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Chapter One

GLASSBORO

IN 1992 GLASSBORO STATE COLLEGE RECEIVED a gift of $100 million and renamed itself, after its generous benefactor, Rowan College of New Jersey. Another change of name is imminent; any moment now I expect to hear that Rowan College has become Rowan University. I sympathize with this desire for upward mobility on the part of the trustees. When I enrolled there in 1973, Glassboro was just another teacher education school in the flatlands of southwestern New Jersey. I too yearned to be part of a university, and eventually I got into one: not Princeton or Penn, whose proximity to Glassboro was a reminder of things best left unstated, but the University of Connecticut, which had begun its days as the Storrs Agricultural School. But coming out of high school, I didn't have many options, and Glassboro State College was what I got. It wasn't a terrible place by any means; and yet I hope that Mr. Rowan's money will go far toward improving it. Perhaps even now the two required courses in physical education have been waived.

I didn't exactly "choose" Glassboro. In my hometown, Westport, Connecticut, a famously well-heeled suburb with a smattering of working class families, almost all the students from Staples High School went to college and most of them got into better ones than Glassboro. But somehow I missed the interviews with campus recruiters and preparatory sessions for the SATs. When I did get around to sending off applications, I picked four out-of-state schools (I had a notion that you were supposed to go to anout-of-state school) that seemed comparatively affordable and that were not to be found in Peterson's Competitive Colleges. (Two of the four no longer exist.) My grades, alas, spoke for themselves, but I certainly didn't get much help. Sizing me up as state school material, my guidance counselor got rid of me as quickly as he could and even expressed some chagrin that I had to consider mere economic factors. My father, a high school administrator who might have advised me ten years earlier, was in the depths of a severe alcoholism that had recently destroyed his marriage and would soon nearly destroy his career, not to mention his life; he had other things to worry about than where his third son went to college, though he was concerned about the tuition. My mother was not at that point in much better shape than my father, though she had, thank God, stopped drinking; anyway, the education of the children was not her responsibility. So I went to Glassboro. I still don't know why. But it had had the decency to accept me, and to ask for more than that seemed ungracious. After all, as my guidance counselor had joked, "I don't see you storming the gates at Harvard, do you?"

I got down to see the campus twice before classes began. The first time was with my father in the spring of 1973, a few weeks after I had notified the college of my intention to enroll. My father saw it as his duty to give each of his five children a preliminary tour of the college of his or her choice. After that he pretty much forgot about our higher education, except to help pay, in ever decreasing amounts, as much of the tuition and fees as he could afford. Still, it couldn't have been easy for him to take a day off work and drive three hundred miles without taking a drink. We didn't say much to each other—we never did—but I appreciated his effort to be a Good Father. What I remember most about that trip was the long ride on the New Jersey Turnpike and the astoundingly dismal road that led into town. I really didn't have the heart to go on. Fortunately, the meeting we had with a low-level administrator turned out to be even more perfunctory than I had dared hope, and we spent only fifteen minutes or so pretending to look at the campus before getting back in the car for the four-hour ride back to Connecticut.

I spent that summer washing dishes in an Italian restaurant and trying not to think about college, but in July I had to go back to Glassboro to find a place to live. (Housing tended to be a problem for me in my four and a half years as an undergraduate.) In the late spring I had been notified that there was no space for me in a dormitory and that I would have to find off-campus housing on my own. So my older brother volunteered to drive me down and help me find a room. Actually, I was hoping he'd do it without me. By then I was starting to feel slightly sick about the prospect of college at all, and the long day we spent going from campus bulletin boards to off-campus houses was depressing in the extreme. We did, in the end, find a place that wasn't too far from campus and that I could afford: sixty-five dollars a month for a share with five other freshmen on Yale Road. The landlord was a thirty-year-old mailman who had recently moved into the refurbished basement of his house in order to rent out the top two floors to students. He told us that he had already signed up the other boarders: a couple of music majors, at least one of whom was black, a future shop teacher, miscellaneous other freshmen.

For the first time I felt a little hope. Black roommates! Maybe I would get some sort of education at Glassboro. At the least, I'd get to know a black person, which was more than I'd ever done in my hometown. It wasn't that Westport was racist, exactly; it was just that, for some unaccountable reason, no black people lived there. Despite the genteel hypocrisy I grew up with, I was sufficiently a product of the sixties to sense that maybe black people weren't entirely welcome in Westport. Anyway, by the time I graduated from high school I had seen enough tragic and heroic American history not to take it for granted that I would be living with people whose skin was black.

When I arrived in late August the landlord told me that one of the black students had backed out and that I would be living with only four other guys. None of them was there just then, though; I had, with the consent of the landlord, arrived about a week before anybody else. My older brother and sister and a cousin of mine, who was soon to depart for his own third-rate state college in New Hampshire, had offered to drive me down, but they could do so only then and no later. It was one of the last times I ever got a ride to college (transportation being another problem for me in the next four and a half years), and all three tried very hard to cheer me up. As we took a quick tour of the campus, my sister pointed to a necking couple on a lawn and said, "That's what you'll be doing in a few weeks, Stephen." I believed her. In truth, it wasn't education that was on my mind so much as a girlfriend, and Glassboro, I was acutely aware, had a nearly two-to-one ratio of females to males. I had been abjectly girlfriendless in high school, but no one had to know that down here, and I was reasonably confident that having a girlfriend would just happen to me. Actually, my family must have been as eager for me to get a girlfriend as I was for one to get me. They had to wait an awfully long time to find out I wasn't gay.

In the afternoon my brother, sister, and cousin left me at my new house and wished me luck. I got a little choked up, but I also felt a certain wry amusement in my situation: it was such a classic rite of passage. Still, when I sat down to an early dinner of a roast beef sandwich, I dumped sugar on it rather than salt and had little stomach to eat it anyway. I tried to find some comedy in that, too. The next week was pretty bad, but I wasn't expecting to have a great time before classes began and my housemates arrived. So despite a withering heat wave, I used what little imaginative resources I had to keep myself busy. I opened a bank account with my savings from the restaurant, I went to a dining hall twice a day for meals, I listened to records on the cheap stereo I had set up, I read The National Lampoon and Rolling Stone, I got very well acquainted with the Penthouse Pet of that month. And, on my landlord's borrowed bicycle, I explored the town.

Glassboro, New Jersey, was a fiat, quasi-suburban place without much charm that might have once belonged to the Pine Barrens. The Encyclopedia Americana says, "It has canneries and makes bottle caps." A railroad track ran through it and there were still some pine woods on the edges. The only remarkable thing about it, I thought, was the street names. To walk downtown or to campus I could take Yale Road to Columbia Road or, alternately, Princeton to Cornell; there might have even been a University of Chicago Lane. Now I wasn't exactly ashamed to be at Glassboro State College, but it did occur to me that I'd never find a Glassboro Avenue in Princeton, New Jersey, or Cambridge, Massachusetts. Why rub it in? Those street names bothered me more and more as the year went on. They seemed embarrassingly unselfconscious.

I also explored the campus. It didn't take very long. Glassboro was a middling-sized place, and though I hesitate to say the architecture was bad, it wasn't good. Still, there was a lovely old domed building approached by an oval lawn and flanked by "stately" trees that formed the visual center of the campus: Glassboro's answer to Harvard Yard; also, the president's stone and ivy-covered house, site of the never-to-be-forgotten 1967 summit discussions between Lyndon Johnson and Aleksei Kosygin and called, with delicious gentility, "Hollybush." The rest of the buildings were fairly nondescript. Some of them, like the steel and glass library or, more properly, the Savitz Learning Resource Center, were in the kind of bland International Style favored by corporate America in the fifties and sixties; others, like the new Student Center and the music building, were dark, brutalist hulks, though the interiors were rather handsome; and a few, like the dormitories and various halls where classes were held, hardly seemed like architecture at all; they were just buildings, blocks of brick and concrete and metal plunked down on the ground with a kind of majestic indifference to their own ugliness. Even the grounds were bleak, though I decided that many of the plantings were too recent to have taken root. I was still trying not to be depressed.

Finally, my roommate arrived.

"Paul!" I cried as he emerged from his car.

But it wasn't my roommate Paul, the musician; it was Sal, the shop teacher. Just as well. I got along better with Sal anyway. A short, working-class Italian and former wrestling champ with a fifteen-year-old girlfriend back in his high school, he was one of the most decent people I met in the next four years. But then, almost all the people I met at college were decent. It wasn't their fault I fucked up so thoroughly.

In the next two days the three remaining boarders arrived: Claude, the black student, a music major, and, like Sal, impressively independent (he came, unaccompanied, in his own car); Paul, my roommate, a very talented pianist with whom I had almost nothing in common; and a tall, gangly longhair named Andrew who should have been a close friend but with whom I quarrelled endlessly until we stopped talking to each other. Perhaps because I came from a place where such matters would have been taken for granted, I noticed that except for Paul, none of us got the standard upper-middle class send-off, with the overpacked station wagon and both parents along to provide encouragement. Education at Glassboro State College was pretty much a no-frills experience, and parents who could afford to send their children there rarely had the luxury to spoon over them. Compared to Sal's and Claude's solitary car trips and Andrew's embarrassing farewells to two carfuls of Polish relatives, my humble little send-off, I realized with a tinge of guilt, hadn't been so bad.

The five of us got along pretty well, except for Andrew and me, and the silence between us came only in the spring, after he had told me that I had bad breath. Such as they were, Sal, Claude, Paul, and Andrew were the only real friends I had all year. Except for Claude, who didn't know who the Who were and never talked trash, we all liked rock and roll and considered ourselves reasonably cool. Claude made up for these lapses by playing so many instruments so well and by maintaining an unimpeachable dignity. He was the son of a career officer at Fort Dix; maybe he had no time for these white boys' games. I might have been a bit disappointed that he wasn't more, well, black, but he disabused me of the notion that he should be simply by being so unfailingly himself: relaxed, cordial, considerate, totally unhip. As for intellectual interests, Claude was as perfectly void of them as the rest of us.

Andrew was somewhat different. An undeclared major, he didn't as yet have any particular interests either, but he clearly had a mind and, as he frequently reminded us, he could have gone to Rutgers instead. He was evidently, and to my annoyance, a good deal brighter than I was. He knew a lot of stuff that I'd never heard of—for instance, that Tennessee Williams was openly homosexual (I was shocked). Most impressively, he knew—it did not, with Andrew seem a matter of opinion—that God didn't exist and that religion was a fraud. I was reluctantly coming to the same conclusion myself, but I hated to concede the point to him. It was probably not so much any lingering scruples as the fear of seeing Andrew gloat that held me back, because the next year, with Andrew no longer around, I became as militantly atheist as he had been.

Andrew knew more than I did, but he could scarcely have known less. How I could have come through twelve years of what was supposed to be one of the best public school systems in the state of Connecticut without knowing how to use an apostrophe (I thought it was "did'nt") is not quite the mystery it seems. The Westport schools were oriented toward "achievement," and if you achieved, or if your parents made a fuss over your achieving, or even if you were fated not to achieve (i.e., if you were a greaser, part of a select group that received excellent vocational training), you could count on getting an education. If you were—I was—a scholastic nonentity, equally unadept in music, art, sports, and drama, you could, to your relief, accumulate your C pluses year after year in comfortable anonymity. Also, I was educated in the sixties, or what was left of them. It made a difference. In history we had units about prison reform, drug abuse, and, though no one thought it odd that there were no black students to discuss it with, race relations. These were worthy subjects, of course, but the one thing we emphatically did not discuss was history. In English we read such classics as The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, saw a lot of movies, and discussed race relations some more. On Thursdays in my senior year my school day ended at 10:30, a schedule that gave me crucial time to listen to records and shoot baskets in the driveway before reporting for a night's work of dishwashing. I did meet with a few teachers who gave me what little sense I had that learning mattered, that books and reading might actually be interesting. That sense, and a couple of A's in my junior year of English, were enough to save me from junior college but not enough to prepare me for anything like "higher" education. So when I arrived at Glassboro I could not have identified such alien concepts as the Bill of Rights, pronominal case, or the Industrial Revolution. And if I had ever heard of Belgium, I certainly didn't know where it was.

Still, I thought I was pretty smart all the same, and the first professor I met gave me more reason to think so. At a preregistration meeting of freshman English majors, most of whom (my heart leapt) were gifts, he told us that we were, of course, the intellectuals of the campus and that it was only natural to feel a little superior. He also told us, as he stubbed out his second cigarette, that there was absolutely no smoking permitted in that or any other classroom. No doubt, faced with another clutch of ignorant seventeen-year-olds, he needed to encourage himself as much as us. Yet he clearly enjoyed the performance, and the lesson wasn't lost on us: that as he was gracious, witty, and intelligent, so might we be.

My decision to major in English was made with the same indifference that had brought me to Glassboro in the first place. I had rather liked the two or three plays by Shakespeare that we had read in my sophomore and junior years, and certainly English was one of the few subjects I wasn't actively bad in. That seemed reason enough. But I also had an obscure sense, laughably naive, I know, that language might not be purely utilitarian, that it might be beautiful and powerful, and that I might even have a particular facility for it. It was well to keep my expectations within reason, however. I had never actually read a pastoral elegy and I wasn't sure I wanted to.

Before classes began the freshmen were given an orientation consisting of a magic show and the distribution of the brown and yellow caps of the Glassboro Bulldogs (discarded en masse immediately after the assembly). Probably more serious attempts at freshman orientation were made in the dormitories, but the Amazing Randi's parlor tricks were about all the off-campus students had in the way of hand-holding. Registration was the expected horror, but as an English major I was allowed, incredibly, to bypass Freshman Composition, a course I could have profited from even more than Elementary Thinking, had there been such an offering. Instead I signed up for Creative Writing I and for good measure Journalistic Writing I; also Masterpieces of American Literature, Issues in American History, remedial algebra, and one and a half credits in physical education. Except for the gym class, they weren't terrible. I had to start somewhere and it was just as well I did so with introductory courses that assumed nothing more than functional literacy. As ignorant as I was, though, it was apparent that I was a step ahead of most of my classmates. A certain amount of Fairfield County sophistication must have rubbed off on me; I could, at the least, talk better than these New Jersey kids. It wasn't long before I began to ask myself, What am I doing in this godforsaken place?

Not yet, though. I tried not to hate college. I hung out with the guys in the house, I went to the movies on Saturday nights, I played the piano in the comfortable practice rooms of the music building, I bought more rock and roll records, I broke out my old National Lampoons whenever I started feeling depressed. But I was sinking and I knew it. My twice-daily meals, for instance, were fast becoming a trauma. In the beginning I didn't mind eating alone, even though the dining hall reeked of sour food and the grease on the meatloaf cleaved to the roof of my mouth, because I hadn't yet made friends with whom I could share meals. But after three or four weeks I seemed to be the only student in the room eating alone. Sometimes Claude or Sal would happen by and rescue me, but I developed the habit of bolting my wretched food and keeping my head in a book while eating—not a stance calculated to end the isolation I so much abhorred. There were even days when I ate nothing rather than wait in long lines and have to share a table with strangers. This wasn't supposed to be happening to me.

I still have no clear idea why I failed so quickly and so completely; perhaps "Something to do with violence / A long way back, and wrong rewards," as Philip Larkin wrote. It's a line of thinking I don't particularly wish to pursue. Whatever the deeper reasons for my utter inability to take control of my life, the resulting humiliation made a good student of me. Probably I would have become infatuated with literature anyway, but I had to compensate for my social and sexual privations somehow, and I did so by studying. At first I studied about three hours a day—a heroic regimen, I thought—and I stepped it up each semester. Anyhow, reading The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises, as I did for my survey in American literature, hardly seemed like studying. This course, in which twenty or twenty-five math, science, and home economics majors sat glowering at the elderly instructor as he rambled interminably about the "European theme" in Henry James, was my introduction to the advanced study of literature. I liked it a lot. Certainly the instructor was boring, but he had written a novel and could talk about great books as if people had actually written them. On the spur of the moment he assigned us "Song of Myself" because, as he explained, in that dark moment of national consciousness (1973: Watergate), he thought we would appreciate Whitman's testament of democratic faith. I can imagine how pleased the other students were to have the fifty-two sections of "Song of Myself" added to their other Whitman readings, but I didn't mind. Whitman seemed like an interesting writer, and I didn't have any fraternity rushes to attend at the moment. Alas, "Song of Myself" struck me as woefully verbose, but a few stanzas—"I think I could turn and live with the animals," "Is this then a touch?"—got through to me. It was enough that the entire poem hadn't defeated me, and I proudly worked a few of the lines into my letters home. When I reread the poem in preparation for our mid-term exam, a few more stanzas—whole sections, even—seemed nearly as fine as anything by Bob Dylan.

Of my remaining classes, the most involving were those in creative and journalistic writing. I still marvel at my creative writing instructor. To have read all those hopeless poems and short stories and to have found something encouraging to say about each one was no more than his job, but I never knew him visibly to lose heart, and even the cynicism he affected was patently a ruse. Maybe he did discover some good work now and then, but if so, it wasn't mine that gave him the strength to go on. Once, after the class had ripped apart one of my anonymous efforts, he said, "Mr. Akey, if you were the author of that poem, how would you react to all these criticisms—go home and cry or sit down and rewrite?"

"Go home and cry," I said.

"That's not what T.S. Eliot did when Ezra Pound made a few suggestions about the first draft of The Waste Land."

"OK, I'd try to rewrite the thing. It's nothing personal, as you say."

"No, it's not personal, Mr. Akey. I, by the way, think the poem is very much worth salvaging, though it may not be The Waste Land. Any suggestions you can think of?"

My journalism teacher was not nearly so inspiring. I thought him rather a hack, but that may be because he gave me C's and B's rather than B's and A's. Still, he told some terrific stories about the time in 1967 when President Johnson and Soviet Premier Kosygin came to Glassboro for their great summit meeting and the campus was taken over by the higher journalistic and political powers. He greatly enjoyed the whole circus, he said, but was under no illusions about why Glassboro and not Princeton had been chosen as the appropriate academic setting midway between Washington and New York: unlike their Ivy League counterparts, Glassboro students could be counted on not to embarrass the president with unseemly protests against the war.

One of the requirements of that course, our instructor informed his stunned pupils in the second week of the term, was to get so many column inches in print. In a panic, I signed up for the student newspaper, of which he was the faculty adviser. There was a girl in the class whom I tried to persuade to join me. She came to one meeting and I was rather relieved that she didn't come back. Well, I had done my bit. If she didn't want to fall in love with me that was that. The truth was, I didn't want to fall in love with her, either. Margot was a stocky home economics major—not my type, exactly, but I didn't dare approach the beautiful, more sophisticated students I yearned for. She once told me, approvingly, that her father belonged to an "Optimists' club." Jesus, I thought, these New Jersey hicks are really hopeless. I believe we gave up on each other at about the same time. She was awfully sweet, though, and I trust that she didn't take me seriously enough to be disappointed.

The newspaper experience was pretty ghastly. I went to the offices every Monday night and was occasionally put to work writing headlines and paragraph breakers, Mostly I hung around feeling useless and stupid. It was a very clubby atmosphere, and the "communications" majors who edited the thing seemed formidably professional; one or two of them puffed on pipes. About halfway through the semester I got my first and only assignment: to write an article about a newly formed Campus Safety and Security Committee. I had no idea how to interview people, but the upperclassman who headed the committee read the notes I took in his dormitory room and obligingly rewrote the quotations I had got wrong. The article was a terrible mishmash; it was hard to find anything interesting to say about the Campus Safety and Security Committee, so I adopted a mock-heroic tone to hold the reader's interest. I was at first shocked, then greatly relieved, to discover how little the published piece resembled my own copy. The future in journalism I had been contemplating began to look cloudy, and I had certainly had enough of the Glassboro Whit (the Glassboro Shit, as it was inevitably called by everyone but the staff members). All that trouble to break into print and the bastard of a journalism teacher still gave me only a C plus for the course. In a couple of assignments for Journalism II the next semester I forwent interviews entirely and simply made up stories about nonexistent people. The instructor never questioned my sources and I turned in pieces far more readable than anything I did for creative writing.

Well, I had failed with the student newspaper, failed with the one girl I had approached. I could now, in good conscience, become thoroughly depressed. There followed many, many hours spent listening to moody rock music, staring at a bare tree outside my bedroom window, and solemnly pacing deserted athletic fields on foggy nights. These activities, though deliciously self-pitying up to a point, ceased to offer much satisfaction after a couple of months, and yet I plunged on heroically with my morbid reveries. It hardly mattered how much of my misery was real and how much contrived; either way, I felt like shit.

(Continues...)