Category Archives: College

In 1967 I began to think about going to graduate school though I was thinking more about getting drafted.  When however I thought about the former, I realized I would need to apply and take the GRE’s and get some letters of recommendation together.  I knew I could get one from my favorite teacher, but I was sort of lacking in that department till something showed up.

I took a class on Aesthetics; really it was a seminar, the only thing of its kind I had at college.  We met at the Professor’s house a couple blocks off campus, sat around in his living room and discussed Aesthetics.  Maybe we had eight people in the seminar.  I remember one guy talking with great enthusiasm about driving his little sports car at high speeds in the mountains and wondering if what he felt while doing so didn’t constitute an aesthetic experience.  We read stuff too like Plotinus and Kant.

The only “work” for the course was showing up for the seminars, writing some journal entries, and one long paper.  This was, by far, the most wide open and relaxed class I had taken.  I enjoyed the subject and I had gotten my hands on some Dexedrine.  So I took that and paced back and forth in our little kitchen in the apartment over the garage and thought up a whole paragraph in my head and then wrote it down and then thought up another and wrote it down.  The paper was exploratory and speculative though I had a general idea about where I was going….

 I wanted to disassociate the aesthetic experience from things people might call art—of any kind, and argue that it was an “everyday experience” that anybody could have because its primary locus was not the brain but the body.  So I concluded the guy’s sport car experience was an aesthetic experience, though my primary personal reference was basketball.

While I was not really tall enough to do it effectively I worked hard on my back to the basket game, especially on a quick turn around jumper.  On several occasions during pickup games especially, I did this turn around and had sort of an out of the body experience—I could sort of see myself with a little camera located over my head.  Somebody else had the ball, eye contact was made, and I would move away from my position five feet or so under basket out in quick movement towards the ball, so I caught it ten to twelve feet from the basket when I caught it in motion, mind you, and still in motion, and with the momentum of moving away from the basket, I caught it, turned in air, and made the fall away.

Once, maybe 30 years later, when I was over forty, I did the same thing in a pick up game at the “Y” and the guys, a bunch of strangers, spontaneously applauded when I successfully and surprisingly made that move.  Why not?  It was a thing of beauty.

So the Professor wrote on the paper that on the basis of it he would recommend me to any graduate school in the country.  So I picked up another letter of recommendation though I don’t believe I mentioned basketball in the paper.

I am walking back to the former apartment building where are offices are with the woman of home coming queen material, and she is lamenting that she has been trying the whole semester to teach her students the difference between the abstract and the concrete and she has failed, and I want to go, well, duh, you silly woman.  The students in their ignorance are telling us that it’s damn hard to tell the difference between the abstract and the concrete.

If Marx is correct, as I believe he is, our consciousness is informed through and through by abstractions; this massive thing that we call common sense (and take as reality) is socially constructed on the basis of economic and power relations.  One does not pile up examples of the concrete so that one may rise to the abstract, but the other way around, one must chip and chip away at befuddling abstractions to even begin to get a glimpse of the concrete.  History is made behind our backs and mostly we mouth unaware  what it says.

Perhaps too that’s why I read phenomenology so much.  Its motto was, “Return to the Thing.”  I was actually motivated by the desire to get to The Truth.  I didn’t want to live in darkness.  At college this desire got me into some trouble.  When for example we were asked to think about the difference between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance my desire to get at the truth was so strong, that I did extra reading beyond what we had been asked to read, trying to figure out the difference, and I got screwed up on the final essay exam because I knew more than I needed to answer the questions they asked.

I had not learned one of the basic rules of being a good student: never think about anything more than you absolutely have to and seek especially to take classes where no thinking at all is required.  Thinking may lead to the uncomfortable sensation of confusion and the slightly humiliating sense that you don’t know what you thought you did.

My pursuit of the heroic ideal of truth mucked me up especially when it came to writing papers on literature.  One evening I was sitting in the stacks trying to write one of those, surrounded by piles of books, cast off first drafts, piles of papers and coffee cups, and a colleague came by and said, “Man, what the heck are you doing?”  And when I began to describe what I was trying to understand and how befuddled I was, he said, “Man, it sounds as if you are looking for the truth.  All they want is a gracefully written essay.”

This guy was a good guy and as they say “well-rounded” and unlike myself socially poised, and while he got really good grades, he was not viewed as some sort of proto-nerd.  Maybe because he really didn’t sweat it.  I should have listened to him but I couldn’t.  I had to believe that, to wade through all the shit I was wading through, coming as I did from a working class background, I was in pursuit of no less than The Truth.  Writing gracefully was not enough to justify my misery.  He however was the son of a College Professor and knew better.

Five years or so ago, I called a buddy that I had roomed with for a year in college.  I don’t know what came over me, but I knew he was an iron worker in San Francisco.  So I went to the union web page and there he was working for the union.  They gave me his number and I reached him on his cell as he was driving to check out a job.  We exchanged notes, and when I told him I was married, he laughed and said, “So you finally got over your woman problem?”

 35 years later, he still remembered my “woman problem.”  Maybe that was because whenever the subject came up, I said I had a “woman problem.”  People only know what you tell them about yourself.  The “woman problem” was code for a whole bunch of issues, possibly pathological “shyness,” a “complete lack of self-esteem,” a stunted “emotional development,” an utter lack of experience, upon entering college, in the whole general area.

I was not aware of the full extent of the problem until I was attracted at the end of my first year or maybe the start of my second year in college to Elsa.  First, I had never known anybody named Elsa and second she was exotic looking being a generation removed from one of those little countries near Russia, Estonia maybe or Latvia.  For a while I pretended that the attraction was not really there or that it was not mutual.  But one evening I am studying in the stacks, and I look down the long row of books and there she is sitting at the other end.

So I go down and ask her what’s up, and she says she is there to see me.  Oh, yea, I say, and sit cross legged on the floor, and we talk a bit, and somewhere in there, she asks me what qualities I look for in a woman.  I was dumbfounded; I had never gotten to know a woman well enough to know they had particular qualities.  But off the top of my head, I said, intelligence.  That would be number one? She said.  I didn’t know about that but I couldn’t imagine myself being with a woman that wasn’t smart.

Whereupon, she starts to document how intelligent she is.  Her SAT scores were higher than mine; her high school GPA had been higher than mine.  Her IQ, if you could believe those tests, was higher than mine.  OK, so she was intelligent, but that for me was of secondary importance since I was wondering if maybe I had not acquired, while sitting there, a permanent boner and would never be able to stand up again without embarrassing myself.

In a way that boner might stand symbolically for the very backboner of my “woman problem.”  A) I was not comfortable with the natural process of the boner, and B) the fact that she could look at me and I would get one meant she was in control.  A meant I could not relieve myself of the boner by moving deeper as it were into the relationship, and B meant I could not risk moving deeper into the relationship without possibly losing my mind and flunking out of school.

At the time, I didn’t have an inkling of how much my woman problem was related to my mother and my fear of completely disappearing into that place where boners go.

1968 proved a veritable avalanche of confusion.  Martin Luther King was murdered.  McCarthy knocked off LBJ in the Primaries; then LBJ resigned.   Robert Kennedy knocked off McCarthy in the California Primaries and was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan.

By that time my good buddy and I had an apartment over a garage and a little black and white TV hooked up to an outdoor antenna—not just rabbit ears—and so being in the LA basin we could pick up a number of channels.  We got into watching late night horror movies—mostly vampires, and Frankenstein stuff, but especially Mummies—Return of the Mummy; the Mummy’s Return; Mummy Rising; Mummy’s Revenge—there were an unbelievable number of bad black and white mummy movies.  They were all sponsored by this Ralph Williams who had a car dealership and did his own advertisements.

The Mummy movies were all alike.  These stupid people would unearth the Mummy, and wrapped up usually in big bandages, he would start to pursue the Avatar of his long lost love who had been buried with him.  The poor guy must have been as horney as hell and figured that, given his decayed condition, the only person who would accept him was his own true love.  The poor fuck hadn’t learned that you simply can’t repeat the past; especially when the past is like 3000 years ago.  But there he would be on his dumb journey just like all the rest of us in search of true love and looking to get laid.

 I must have identified with the Mummy.  As I said, at first losing the stigma of my virginity was uplifting but then things got as confusing as ever.  At what point did quantity lead to quality; when did repeated copulation convert to the higher state of marriage.  Or did it?  I just didn’t the fuck know.  In the past, getting the girl knocked up had taken care of the decision for a lot of people, but the pill had taken care of that as a sort of inevitability.  And there was this “free love” stuff in the air, though love is never free.  I was as dumb and stupid as the mummy.

So the Mummy rises again, like a long defunct phallus, and wants to possess his Avatar, his female co-conspirator, but one must asked, who here is possessed really?  One must conclude I believe that the Mummy is possessed by the memory of his true love.  He is in the hands of the compulsion to repeat.  But I unlike the mummy did not wish to possess because that meant being possessed.  I felt something breaking up in my chest and felt rising to my lips, like the Mummy, not words but a grim howl.

 So I turn on the TV to see Kennedy gloat about his victory over McCarthy, whom I had wanted to win.  I scorn him in my heart as an craven opportunist and I start to turn the TV off as he left the podium.  But they are talking about something and then they are screaming, “Kennedy has been shot.”

It was like the Mummy was rising again.

For whatever reason, I had not read in my list of 101 Greatest Books of the Western World much stuff that rhymed.  This wouldn’t have made any difference but for the fact that after I got a D+ on my first paper ever for an English major class the stuff I had to write on was poetry.  Aside from Shakespeare I had not read poetry in high school; and really I didn’t consider Shakespeare poetry just hard English.

Shakespeare has a plot too, but the poetry I had to write on didn’t have any plot.  It was more like that stuff by Robert Frost that people have to read in high school, especially the one about having taken the road less traveled by.  Like it was supposed to mean something and on top of that, at least in the class I was in, the way the poem was put together was supposed to be tied into that meaning.  So I not only had to figure out the meaning; I had to figure out how the way the thing was put together went along with the meaning.

Fuck me, if I could understand it. The teacher wasn’t any help.  So I went to the library, partly to figure out how people wrote in the 20^th century since he had said I should try to write as if I lived in the 20^th century.  He gave us some poems to write on that were not discussed in class, and for some unknown reason I chose a poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins.  Maybe I chose it because the poem seemed to have all sorts of special effects that I might talk about as things that went along with the meaning whatever that was.

Excuse me, please.  Here’s the poem I tried to write on.  You don’t have to try to figure out what it means:

 Look at this fucker.  Written up by some sort of overwrought religious fanatic.  I mean he dedicates his poetry to Jesus H. Christ for God’s sake. Now that takes some gall.  I am pretty sure it’s about a bird, like that white tailed kite that lived by the Japanese truck farm.  So we have a religious fanatic who dedicates his poetry to Jesus H. Christ, for God’s sake, writ ing about a bird taking a nose dive after its prey.  Though you wouldn’t know it form lines like:  brute, beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle!  I thought maybe this guy was was beating off in his brain and about to come. But I wasn’t about to write that in my paper.

And dig it, but “stirred for a bird,” has got to be one of the worst lines in the English language.

I had to wade through shit like this to get a B+ in that fucking class, and I almost killed myself trying to do it.

I declared myself an English major because I did well on the verbal part of my SATS and had lousy math teachers.  I played it safe because I didn’t want to flunk out, and I figured I would get to read novels and other books on the list of the 101 Greatest Books of the Western World.  So in the last quarter of my first year in college, I took a special introductory English class for English Majors only.

Needless to say, I was thrown into a state of shock, even panic, when I got my first paper ever that I had written as an English major with a D + on it.  What the plus was for I am not sure.  I had tried hard on it, probably overly hard; but was somewhat hampered by the fact that I had no idea what I was supposed to say or not to say about C.P. Snow’s little essay—much read in those days by English majors—called “The Two Cultures” or something like that.  This article said something like the humanity’s way of looking at things—whatever that was; and the scientific way of looking at things—whatever that was, were not opposed or had more in common than they thought they had.

For my part, I had no idea that these two points of view were in some sort of conflict to begin with.  I liked science for my part.  Once, for some unknown reason, I had read a number of books on ghosts and ghostly phenomena in high school.  I was really impressed by the way poltergeists could bite a person and leave actual teeth marks along WITH SILIVA.  That saliva part suggested I should take poltergeists more seriously than I had.

Then I read a book that analyzed different stories on poltergeists and showed the scientific basis for many ghostly phenomenon in unconscious mental processes.  Take for example those guys in India who could do all sorts of amazing things with their bodies, or those cases of hysterical blindness and such.  I found these scientific explanations about as amazing as the supernatural ones.

I read another book that like “proved” people had past lives by the use of regressive hypnosis.  I thought, if this is true, why the hell haven’t I heard anything about this book before? So I went back to the library and checked out a book right next to the one I had read, and it was a whole book, with different articles by different scientists, refuting the book I had read which had been apparently pretty notorious in its day.  This one was also about unconscious processes and the great power of suggestion.

Where’s the conflict here?  I don’t see any conflict.  Had I been a Hindu maybe I would have been upset with the refutation of the idea of past lives.  But I wasn’t a Hindu.  As for ghosts, whether they existed or not really wouldn’t and didn’t get in the way of my enjoying a good ghost story.  Where’s the conflict?

So lacking anything to say really, I tried to impress the teacher by writing humungous Latinate sentences that went on forever.  He wrote a lot of stuff on that paper, but the thing I remember is: “Write as if you lived in the 20^th century.”

 I thought that was gratuitous really; and fuck me! In any case I thought I was doomed.

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.