Month: May 2006

I went through my first two years of college scared to death and feeling like a moron.  The tone was set in that week of indoctrination.  I had read Walden 2 pretty carefully, and, as I said, I had thoughts about it, though I was not sure I had the right ones, the ones I was supposed to have.  Overall, I thought, you know, that a world controlled along rational guidelines by scientists was not an entirely bad idea.  I am speaking here, to be sure, of ideas.  The book seemed to me sort of dumb at another level, or let’s say it was dumb if it was anything other than pure speculation.

For example, in a rational universe, people would say, cigarettes are bad for you. They kill people; therefore we should ban the sale of all cigarettes. That’s pretty damn logical and right there you have the problem.  People are too stupid to know their own self interests; they are ignorant and self-centered.  Also self-destructive.  If people were rational they would have all already decided not to smoke on the basis of a response to the evidence.  So people were too dumb, stupid, and self-centered for them to ever go for Walden 2.

That’s sort of what I thought, although perhaps not quite as articulately as I have put it here.  Finally, the time for discussing the book came around.  I was in a room with about 15 other people I didn’t know and a professor.  I gave up almost immediately on the idea I was going to say anything.  These people were smart and they were articulate, and they didn’t mind being in the spotlight.  They didn’t say just yes or no or this is what I think the author means.  They immediately lit into what they thought about the book, and they didn’t like it.  The best I could gather was that Skinner was an evil bastard who would strip persons of their rights and their freedom.

I felt bad.  I let myself down that day.  I got snowed under.  I was for rights too, and being a teen-age existentialist, nothing was more important than freedom.  I just didn’t understand what I was getting into.  Just as I didn’t understand my reaction to the word “lifestyle.”

I don’t think I can think of any other moment in my life when I remember the first time I heard a word.  But I can remember that time.  I can remember where I was sitting in the room, over towards the windows, with the afternoon light slanting in.  I was in my first ever “English” class, a special one for majors like myself, and the Professor had asked some question maybe about abortion, and a student said, “That’s a lifestyle choice.”  I had heard the word, but not seen the speaker.  But I turned round to see who it was, as the teacher indicated that was the correct response.

My reaction was involuntary and strong.  I was angry and disgusted.  A life was not a fucking lifestyle.  Deciding whether or not to have an abortion was not a fucking lifestyle choice.  I mean back then abortion was illegal.  I couldn’t imagine that any of the people I had known who might have had to get one would have seen getting one as a lifestyle choice.  It would have been a grueling, horrible and debilitating decision, and you might not have been able to get one at all.

So I let myself down again.  I didn’t say anything.  I mean what was I going to say?  I hadn’t heard the word before.  I didn’t know the fucking word existed, so I didn’t have any rational objection to it.  All I could have said was something like, “Lifestyle!  Lifestyle!  Who the fuck dreamt up that abomination!  Lifestyle my fucking ass.”

Hell, I was already having problems fitting in.

I got to know BJ bussing tables.  We got to talking and she had a sense of humor.  And then she went away for a year to Germany because she was a German major. And then she came back and we got to talking some more, and then necking, and dry humping and whatnot.  And that might have just gone on forever because I was afraid of getting her pregnant and just couldn’t bring myself to ask if she was on the pill.  I was also afraid of venereal diseases, but after I got to know her a bit I figured she wouldn’t give me one of those or at least tell me if she had one.

But we studied together and one night she went off to the john and left her diary, I guess you would call it, sitting there.  And I didn’t have to reach out or move it or anything to read that she had recorded that she had been taking the pill for over a month.  And after that things preceded apace, and I was able to unburden myself of the terrible stigma of my virginity albeit, if I am to believe other guys, rather late but still somewhat in the ballpark for what might be called “normal.”

I was terribly concerned about being “normal” since I was pretty sure I wasn’t.  But the idea that I might want to fuck a woman just to get rid of my virginity troubled me.  That seemed like using a person to satisfy your needs, and I didn’t want any woman I knew to think I had used her just to get rid of my virginity.  That felt awful.  I didn’t get drunk and go to parties, so I didn’t have an opportunity for casual sex and besides I was incapable of casual sex.  I mean a guy who worries that a woman might feel used if he has sex with her to get rid of his virginity is too screwed up for casual sex.

But I was pretty horny and that overcame any compunctions I had about using a woman to get rid of my virginity.  Besides I liked BJ.  She was smart and liked to laugh and anybody who is a German major has got to have a bit of a tormented side too.  Just my cup of tea, the tormented side I mean.  I liked too that, when she had gone to Germany, she really had insisted on going to Germany, and not some place where everybody spoke English.  Instead she stayed with a German family that hardly knew English and nearly had a nervous breakdown for her troubles.

 Afterwards I felt pretty good for a while.  In fact, a professor said, Nick, what’s going on, you seem in a better mood.  I didn’t know any professor had noticed my mood and I figured I must have been in a pretty vile one if people could actually see the change.  I wasn’t going to tell her I had just got laid.

That lasted for a little bit.  But then things got complicated again.  Because having sex with a woman that you know brings about an increased degree of intimacy whether you want it or not.  Getting laid and losing my virginity I saw was a pyrrhic victory.  I hadn’t really changed any.  Things were as fucked up as ever but more complicated.  Before I got laid, I knew at least where I was headed, but afterwards I had no idea where we were going.

Hindsight they say is 20/20.  But really it’s not.  Or let’s say it depends on what you are looking at or for.  I have spent a long time looking and reviewing and contemplating to come to the conclusion—or sort of conclusion—that the persistent angst I felt at college was not entirely the result of my having no social skills, or being emotionally stunted, or being tortured by my inability to get rid of my virginity, like it was the plague or something, but at least partly from my just not fitting in.

I attended a relatively exclusive, tiny, liberal arts college that affluent middle class people sent their kids to.  I was a poor white.  That’s why I got all the free money I got to go there.  I was like part of their quota for poor white people, and it was no skin off their nose because the government gave them money to help people like me. Naturally, I didn’t know or think of myself as a poor white person.  I didn’t really notice even that only a tiny percentage of us worked in the student union and that alone put me in a different category.

 That was part of the deal I got.  The college made sure I got a job to cover my books and stuff like that.  I didn’t mind, really.  I worked 20-25 hours a week, and that was nothing.  All I did was go to classes and study, so working in the student union was a break and good for a little exercise especially when I worked washing dishes.  Sometimes I didn’t wash the dishes; sometimes I bused the tables after everybody ate.

Sometimes I worked the line tending the tea, the coffee, the milk and making sure the deserts didn’t run out. The soft drinks were out in the open so I didn’t have to mind those unless one ran out. I wore a sort of super-starched white smock, I guess it would be called, and a floppy version of a chefs hat.  I didn’t like the hat thing at all, but was happy they didn’t make me wear a hair net.

So the sophisticates who were too good for soda pop, would look at me and say, “Tea, please.”  And I would get a cup and a saucer and put hot water in the cup, naturally, and place a tea bag on the saucer and they would say, “Thank you.”  And I would say, “You’re welcome.”  And somebody would say, “Coffee please.”  And I would do it all over again except I would put coffee in the cup rather than hot water, and so on for twenty minutes or so, till most of the stragglers came in.  By that time, people were leaving and I would go out with a cart and start picking up the slop they had left behind.  The amounts of wasted food I could not believe.

While most of my peers constantly complained about the dorm food, I didn’t.  Well, I did so I could fit in, but really I liked it better than home food because a) there was a lot of it and b) there was more variety.  Once I was eating with a group of guys and I said, “Damn. This is good.”  And jabbing my fork at it, “What the fuck is it?”  The guy across from me, the guy who later went to jail rather than be drafted, laughed and said, “Lamb.”  The laugh was good natured; a laugh of recognition, or rather non-recognition, like, “Who the hell is this guy?”

 I didn’t know anything about Chinese food either; I mean I knew of course that the Chinese ate food and that it was called Chinese food.  But I hadn’t eaten any of it.

LBJ, they say, could meet somebody once and remember his name forever.  Not so with me;  I can be introduced to somebody and five minutes into a conversation not have the faintest idea what his name is.  I am lousy with the names of other people probably because I have insecurities about my own name.  First comes the Nick part.  Wait, actually, first comes the William part because my first name is William after my father.  So when I am making plane reservations or something like that and give my legal, credit card name they sometimes, with excessive familiarity, take to calling me Bill.

I don’t like being called Bill.

And for most of my life in the parts of the country where I have lived, “Nicks” have been very few to none.  Perhaps because the name was unfamiliar, I would introduce myself and people would say, “Dick, did you say?”  Or “Pleased to meet you, Rick.”  I thought maybe I was saying the name too softly because of what followed it, “Tingle.”  So I practically took to bellowing “Nick,” but I still got the Rick or Dick deal.

Then came the “Tingle” part.  I think about 2000 Tingles live in the USA.  We are not that common, true.  So I could understand having to repeat that.  But be damned if I can understand why people can’t spell it.  Is that T….I…, they would say, and so I took to saying my name is ‘NICK!!!         Tingle, rhymes with Jingle or Dingle; spelled “gle” and not “gel” which properly speaking is something a person puts on his hair.”

And there was that stinking commecial for dandruff shampoo.  You could tell it was working, the commercial went, because “the tingle tells you.”  So practically everytime I heard it, I would yell at the TV, “Well, this mother fucking tingle isn’t going to tell you a goddamn thing.”  Or words to that effect.

My best friend in college roomed with the only black guy in our class.  His name was Wilbert, and I called him Wilber for nearly a year and a half till he exploded and yelled directly into my face, “WilberT.  With a T.  Wilbert.”  I apologized and felt bad for a week.  I guess I just didn’t hear the “T.”  I had never heard the name Wilbert before.

Once Wilbert and I rode back to San Diego on the same Greyhound Bus.  As I was saying goodbye to him, our fathers came up.  His father was a bit shorter than mine; mine was white and his was black.  But they were dressed exactly the same way.  In khaiki shirts and pants and with steel tipped work shoes.  This was a common working class uniform at that time, a left over, I expect, from soldering in WWII; Sears sold the pants and shirts real cheap.  The uniforms made them look like twins.