Missing the Big Picture (13 page)

Finding out who was going to be my roommate had me filled with anxiety. I didn’t know anybody going to SUNY Geneseo, so I was randomly assigned a roommate. My roommate, Bruce, was from a neighboring town in the Capital District. He arrived to the room first, and when my mother noticed that he brought coasters, her response was, “I like him already.” My dorm was known as Onondaga Hall, and I was living on the fourth floor.

The day my mother dropped me off was emotional for her. She was scared to let me go, especially knowing what had happened only a couple of months before. She reassured me that things would be fine. I was still diligently taking the Zyprexa, and I hadn’t heard any voices since June 20th. My mother was scared to drive a van or truck, so we managed to fit a refrigerator and all my clothes in a small Dodge Neon. As a result, I didn’t have a television, DVD player, or a computer my entire freshman year.

I had a more positive attitude toward college than I did high school. I didn’t want to be known as a loner; I wanted to have a fun college experience. I changed drastically, often walking into people’s rooms and introducing myself.

August 31, 2001, was the first Friday night I was officially in college. Most of the people who lived on my floor were planning to get wasted, but I didn’t really want to, so I decided to stay in the dorm. I didn’t just want to spend a Friday night masturbating alone, so I wandered a few doors down and found a pair of female roommates redecorating their room. Without being invited, I just went in and said hello. Amelia and Jody were the two roommates. Amelia told me that the she didn’t go out drinking with the rest of the students because she promised her boyfriend, who was going to college in Washington, D.C., that she would stay in. Jody didn’t want to go out, either. I joined Jody and Amelia and some of their friends in a viewing of
Pretty Woman.

While I was watching the movie, I had an itch in my underwear—something that happens to men sometimes. I had to maneuver my hand to get to it, and it appeared to the girls that I was masturbating. One girl, Denise, ran out of the room because she was laughing so hard. I left quite an impression on those girls down the hall.

During the initial weeks of school, I would basically hang out with anybody. At the dining hall, I would sit with random people I didn’t know and then ask them what they were doing that evening. Another group I gravitated toward was Bruce and his friends. Within the first week of school, Bruce had found a girl he was interested in named Margaret, and he started hanging out with her friends. I got the feeling that I wasn’t welcome after a few weeks of spending time with them. One time when the group was playing Hangman, my statement that everyone had to guess was “My dog has pubic lice.” Another time when a girl jokingly called me gay, I responded with, “No, I have my own penis to play with.” I started to get annoyed with Bruce’s friends, too. They loved having dance parties in my room and would sing Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” while dancing on my bed.

A few weeks into the school year, I saw a sign for an informational meeting about working at the campus radio station. I was excited and eagerly attended the first meeting. My first day as a disc jockey was Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001. Even though it was from two to four in the morning, I liked the pretty blonde girl who was training me and enjoyed listening to the music. When I was alone at the station, I would dance in my chair and roll the chair with myself in it all over the building.

After my first day as a disc jockey, I went to bed, got up at 9:30 a.m., showered, and went to breakfast in the cafeteria. Instead of showing music videos or college news, the television station was glued to the terrorist attack that had just occurred in New York City. I was listening to the news from afar, but I didn’t know the details of the event. Still unaware of what was happening, I went to music history class and took my quiz, then went to work at the admissions office where I finally heard about the terrorist attacks. Since I didn’t have a television in my dorm room, I asked some people on my floor if I could watch the unfolding saga with them. Later that night, a huge candlelight vigil was held at the campus center. My first instinct was to ask Bruce and his friends if I could go to the vigil with them, but Bruce told me they were leaving immediately and didn’t have time to wait for me to get off the phone with my mother. He came off as cold and heartless on a day when the whole world was crying. In fact, Bruce and his friends went to the vigil only because that’s where everybody else on campus was going.

Besides singing “Kumbaya” at the vigil, many students took the time to talk about how the terrorist attack had impacted their lives. One girl went up to the microphone and said, “My dad works at the World Trade Center,” after which the audience gasped. But then the girl reassured everybody by saying, “But he had a doctor’s appointment.” September 11 was probably the only day when men were thankful for proctologist appointments.

After the vigil, many of the girls I was with started crying. I really didn’t know how to handle a group of emotional women, but there’s a time in every boy’s life when he has to learn. Denise, who was from Long Island, went home that weekend. When she returned, we started hanging out a lot—so much so that everyone on the floor joked that I was her second roommate.

No matter how many hours I worked at the admissions office or how much homework I had, I always spent ample time with Denise. She enjoyed most of my jokes, as we both had backgrounds in retail and I had a whole routine about my years at the Gap. For example, I was often the only one who would wear a headset. Most of my coworkers laughed at me for wearing one since I couldn’t communicate with anyone. When customers asked if we had a certain size in the back, though, instead of taking the time to go to the back, I would pretend to talk to someone on my headset—thus, way avoiding more work for myself. Denise would laugh hysterically every time I told this story.

After Denise’s weekend in Long Island, I started joining her and her friends for dinner every evening. The first time I went with Denise I met a girl named Vanessa. Vanessa and Denise were from the same town; they didn’t attend the same high school but had vaguely known each other before college. Vanessa was initially taken aback by me because the first time I met her I couldn’t stop burping loudly. Vanessa thought it was hilarious, though.

After many successful dinners with the girls, I asked if I could go out drinking with them. About three weeks into the semester, I went to my first college party, which eventually got out of hand and required a visit from the cops. It was the first time I consumed alcohol. One boy asked me if I had ever had Guinness before. Unfamiliar with any type of beer, I said, “Is that a blow job or something?”

The next weekend I was excited to go out with my new posse again. Most of the Geneseo undergraduates found out about the parties going on around town through fliers that were handed out in the dining hall. Most of my new friends would chuckle when I would beg to go out drinking with them because when we got to our destination, I would just wander off and start talking to strangers.

The “hot” party that was going on one Saturday was at the soccer house. When I got there, I noticed a boy in a hooded sweatshirt who was yelling at his friend for pouring beer on him. The girl that this boy was with was very attractive and very drunk—two excellent qualities boys love in a woman. I started talking to both of them, and after a few minutes, I found out that the boy’s name was Rich and that he was from a town in Long Island. I spoke to Rich about the usual—what our majors were and so forth—and I also asked if he had ever been to a strip club. Rich answered my question with an emphatic yes, and then I told him how a few nights before I went away to college my older cousin took me to a strip club that was later busted for prostitution. I felt comfortable around Rich, and then I told him, “Wish I had known about it.”

I also found out that Rich had a girlfriend from his high school and that the two had been dating for about six months. The soccer party was the first time I actually got really drunk, and that following Monday while I was in the cafeteria, I could overhear people pointing at me and saying, “Isn’t that the kid from the soccer party?” On Sunday, some of the people who lived on my floor told me, “So I heard you went to the soccer party.” I was so drunk that I tried going to the bathroom but couldn’t stand still. I just started jumping up and down, almost falling down in the process.

The following Monday I saw Rich on my way to writing class. At first, I didn’t know whether I should say hi or just ignore him. To my surprise, Rich was very friendly and said, “What’s going on, man?” I didn’t know it then, but Rich would always refer to me as the “drunken kid who always said hi.”

Until Thanksgiving vacation, I spent a lot of time with Denise, drinking in her room and going to the movies. Once when we were out seeing the movie
K-Pax
with Kevin Spacey, I was so tired that I fell asleep, started talking in my sleep, and even started grunting.

One of my favorite nights during my freshman year of college was the Friday before Thanksgiving. It was supposed to be “Girl’s Night Out,” but the girls felt so sympathetic toward me that they called the night “Girls Night Out and Lukey.” After we arrived at a local fraternity house, I noticed a girl from my writing class standing by herself. Shannon was an attractive brunette with long hair and an engaging smile. We had talked once in class about how I worked at Friendly’s and was disciplined by the manager for wearing my pants so low that it looked like I was mooning customers when I was scooping ice cream. Shannon pointed out who she came to the party with, a girl who lived on her floor named Diana. Diana had to be the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She was blonde and had a nice figure, and she was laughing and very personable. After a few drinks, Diana convinced me to do a striptease, and I actually took off my shirt. That night I couldn’t help but think how much my life had changed. In high school there was a better chance of Richard Simmons being invited to a party than me, and now I was actually out with friends, drinking and getting all this attention. The party was very loud and dark, and Diana thought my name was “Lou” instead of Luke. I didn’t correct her, and that’s how I got the nickname Lou. While Luke would spend Friday nights feeling sorry for himself and masturbating into a sock, Lou was an entertainer, the life of the party. I ended up leaving the party at midnight to go to another party. Diana’s last words that night were, “Well, you made me laugh. Now try to act sober.”

The next party that I went to I ran into Rich, whom I hadn’t talked to since our first meeting a month earlier. Rich ended up talking to Denise after they found out they were both Long Islanders. Rich confided in Denise that I would always go out of my way to say hi to him, even though we only spoke once. I started talking to Rich, and even though Rich told me that he had a girlfriend back home, he tried to pursue other girls at the party. Then he asked me, “So have you gotten any pussy since you’ve been in college?” I was a virgin at that point and hadn’t even kissed a girl, but I would never admit it. I thought it was strange that Rich would inquire about my sex life so soon after meeting me, but Rich mainly talked about girls and ways to get laid. The following week, I went home for the Thanksgiving break.

Thanksgiving 2001 was one of the first times I’d been home since August. I rejoiced in the freedom of not having to attend class for a week, but coming home wasn’t what I had hoped it would be. Every visit home reminded me of Eric and his friends and all those dark memories that haunted me from high school. I would spend most of the weekend with my family, and my cousin Alex would bring up all those former classmates that I never wanted to talk about again.

One strange thing happened that weekend. My older cousin Bob had a strange response to one of my stories. I was telling him about the time I was embarrassed about purchasing a
Penthouse
magazine, and Bob said, “You should have just said you bought it for the articles about telepathic conversations.” Bob’s comment made me paranoid. The only people that I had ever talked about the voices that I heard were my mother and Dr. Roberts. My psychiatrist and mother had spent all this time trying to convince me that the voices in my mind were only my brain playing tricks on me, but I had always felt that the voices I had heard were real.

On my last night before going back to Geneseo, my mother and I decided to go out to eat at Friendly’s. Typically we would avoid talking about sensitive issues; it was hard for me to talk about my feelings, to open up and talk frankly about what was bothering me. This was one trait I adopted from my mother. Living all of her life with my grandmother’s illness, my mother knew how to cope with things and avoid certain topics. However, our conversation that night was different.

She mentioned to me that when she was at church last week she saw an advertisement in the church bulletin for Saint John’s. She even laughed when she noticed Mr. Ramone’s name in the advertisement, the assistant principal that my mother had to argue with for me to take honors courses. Then she started telling me how much she hated dealing with Saint John’s, then worrying about my depression and having to take me to a psychiatrist. Finally, she ended her rant by saying, “You put me through utter hell.” My mother’s comments left me speechless and dumbfounded. Normally, as a teenager, I would get defensive and try to negate what my mother was telling me. This was the first time I realized that my mental illness not only took a toll on me, but also put an enormous strain on my mother.

The next day I boarded the train back to Geneseo, where I could hang out with my new friends and my new life and not worry about old memories. The following Friday night, just before my friends and I were about to go out to a local party, I stopped at the laundry room and ran into Shannon and Diana, the two attractive girls I had met two weeks earlier at a frat party. I went up to them and said, “So your name is Diana, right?” Diana replied, “Surprised you remembered. You were very wasted that night.” The three of us started talking, and Diana took Shannon and me back to her dorm room. As Diana would remark months later, “He never left.”