Which meant Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia with a few Latin-American sites tossed in, apparently for racial diversity. (I never saw any non-Caucasians on or off campus.) Our instructor was this Southern expatriate in his late forties named Mr. Lembeck, whom we called Slappy because he'd pace back and forth and slap his huge potbelly more or less in rhythm. He would ogle the flat-chested girls in class, particularly while recounting for the thousandth time his wife's double mastectomy and her inspirational triumph over what he called "that nasty ol' brute, the big C." The flat-chested girls would look sympathetic and rub their fingers between their lips and get A's from him, speaking of letters. I don't know what the girls really thought about him; I didn't bother asking them or even talking to them, because flat-chested girls don't appeal to me.
EARLY 20TH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE�Taught by Mrs. Tibbetts, a smiling, gray-haired granny type in plaid slacks. We spent the first half of the semester studying My Life at Stonycreek Farm, a cloying and tedious 1931 novel by one Abigail Sue Farnsworth, about this 12-year-old girl named Betsy Benjamin growing up in the Utah Territory during the 1860s, complete with a mischievous pet goose named Squawker. Mrs. Tibbetts called this book "one of the finest literary works in our young country's history." We spent the second half of the semester studying Return to Stonycreek Farm, the 1944 sequel by Farnsworth. The novel's high point was when Squawker bit the town pie-thief on the nose. Mrs. Tibbetts called this even more cloying and tedious book "just as splendid as the original." If I'd had some balls, I would have bitten her on the nose.
NATURE OF LIGHT AND SOUND�Taught by Mr. Keene, nicknamed Mr. Clean due to his bald head. I mean he was totally bald. He didn't even have facial hair, not even eyebrows or faint stubble. I heard he'd lost all his body hair in a laboratory accident in the mid-Sixties, working on some secret project for the Pentagon. I never asked him, and I don't think any of my classmates did; he gave off a mind-your-own-beeswax vibe. Anyway, he would either show black-and-white, junior-high level educational films about Mr. Light Particle and Miss Sound Wave, or drone on about how something he called "quadraparticle technology" would "radically transform life in the twenty-first century." He'd even written and self-published our textbook, a 638-page doorstop titled Sensory Synchronicity: Life in the Quadraparticle Tomorrow, but he never used it in class�just as well, since I stopped reading that jargon-clogged book around page four. I have no idea if he believed his own pseudoscientific babble, though sometimes I'd see what looked like a smirk appear on his face for a few seconds in the middle of a lecture.
COMPARATIVE ECONOMIC PHILOSOPHY�I don't remember anything about this class. I don't even remember taking it. And I can't consult my class notes to refresh my memory, if I took any notes, because I no longer have them. I threw out all my college stuff after college. Why bother keeping symbols of uselessness, or so I thought at the time.
AMERICAN GOVERNMENT�There were only three students in this class: me, Peyton, and a slightly plump redhead named Lissi Kernahan. Our instructor was this skinny guy in his early sixties named Mr. William Howard Taft. "I'm not related to the other William Howard Taft, the fattest president in American history," he told us, "but I do probably weigh about the same as one of his thighs." This remark caused Lissi to snort with amusement. She did that a lot, especially during Mr. Taft's political discussions. Well, more like political rants. He'd tell us for almost the entire class about how "bleeding-hearts" and "pinkos" and "unadulterated Communists" and "the far-left liberal news media" and "atheists" and "women's libbers" and "the homosexual fringe" and "pornographers" and "urban radicals" have "ruined this once-great nation." He always looked sad and always ranted with great reluctance. "Someone has to warn you young people about the un-American trash polluting our shores," he said, "but frankly, I'd rather be fishing." Indeed, he displayed a fish-shaped, foot-long wooden plaque on his desk that read I�D RATHER BE FISHING in goofy black letters. (The fish looked off to Mr. Taft�s right, appropriately enough.) But even those goofy black letters couldn�t cheer up our instructor. He was genuinely despondent over what he saw as this country's "terminal condition," which almost made me feel guilty for making fun of him after class, when Peyton and I would ask each other in bad Russian accents what we'd done that day to hasten the overthrow-ski of the wretched capitalist regime-ski.
TO BE CONTINUED
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I have changed the name Mr. Shaft to Mr. Taft, because the former name was too humorously appropriate, considering his involvement with someone later in the story. I tend not to like humorously-appropriate names�too unchallenging, too schticky.
All right, the humorously-appropriate names Charles Dickens created did have some verve. Who can fail to like monikers such as Mr. Grindnuts or Miss Lovesplooge or Reverend Gaystroker?--DVM, 2/6/08
Toga! Toga! Hot sex...in your mind with the various unattainable campus hotties! Selling out and changing your liberal arts major to business! Dressing in business casual and chuckling over Ann Coulter's latest witticism!...Fiction, Home.
� 2006-2008 David V. Matthews