first of all, my brother said
all of this about us & our parents & college. & then i thought about it a long time & now i want to say this.
i doubt that my children will want to hear stories about my college days. for one, there were precious few hijinks. i mean, once we threw an entire V-day cake at the concrete wall outside of gund commons, & three years later you could still kind of see the stain which looked vaguely like a de kooning portrait of jimi hendrix, maybe.
we did like to name people, though the people we named were not our friends (at least not at the time): Big-Ass James, Auntie Rachel, Uncle Patrick, Bad Taste, Charlie the Wonderful Guy, Action Packed, Leather Jacket, the Dental Hygienist (whom i saw! a couple of weeks ago, standing outside the newport!), Proto-nini. Mastodon.
if i told stories about my days at kenyon there would be a lot of breaking down. obviously.
stories that i think are nice, although not nearly as interesting as the hijinks-filled stories of our parents:
� the first time n came to visit me at kenyon, we went to see the glass menagerie & afterward d came running up to us to say that he had been sitting a couple rows right behind us, that these teenage girls from mt vernon had been sitting by him & had spent most of act II saying, "they're holding hands! ohmygod! those girls are holding hands!" & then n & i walked through the snow to palme house where i took her up to the anthropology lab so we could handle all the bones. (n might tell you this story herself, & if she does, she will say, "that's when i knew ericka was sensitive" & you can hear her just underlining the word "sensitive.")
� many fond memories which run together of nights spent staying awake until dawn in the editing suites on the second floor of bexley. also one night in particular, not in the editing suite but just in bexley, probably painting something: i was the only one there & suddenly i could hear this mournful gorgeous music. i stood there very still in the lit-up room with all that darkness around me, listening, until finally i got up the courage to explore. some senior art student was playing the cello in her/his studio space.
� let us not forget the time i convinced most of my friends to re-enact nude paintings, a la the 19th-century party tradition of the tableaux vivants, for my first video project. i built up a little atelier in the basement of bexley & brought down a space heater so that everyone's nipples would remain attached to the chest.
� oh yes remember how i was one of the winners of senior kill, because by that point i wasn't leaving my room at all anymore, except one time i went down to the bookstore for a cherry coke & i shot my target? but no one could shoot me, i was always in my room.
� video games played on the projecting screen in sam mather. afternoons watching mischka do some kind of experiements in the basement of the mathers. that time i walked in on james ray, the samson figure, reciting "ode to a nightingale" standing on top of a table in the seminar room in sunset. with all the lights out. taking lots of people, over the four years, to see every ginkgo tree on campus. various appearances as the rockstar poet but especially the time i wore the famous (now goodwilled) silver pants. the time i kicked a girl out of my italian class because she would not respect my authority. first i told her, i have studied more languages than you, and then i told her to get out. for this professoressa commended me.
oh dear. i notice that my memorable college experiences are pretty low-key and lame. i was in a lot of art projects. i was the token queer a lot of times. i tried to kiss my friends more often than i care to admit. this is about it.
so, hermanito, what do you say?
