Precious Moments

Continuing the account of my first year of college...

My social life that first year at college was on par with my academic performance. I don’t think I went on a single date. Meanwhile, my roommate Dave and I slowly came to hate each other. He hated me for typing up papers while he was hung over, and I hated him for constantly being hung over. Our suitemates tolerated us both with a sort of half-pitying bemusement. Meanwhile Mark, the RA, continued to pray for my soul. I realized later that Dave and I were so antisocial that a lot of the other guys on the floor didn’t even know which of us was which. As a result, somehow I was attributed the bad habits of Dave as well as my own; one particularly pious jackass named Brian insisted on greeting me with a hearty “Hey, Druggie” every time he passed me in the hall. The fact that I had never used anything stronger than peach schnapps at this point was lost on him. It was assumed, since I swore like a sailor and had gotten drunk on at least one occasion, that I was In Desperate Need of Salvation. One time Mark the RA, Brian the Pious, and the other Keepers of the Faith on my floor invited me to a Bible study, and I shocked them by agreeing to attend. I had no idea at this point that I was considered a heathen almost beyond the reach of grace; I was just bored and thought, “Sure, why not?” They must have thought they had pulled off a major coup for the Holy Spirit until I got fucking wasted again the next weekend.

I frankly never saw the connection between Christianity and not using the f-word. It seemed to me that Jesus had bigger concerns. As for drinking, well, I figured that as long as I didn’t drive while drunk, get into fights, or puke all over my roommate’s clothes (looking at you here, Dave), what was the big deal? My lackluster academic performance wasn’t really a moral issue either, as far as I was concerned. I looked at education as an economic transaction: I give you half-assed effort, and you give me a B-. As long as I didn’t cheat, I couldn’t see Jesus caring one way or another. Of course, this didn’t stop me from cheating.

Adding to the irony of my situation, shortly after I started college I got a job at a Christian bookstore. I had wanted to work at a real bookstore, but the only opening they had was at their religious outlet, and I was desperate enough for a job to act super-excited about selling religious paraphernalia. To me, the whole idea of “Christian books” was (and is) a little silly. Books aren’t Christian, or Muslim, or Hindu. They are just books. Some books are good (inspiring, thought-provoking, educational, original) and some books are bad (inaccurate, disingenuous, melodramatic, manipulative), but no book is “Christian” or, for that matter, “un-Christian.” But hey, if somebody wanted to pay me $3.35 an hour (minimum wage in 1988) to sell officially sanctioned “Christian” books (along with “Christian music” and those fucking Precious Moments figurines with the creepy giant eyes), then I could play along.

Well, at least I thought I could play along. One time a guy told me he wanted to buy a Bible, and I asked him what kind of cover he wanted. To my way of thinking, Bibles were categorized in several different ways (translation, print size, etc.), one of which was the type of cover. I had planned to narrow down the options based on his answers regarding the various categories. I didn’t realize how gauche it was to start with the cover. To me it was no different than asking a new mother how much her baby weighs. You aren’t saying, by asking that question, that you think that the most important feature of a baby is its weight; you’re just gathering some basic information. Actually, unless you’re planning on eating the baby, you’re probably just being polite. Anyway, that customer decided he didn’t need help from someone like me, who was clearly going to hell for his superficial attitude toward Holy Scripture.

I couldn’t be bothered to learn the difference between Michael W. Smith and Steven Curtis Chapman (Pretty sure one of them shot John Lennon), and I had trouble disguising my disgust for Precious Moments figurines and other religious tchotchkes. Catholics at least had cool hardware like rosaries and crucifixes; the best we Protestants could devise were postcards featuring gauzy watercolors of lighthouses and ceramic Bible characters with thyroid problems. I did my best to be cheerful while on duty, but I think the store manager and I were both relieved when the school year ended, and I moved back to Florida for the summer.

Why did I return to Punta Gorda for the summer? The answer to that question, as it was for most of the things during that period of my life, was that it was the path of least resistance. I had no job and no place to stay. To my credit, I also realized that I wasn’t really emotionally prepared for college, and I informed my parents that I intended to take a semester off and work in Florida before returning. Unfortunately, about half of the population of Florida lives somewhere else during the summer, which means it’s a terrible time of year to try to find a job at a restaurant or grocery store. I put in a few applications with no results, was overcome by depression, and spent the rest of the summer hanging out in my room. The high point was when my old friend Kristy stopped by one day and apologized for having abruptly cut off contact with me the year before (after remembering she had a boyfriend). I was thrilled to see her and suggested that we go so a movie sometime. We ended up going to see Lethal Weapon 2 and having a good time. Then she remembered about her boyfriend again and stopped returning my calls. She probably could have kept doing this ad infinitum, and I’d have kept falling for it.

My parents weren’t taken with the idea of me lolling about the Cadillac Motel for the fall, and they insisted that I return to Calvin. I did so, under protest. Part of the problem at this point was that my former roommate and suitemates had already secured an apartment with some other students and had no room for me. I ended up having to go back to the dorms and was assigned a roommate by the college.

My roommate turned out to be a guy named Wade, a fan of sports and rap music who looked eerily like John Stamos and had never voluntarily cracked a book in his life. For the first few weeks, we went our separate ways, but eventually we actually started hanging out together. Wade was a strange person, in that the personality that he presented to women was almost entirely a façade. And I don’t mean that he fabricated an ingenious veneer carefully tailored to impress women; I mean that he constructed a personality on the fly, mostly out of quotes from Fletch and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I remember one evening in which we were enlisted to repair a fellow dorm resident’s radio because Wade had told her, and I quote, “My dad’s a TV repairman, and he’s got this awesome set of tools.” Wade’s behavior at times was borderline pathological, but he could be a lot of fun to hang out with.

Several of my other floormates also ended up being good friends of mine. Across the way were Eric and Gary, and down the hall a few doors was an odd little guy named Chris, who was to become one of my best friends. My new friends were, overall, a good influence on me. I stopped drinking (not terribly difficult) and cut down significantly on my swearing (a bit tougher). We even attended church most Sundays.

This may not sound like the most exciting college experience, but the year was one of the best of my life. My depression never really went away, and my academic performance remained mediocre, but my floormates and I had a blast staying up till the wee hours of the morning debating topics like free will, drug legalization, and the precise definition of the word laundry. That was also the year that I became seriously involved with the college newspaper, the Chimes, and realized that I was actually pretty good at writing. I also met a girl named Sally, who became my first real girlfriend.

Sally and I had one of those relationships that would be entertaining as a TV sitcom device but is annoying as hell in reality. We would date for a while, break up and be “friends” for a bit, get back together with renewed promises to “work on our issues,” break up again, etc. Looking back, there were two big problems with our relationship: (1) I was kind of an asshole; and (2) Sally didn’t have enough self-confidence to tell me what an asshole I was. Well, eventually she did, but it took her about two years.

Meanwhile, I had gotten another shitty retail job, this time at a store in the mall that sold luggage and things like those metal balls hanging from wires that go click-clack on your desk. This was another disaster. I couldn’t make myself be interested in luggage or metal balls that go click-clack. I only had one tie, and I didn’t like wearing it. I tended to hide in the back of the store until customers left. They didn’t put me on the schedule after Christmas.

By some miracle of divine irony, I managed to get a job at the on-campus job service desk, helping other college students find employment. This job required neither memorization of arbitrary details nor feigning interest in shit that people didn’t need; additionally, I was so desperate for a job at this point that it wasn’t an insurmountable challenge to assume a pleasant demeanor in the office. Eventually my self-destructive tendencies started to assert themselves, and I was nearly fired several times for habitual tardiness, but I managed, by the grace of the nice old ladies who managed the job service, to remain employed there throughout the rest of my college career.

At this time, I was an avowed political science major. I had always been interested in politics, and had figured that I would go to law school and maybe eventually run for office. In retrospect, this was an absurd idea – I am by nature an introvert who detests small talk and other superficialities. As part of my manic/depressive cycle, however, I was going through a prolonged phase of forced extroversion. I had realized that if I was constantly engaged in spirited conversations (or diatribes), I could keep my mind from focusing on the nagging self-doubt that always lurked just below my consciousness. I can only imagine how insufferable I was. My friends realized that there was more to me than this obnoxious front, but there were plenty of people who couldn’t stand being around me. I was, of course, almost entirely oblivious to this fact.

That isn’t to say that I couldn’t be entertaining at times. I made a sort of fetish of tactlessness, going out of my way to say exactly what I thought about pretty much everyone and everybody. One example: My friend Chris’s roommate was a guy named Alan, who clearly had a bit of a feminine streak. One day I was hanging out in their room, and Alan was debating whether he should ask out a girl that he liked. He made the mistake of asking what I thought, and I shrugged and said, “I always thought you were homosexual.” Something like an eternity of awkward silence followed. It turned out that I was right: he later came out of the closet. I think that was the first time anybody had told him what he had probably only suspected himself.