Going to Church in the Strawberry Patch

Trying to Grow Up In Spite of Myself

A Memoir by Tom Bessette

Copyright 2009 BessetteBooks

Chapter 12
A Whopping Associate’s Degree

I was braced as well as I could be but that damned ice.
I was slipping, excruciatingly slow, inexorably farther down the incline, transfixed by the vastness below, knowing full well that if I slid too far I would be gone, bouncing and flapping down the slide, rolling, scraping, bleeding, splitting and then slapping the water with a sound like a shot, under now, is alive after the fall, now drowning.

I slid silently, unable to stop, unable to scream, watching the summit get farther away by the second, lost, doomed, horrified that it was ending here, like this.

I’m sliding too far…

I was tripled.  The dorm rooms were made for two but enrollment was high and the luck of the draw put me with two other guys, and I had the side with the bunk bed.  Never had slept in one of those things, ever; luckily the other guy wanted to be on top, so I didn’t have to climb up and be nervous.

They assigned rooms by alphabet, so I was billeted with Joe Balley and Steve Benhoefer.  Steve got there first so grabbed the single side of the room.  We were in one of the ‘new’ dorms, Parsons Hall, which was fabricated of cement with tall narrow windows and loving industrial design that made you feel right at home.  The rooms themselves were divided by a central set of closets so that, other than the common entryway, roommates did have a modicum of privacy from each other.

Balley was a wrestler and, while nice enough, wasn’t the most intellectual guy I ever met.  Steve was a good guy from one of the hill towns near the Catskill Mountains and was here to get his dairy farming degree, presumably so he could advance his dairy farming career.  Our RA was Brendan Benson, a hell of a name, and was one of these lotharios whose favorite expression was; “She just lay there, but I fucked like a bunny.”  This was our mentor for the next year.  Chucky Doolittle, another farming major with a taste for Coors beer, Paul Delanson, who had a great talent for sucking jello into his mouth in one inhalation, Kyle Goyer, affectionately known as ‘Artichoke’ and then just Artie, who was focused in on being a DJ and would rap out strings of DJ announcements at the least provocation, Tim Dolenz, he of the flaming red hair and low key personality, taking nursery management, Don Kerndon, into meditation and serious as hell and a few assorted stoners and partiers made out the roster of our floor.

Maybe the most interesting character was Dom Abbruzzi, an affable guy who I immediately hit it off with, probably because he liked me, and we started cutting up and fooling around from the first day.  He was easy and simple and seemed to live to have fun and was a fresh presence for me after weeks in the woods alone and dumb boring jobs.  This was college.  Tom had some sort of problem that caused some of his hair to fall in patches.  He kept his hair medium long so the patches didn’t show too much when his hair was combed correctly, although when they did it was pretty obvious.  He was open about it and didn’t mind people noticing.  We hung out together immediately; no cerebral philosophical discussions but lots of screwball fun like putting Saran Wrap on the toilets and rubbing Ben-Gay on toilet seats, stuff like that. What a hoot it was, especially when we were able to doctor the toilets in the girls’ dorm and then listen to the bitching.  Imagine them sitting and wee-wee-ing and the pee then flowing out onto the floor, wetting their feet, and then feeing the warmth of Ben-Gay on their tushies.  We met lots of girls and boy, were we romantics.

Probably the most ridiculous thing we ever did was convince almost half of our floor mates, even some second year guys, to go to dinner one night wearing only our underwear and no pants.  It was a sight for sure, a parade of all but hysterical guys strutting into the dining hall in our tighty-whities, precariously balancing food trays, and barely able to keep straight faces, snorting and sniggering like we were ten year olds in church.  Lots of ‘what the fuck are those assholes doing now’ stares from the girls, many of whom had experienced warm gushy tushies and wee-wee sockies at various times, thanks to us.

More than me though, Dom and Balley got along, and as soon as Dom’s roommate quit school, Balley moved out of our room and in with Dom.  Even though we all hung together and did stupid stuff whenever the opportunity arose, more than any other two, Balley and Abbruzzi became a pair, lived together and went everywhere together.  I stayed with Steve and he convinced me to take a barn duty elective course, where I had to get up at five AM seven days a week for six weeks to get to the barn and milk cows and clean stalls.  It was a requirement of all Horse and Dairy majors and none of them could figure out why I was there, but it was something I had never before experienced and I was here to learn, right?

At birthing time, a calf was breech, meaning it was turned around the wrong way and wasn’t coming out properly, and the mother cow was in trouble.  The supervisor selected me to reach up the cow’s vaginal canal, up to my shoulders, and bodily turn the calf around, unfold it’s front legs and help by pulling it out and delivering it. One big mother of a pussy, I can tell you. You could have climbed right up in it and gone spelunking, for Christ’s sake! Slippery, slimy, bloody, wet with afterbirth, straw, dust and a saved calf and mother, mooing gutturally. They said I did a great job and I was very proud, albeit smelly as hell.  I was tempted to stroll through the girls dorm just to show how manly I was but some instinct kept me from it, possibly the profound knowledge that it was seven AM and they were showering and hadn’t eaten breakfast yet and might not have the same sensibilities about these things as i.  Poor, sheltered things.

One of the courses I was taking that first semester was one in Modern Literature.  I had always been a reader but much of my reading was influenced by my father’s decidedly un-academic tastes.  I had read some of the classics of American Lit but not much after those written by authors published in the very early 1900’s.  This teacher introduced me to some new names, one of which became one of my favorites.  We read, among others, ‘My Antonia’ by Willa Cather and, as had happened years ago with Huck Finn and ‘The Call of the Wild,’ I fell head over heels, absolutely, completely in love with a book.  Wow, college!  I devoured the book along with ‘Winesburg Ohio,’ Ellison’s ‘The Invisible Man’ and a few others.

A woman named Mary Ann Depardieu sat next to me in class.  Well, OK, OK, I sat next to her but so what, OK?  Jesus Kee Ko!  She wore flannel shirts and Cowboy boots and had long brown hair, sweet eyes and a great smile and I was pretty much smitten from day one.  We would walk slowly out of class and talk about the books we were reading and I felt academically enriched for sure.  She was just 18 and I was almost 21. A perfect age difference I thought.  She was from Binghamton and was a horse major, although she said she was a city girl, which confused me totally but I didn’t care.

In October, my roomy Steve and I decided to have a party, and in keeping with my academically classy attitude, I suggested a wine and cheese party.  We lived in Parsons Room 510 so we advertised it as ‘A 510 Wine & Cheese.’  It was a huge success, we had over fifty people show up, his friends, our floor mates and guests and my Mary Ann.  It was an odd party in that we didn’t have a kegger and there were no chips but everyone got drunk all the same, including me, and I found myself talking at Mary Ann all that same old horseshit that I used to spew out in high school, telling her of love and endearment and all that crap I knew nothing about, droning on and on, like this sentence.  She left at some point but in my fog I wasn’t sure when or how and I have clear images of drunken hangers on flopping around the hallway and puking in the water fountain well past daybreak.

I hunted up Mary Ann the next day after noon when I clawed my way out of bed and she was definitely cool to me and finally said that she wasn’t ready for such a committed relationship as I wanted and we shouldn’t see each other anymore, at least outside of class.  Shit, and shit again, dammit, Goddamn me, I didn’t even remember what all I said, though from past experience I had a rough idea, and was red faced at the thought.  In later years I heard a Sheryl Crow song that had a telling lyric in it, something like, “What you must think of me tonight, well it almost makes me cry…” so goes another morning after for me. Well, there were more fish in the sea and I would just strike out with fresh bait and see what I could hook.

My chemistry teacher was a character who had a technique that I know use, with variations, today. In this two year Ag and Tech school, you can imagine that most of us in Chemistry 101 were not intending on being future chemists.  Most, if not all, more likely intended not to be there at all if it weren’t a requirement for some associated major.  Anyway, although he was an interesting speaker, all eyes would begin to close about 10 minutes into each lecture, and, noticing this, he would suddenly pick up an empty desk and slam it onto the floor, whereupon it would skitter and bounce a few feet to the side before coming to rest.  Windows would slam shut with the vibration, kids would about jump out of their skins, even those who saw it coming, and, early on, one young lady suddenly had to get up red faced and sidle off to the nearest rest room to do some emergency maintenance. Some days this would have to be repeated five or six times in a fifty minute class, depending on what we were covering that day.

Also that first semester, in the spirit of joining the Cobleskill social order, I allowed myself to be sent to the Dorm Council as our floor’s representative.  Easy enough, but at the first meeting, there was a call for one of us to represent Parsons Hall in the InterDorm council.  A son of a bitch named Ron DuLima, who I had met only minutes before, nominated me, and since I was the only nomination I was elected by acclamation and kind of, sort of, went along, not knowing what else to do.

Well, I was now part of the community so I went to the first InterDorm council meeting, clueless and simple as the day was long, and it was there, at that first meeting, that I was abruptly sucked into the world of asinine, childish petty politics.

The IDC, as it was called, was an organization meant to bring together the college residents for the greater good, to build that all important sense of collegial community, and to foster involvement in campus issues and decision making.  The IDC came complete with Faculty Advisor, in the name of Sally Roberts, Dorm Director of Pearson Hall, the first of the newly coed dorms, and as it turned out, the happenin’ dorm in which to live.  The IDC needed a president, and a mousy kid from the dorm next door nominated one of the RA’s from Pearson and Sally called for one more nomination so that there would be good competition. 

I had been talking to a girl from Davis Hall that I had met before, not really paying too much attention to the proceedings, when she paused our conversation, raised her hand and nominated me.  Sally said, “Oh good, a newcomer,” and I was placed on the ballot forthwith.  Then, after the votes were counted, I had won in a landslide and was installed as the President of the InterDorm Council, completely unaware of what I was supposed to do.

Sally said, “Take over the meeting Mr. President,” and I said, “How do I do that?”  She just smiled and held her tongue as I realized that I had never run a meeting, but, damn it, I should be able to, so I started by asking everyone to introduce themselves, saying what they were here to study and where they were from, while Sally and her RA (the one I had beaten in the election), shared whispers at the back of the room.  I then asked if anyone had any knowledge of what went on last year or ideas about whet we should be talking about and a few brought up topics and we talked about them, although I admit I was very lax about Roberts Rules of Order.  Had I known Robert, whoever he was, I might have assassinated the fucker before he wrote out his Goddamn rules and saved us all a lot of trouble.  The meeting seemed to go well, people were talking and smiling and discussing things to do and after adjournment I felt OK about it.

Next week, Sally wore a concerned look on her face, like those worn by supervisors that have to do something that they know needs to be done and can’t be helped but will hurt someone, badly.  I started by privately asking her if there was anything I should be doing and she said “You’ll figure it out,” so I started by discussing what I had talked about with various members and, I guess, must have sounded like I was forcing things on the group because suddenly Sally said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but as advisor I just have to step in.”

She continued, “Many of you have come to me in tears about this new president, and how he is ruining the council and acting despotic and how everyone was going to have to resign and I just feel that I can’t let this terrible thing happen and so, unfortunately must call for Mr. President’s resignation effective immediately.” 

The room was quiet and I stood there in stunned silence, having been stupidly and completely unaware that I had caused such strong feelings.  I felt the blood rush to my face and perspiration break out at my hairline and somehow mumbled that I would be happy to immediately tender my resignation.  I walked out with my head bowed, afraid to look to either side, afraid to see the looks of hatred and contempt that would be sent my way, and dropped to the floor right outside the meeting room door, sitting with my back against the wall, head in my hands.  How could I have been such a complete asshole?

Finally, worried lest the meeting break up and I was still there when people came out, I slithered away like the snake I was, scurrying from shadow to shadow in my shame, slinking into my room silently, Steve too engrossed in homework to see anything wrong.

Two days later one of the IDC members stopped me between classes and told me that right after I left sally declared that the second highest vote getter should be elected IDC President, so her RA got the position after all.  The member said I should complain to the Dean but I said, sorry no, I knew when I was beat and off I went, suddenly with no stupid Roberts-correct meetings to attend.  I was able to get back to focusing on the college experience.

Don Kerndon was an odd guy that I really liked, being the only semi-cerebral resident on our floor.  When you wanted to see him, you had to first clap loudly just outside his door because he might be meditating and that was the prescribed way to waken a meditating person from their trance, as we understood it.  He spoke about Transcendental Meditation, or TM, a lot, telling us how it helped him calm himself, relieved all his stress, made him happier and more content with life, helped him concentrate in his studies, made him stay awake in class and learn more, helped him ace tests, understand things more thoroughly, kept his sinuses clear, breath better, bowels looser, did his windows and tucked him into bed.  Don was also into martial arts, the first person like that I knew, and we would watch Bruce Lee movies with him well into the wee hours on his TV. All in all, TM was the answer we were all looking for, even if we didn’t know we needed an answer.

Some helpers of the Yogi, or whoever the boss was, were coming to Cobleskill for recruits shortly and Don suggested we join the club, so to speak, and start a meditation program ourselves.  Paul Delanson and I bit and started reading all about it from books Don loaned us.  It all sounded so reasonable and we became enthusiastic aficionados, awaiting that glorious day when we would receive our cherished mantra and be lifted joyously into the realm of inner harmony and nirvana.

The great week came and we went to the first informational meeting where we found out from the masters that everything Don said was true and that this was the most wonderful opportunity we would ever have for happiness.  At the second meeting, we were sold even further, whipping ourselves into an orgasm of zeal for the teachings of such a great man.  Why didn’t everyone see this?

At the third and final meeting before initiation, we were told that we had to bring in four pieces of fruit, two pieces of white cloth, a candle and a fee of seventy dollars for the ceremony.  I paused a minute and then asked Don, “What ceremony?”  He patiently explained that it wasn’t really religious, after all he was an atheist Jew and what would he be doing following a religion and so on, and I asked, “So what do they do with the fruit and cloth and candle?”  I suspected all too well what they did with the money.  Don tried to explain further but all my alarm bells were going off, it sounded too much like my experiences in Catholic School and the next day I begged off and didn’t go to the ceremony.  In all, fifteen new initiates attended, paid their fees, burned their cloth, and received their mantras. I don’t know what they did with the fruit; no one would tell me.

Paul D. took his mantra straight to his room and locked himself in after instructing his roommate to clap before entering.  We heard him in there mumbling something and about a half hour later he came out, red eyed, confused, frowzy headed and hoarse.  We asked how it went, he didn’t answer and Don said that if I had gone I’d know how it took a while to get used to meditation and some temporary perplexity was to be anticipated.

Paul lasted about three weeks during which time he got increasingly nasty and edgy, seemingly on some drugs that made him more and more distant, actually very similar behavior to that displayed on most days by Don, now that we thought of it. Suddenly the clapping rule was rescinded and he went back to being his easy going, decent jello sucking self.  He never talked about it, just said he stopped meditating and  we couldn’t get anything out of him the remaining time that we knew him.

I was getting very good grades, without having to work too hard, so I had plenty of time to attempt socializing.  Our floor RA slept with the RA from the women’s dorm next door and they decided that the two floors should have a brother-sister floor relationship.  We played volleyball together on the shared court in front of the dorms, Cindy Baker calling out, “Rotavate on the Tarvia,” whenever it was time to rotate players, and everyone would laugh.  I think we even got up a secret handshake and greeting but I can’t remember what they were.  We developed a great game for rainy days called ‘Mudding.’  There were hills out back and the grass and clay soil were very slippery.  We would run towards the brink full speed and then throw ourselves on our stomachs and slide belly down the hill, just like snow sledding.  After a while of doing it, we’d wear right through the grass and get these long, steep mud slicks, much as I’ve seen Otters make on the shores of Adirondack Lakes, used for the same purpose.  It was terrific fun, and the mud would pack into the neck of your shirt and wad itself down onto your chest.  The girls who weren’t careful, which was usually all of them, would end up with bras stuffed with caked mud and the less endowed ladies underwent dramatic changes in appearance.  Karen Koppelfeld would be especially enchanting if one was willing to overlook the obvious reason.  At 18, 19 and my 20, we men in our prime didn’t really care or even think about it, we were always thoroughly interested.

We had keggers together too, and at some point in the drunkenness, some idiot would put on Billy Joel and we would form a circle, clasp arm in arm and sing Piano Man at the top of our lungs and to this day when I hear that song I can smell Cindy Baker’s sour breath in my face.  I’m sure she can still smell mine, too.

Steve didn’t take part in the get togethers; he had a serious girl back home who was still in high school and he went home to see her every weekend.  It was great because I was one of the very few who had his room to himself on weekends and had an opportunity to score, if I could only lure a babe into my room.  God knows I tried.  I even looked up Mary Ann and told her I was willing to be completely non committal but that didn’t work either; she only shook her head and sat farther away in class, dammit.  Some women don’t know what they want.

Then there was Jane Kellogg.  She had already, in such a short time, developed a reputation for being easy; so easy in fact that the more creative guys nicknamed her ‘Eveready.’  This was long before the Energizer Bunny commercials, but a similar state of affairs.  This led to one of the most horrific moments of my life.  I ran into her at a party and waited until I believed her judgment was sufficiently impaired and then invited her back to my room for some wine and cheese, you know, classy.  She came willingly and it wasn’t long before we were groping each other on Steve’s bed; I guess it was my judgment that was mainly impaired.

She was going on and on about how she knew I was special from the first day she set eyes on me.  My alarm bells were going off at this crock of shit but I stuffed them under the bed and pushed on.  I suddenly knew that I was going to have difficulty as I kept starting and stopping, if you know what I mean; you know, surging ahead and then falling back, growing and shrinking, happy and sad, good and evil.  Damn unreliable fucking thing, Jesus Kee Fucking Ko!  I thought to give myself time by telling her how great it was going to be for her, selling myself on the idea that the longer it took me, the more aroused and closer to orgasm she’d be.  She said, “I can’t wait!” If nothing else, I was always a great salesman.  Finally, in a microcosm of twenty years old going on thirteen, I suddenly and completely unexpectedly finished, before I had even started, not even inside a condom or her yet.

She was a good sport about it, possibly having experienced this before, and wiped herself off with her hand and Steve’s sheets, saying, “It’s OK, probably best that we wait anyway,” and other bullshit, bless her.  She was so sunny about it that I felt no need to pout in a corner and feel sorry for myself.  We talked until dawn, she telling me of her fiancé and how he had given her permission to be with other men so that she could, as she said, ‘get it out of her system.’  I’ll be damned if she didn’t sound like a nineteen year old guy.  I wonder if she ever did get it out of her system.  In the two years I knew her, she worked her way through an astounding number of my classmates.  We became just friends, of course, and after she left that morning I had to go do some laundry.

There was this cute looking young lady around campus that I developed kind of a distant crush on.  Didn’t know her name but she had a honey sweet ass and smoky brown hair and very interesting eyes.  Turned out that Steve knew her and that she had noticed me too, always running from class to class.  She thought it interesting that I was so enthusiastic and never realized that I was just always late.

We finally met, her name was Julie Armstrong and, as usual, I fell in love before I could get a breath.  She was flattered, if a bit wary, but we spent a great weekend together, visiting her horse at a nearby farm and taking long walks and talking.  She was from New York City, her father was a cop in Queens and her mother was Puerto Rican, which I considered delectably exotic, and it explained her eyes.  One might wonder why I mention it but this was my first experience with a girl not totally, thoroughly Caucasian, and I felt that I was broadening my knowledge of the world. I had seen one Hispanic and maybe a few Black girls, but had rarely ever talked to one, except Leila back at an old warehouse job a while back and then only embarrassingly and haltingly.

Illustrative of how narrow we all were, a guy on my floor had already been advocating the idea that Asian women were built horizontally instead of vertically. We abused him roughly about his ignorance, asking how that could be possible, it wouldn’t fit that way between their legs, but the fact is that none of us really knew. He insisted, saying that when you had intercourse with one, you had to be at right angles to her, making kissing titties and other romantic endearments virtually impossible during the act. We were all milk white and mostly unpracticed anyway, even with girls from our mostly rural hometowns, so some of us (not me of course!) secretly wondered if he was on to something. This was the same guy who wanted to go live alone in the woods of British Columbia after graduation.  He had the odd name of Bater McDonough and we called him ‘Master.’

Julie and I  met as much as we could over the next few weeks; she had to go home the next weekend but I was floating and giddy, yet concerned that she would soon find out my problem and run away.  Two weekends later, we were alone in her dorm room and I was getting nervously bold. Aching to touch her breast, even through the sweater, and surreptitiously worried that if Bater knew about her he’d share some oddity of Hispanic anatomy too, she blocked me to a stop and said dreamily, “All you get is the back.” Essentially relieved, I eased off, my shame hidden for another week, maybe.

The next weekend a friend of hers came up to visit from the city, towing a reluctant boyfriend.  As the girls went off alone to catch up, he and I had a few beers and he told me all about her many indiscretions and other affairs, about how she had lived with a few guys and was otherwise haphazard in her relations with men.  I didn’t believe a word of it; in fact I was so smitten that I was ready to completely forget it had ever come up.  Needless to say, as soon as they had left to head back home, perturbed that possibly she had had all these men and was only allowing me the back, I had to bring it up. Verbal firecrackers went off around my head and when the sulfuric smoke cleared I was alone, again, (naturally!) underwear shredded, ears ringing, eyes blinded, blinking stupidly, wondering what in hell had just happened.  Weeks later I was still trying in vain to talk to her with absolutely no result and only found out later by accident that, as I suspected, she was in fact as nice and sweet as I had originally thought.

She was a special one, and I held a candle for her for five long years until my next unrequited love struck, painfully.  I actually got brave and sent Julie a Christmas gift, something I knew she would like and wanted, along with the most abject note of apology that I could wring out of my overwrought absurdity.  I hoped she’d call or at least write but I heard nothing, knowing full well that I could expect to hear nothing.  I still wished she would call, or something, and waited and waited, until we were all back in school for the spring semester. One evening, I saw her in the cafeteria and she came over, with a friend for security, and very nicely but distantly thanked me for the kind gift and then sauntered away, that great horse major ass swinging alluringly up the stairs, soft hair bouncing, my heart crushed under her cowboy boots, right where it belonged.

I got a 3.63 CUM that first semester, held back mostly by abysmal gym class grades.  The teacher was Cindy Donohue and I think she’d been there for years although she wasn’t especially old or anything.  She represented that kind of locker room mentality that I had always been really bad about.  I pictured her in the locker room, snapping women’s asses with wet towels and commenting surreptitiously to others about breast size and pubic hair thickness, in much the same way that the more sweaty Keveny guys had seemed way too interested in the physical attributes of other men while showering. She and I just plain never hit it off. 

Phys Ed. was compulsory in college then under some bizarre New York State law, or so they told us, so I was required to take two semesters of this one credit class called something like, ‘Adult Leisure Activities,’ or whatever.  It consisted of bowling, archery, skiing and tennis amongst other important activities for well adjusted adults, of which I am sure I was not one.  We started with tennis and I had never played the game before.  I have struggled all my life with a cruel lack of hand to eye coordination, terrible at everything that required using my hands quickly for precision activity.  I knew better than to even try. Coach Donohue was the coach of women’s tennis and so had a stake in tennis as a way of life.  This was very clear from day one when she told us that tennis was life, or words to that effect.  If I could only have shown more enthusiasm.

At any rate, in six weeks of weekly tennis lessons, I was never able to, even once, successfully hit the Goddamn bastard ball over the Goddamn bastard net.  Once in a while it would hit near enough to the top of the net to kind of lamely flop over and piddle around at the base of the other side, but that was it.  I got it out of bounds a lot, bouncing it off bystander’s heads and kneecaps easily enough, but that Goddamn bastard net was elusive.  Coach had clearly never seen anything like me in her life and was completely stymied.  She tried mockery, she tried embarrassment, she tried physical laying on of hands; nothing worked.  She would gather the rest of the class to watch and jeer me on, which they did with well adjusted adult enthusiasm, and that didn’t help.  Jesus Kee Ko, I was utterly hopeless.

I tried to plead my case.  I said I had bad hand to eye coordination; she said, “Bah, you’re just not trying.”  I told her that I hated tennis and didn’t even watch it on TV and she said, “I feel sorry for you, then.”  I was a failure and got an F in the segment to prove it.

I had bowled as a kid and had developed, through hours of practice and mockery by onlookers when I was young, the ability to at least roll the ball down and hit some pins, sometimes even knocking one or two down.  Being bigger and stronger now, I was able to hurl the ball with some dash and averaged close to 100 points, or pins, a game.  She clucked and smirked and said how could I ever expect to win with such ludicrously low scores.  Pissed off by now, I said, “Who the fuck cares,” and she brought the rest of the class over for a lesson in maladjustment in contemporary adulthood, me being the only example ever discovered, evidently.

Archery was too painful to talk about, except to say that it was as close as I have ever come to contemplating murder in my life, outfitted with motive and means as I was.  I swear the target moved when I was aiming at it, though coach insisted that it was me all along and what was my problem?  I cried for the trees and the birds and the bunnies and the poor souls who wandered too close.

I’m kidding, of course.  I was actually pretty good at archery and bowling and we didn’t have problems in those segments.  So, all averaged together, I got a D in Gym and pained expressions from coach, disturbed and irredeemable and male as I was, even though my only real failure was coach’s specialty.

My physical problems started up again in Ski Class but we had the ski coach for that instead, and he was much less negative about my shortcomings, accepting the fact that not everyone lived for the slopes.  I had been on cross country skis but NEVER downhill and I have to say I was scared shitless to be pissing with these big dogs.  Coby had its own ski center, complete with rope tow, small ski lift and ski lodge, so of course skiing was part of the Adult Leisure Activities curriculum, or ALA for short.  Or, how about Asshole Living Anonymous, with the 7 step program, starting with denial and moving all the way through to spurious acceptance. Whatever!

Anyway, our first class took us up the rope tow and then, through the woods where we were taught, at high speed, to lift first one and then the other leg off the ground while skimming on the other ski.  Coordinated as I was, I was wobbling precariously before I had gone 20 feet, everyone else passing me off to the side, crashing through brush and deadfalls in their haste to keep up with the instructor.  In quick order I was dead last in line, and then soon absolutely alone on the trail; waddling along, out of whack, out of kilter, out of my mind, exuding flop sweat.

I came to the next clearing just in time to see the rest of the group careening down a steep slope with varying degrees of success, the instructor standing Viking-like halfway down, exhorting all to keep those knees bent and crawl out of the way when fallen.  I broke out in a cold sweat to cover the existing exertion sweat already tickling my armpits and somehow came to an ungraceful stop at the brink, just as the last of the class shoved off from the bottom of the hill and across a field.  At least I wasn’t calling attention to my failings like I did in tennis.

It was quiet up there all alone as I pondered my course of action. There was no longer anyone in sight and I struggled out of my skis to sit and consider my options; immediately a ski slipped over the top and swooshed to the bottom and out into the meadow, finally coming to a stop obscured in a patch of picker bushes.

I got up, collected my remaining ski and poles, slipped and slid down the slope, pretty much sort of on my feet, scratched through the brambles to retrieve the other ski and somehow managed to get back to the beginning just as the last of the class was coming in and being dismissed for the day.  It seemed that I could fit in pretty well here, just starting out with the group, getting left behind, then traversing the back country in time for the end of class. No one seemed to miss me and, in fact, the ruse worked and I got a tidy B+ for the segment.  Now this was leisure activity.

Second semester, because of my high CUM, I was invited into Phi Theta Kappa, the junior college version of Phi Beta Kappa.  I went to the meetings which seemed to consist entirely of calls for fundraising volunteers which was then and still is today probably my least favorite activity, ranking below even tennis if you can believe it.  I lasted two meetings before speaking out to the group asking if we were an academic honor society or a community service organization and was pretty much ignored after that, so I just stopped going.  Another meeting I could avoid.

So, I partied, wished I was better with women, got pretty good marks and the year came to an end.  Next year we would get into the meat of our Fisheries and Wildlife curriculum and I could really start learning the important things to help me get a good job, finally. 

My parents were campaigning for me to get a summer job but I had money left over from last summer and thought I could make it last another few months of hiking in the Adirondacks.  I was convinced that once I was finished with school and got a ‘good’ job that I would be pretty much done with the freedom to be in the woods an entire summer and felt that it was the time to get it off my chest.  Maybe my wish to get the hiking off my chest was similar to Eveready’s need to get her sleeping around off her chest, maybe even with the same internal doubt that it was even possible that I suspect she felt.  Either way, I was committed to avoiding work that summer if I could get away with it.

We were out of school by mid May and I skedaddled up to the Adirondacks soon after that, just in time for the brunt of Blackfly season.  I had missed this wonderful experience the year before because I didn’t start this early, but I hit it square this year.

Blackflies are these small gnats that swarm like the dickens.  The stories about them run the gamut of torture.  Some say that they simply like to, as a horde of zillions, pick you up bodily, stuff you up into a tree, and let you ripen fully before ingesting you.  Others say that they have corkscrew mouths, screw their intake appendages into you and then yank them out, covered in your flesh and blood, to eat leisurely.  Either way, at peak season in the interior, you will have untold millions of them clouding around your head, landing and scurrying nervously, looking for a way onto your skin and, if successful, then lunch. It is necessary to wear gloves, hats, face netting, socks folded over boots, neck covered, everything tucked in, sweating bullets; and still they envelop you with a billion bodies, always seeking, searching out and finding places that you thought sure you had covered.  I found this all out by experience, hiking in the woods, being followed insistently by a cobwebby complement of huge, concentrated populations of these tiny bugs.  There was just no getting away from them unless you could position yourself well out from cover in a strong wind; that could lessen the numbers significantly.  Unfortunately, there were few large clearings with strong winds in the Adirondack forest, and anyway when the wind died a bit, their radar would find you quickly enough, wherever you were.

It was an exercise in quasi-sado-masochism to be out in the bush in blackfly season.  I often wondered what heretofore hidden self loathing aspect of my personality drove me to this torture.  I would sit in the glare sun of an early June evening, on the shore of some glittering stream, listening to water cascading musically over stone, hearing birds singing and deer snorting in thickets, covered and sweating head to toe in the heat, cocooned in netting, gloved, rubber-banded, surreptitiously lifting the head net to shovel some Mountain House glop into my mouth, letting in a few hundred voracious insects intent on ridding me of calories as quickly as I took them in.  Sitting alone, in heat, exhausted, itching, knowing that nothing, absolutely nothing, would make them stop swarming my head, singing in my ears.  I wasn’t thinking about survival of the fittest, or the wonders of Thoreau’s Walden, nor even the man against nature philosophies of Jack London.  I was just an organism, living painfully and thoughtlessly, from minute to minute.  During the day, the physical exertion of hiking allowed some mental respite from the plague (my knees hurt so much that I didn’t even think about blackflies), and it was only at night, after full dark had fallen, when I could undress and cool off, and live only with the flock of mosquitoes that came out for their turn at my blood, much easier to tolerate, all things considered.

At one point that early June, my father drove up and met me, by pre-arrangement, at a trailhead and we went to our beloved Forked Lake.  The weather was absolutely glorious: 80 degrees, incessantly sunny, dry and sparkling day after day – and we pretty much had to spend them all in the tent. 

We had Mr. Buck with us, as game a dog as there ever was.  When we got to the deserted landing (why weren’t there scads of people here in such beautiful weather?), we set about immediately loading the canoe while Buck smelled the outhouses, as usual.  As we were ready to cast off, we called him and he came running, literally dripping blood from his belly to the point that we thought he had been bitten by a ferocious wild animal like a grizzly bear or tiger or something.  I rolled him over and sure enough, his underside was awash in blood but I couldn’t see any wounds so I just rinsed him off in the lake and dragged him into the canoe.

Then, the answer became very clear.  The skies darkened though there were no clouds; we thought there must have been an eclipse scheduled that we hadn’t heard about but the sun was whole and shining brightly.  Then, our skin was tickling, we were getting that weird crawly feeling and sure enough, son of a bitch, we were covered with hundreds, no thousands, no millions of tiny questing insects, crawling under sleeves and up pant legs, settling in armpits and crotches and enjoying a fine mid day meal, on us.  We paddled like there was no tomorrow, actually worried that there might really not be a tomorrow and hit shore so fast that our momentum washed us up about 3 feet onto dry land.  We worked like madmen to get the tent set up and our gear stowed and then dove into the tent, spraying Deep Woods Off liberally on every surface until the whole tent was dripping and the torment dropped off to mere wartime torture levels.

The next morning, Pop crawled out of the tent first, as usual, and after standing for a minute or so, proclaimed the scourge finished and beckoned me outside.  I excitedly and unbelievingly started gyrating to get myself untangled from the sleeping bag to get outside while I could, only to be almost immediately greeted with his vehement cursing as he near ripped the zipper in his haste to get inside and away from the army of Blackflies that suddenly gathered for the attack.  Jesus Kee Ko, we said, will the bastards ever go away?  Christ!

In fact, it took us two nights to figure out that they in fact actually went to bed at night.  We found this out after a number of beers convinced us that we were immune to bites and went outside for a traditional fire. We dreaded their arrival as soon as we sat down, worried lest they come, knowing full well that these few seconds of bug-less freedom were likely waning, convinced after a few minutes that they were just fucking with us, waiting to pounce with accelerated viciousness, wondering after a half hour if we had in fact found a new use for beer.

We tried overdosing on beer during daylight hours, but alas the experiment proved the fallacy of our theory.  No matter how much we drank, the bastards found us just fine in daylight, and even when our pores were oozing alcohol, the Blackflies scurried all over us, seeking exposed skin.  It is indeed possible that they suffered some effects from inebriation but our powers of observation at those times failed to prove it out one way or another.

We tried getting out into the canoe, enjoying a brisk breeze in the middle of the lake.  We had blessed minutes free of flies in patches, but whenever the breeze abated by about ten percent, the flies found us over the vast expanses of water as easily as if we were neck deep in buggy thickets on land.  It is a tribute to our perseverance and hefty supply of beer that we managed to last two-and-a-half grueling days camping in the best weather we have ever experienced at Forked Lake before or since.

I didn’t spend this entire summer hiking alone in the woods.  In addition to camping with my father and the bugs, I also met Bob DuPuis for a few extended hikes and canoe trips. 

That same June, right after the fly-infested trip to Forked Lake with my father, Bob suggested we tackle Cold River country from Long Lake.  I warned him about the flies, but Bob was never one to be swayed by the possibility of discomfort.  He insisted we go; so armed with face nets, brimmed hats, long sleeved shirts and long legged pants, turtleneck sweaters, cases of bug dope, and God knows what else, we ventured forth.

I have to admit that we got very few Blackfly bites that whole week we spent in the interior.  Maybe four, maybe five each.  Piece of cake!  We each sweated off 20 pounds in the heat and were persistently in a state of near insanity from the constant attentions of what may have been the entire population of Adirondack Blackflies, but we didn’t get eaten up.  I have a picture of Bob securing our food in a tree, dressed for the worst of winter, slightly out of focus as if he were standing in a cloud of thick smoke. I strongly believe that the best weight loss regimen possible is a week in peak Blackfly season in the Adirondacks, dressed sufficiently to ward off being eaten alive. You may not have all your marbles at the end of it but you will be thinner.

This was the year that I explored the West Canada Lakes region, starting from White House on the Northville Placid trail and hiking up through to Cedar River Flow, probably a total trek of over 50 miles.  I was mostly alone, seeing very few people and no one to hike with except for one night meeting up with a few forest rangers out on patrol, who shared their meals with me; actual cooked food as opposed to the ‘recon’ glop I was sucking down.  I had brought Brad Angier’s book, ‘Feasting Free in the Wild,’ with me, and actually found a number of edible greens and tubers and experimented with cooking them, with some success.  I can’t really say I could survive in the wild on what I was able to gather but I can find some things that are good to eat.  Just stay away from mature ferns.  Be careful of mushrooms and many berry looking things, some are a problem.  Cattail roots are great as are the insides of new pinecones.  Smooth and Staghorn Sumacs make great tea-like drinks but if you get some poison sumac by mistake you will be one hurting buckaroo.

I had Mr. Buck with me this trip, it being July and after Blackfly season, and one night we were camping at South Lake. On a nice night I would have been sleeping under the stars on the beach there but this night was close and humid and I was lazing in the Lean-To instead, prepared for rain.  Mr. Buck was great at keeping animals away who might have wanted to steal my food and was handy to have around. 

That night I heard him wandering the area while I was nodding off, and shortly I was dreaming that I was kissing a woman with a particularly spiky beard, and was just puzzling over the weirdness of this concept on all its levels when I awoke to an actual wet scraping of my face.  The adrenaline rushed me as I tried to understand my predicament and I grabbed in front of me and got fists full of fur, felt the spikes anew along with sour breath and feared for my life, convinced that a black bear was tasting me before eating me, lying on my back, wedged into the rear of a Lean-To as I was.  I grabbed harder and heard Buck’s unmistakable whimper, was able to somehow grab my flashlight and sure enough, it was Buck.  Upon examination I saw that his chin was covered in porcupine quills, about 15 of them at least, all well driven in, and he had been trying to lick me awake so I could help him, the quills scraping across my cheek and nose as he licked.

I lit my candle lantern, aimed a flashlight, got him to lay down, he was always so trusting, a noble dog, and went to work. I tried to remember everything I had ever heard about porcupine quill behavior. I used the wire cutters on my Swiss Army Knife to cut the quills in half, which let the compressed air out, then somewhat roughly was able to yank the quills out of his chin with minimal problem.  He lay there patiently, crying but calm, and let me do what I had to do, secure in the knowledge that I would make it right, protect him as he had protected me; as good a dog as there could be.  I used salve and antibiotic cream from my first aid kit on his chin, admonishing him not to lick it off, like he could help it.  Next day he was fine, not swollen or in obvious pain and raring to go.

Later that summer, I went back into Cold River country and bushwhacked my way into the Seward and Santanoni ranges, climbing all of them over the course of a two week trip.  I was getting pretty good at this wilderness stuff, if I might say so myself.  I hiked and climbed through all types of Adirondack weather, through driving rains and misty drizzly days, damp and spooky.  I walked in brutal heat, and ascended Mt. Seymour in a dusting of early morning July snow.  I climbed through screaming thunderstorms, emerging on a summit above the clouds, flashing lights 500 feet below.  All the while, I stayed healthy and safe, relatively dry and even somewhat clean, washing in streams and ponds whenever it was warm enough and I felt crusty enough.

I supplemented my glop with wild greens and even caught messes of trout now and again, making entire meals of what I harvested from the woods.  I slept when I wanted, ate when I wanted and often stayed up all night looking at stars on clear nights. I was in the zone, in my element, proud that I could be on my own in these remote places, handling myself and providing for myself, leaving very little footprint behind me.  While thus employed, I developed (unconsciously, for the most part) many of the philosophies that I would take with me through the years.  I thought about self sufficiency, not depending on others, refraining from complaining, especially about physical discomfort, and generated a genuine love of the natural world, it’s interwoven systems, and man’s effect on it.

Every once in a while I would meet up with someone in the woods, often quite civilized young men, sometimes with their girlfriends or wives, and usually they gave me a pretty wide berth, looking at me sidelong and silently as they passed me on the trail, or deciding to push on just a bit more if they spied me in a Lean-To.  I wanted to talk, and in fact was hungry for news, but seemed to be just a bit too disheveled and scary for these people to chance. 

By August, it was time to come out of the woods, supplies exhausted, clothes getting threadbare, first aid kit emptied and me needing a bit of human contact before I lost the language completely.  I was pretty sure I was getting out in time to make the annual Forked Lake campout and sure enough I got home in time to help my father pack the car.

I had applied for and been hired to be an RA this year, and in fact would be the RA on the same floor that I was on last year, so had to head off to Cobleskill a full week earlier than everyone else for RA training.  There were 10 of us RA’s in Parsons and we were to be reporting to a brand new Dorm Director by the name of Dennis Carter.  He was fresh out of graduate school and was all steeped in what we thought of as sociological mumbo-jumbo.  He wanted to analyze everything to death and had high faulting theories about every type of behavior that had ever been analyzed to death.  Other than that he was OK.

Coby RA training was my first exposure to social training and I can’t say I took all to well to it, nor do I still, in fact.  Instincts and common sense should serve us well enough without formal training in how to handle behavior issues. But, we all attended all these sessions filled with overwrought theoretical discussions about the causes of behaviors and how discussion and appreciating the feelings of your adversary would lead to fruitful empathy and mutual understanding; leading further to world peace, a chicken in every pot, every stitch in time saving nine, each good turn deserving another, and all of us finally loving our neighbors as we loved ourselves.  Phew! I sat there, remembering the political nicety bullshit of Sally Roberts and how that played out, and thinking to myself that this was all a bunch of mental masturbation.  If only I can make myself feel good, all others will follow. All this touchy-feely wonderfulness was at odds with the ‘fuck the assholes’ mindset I was embracing at the time.

The most poignant moment, and possibly the beginning of the end for me, was during an especially painful session of ‘assertiveness training.’  The instructor called for two volunteers to do some assertiveness role playing.  Role Playing! Don’t get me started on that subject! Mary Morrison instantly stepped up to the challenge, which was very typical of her sunny, can-do attitude, but she ruined the effect when she yelled out “Come on, Bessette, come up with me”.  I liked her at the time and was interested in pleasing her, but I stoically stayed in my seat, smiling as best I could, saying, “No thanks, not this time, let somebody else go up.”  She persisted and the instructor said, “Come on, be a good sport, I won’t hurt you.” I again demurred, saying that I didn’t believe in role playing and would respectfully prefer to watch instead of participate directly.  At that moment the whole group started a cadence clap, yelling in unison, “Come on, Tom, let’s go Tom, Go-o-o-o Tom,” and this went on for fully five minutes while the instructor tried ineffectively to restore order. Jesus, I hate people sometimes!

Finally, the dorm directors, using whips, chains, rubber bullets and pepper spray, tasers not yet invented, got everybody seated; many of them grumbling that I had ruined the lesson and how could they learn anything with such assholes always going against the group.  The instructor, having a sudden epiphany, shouted that in fact I had shown strong assertiveness in respectfully declining to be dragged up, but her entreaties were drowned out in the commotion.  Ay-up, ya shore cain’t bate qualata trainin’ if’n y’all wanta larn yerself whut ta do!

In preparing for my floor members to arrive, I decided to put up those cutsie little signs here and there to get a laugh and give some necessary instruction.  Signs like those taped up over the urinals that said ‘We aim to please so please aim.’  I lost my creativity after those but had paper and wall space to fill so I made some that I regret to this day, statements like the one next to the big window in the lounge that looked towards the women’s Porter Hall that stated slickly, ‘Some of those girls over there are crazy.’  I plead stupidity, a commodity I possessed in abundant supply.  I still remember the looks on a few of the mothers faces as they dropped their virgin sons off and continue to feel the heat in my cheeks as I picture their concerned looks.  It is a testament to the simplicity of the time that I wasn’t hauled away to solitary confinement in Dannemora State Prison.

Doc Showalter was the head honcho in the Fisheries and Wildlife curriculum and I guess I didn’t measure up to his opinion of a quality student that year.  I had gotten B+’s last year in Intro to Fish & Wildlife and Ecology but this year I guess I was less impressive in my commitment or something.  At any rate, within two weeks of the start of the semester, he took a strong dislike to me, something I had come up against before and would continue to experience all my life.  I wasn’t sure what it was, but knew that it happened from time to time, and I had no idea how to fix it beyond becoming a complete sycophant or something.  He would ask these really intricate questions of the class and when no one would raise their hand to answer, he would call on me, every time, and when I failed to give a satisfactory answer, he would say something to the effect that I used to be a good student.  I would sit there with my rebellious look on my face and do my best to ignore him, something at which I became very proficient.  Doc seemed to be one of these people who had favorites who were in perpetual grace, and outcasts who would barely make it through the program. I was one of those outcasts and I quickly grew not to care.

That fall we had what was known as the legendary great exam, the one that would make or break us in the program and affect our careers forever.  Doc had a significant collection of fish specimens preserved in formaldehyde, about three or four hundred of them, and the exam consisted of walking down along the lab tables with pen and a numbered blank list and writing down the following about each example laying in the pan under your gaze:  Scientific Name, Common Name, Genus, Species and one major characteristic.  Since these were not lectured on in classes, everyone had to spend long hours in the lab, breathing in formaldehyde fumes, studying these decaying samples under the lights, stuffing our brains with their identifying information, and somehow committing it all to memory.  It was said in the hallways that many was the candidate for graduation who had gotten ten or twenty out of a hundred on this exam and failed to complete the course.  There was an official two month run up to the test and no one slept; at any given hour of the day or night, the lab would be filled with a minimum of fifteen of us, droning Latin, making lists and sweating bullets. There was no way you could blow it off or hope for luck, there was no multiple choice about it, no way to guess, you had to know them or not, period.

Test day came and everyone was on the verge of mental and physical collapse.  Women cried inconsolably, men cursed inventively and for that one day, everyone, but everyone hated Doc, even his ‘favorites.’  I trudged down into the reeking basement lab; fresh formaldehyde had been poured into the pans to overcome the increasing stench of dead fish and was given the numbered list, fifty samples of the three hundred plus we had studied, and sent down the row.  Somehow, amazingly, everything came to me.  I missed characteristics of two of them but got everything else correct, ending up with a ninety-eight on this most dreaded of tests.  I figured if I had done it, so had everyone else and the whole legend must be a complete ruse to get everyone to study.  In fact, I had the next to the highest grade and nearly a third of the class failed the exam, a few quite spectacularly.

Doc looked at me very suspiciously but many people stated positively that I had been there studying every time they had and there really was no way to cheat.  This was before the era of cell phone cameras, digital voice recorders and cameras, everything, and besides he was there with two assistants scrutinizing our every move during the test; non favorites especially.  I did so well, so confoundingly, that I fell further from grace and became a pariah in the classroom, never again to be included in discussions, nor invited to extra credit sessions nor so much as greeted with a kind word.

That was in my major, the stuff I was here for.  I also was required to take two semesters of Calculus and two semesters of Economics, neither of which could in any way be considered my strong suit.  For Calculus, I had George Hanover, he of extra thick glasses, broad featureless back and vacant stare.  He stood with his back to us and wrote long incomprehensible strings of figures on the chalkboard, droning on in the most sleep inducing voice imaginable, and not one of us students were able to make heads or tails of a single thing he said.  This is true, we all talked about it after classes every day, “Did anybody get what he was saying?  No?  Nothing? Does anybody have any idea what this class is about?  No?  Nobody??” and so on for both semesters.

For Economics, I had James Zybnewski.  He was at least ninety years old and spoke in a halting accent that not one of us in the class was able to penetrate, other than a word here and there.  He did use the recognizable word ‘Oleo ’ a lot, and some of us even knew what Oleo was, although what it had to do with Economics remains a mystery. I believe, after questioning his colleagues, that he was using it as some sort of commodity example, but that is about all I got out of Economics.

In both these classes, for both semesters, the tests were incomprehensible.  I would take a Calculus test, know absolutely nothing about anything on it and somehow get a B.  I think he was curving it a bit.  It is an interesting idea to get a B in two separate math courses and exit the class with absolutely nothing learned.  Zybnewski’s tests were equally inscrutable but I failed those, as did most everyone.  He gave one test where the highest grade was an eight out of one hundred.  At the end of every semester, he was beset by the vast majority of his students begging for passing grades, talking about disappointed mothers on their deathbeds, horrible cancers developed from eating cafeteria food and myriad other situations that contributed to an unusually low grade earned. He would look completely confused, blink a few times, say something unintelligible, and the student would end up with some manner of better grade.  I hated to debase myself with such lame and patently untrue excuses and simply asked for a better grade and he gave me a D or a D+ and thus I managed to graduate with barely a C average, considering the C’s that I was getting from Doc.

That final year, I was at loose ends.  I had started to date Melanie Bonasera in the early fall, and had hurt my back getting up off her bed, ending up spending a week in the infirmary.  They had me on some kind of pain killers and I was one happy fella for a while there.  I would like to blame the drugs for my lousy performance in classes but it was so short-lived that the excuse won’t hold water.  We were trying to make love but my stop and go routine made any kind of completion impossible and I knew she was getting tired of me.  Then on the night of my birthday, the dorm director called an emergency meeting, and then a bunch of us stayed and shot the shit.  By the time I showed up in her room she was as frosty as I had even seen anyone. She informed me that the surprise party was a bust, and everyone left, and she was mortified that I didn’t show up for my own surprise party, and she didn’t want to see me anymore, please leave, and that was that.

My grades had dropped beyond the lower echelon for even being invited to Phi Theta Kappa and I am sure that there was an officer or two who remembered me and were saying, ‘I told you so.’  I hated Doc and had real contempt for most of the professors I had.  Since I was an outcast to Doc, it made sense for many of the other students to shy away from me, not obviously, but in little ways; I just wasn’t part of the crowd.  Now and again I would get an inkling that this wasn’t particularly a new occurrence for me but I didn’t really investigate that concept too much.  What I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me.

I met Lana.  She was my age but acted quite a bit older.  There was a concert by the classical rock group ‘Renaissance’ that a bunch of us wanted to see in Albany and I invited her along.  A guy had a van and we all crammed into it for the hour plus drive.  At the end of the concert, I decided that I wanted to go home for a few days to get my act together and he dropped me off in Waterford at my parent’s apartment.  Lana was dumbfounded that I would ask her on a date and then scoot out in the middle of it but that’s where I was in that stage of my maturity.

My parents were on their yearly pilgrimage to Daytona Beach, Florida, so I had the apartment to myself; no one knew I was home.  I had no car and couldn’t go anywhere; no matter, I had no money either.  Found my parents checkbook and cashed a check at the grocery store and stocked up on beer, chips, ice cream and hot dogs and spent most of two weeks commiserating with myself, wondering if I just wouldn’t go back at all.  It slowly dawned on me that I had only about a month and a half left and had spent too long not to at least try to get my degree, so I hitchhiked back to school and, grudgingly, made apologies for being absent and somehow finished out the semester.

It couldn’t end without a few final stupid practical jokes.  My buddy and fellow RA Sparkie and a few others managed to get into my room and move all my stuff, bed, dresser, desk, clothes, everything, out onto the lawn outside the dorm, five floors down.  I came home from class to a half empty room (Steve’s stuff was all still there of course) and a sign taped to the window saying, ‘look out here!’  Yup, there it all was, out in that there yard, there.  Needless to say, the guys who did it were so busy they couldn’t help and I had to enlist some of my floor residents to haul it all back up again.  Naturally we headed over to the other end of the building, I filched the master key, and quickly moved all Sparkie’s stuff out to the same spot. Taped a sign on his window.  Was too busy to help him.

In the last week, Steve and I Saran Wrapped and Ben Gay’ed the toilets on the fifth floor in Porter, one last time, and the girls there responded by gathering  a few square yards of mulch and paving the bathroom floor on our floor with it, up to a depth of three inches at least.  They did it overnight; I don’t know how no one caught them, and we found it at shower time first thing next morning.  At least they helped shovel it all up.

Graduation was a gala day.  I had no sense of accomplishment and my overall 4 semester CUM of 2.6 was pretty sad.  It was 1978 and New York Governor Hugh Carey had just put the state on an extended austerity budget, along with a hiring freeze which pretty much put the kibosh on getting a job with the Department of Environmental Conservation.  My classmates with happier grades were all going on to four year schools for Wildlife Biology and the like, there being no jobs, but my family was pretty much out of college money, especially for me, who still hadn’t learned to put any effort into it.

So, I went home to my parent’s apartment, listless, angry, careless and clueless about my future; knowing only that I hadn’t seemed to do myself any good yet, and what in hell was my problem.  My mother said that now I could finally settle down, get a steady job, meet a nice girl and get a place of my own. I said, “Yes Mom, sure, right away,” went into my room and blasted the stereo.