Within a week the smile had faded, new classes had started, my attempt to manipulate the system, to get the money i needed failed, oh they still gave me the money but i was still the man without a state, so before i knew it most of it was gone, i paid the rent and began picking up hours at the coffee shop but soon i noticed a gap in the local market, seems that the town of Podunk U. had gone dry, and what was the future of the American service sector going to do without their weed? how would they study or hook-up randomly at parties if they didn't have an excuse, of course for some of us the weirdness just kept on rolling for while the weed was gone there was other stuff around, i had the choice of buying books for my new classes or eating and so i choose a bit of both, not buying all of them cuz in the back of my nappy head i knew i was bolting, i just had to make sure the lupine dominus of the banking world would not hunt me down before my time and demand the money or my blood, so i played along, i knew i was shit at the academics game, i'm sure my new profs knew it too, sure the faculty had talked about the wild man who didn't seem to take it all that seriously, of course my papers had barely made the grade, Dr. Rockstar gave me the highest grade and stated that had the grammar and punctuation been a bit cleaned up i would have aced it, stated that when cleaned up it was conference worthy material but at this point i didn't hear a word he said, i wanted to cackle in his face and state the obvious that i should have flunked out first semester but you Piled Higher and Deepers needed me like virus needs the host, but i had checked out, but that's been covered, back to the new semester...
There was a market to be exploited, one just had to have the means and know-how to do so and with that knowledge i took my cue and began working on a way to get whatever i could to the little house near the corner of 4th Ave and Main St., first i had to find the product and then i had to procure a means of transportation... and for the what seemed like the first time in months i caught a break, they arrived in the form of the same guy, a friend of mine who's childhood buddy was a guido, frat boy who just happened to be in the game down at the big uni in the city, funny enough was he had graduated and was trying to break into the financial sector but as we all know nothing can supplement or provide an income like contraband and so while he wore cheap suits and drove a half-assed sports car he stayed in the game, i got my first ride down and we met in a parking lot off a shit state route highway, the neon restaurant sign flashing behind us, it was $425 a quarter pound for shitty brown Mexican brick... the early 90's were a seller's fucking market, one just had to find a spot somewhere on the seller's line... and like most things the higher up that line the better the view, i was one step from the fucking bottom...
Now if we have studied our lounge, and i'm quite confident we have not, there was a post a while back entitled Cowboy Dan, see Cowboy Dan had the grass market at Podunk cornered for years, a one man monopoly and the way Cowboy did business was there was no break down, it was $25 a cut and 200 a zip, no if's no but's no motherfucking coconuts, so the drug using segment of the student body was quite accustomed to the shit end of the stick, i figured that after i took out the head stash there was at least 3 bills to be made off each one and in the beginning it worked out fine, it was fucking Mojave dry and the stoners just wanted what ever they could get their hands on, what it afforded me was some time to build up a little cash, of course when you've been flat fucking broke and scraping by a little dosh in the pocket automatically means getting ripped up at the bar, other extravagances like a large pizza piled with sausage and pepperoni and bacon, maybe a trip to the diner and a plate of hot roast beef and fries with gravy, it means scoring some gear as a back-up too in case the money dried up, any way you chopped out the gear a lot more money got spent then originally intended...
And the classes were slowly receding into the winter sun, i attended, i feigned an interest, i can't even remember what they were except for linguistics, Prof. Herb might have been the most boring motherfucker on the planet, he may have known his shit, one of those guys who is so smart and knowledgeable in his field yet has no hope of effectively communicating it to anyone other than those in his field, or maybe he was just a shit teacher, i have no idea cuz i couldn't make heads or fucking tails of it, Noam Chomsky i was fucking not... ah memory, there was a drama class? i remember something about reading plays with a tall goober with wispy brown hair in bowl cut, he fancied himself as the young heir apparent to Dr. Rockstar but that wasn't gonna fucking happen, this fucking geek didn't have the charisma or the intellect and to my 24 yr. old eye had zero chance at pulling a Brazilian Bombshell, maybe he could finagle one of the co-eds and even that would have been a stretch, he seemed to think that everyone in the class loved the theatre as much as he did, years later i would come to appreciate it but at the time Mamet and Beckett and the lot could kiss my dirty, hairy ass, of course having some budding play writes in the class didn't help, nor having the queen of fourth rate drama, (affect English accent now) Oh how they couldn't help but stay in character, cupatea? Wink wink, where art thou Coolio?, dare i say i almost bonded with a few individuals over just how annoying these twats could be and with Bowl Cut joining in at times it was a wonder i didn't bring a pint of cheap bourbon in a 7-11 cup, but the time for paper proposals was coming and by this time i had no intention of proposing anything other than another beer or toke or trip... in short, fuck academia.
Of course the psychedelics helped expedite the process, in particular acid and MDMA, the kind the kids couldn't really get way back in the early 90's unless you lucked out or knew someone who made it, i never bothered to ask which it was but it was all the rage with a select few back then, oh how i hated it, i mean i kept taking it just to be a bit more social, i'd take it and then spend the night talking to people who when sober would fucking annoy the piss out of me, i called it the Asshole's Best Friend, just happy and smiley and fuck if the next day i wouldn't wake up and want to punch myself in the face thinking about what a friendly fucking wanker i had been to everyone all night, you could have banged my mom, my dog and every girlfriend i'd ever had and i'd have still been your best friend while i was on it... the acid on the other hand kept me steady and insane, a symbiotic relationship of light and dark with the dark slowly pushing harder and harder, don't get me wrong now they weren't bad experiences, i'd call them something akin to a cleansing, it was making me come to terms with the mistake i had made and it also made me wander and in a small town like Podunk wandering inevitably led to bumping into people and Profs i didn't want to see... hell after avoiding Dr. Rockstar on a number of occasions, either mumbling greetings and quickly exiting or just completely about facing i just said to him one night outside the coffee shop that he just always seemed catch me when i was on acid, he just smiled and said something in Portuguese to his bride and wished me luck... it was the last time i ever saw him...
16 weeks, that's all that was left when it started, of course when you feel like you've been caged, when it feels that time is being stolen and fucked away it will make you mad, it will have you talking non-sense to yourself, cuz you're young and self important, cuz there is a need to be in the action and because the classroom you're looking for is not anywhere near a library or science lab, it's out there, it's just not here now and like young Skywalker i had not the patience nor the discipline to go rationally about my business... the wheels keep spinning... the stomach rumbles... the days crawl...
3 comments:
You're so lucky. I was too old for MDMA. During those years, $20/oz Mex was the rage. I'd always wished I'd had the opportunity but MDMA hadn't been invented yet. Too late now of course, but I still wonder about it. Nice work, again.
the grad school machine is bullshit - especially in liberal arts. what can you 'do' with a PhD in English? Teach. How to you succeed at teaching? Publish, write expensive textbooks and get PhD students to do your shit work so you can have more publications. We crank out far too many professors...
My son, when he leaves Mother Army, is going to get a Masters in Philosophy - because he wants to study it. Said he'll never put it on his fucking resume, and he may never get the degree, but he's going to grad school to learn something. That's a little bit different...
And as always, i love your Wilderness Years...
Exile- To be honest you didn't miss much, the shit wasn't that much fun, unless of course you were naked and with a lovely lovely then it could get a bit interesting.
Daisy- I couldn't agree more, i thought the whole point of higher education was to learn something but i was mistaken, apparently it's to get a job and increase earning potential, my whole college career i took to knowledge and learning more than building a resume, as for the academic machine i think the posts lay out how i feel about that, my wasted mind thought back then that i could go and teach high school English somewhere and "make a difference" or some fucked up non-sense of that sort, oh well... and tell the boy to do it, he'll have fun and fuck with the careerists cuz he's there to learn, i can speak from a bit of experience on that note.
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