Try Not to Catch Their Recklessness
The impossible lure of college-flashbacks
I was out of my mind with excitement to start college: I graduated at 17, having skipped my junior year of high school by taking extra English classes. I made a nearly-instant friend upon moving into my dorm, and the sudden blast of freedom had us high with possibility. My then-boyfriend hadn’t graduated high school yet, though he was one of those genius engineering-artsy types that fit the profile of someone who’d graduate early. When he called me that first night in the middle of our antics, my friend joked, at an ecstatic pitch, “Is that your boyfriend, the high school loser?” She grabbed the (curly-corded landline) phone from me. “Hi Loser, bye Loser!” she exclaimed into the receiver. Damien, as I call him when I write about those years, was cracking up when she returned the phone.
“I’ve never heard you so happy,” he said.
Most intoxicating about those first months was that we were all chomping at the bit to make friends. Anyone could start a conversation with anyone else, because life was new and none of us were held down by old ideas of who we were. I had tested out of basic English classes and could start reading serious literature and doing serious writing right away. Even in the daze of my first queer heartbreak and 9/11 (which happened at the same time), amid the despair of thwarted crushes and adventures with my new friends, writing fiction remained at the center of my consciousness and being. For my final short story in Undergraduate Fiction Workshop, I stayed up all night perfecting my painstakingly-crafted tale and didn’t go to sleep until after I had turned it in the moment it was due, at 3:00 in the afternoon.
But if I wasn’t in the raw mood to accomplish a task, I had difficulty motivating myself to do it. I once started a paper for Literature and Philosophical Thought at 2 in the morning on its due day, turned it in at 8am, and slept through my 10:30 class. I got a B+ on that paper. When I advise students to give themselves plenty of time to get things done, more than you think you need, then twice as much as that, I’m thinking about moments like these.
My professors were always present and human with us; no one had any illusions that their particular class was at the forefront of our minds when we awoke to breakfast on cold pizza or when we went to sleep right as the birds started singing. But I was also fortunate in my classmates, who kept lively discussions going about Rennassaince literature and the rhetorical messages of masculinity and the body in Rambo. Outside of class, my stoner friends ignited winding discussions about the purpose of living and never-ending debates about whether there was one, and some Cinema people I met by chance put together an installation where the viewer climbed into a glass box covered in astro-terf and a trippy film was shown inside the box. I wrote and performed erotica for the first time and participating in such readings became my thing. (Still is, by request.)
At that time, Iowa Book operated as an artsy middle ground between the revered literary icon-spot, Prairie Lights, and the more sterile University Bookstore. What made Iowa Book an invigorating place was a group of flamboyant gay men who worked there. My freshman year, I was immediately tempted by the shamelessly trashy book Boy Banned, a ceaselessly pornographic story of (surprise) a popular boy band whose members were all gay. (Its tagline: “They’re gay, they’re out, and they’re horny as hell!” Poetry.) When a manager with up-to-the-minute spiked bleached hair saw me thumbing through this singular title, he said, “I’m the one who ordered that book for the store! Are you getting it?”
“Oh, I’d like to,” I told him. “But I really shouldn’t spend the money.”
“Here, I’ll give you a discount!” he said, and whipped out a sheet of neon green 20% Off stickers. He slapped one on the corner of the cover, and of course I couldn’t refuse the book now, after such enthusiasm and generosity. I realized with a start that I could charge it to my University Bill, under the amorphous category of necessary expenses like textbooks and supplies for class.
College was also where I learned that it was okay to ask for help carrying things. Having been born with cerebral palsy, anything necessitating both hands was always essentially a no-go, even before I had the operation that left me needing to walk with crutches. Before that, I walked on my tip-toes, and my balance was, as you can imagine, not optimal. Still, the ethos of Disability Acceptance in the early 90’s was They’re Just Like Everyone Else, which is great if you’re talking about living a full life and having a wide range of interests and sexual attraction being allowed. It’s not great, however, if you can’t carry your own lunch tray. I lost many lunches to the cement in 4th and 5th grade. In college, I asked the person behind the counter in the cafeteria if someone could help me carry my tray to my table. When I thanked them, they’d always say something like, “No problem! It’s hot back there, nice to get away for a second.”
I hope my students are in for a semester that builds their confidence in unexpected ways, especially because it will inevitably rip it down in unexpected ways too. The unwitting eloquence of a freshman I had in the Writing Center last year summed this up. When I asked how his year was going, he heaved a dramatic sigh and answered, “Good but college is hard!” I concurred that it was, that it is, and added that it’s supposed to be. For years, I was embarrassed to tell anyone that I didn’t get any A’s for the first semester of my freshman year. Now, it’s a story that helps me establish college’s objective position as more challenging than high school.
I also remember a group study session the night before our Reading Short Stories final. Almost the whole class showed up to apply ourselves dilligently after hours in a carefully-chosen study room in the Student Union, but we didn’t get a damn thing done. Something about the collective company, the novelty of it since few if any of us hung out outside of class, and the darkness outside, the lateness of the hour, obliterated any of the intended quizzing and gave way to half-crazed anecdotes and you-had-to-be-there jokes. I enjoyed my time in Reading Short Stories, but I didn’t do very well on that final.
One night, a male voice called my room asking for Amy. I lived next door to an Aimee so I naturally assumed this was a friend of hers. Since our phone numbers were all prefaced the same way, a wrong number would’ve been an easy mistake, and I told him that this wasn’t her room and asked if he wanted her number. He ignored my question, though, and told me I sounded sexy and interesting, and did I have a boyfriend? I asked who this was and he told me it was Matt. I had a couple of Matts in my college life and initially laughed at this weird prank before a few more minutes sharpened my understanding that this was a creepy stranger who happened to get lucky with his sham names. Gross.
Then there was Intro to Philosophy where I apparently annoyed my aforementioned friend’s friend by “saying the most random stuff.” I’m not sure why said friend chose to inform me of this person’s complaining about having me as her classmate, but perhaps it’s because she attempted to soothe with a qualifier. “She likes you in [Reading] Short Stories. She says you’re funny in Short Stories.” Decades later, I remain confused. It was me the whole time!
I liked being on the recieving end of knowledge from those who were wiser than me and didn’t need require intimacy to impart what they knew. One afternoon in Phillips Hall, the Foreign Language building, two girls were walking down the hall chatting a mile-a-minute in French. As a classmate and I passed them, my classmate leaned in and said in a near whisper, “They’re not talking about anything. The conversation is really inane, they’re just showing off that they can go back and fourth in French.” A jolt of a lesson in the effects of smoke and mirrors, and always questioning what seems to be.
I look back on the people I idolized in college and I see a lot of issues. Part of me wishes I’d seen them at the time, part of me wishes I never did: believing that there were people in my peer group who occupied rarefied tiers of creative existence shot an effortless thrill into every day, even as I contended with the other side of that thrill, sadness that I could never measure up. When a Music major I was temporarily gone over hooked up with a friend’s friend who was visiting from out of town, I wrote reams of tearful poetry. When Damien met a boy at a party that obliterated his feelings for me (already unequal to mine for him), I sat in my room alone, heartbroken, listening to The Smiths’ “I Won’t Share You” on repeat.
Maybe such moments of heart-fracture are why I so vividly remember the fearless and charismatic grad student in the Theatre MFA program I’ll call Marlene who took an inexplicable shine to me, or seemed to, after the screening of a friend’s film. We fell in-step together and into easy conversation as we left the venue at the film’s end, and as we walked, a dude drove by who shouted into a megaphone. “That guy,” she said. “He’s like,” and here she adjusted her voice into an appropriate shout: “MY PENIS AND TESTICLES ARE SMALL AND I HAVE A MEGAPHONE.” I still admire that she got anatomically specific, where a lot of people would’ve thought “dick” might suffice.
We hung out at her place, where she wrote an email to her then-boyfriend mentioning that she was hanging out with me. This was flattering and odd, because I had no reason to assume he knew who I was. (Later, he and I would establish our own complicated dynamic, and when he blew up at me and dismissed me as crazy, I’d say, “I get your thing. You go for these exciting craaaaaazy women so that you can feel SO STABLE by comparison, then when you’ve had enough you can say that the problem is that WE’RE CRAZY and not that YOU’RE BORING, this is exactly how you ended shit with Marlene.” His response: “I don’t want you speculating any further about my relationship with Marlene,” which I think we can all agree means I was right.)
We met our filmmaker-friend and others at the screening’s after-party at a bar, where I ordered my usual cranberry-and-club-soda. When the waiter asked for Marlene’s order, she looked at me and theatrically declared, “I’ll have what she’s having.” When Marlene went to the bathroom and I casually mentioned that we’d shown up late to the party because we’d gone to Marlene’s place first, one friend’s eyes visibly widened as she replied, “You went to her house?” with such scandalized emphasis on “house” that it was clear she thought a lot had gone on that hadn’t. Still, when Marlene later performed “Pretty Women” from Sweeney Todd on the bar’s stage, she came back and told me, “I sang that one for you,” in such an undeniably girlfriend-y way that I almost believe things went on that didn’t.
The confusion, the drama, the desperation to be known. These somehow don’t sound like gen-z concerns, convinced as they generally seem to be that being “known,” outside of any kind of cultivated social media persona, isn’t really a thing. Several professor friends have told me that it’s become more difficult in recent years to get class discussions going, because their students don’t want to risk making a statement that their classmates disagree with. It’s too bad that “conflict” in the current youth consciousness has taken on toxic associations with social media trolling and bigotry. I’ll do what I can to bring back classical notions of heated but respectful debate.
College, simultaneously a massive universe and the tiniest little world. All of us astronauts, moonlight, and insignificant specs.
