Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (15 page)

As odd as it is to understand that life goes on when you’re not looking, it’s incomprehensible that death goes on, too. It was hard for me to actually process the information, but Jeff was clearly dead.

I found out a lot about Jeff with a few more clicks. He’d apparently died spectacularly, on a souped-up bicycle or moped, in the city where he’d lived for more than 10 years. Always an edgy outsider even in high school, he appeared to have become more and more a part of fringe culture, and had been involved with performance troupes, even learning to breathe fire. The idea of Jeff spitting fire is almost too priceless not to be made up. He was so provocative he’d once pushed my mild-mannered father to the brink of violence at my high-school graduation party by pretending he was about to toss my fragile aunt and grandmother into our pool. “Take one more step and I’ll drop ya,” my dad had growled.

Fire never stood a chance with Jeff.

Jeff was a clown, a hippie, a Burning Man crewmember, a convert to Islam, a father, probably an anarchist. His death clearly touched and ticked off a lot of people I can’t imagine hanging out with, and I’m sad for them in the same way I’m sad for me. An article discussing a February 2007 tribute to Jeff—he died in February of 2006—summed up his personality succinctly in a line meant to describe the life of a clown: “Who really wants to be normal?”

I do, probably too much; Jeff never did, probably too much.

And he never was normal—less so as he got older, it seems, potentially helped along by mind-altering substances that must have been especially powerful considering he was born with an already altered mind.

It’s almost like Jeff was trying to get so far away from normal he had no place left to go but wherever it is he went.

One of Jeff’s last letters to me in college reads:

“I doubt myself too much and I’m afraid to fail. I don’t like to do things if they don’t work right at the start. I’ve abandoned many a thing because I would look bad at it in the beginning.
That’s silly.
”

I’ve thought about writing this too much so I know it won’t be adequate; maybe it will be more than adequate, because Jeff didn’t value perfection. He wasn’t a perfect person or a perfect friend—he sometimes enjoyed being a perfect jerk—but our brief, intense friendship happened to me at the perfect time in my life to change me deeply, like fire, an irrevocable cleansing.

As much as Jeff also changed, deeply, over the years, I’ll never forget him and I’ll never regret knowing him; I only regret not knowing him longer and better. But also like fire, he burned brightly, sometimes did damage, was essential, was elusive, scared me, mostly was comforting and warm and, ultimately, was extinguished at an unpredictable hour.

I know I’ll miss him as I will also miss my fifth-grade buddy—because in both cases, I had a 20-year head start.

Living in Michigan, you have to choose sides early on—is it gonna be U of M or is it gonna be Michigan State? Once you choose, you’re supposed to react to mentions of the other team in much the same way one would react to finding a human turd in one’s Apple Jacks. Because I hated sports in spite of having a jock dad, I made my choice based on something even more arbitrary than most—I liked U of M’s maize-and-blue motif better than Michigan State’s white-and-green. I was a real
neo maxi zoom dweebie
.

As I sailed through my senior year of high school, there was never any real question that I’d go to U of M Ann Arbor, where all the smartest kids went. Even so, due to pretty good grades, I’d collected several trash bags’ worth of college brochures from all over the country. Used to being picked last for kickball, it was pretty nice to be wanted, even by godforsaken Arizona.

“You ought to spend a little more time trying to make something of yourself and a little less time trying to impress people.”

Reading through them while communing in my maize-and-blue room with my Cairn Terrier Cinnamon and her reluctant “sister,” a black cat named Princess (neither of whom were destined to live to see my eventual graduation from any of the schools I was considering), I began to think about maybe-possibly applying to at least one non-U of M school. Just for fun. Sure, they all had $50+ application fees, and sure, they all called for the submission of essays and transcripts, but I was beginning to hear the siren song of traveling far, far, far from home, where I could be gay, gay, gay in peace.

Going to college is about sexual freedom at least as much as it is about calculus.

“Are you a virgin? I’ll bet you a million dollars that you are. Let’s end the suspense. Is it gonna be…a white wedding?”

For some reason, the University of Chicago caught my eye. I liked the idea of moving to a huge but reasonably close city, and—oh, yeah—it was considered to be as good as most Ivy League institutions by people who give a shit about colleges, which I didn’t. While the school seemed to be heavily geared toward math and science, it had a solid English program, and in my mom’s eyes it had two major things going for it: It was
not
art school (she felt I should not be indulged in my doodling hobby but rather learning the kinds of things that might get and keep me employed one day…good call since my eyesight and patience eventually failed anyway) and it was not NYU, whose location in Manhattan seemed
too
far away and potentially dangerous. People in the Midwest tend to think of New York as a place where you might be in a subway that breaks down and whose riders might then turn on you, a la
The Incident
, a 1967 film starring Tony Musante and Martin Sheen (in his first role) as thugs who mind-fuck everyone on the No. 4.

“You’re an idiot anyway. But if you say you get along with your parents, well, you’re a liar, too.”

But faced with the choice of either shutting me down completely and making me stick to U of M only, or letting me try my hand at getting into another great school, albeit one further away than Ann Arbor, my parents packed up my sister and me and drove to Chicago for a look-see.

While on campus, I was bowled over if not outright scared by the looming concrete gargoyles everywhere and the gigantic Gothic buildings on that stern-looking campus. It was like the whole place was 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding area, haunted by the ghosts of its students’ social lives. My dad pointed out that everyone was Asian. The only Asians in my high school were an adopted brother and sister who acted whiter than me, so it was acceptable that this was something he’d notice. It was like a glimpse ahead to 2050.

When my little tour group of nerds and their nerd parents wasn’t looking, I lingered in a common area at a huge wooden stake on which countless notices advertising various dorky activities had been tacked. It was like a totem pole of unpopularity. One flyer that caught my eye had a pink triangle on it. It was for a gay group, and was advertising a screening of the “queer” movie
Taxi zum Klo
on campus. I immediately had visions of gorgeous, collegiate men who looked like the original Arrow Shirt model sitting around in a stately room in one of these palatial buildings watching some bona fide cinema and sizing each other up. We would all speak with sophistication on the history of the Academy Awards and then pair off for pornographic dates, never getting jealous when, at the next meeting, the pairings were slightly different. We would be like Allen Ginsberg—intellectuals
with
penises and
without
fear.

“You wouldn’t know anything about it, faggot! You never competed in your whole life!”

I made up my mind that the U of C was my fantasy school, even if it was becoming more and more apparent I’d never be accepted. Kids so smart you could hear their heads humming were everywhere I looked, the cream of the crop from all over the world. It was like a valedictorian convention on those busses, in those bookstores, and on what they called that Quad.

“So it’s sorta social, demented and sad, but social.”

I returned home and applied, with my parents’ consent. They were consistently surprised by me, whether it was by my ability to draw an exact likeness of Tina Turner or by my desire to draw an exact likeness of Tina Turner—but they didn’t think I’d get in any more than I did. If they had, they might have thought twice about agreeing considering its astronomical tuition. But apply I did. And I did so without the same pressure I felt while applying to U of M. After all, U of M was a must, while U of C was a dream. So to get in to the U of C, I approached the admissions process shooting from the academic hip.

“All right people, we’re going to try something a little different today. We are going to write...an essay...of not less than a thousand words...describing to me who you think you are.”

When asked to submit an essay on the work of art that most inspired me, I didn’t choose a painting, sculpture, or opera. I chose the movie
The Breakfast Club
by John Hughes. (I didn’t realize he was a Republican then. But I’d also only recently realized I wasn’t.) I wrote about Anthony Michael Hall in my effort to get into the hallowed halls of the University of Chicago, about dandruff, detention, and deflowering. The movie had so perfectly captured the tropes of high school it had become my instant favorite. Its ending, in which the stereotypical kids emerged changed and cockily ready to challenge the world’s expectations of them, had been a key part of the first work of art to make me feel I could handle leaving the safety of my room.

“Why is that door closed?”

If
The Catcher in the Rye
had been the first work of art to inspire me, the crack team of brains at the U of C would have had yet
another
Salinger-inspired essay to read. Instead, I’m sure that mine was their first, last, and only
Breakfast Club
deconstruction.

Having poured my heart out in my essay, which I wrote straight through with no corrections, I sent off my application and awaited my admission into the U of M and my haughty rejection from the U of C.

Funnily enough, I was wait-listed for the U of M Ann Arbor.

“Screws fall out all the time…the world is an imperfect place.”

I’d only applied to the U of M Ann Arbor, which was blowing me off, the U of M Flint which would mean I’d live at home four years longer and remain celibate for at least as long, and the U of C, which I’d assumed I had zero chance of getting into. Imagine my surprise when I was warmly welcomed to the U of C and had to break it to my parents that they’d be going broke in order to send me out of state when they still had another kid to educate a few years later.

But go to University of Chicago I did.

“When you grow up, your heart dies.”

In Chicago, I found myself placed into a residence called the Shoreland, a knockout of an early-1900s building on Lake Michigan with unobstructed views and a grand ballroom in which Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter had allegedly gotten hitched. The place had been converted to a dorm, but its longtime residents, extremely elderly folks all, had been allowed to stay put, leading to a delicious mix of 18-year-old Indian girls in sweats feverishly doing homework on sofas next to 88-and-a-half-year-old white men in well-worn suits watching
The Cosby Show
in common areas.

The day I moved in, a classmate was hyperventilating in the parking lot because all of her worldly possessions had been stolen right out of her car, which her parents had naively left open to facilitate the move-in process. Welcome to Chicago, where possession of street smarts is nine-tenths of the law.