Look Back in Anger

I find it hard to believe that it's been 25 years since I went off to college.

For the second time this summer, I mark a bittersweet anniversary. June marked twenty-five years since my graduation from high school, and this week is the silver anniversary of starting college. The barrage of “back to school” ads I still somehow receive even after all these years never fails to elicit a twinge of anxiety, and this week the Brazilian comedy I had watched on Netflix, Back to 15, jumped ahead to freshman year of college and became Back to 18. For many people, the college years are the highlight of their lives, an ideal combination of freedom and freedom from responsibility. It wasn’t my favorite time of life, though, and even watching it on TV makes me little angry. Frankly, I didn’t remember most of the reasons it upset me. I kept a journal back then, more detailed that I suppose I should have committed to paper, and looking back at it brought back to mind so many incidents that would otherwise have vanished into the fog of memory, and perhaps should have.

But seriously: It’s been twenty-five years, and that just astonishes me. I feel so old.

Weeks before the semester started, I attended Ithaca College’s freshman orientation as an incoming journalism major, and the college housed me in a dormitory with a roommate from New York City who screamed and thrashed in his sleep. I was never one for group activities, so I did not much enjoy three days of forced icebreakers and team activities intended to bond the class together. They didn’t work anyway. The jocks went off together, and the other stereotypical cliques sought their own levels, and it all seemed rather juvenile, even to me at eighteen.

Several of my high school friends also entered Ithaca College in that same freshman class, nearly all of them members of the incoming JV football team, and at 1:30 in the morning on the last night of orientation, they and their teammates and roommates found themselves in my room, demanding I tell them a supposedly funny story about ancient Egyptian sexual practices one of them remembered me offering in high school. That was the moment that one football player’s roommate, a small, nerdy kid named Joey with a purple medieval-style hat sporting a giant feather, chose to announce that he not only did he play the bagpipes, but he was bisexual. One of the football players—he went by a pro-wrestling-inspired moniker, like “Slash” or “Slice” (I won’t use the real one)—freaked out, becoming red with rage, punching the wall, and yelling that he couldn’t be in the same room with one of those people, lest he beat him to a pulp. Many walked out, unable to accept that a bisexual existed. Imagine if they had known there was a gay person there, too.

On the way out in the morning, my temporary roommate, who seemingly intuited what the football players could not, pulled me aside to caution me that these people are not my friends and were likely dangerous for people like me.

Ithaca College. My freshman dormitory was the one at far left.

When we all returned to campus in late August to start the academic year, the student housing office seemed to have arranged roommates in some combination of vindictive irony and social engineering. My closest high school friend to attend Ithaca with me found himself in a room with a grotesque young man I have difficulty describing even now. Suffice it to say, his personal hygiene was poor, his personality aggressively off-putting, and he openly indulged in watching and displaying what, for those pre-Pornhub days, was deeply disturbing pornography. They put Joey in a room with a football player, and they gave me what I suppose on paper seemed like the right choice. My roommate Jeff was effeminate, flamboyant, and emotional. He liked interior decorating, owned a pink iMac, stocked his closet with scented body oils, and was studying music to become a teacher. Surprisingly, he was not gay (or so he said at the time) but had multiple girlfriends he saw at all hours and insisted I help keep him secret from one another. He played the trumpet and insisted on practicing in our room at midnight every night and wanted me to follow the restrictions his conservative brand of Judaism put on his lifestyle. We didn’t last the semester. On the other hand, he was such a cartoon that I seemed normal by comparison.

My second roommate was worse. When Jeff moved out after taking an R.A. job, the college filled his bed with an international student. Ng hailed from Singapore, spoke little English, and was a decade older than me. I can’t remember if he had a second name. He was just “Ng.” He had no sense of personal space or boundaries, and—this is completely true—he owned only two changes of clothes, which he never washed, and had no personal belongings or personality. His only real trait was his insistence that he live by Singapore’s time zone, twelve hours ahead of New York, eating breakfast long after I had finished dinner and staying up all hours to call his parents each night to speak when they were awake. He fumed with rage that I wanted to sleep at night and would not follow his schedule and sleep only in daytime.

Some of it was my fault, I’m sure. Being closeted and undiagnosed neurodivergent, I was too rigid and had difficulty connecting with people. Throwing me unprepared into a dormitory full of noise and people and no way to get away and just be quiet for a few minutes was not exactly an ideal recipe for warmth and camaraderie. And don’t get me started on the communal bathrooms. I still have nightmares.

I found college a terrible disappointment in other ways, too. The coursework was simplistic, material I had mastered in high school. I had arrived with the expectation that I would find people who shared my interests and ambitions; instead, I found mostly careerists of limited imagination. Aspiring news anchors all, the broadcast journalism students arrived with blow-dried helmets of anchor hair, pressed khakis, and a single-minded obsession with politics, a subject they barely understood and cared little about beyond its career value. One young woman so idolized Barbara Walters that she styled her hair after hers, wore pantsuits to class, and effected Walters’ speech impediment. I made news headlines in the local papers when I attended a campus speech by then-Today show newsreader Ann Curry and asked her a question she considered so piercing (it was about some long-forgotten eco-controversy she had recently reported on), she called me a “smartass” from the stage and then sought me out after the speech to compliment me for asking her such a difficult question instead of another softball. The dean, by contrast, warned me not to do it again. I didn’t listen. In the coming years, the president of a broadcast network, a cohost of The View, and the anchor of a network evening newscast came away somewhere between amused and upset.

Eventually I ended up adding a second major, anthropology, in large measure because both the professors and my peers in journalism just didn’t like me, and it was exhausting fighting through that every day. When the communication school dean was forced to award me the school’s most prestigious scholarship because I had the highest GPA, they canceled all of the events that were supposed to honor me, including the career networking session with TV news executives. (They blamed unprecedented “scheduling conflicts.”) The woman who, at the time, was the senior professor in the journalism department—ironically, Walters’s former producer who also styled herself like her and spoke like her—straight up told me that I had the best technical and performance skills in the program, but she didn’t like that I wasn’t enmeshed in the culture of journalism, and she would never recommend me for a job. (She also refused to cancel class the afternoon of 9/11, saying the terror attacks weren’t a big deal and were over by 10:30 AM anyway, so her judgment wasn’t exactly unimpeachable.) Another professor held drunken beer bashes at his house, and I wasn’t aware that attendance was the unofficial way one earned positive notice and thus opportunities. The students and professors in anthropology liked me better, even if I was never quite the kind to want to get too dirty.

That first year of college, ironically enough, the football and baseball players were better friends than my journalism peers. I’ve talked about that before, and it was the closest I came to the idealized college life you see in movies and TV shows. They eventually found “Slice” too angry and extreme even for them (and they were not exactly progressive) and sent him on his way. It is to them that I owe what “normal” college experiences I had, many of which I can’t commit to writing. Those were the good memories of college.

But the bad memories outweigh them. One night, someone taped a pipe bomb to my dorm room door and exploded it while I was asleep inside. It’s insane to think that back then the police did nothing, but no one other than me and the guy who had to fix the door much cared, and the culprit was never found. It was far from the only incident, if the most dramatic. When finally I worked up the courage to try to explore what it meant to be gay, it was horrifying. I tried talking to an openly gay fellow I knew, and his only advice was to offer a trip to the local cruising spot to find a hookup. I attended a meeting of college’s LGBTQ club, and the leaders asked the new visitors to introduce themselves by standing up and announcing how many same-sex partners they had had, how often they have sex, and which sexual acts and positions they had tried. Maybe there is a world where I would have found that liberating; in this one, I was appalled.

I do wonder, though, whether the environment was to some degree toxic. I was far from the only one to have a bad experience there. Students were perpetually angry and upset. I made a few friends that first year who hadn’t come with me from high school or were the roommates of those who had. But many of them had a bad time, too. One descended into religious extremism and eventually moved to a religious commune to live a fundamentalist biblical lifestyle. Another left campus to start an unsanctioned underground fraternity and eventually fell into a life of petty crime. A third became a recluse and only left his room for class. I met a guy named Jim, and we hit it off and were good friends for the year, eating breakfast together most mornings at 7 AM, the only people awake before 8 AM classes. We were going to room together sophomore year, but he, like me, found the curriculum and the people and the professors uninspiring and unchallenging and often hostile, and over the summer he transferred to another school. He went on to live a lovely, successful life, and when, twenty years after he left Ithaca, I looked him up and asked how he had been, he did not remember me at all and said the experience had been so bad he had blocked out that whole year.

His sudden absence left an unexpected slot for the  student housing people to fill, and that is how I ended up with my third and final roommate, who transferred to be closer to home after a rough time at another school. I’ll use a pseudonym and call him Blaine since he belonged to a locally prominent family.  I liked him, for a time. A tanned, handsome former athlete with floppy blond hair, he was more or less the image that comes to mind when you picture a “college boy.” He was the kind of person who floated through life unburdened by responsibility and expected everyone else to pick up the slack from his lack of effort. One night, a girl knocked at the door and handed me a ball of clothes. “Your roommate forgot his pants,” she said, and I never did find out how he went about his postcoital evening sans pants, wallet, or keys. Another night, I awoke to find two girls standing in the middle of my room—Blaine had left the door unlocked—and they told me that he was so cute that they had come to watch him sleep. He wasn’t there, so they decided to wait for him. Yet another night—these things always happened at night—he decided to chill a can of soda in the minifridge’s freezer, unaware of what happens when you freeze carbonated liquid. The shrapnel that shot out of the exploded minifridge door missed my sleeping head by inches and embedded itself in the wall.

These were normal college antics, though, and Blaine could be fun when he wasn’t talking about politics. But somewhere that fall, as the 2000 presidential election entered its terminal phase, Blaine fell in with the young Republicans and became an increasingly rabid conservative. He brought conservative activists to the room at all hours to challenge me to “debates,” which were exhausting and unpleasant. I hated having to live with a constant barrage of complaints that the gays were poisoning American culture, but there was nowhere to go. That year there was a housing shortage, with students literally sleeping on the floors of student lounges for lack of space. Blaine got mad that I did not want to watch Fox News in the evening, so he bought a second television, bigger than mine, so he could have Fox News on 24 hours a day. It never went off. Even after we stopped living together, and well into young adulthood, he still occasionally messaged me hectoring conservative talking points, unbidden, until AOL Instant Messenger finally faded away. I never spoke to him again.

I had muddled through the first two years of college with something close to a conventional college experience, but by junior year, my old friends had wandered onto their own paths and no one new filled the gaps, in part because I was experiencing what was probably depression, though the school doctor insisted it was stress from working too hard. That was laughable. By that point, I had completely disengaged from school and put in little effort. I graduated at the top of my class in two majors anyway, which only proved to me that the work had never been challenging enough, but it wasn’t a terribly joyful accomplishment. I got the sense that the administrators were rather annoyed, and they went out of their way to minimize the honors typically bestowed on the top-ranking student—budget cutbacks in a tough economy, of course.

The trouble is that you don’t know what you don’t know. With better self-knowledge and more robust support, I probably would have had a much different experience, but in those days, I was doing the best I could with the limited information I had. Nevertheless, I am still annoyed that more than two decades after graduation, the college that quite literally did nothing for me still begs me for money endlessly with appeals to nostalgia that fall on deaf ears. An alumni representative called a few years ago to ask why I didn’t donate and why I didn’t attend alumni events. Didn’t I want to help celebrate the school? I told her the truth, that I had a miserable experience and would never give them a dime. A few weeks later, another fundraising letter arrived.