“You know what?” Nadine says. “Maybe we shouldn’t hold hands.”
Elastic of underwear suddenly flooded with anxiety: “Why not?”
“Just there are a lot of potential rich husbands around here.”
She laughs a little.
I laugh a little, too. “Ha-ha,” I say.
Back in the dorm, alone, the Beaver off adding more difficult classes to his overbooked schedule, I lie down on the hard bed and have a ferocious, unmitigated Oberlin-grade panic attack. Here I am with a beaver for a roommate, with divorcing immigrant parents, and with no one’s hand to hold in the northeastern corner of a state whose unironic tourist slogan is “The Heart of It All.”
Oberlin does not have fraternities or sororities. It is also in a dry county. These and other factors combine to make it difficult for most students to abstain from quantities of beer and marijuana that redefine the term “copious” (for those interested, there is also a decent supply of heroin and cocaine). On my first evening at Oberlin I will smoke a half-dozen joints and drink the Beers of the World, or at least a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best, the bladder-busting local swill. Half comatose I will hold hands with the prettiest girl in the dorm, even as she makes out filthily with a hot resident adviser, everyone laughing at me, the sad drunk holding on to the beauty as she kisses her aesthetic equal, a man with long hair as soft and flowing as her own. Stoned, I grasp the warmth of that hand, forgetting whose it is — Nadine’s? my divorcing mother’s? — until I wake up in a room not my own, wearing some kind of Peruvian poncho and covered in what must be someone else’s drool. In the next year, I will drink and smoke, smoke and drink, trip and fall, fall and trip, until my endless alcoholic and narcotic exploits earn me my Oberlin moniker: Scary Gary.
As night falls on Oberlin, Scary Gary and the Beaver dim their lights. The Beav, exhausted from thinking and learning, snores up a storm from the get-go, but Scary Gary is scared shitless of a certain college peculiarity. The bathrooms in Burton Hall are coed.
To me, every Oberlin woman is already an angel, a deeply odorous creature with the potential of drunkenly holding my hand — and now I am supposed to make waste around her? Also the food served in the dining hall, a disingenuous attempt at beef au jus, a hairy salad of destroyed lettuces, a postapocalyptic taco, have made the Second Directive imperative. If I am to go on living, this crap must rush out of me now as if I were a re-creation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, a poster of which I probably should have bought instead of Munch’s clichéd Scream. I circle the bathroom all night long hoping for an opening, so that I may lay a log. At three in the morning, as someone of the fairer sex is loudly vomiting Milwaukee’s Best, I slip into the stall as far away as possible, shyly undo my pants, and prepare to let loose. Just then the hipster boots of the girl whose hand I had drunkenly held as she kissed another slide into the stall between me and the vomiter. I tighten some rectal screw inside me, cancel the Second Directive, and run back to my dorm room. And that terrible shitlessness, essentially, is my first year at Oberlin.
In the morning, although the toilets are coed, the showers on my floor are for men. There are no partitions in the shower room, and we stand about naked with one another, much like in prison or in the navy.
One man walks in with a toy bucket and shovel like kids have on the beach. He sings happily as he sudses himself down. His penis is enormous; even nonerect it describes full arcs in the dense Ohio steam. I try to will myself to grow a little when he’s around, so that I won’t seem puny, but nothing can hold a candle to his candle. “A mulatto, an albino,” the big-dicked fellow cheerfully sings, as every reference in Oberlin in 1991 is to Nirvana’s Nevermind, every dorm room boasting at least one copy of the iconic album with the underwater baby swimming toward a dollar on a hook.
Men with smaller dicks enter the shower. The complaining begins.
“There’s too much reading for English!”
“Ganzel assigned an entire book to read!”
“I had to write two papers in one week.”
The Stuyvesant graduate in me is amused. During my first semester at Oberlin my longest assignment is watching Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and then writing a paper describing my feelings about the same. Students, townspeople, and other assorted losers are allowed to teach courses at Oberlin as part of the Experimental College. These classes are for actual college credit. The nice sophomore hippie next door teaches an introductory course on the Beatles, which consists of us listening to Revolver, getting the munchies real bad, and then ordering in a Hawaiian pizza with ham and pineapple from Lorenzo’s (oh, the famished thirty minutes until the damn thing arrives). Sometimes we’ll drop acid and try to puzzle out “And Your Bird Can Sing” while walking up to various buildings and leaning on them.
It takes me but a few weeks to realize the frightening new prospect before me. Whereas in Stuyvesant I was at the bottom of my class, at Oberlin I can maintain a nearly perfect average while being drunk and stoned all day long. I get on the phone as soon as the first report card is issued.
“Mama, Papa, I have a 3.70!”
“What does it mean, 3.70?”
“An A average. I can get into Fordham Law easy. Maybe if I graduate summa cum laude, NYU or the University of Pennsylvania.”
“Semyon, did you hear what Little Igor has said?”
“Very good, very good,” my father says across the telephone line. “Tak derzhat’!” Keep it up!
Intense stoner feelings of love wash over me. Tak derzhat’! He hasn’t used that kind of language with me in half a decade. I remember being a nine-year-old child in our Deepdale Gardens apartment, crawling up his hairy stomach, rooting around his chest hair, cooing with happiness, while he nonchalantly reads the émigré intelligentsia journal Kontinent. I call him dyadya som (Uncle Catfish). He is my best buddy as well as my papa. “What did you get on your division test?” he asks me. “Sto, dyadya som!” (“A hundred, Uncle Catfish!”) Prickly kiss on the cheek. “Tak derzhat’!”
Does it really matter that upstairs from me, at this very moment, Nadine is holding hands with a guy who looks to me like a famous actor, the one always in rehab or shooting at the police? Does it really matter that outside the window a bunch of hipsters in propeller beanies are tossing around a Hacky Sack, Oberlin’s primary sport, without inviting me, because somehow they can smell my desperate background, my internship with George H. W. Bush’s election campaign, my years as the head of the Holy Gnuish Empire?
Mother: “And what kind of grades are your colleagues getting?”
“People don’t really talk about grades at Oberlin, Mama.”
“What? What kind of a school is this? This is socialism!”
Socialism, Mama? If only you knew. There’s a student dining coop that doesn’t allow the use of honey because it exploits the labor of bees. But all I say is “It is ridiculous, but good for me. Less competition.”