So I'm in the Five-and-Dime, talking to an old friend of mine,one of the Tri-West Cental High School graduates who didn't escapethe elastic pull of my old hometown. He looks much the same as hedid when we last parted company (me to go to college, and him to goto work at the local grocery store, which is where I found him).His accent is more noticeable...or maybe it was always that way,and I'm just noticing it more. His midsection is beginning thelong, slow fall over his trousers. He's shaved his head.
"So what're you doing these days?" he asks, turning away fromthe register.
"Oh, I'm...going to college." Suddenly, I feel ashamed ofmyself, as though it were a dirty little secret. "Youknow...college."
"Oh. College." It's not my imagination. The word hangs in theair like cigarette smoke. My old friend is giving me a look henormally reserves for the old man who tries to steal loaves ofbread every week. "I thought you had a real job."
Well, hell.
They say you can get used to anything, if given enough time.What they forget to tell you is how foreign everything else seemsonce you're settled again. Did I really live in that wide spot inthe road for seven years? Did it really feel normal to me? We comehere as freshmen, and everything is strange. We leave four (or six,or eight) years later, and suddenly it's the rest of the worldthat's gone cockeyed. You don't think about it, your family doesn'tthink about it, but what you're really doing is living in acommune. You ever want proof, go out to a tiny little town in theMidwest, sit yourself down in the local diner, and start talkingabout what things are like 'out in college.' Suddenly you're anastronaut, a foreigner, an alien from beyond the stars and east ofIndy. We forget so easily that things on campus aren't the waythings are in the rest of the world. No wonder so many post-gradsexperience culture shock entering back into their own cultures!
I'm walking down McKinley with a friend. A Jeep blasts by, musicblaring from the stereo. Someone yells 'Fag!' out the window. Myfriend looks disgusted.
"I thought this was a center of learning," he says. "Damnsavages."
You think so? Try going back to that same diner in Hicksville,USA and announcing that you happen to be gay, or an anarchist, or afeminist. Bring a baseball bat. You're going to need it. I knowlife in America isn't as bad as we like to make it out, but itisn't as good as we've got it here, either. You might have call tocomplain about the lack of air conditioning, or the spotty Internetconnection, or the latest amoral Psych professor, but it beats thehell out of what you could potentially have to complain about,doesn't it?
So I'm living in a commune. I can deal with that.
And there's my old friend, watching me, waiting for me to sayuse those four-letter words we used to whisper behind the barn backwhen we felt like kings for cadging smokes off the seniors.
I smile at him.
"What makes you think I want a real job?"
Write to Jonathan at
tenement_cellar@msn.com
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