The residence hall I lived in during my freshman year was filled with jocks and nerds. Some of them were majoring in food marketing, an abstruse field that was a Saint Joseph’s specialty. The food marketing majors had their very own food marketing library, though no one ever knew what they did in there. Other residents of Simpson Hall would go on to do graduate work in advertising at Ohio State. It was as if they had strolled right out of a scene in
The Graduate
and were curious to know if anyone would like to discuss the investment potential of polyurethane, while downing a martini or two and nibbling on some canapés. They despised me and my roommates, dismissing us as unkempt, hirsute hippies who had no respect for authority and refused to join fraternities. I was neither unkempt nor especially hirsute, and I generally did have respect for authority, provided the authority figures were sufficiently numerous and scary-looking. It helped if they had tattoos. But the upperclassmen were right on the money about the fraternities. I gave them a wide berth for the same reason I stayed away from the Boy Scouts: I never joined anything, I didn’t like the way they dressed, and frankly I found the whole thing just a bit homoerotic.
The upperclassmen had a special animus toward my roommate Steve. Steve was a courtly, soft-spoken Italian American who was reportedly in the process of flunking out of every major Jesuit college on the eastern seaboard. By the time I came onboard Steve already had Boston College, Holy Cross, and Fordham under his belt, and as soon as he’d taken his scalp on Hawk Hill, he could head south to Loyola of Baltimore and Georgetown to complete the mission. (Saint Peter’s in Hoboken and the University of Scranton were optional.) The first part-time catatonic I ever broke bread with, though a very engaging one, he would spend days upon end gazing up at the ceiling, smoking one Marlboro after another and listening to Beethoven piano sonatas, which did very little to improve his mood. Then, every three weeks or so, he would suddenly jump up and do something, like read a newspaper or start an argument, or ask if anyone wanted extra anchovies on their pizza. It was hard to draw a bead on him.
One weekend, Steve invited me down to his home in Vineland, New Jersey. Over dinner, his father told me, in a crestfallen tone of voice, that he had once entertained hopes that Steve would be the first Italian-American president of the United States.
“Don’t you need a college degree to get elected president?” I inquired, unable to resist such an inviting setup line and overjoyed to be in the presence of a patriarch who didn’t seem likely to take offense at such impertinence, much less slug me. But Steve’s father did not find that remark one bit amusing, and I was not invited back.
The big problem at Simpson Hall was this: The upperclassmen didn’t like our attitude. For generations, it had been a Simpson Hall tradition for upperclassmen to bring their meals into the dorm on lunch trays borrowed from the nearby cafeteria, then pile them up at the foot of the stairs, where freshmen were expected to make a nice, neat stack and return them at the end of the day. My third roommate, Bill, who had been my classmate and coeditor at the Venard four years earlier, was already in the ROTC, and was preparing for a career in the military, so he had no objection to this otherwise demeaning chore. But while I did not mind accepting ceremonial abuse from full-grown men, I drew the line at accepting it from boys. If the upperclassmen wanted those trays returned to the cafeteria, they could do it themselves.
My roommate Fred went one step further. An irreverent hippie, Fred had grown up in Yardley, Pennsylvania, a village just across the river from Trenton, New Jersey, which had no great tradition of irreverence. A history major intent on becoming a lawyer, he was the kind of jocular, impudent individual whose applications Saint Joseph’s had gone out of its way to discourage since its inception. One Sunday night, returning from a visit home, I found Fred standing by the bay window in our bedroom, sailing a mass of soiled lunch trays out into the void and down onto the lawn that separated Simpson Hall from a public school in the back. Though large and unwieldy, the trays glided along at a lovely pace if launched with sufficient verve and grace. Week after week, Fred and I would meet up on Sunday evening, down a quart or two of the toxic collegiate beverage Ripple, and toss a hundred or more of those trays into the backyard, all the while listening to the Velvet Underground and discussing Schopenhauer’s debt to Kierkegaard. Presumably, the upperclassmen then collected the trays in the morning and sheepishly returned them to the cafeteria. They would have dearly loved to haul us before the authorities and bring us up on charges of aerodynamic hooliganism, but Fred and I were never apprehended in flagrante delicto, and emphatically protested our innocence when any suggestion was made that we would engage in such a perverse strain of vandalism.
One evening a snowstorm blew through campus after we had turned in for the night, and the following morning when we got out of bed the lawn was covered with a hundred or more V-shaped lunch trays that had wilted and curled in on themselves. With that, the powers that be decided they had had enough. They replaced the oversized trays with plastic carriers less than half their size; these didn’t glide smoothly and were no fun to play with. The administration also ruled that henceforth no one could remove lunch trays from the cafeteria. Fred now channeled his rebellious streak into the less reprehensible, less destructive pastime of Frisbee, and the upperclassmen had to eat in the cafeteria like everybody else. Now they really hated us.
At Saint Joseph’s College I began to bury the past and invent a new persona. Nobody there cared what economic class I came from, or that my father was a functional derelict, and because so many of us went around in shabby clothing with disintegrating shoes and no socks, we all looked like paupers anyway. Once I realized that America was a country where white people could pass themselves off as whomever they liked, provided they still had some teeth, I began to mothball the anecdotes about Alaskan knife fights, bullets in the cerebellum, lengthy stints in the Big House, and all the other colorful lore of the petty criminal class into which I had been born.
Obviously there were times when my background came in handy. For example, when preparing a family history for my Introduction to Western Civilization course, the banner year my father went through thirteen different jobs was a morsel of information I could use to great advantage. Other students could produce documents linking them to people who had lived many centuries in the past; one classmate could even lay claim to an ancestor who had fought with William the Conqueror. This cut no ice with our teacher. To Dr. Schmandt, being related to William the Conqueror was an accident of history, like being Bram Stoker’s third cousin, but nothing more. A student’s provenance from such a dazzling forebear did not make his research paper any better, unless the student could show how this rarefied bloodline had exerted some demonstrable effect on his current economic situation or psychological frame of mind. Anyway, no one in Philadelphia would ever be impressed just because you said you were descended from a Norman. By contrast, being the son of a man who had gone through thirteen jobs in a single year was almost magical; it was the stuff of socioeconomic legend; it tied the indoor record for domestic calamity, inability to toe the line, and refusal to kowtow; it was as exotic as having a mother who had once trained polar bears.
But I no longer wanted to be exotic, or perhaps I now wanted to be exotic only in the same way everyone else was exotic. Little by little, I started to do things that people from my background did not normally do. I studied Eastern philosophy. I read the complete works of Maxim Gorky, without being told to. I made friends with a boy who was slated to appear in a Cap & Bells production of
Julius Caesar
with the entire cast dressed up in
Star Trek
costumes. Or maybe it was
Macbeth
. I definitely began to put some distance between me and the proletariat when I joined the Zarathustra Philosophical Society, chaired by a boy from Atlantic City who once blasted a softball right through a classroom window, then defended himself by asserting that the window did not exist. The Jesuits on the disciplinary committee had no problem with this line of reasoning, it being the Age of Aquarius and what-not, provided the student agreed to pay for the window.
I took a Greek theater course with a bearded scholar named Dr. McDonough, who was said to have used powerful computers to prove that
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
had been written by the same man. McDonough’s ingenious approach while he was up at Columbia University was to compare meter, sentence structure, and the frequency with which certain words and images appeared to prove that the twin pillars of Western literature had been written by one and only one author. According to his data, the man’s name was Homer. He was good fun when you got him off topic and he started talking about his colleagues in the classics department; but he was an abysmal teacher, as he was far more interested in dead Greeks than in live Philadelphians, so I quickly stopped attending his classes. One January evening, my good friend Chris Taylor and I discovered that we were studying for the same final exam in the same Greek course, even though we had never crossed paths in McDonough’s classroom. This was quite an achievement, given that there were only about eight of us in the class and Chris and I were roommates.
We were also roommates when we took John Mullen’s eighteenth-century literature course. That was one class I never cut. A stocky, caustic, debonair war vet and Saint Joseph alumnus who had grown up in that mysterious district of South Philadelphia where Irish-Catholic Republicans not only lived but apparently flourished, Mullen was an expert in Augustan literature. He knew everything there was to know about Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, and all the other acid-tongued misanthropes that thrived in the early 1700s. None of them tolerated fools gladly, and he didn’t have much time for fools himself. In that era many of our teachers were making an effort to take us seriously when we voiced our daft opinions or advanced our inane theories, as the young were then fleetingly viewed as repositories of wisdom. But Mr. Mullen could never conceal his amusement when a student opened his mouth to say anything, because students never had anything to say. That’s what professors were for.
Eighteenth-century literature was going out of style in the late sixties, but then again so were Chaucer and Western civilization, and Mr. Mullen didn’t care much one way or another whether students enjoyed the material contained in the syllabus. I certainly did, but then again, I still read Chaucer. One afternoon, Mr. Mullen’s three o’clock seminar coincided with a momentous gathering at the Alumni Field House, the barn at the edge of campus where the basketball team practiced. Devastating rumors had begun circulating that Paul McCartney was dead, and to stave off a rash of suicides and fire bombings and nervous breakdowns, a symposium of sorts was convened, gathering together a glittering array of the Delaware Valley’s most admired pop cultural luminaries and avatars of taste. These experts vowed to deconstruct the discordant images of an unshod McCartney shuffling through the crosswalk on the cover of
Abbey Road
, as well as the hidden messages contained in the lyrics of “I Am the Walrus,” not to mention the ambiguous photographs included in the artwork accompanying
Magical Mystery Tour
. This way, we could ascertain once and for all whether Paul McCartney was still among the living and make plans for the remainder of our lives accordingly.
The afternoon of the summit conference, Mr. Mullen turned up for class as usual, said a few words about our upcoming assignments, and then announced: “In light of the epochal developments taking place over in the field house today, I wouldn’t dream of detaining you to discuss
Gulliver’s Travels
.” He then dismissed us. Everyone was shocked.
“I guess beneath that tough exterior, he’s a nice guy after all,” one of my classmates said.
“No, he isn’t,” I replied. From that moment on, I wanted to be exactly like John P. Mullen: Suave. Debonair. Aloof. Condescending.
Around this time, I also fell under the spell of a French teacher named Tom Donahue. He, too, was a graduate of Saint Joseph’s; he, too, had grown up on the streets of Philadelphia. He introduced me to Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet, lent me enigmatic plays by Fernando Arrabal and Robert Pinget, and counseled me to dump Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller and take a crack at Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert. One day he organized a field trip to New York City, where a bunch of us dined at a restaurant whose décor consisted entirely of materials pertaining to Napoleon Bonaparte. These objects included paintings, photographs, ashtrays, souvenir mugs, matchboxes, and even a Corsican-themed puzzle mounted on the walls. There may even have been a shawl or two.
We also visited the Museum of Modern Art, where I got to see
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
and
Le Douanier
Rousseau’s crackpot paintings for the first time. Later that evening we went to the Barbizon Plaza Theatre and saw Madeleine Renaud in Samuel Beckett’s
Oh les Beaux Jours
. Renaud, one of France’s most brilliant actresses, was married to Jean-Louis Barrault, the French Laurence Olivier, best known for his role as the doomed mime in
Les Enfants du Paradis
. When the curtain came up, Renaud was buried up to her waist in sand; by the end of the play only her neck protruded. About ten minutes into the proceedings, a crotchety old cuss seated not far from us drew himself up, began brandishing his cane in an ominous manner, and started bellowing,
“Merde! Merde!”
or words to that effect. Later that evening, as we were walking down Sixth Avenue to the train station, I asked Tom if the man with the cane was a plant, if Beckett had written a part for an irate spectator. Tom didn’t think so, though Genet had done this sort of thing in
Les Paravents
, his four-and-a-half-hour play about the Algerian War. Any way you looked at it, I’d come a long way from the East Falls Housing Project.