Columns, Opinion

ARAFAT: Undergraduate superstar

Another semester, another year of my late twenties, another Physics course dropped and three others barely passed. Hopefully. And where does it take me? I don’t know buddy, I don’t know. This entire time I have kept a brave face and made modest jokes about the size of my sense of entitlement (large) and penis (small). But wheels are in motion! There are cogs and gears that strain for me. A whale tugs at my bootlaces. A decade is about to end, and with it a process that began eight years ago, in 2001: college.

Do you know what it’s like to come full circle? I don’t. I don’t finish anything. I’ve spent a lifetime stumbling into situations too deep for me and blaming others for the consequences. But this time is the consequence. I’m about to find out.

In the Hollywood version of my life, I’m wearing a black pleather bodysuit, Brad Pitt on one side and Angelina Jolie on the other. Brad Pitt’s so cool he’s wearing a tie over his bodysuit. Man, that Brad. Angelina looks at me with sultry eyes, biting her lower lip ’cause she knows I’m lookin’. She wants it. ‘You think you can do it? You think you can graduate?’ Brad monotones: ‘Of course he can. He’s an effin’ idiot but he’s still an American!’ I am sheepish. I knew I’d forgotten something. ‘Uhhh guys, I need to go to the bathroom.’

Damn it.

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that wheels are in motion. They are. I can feel the clockwork hum just beneath the surface, especially under the Muddy River bridge where the mole people run a generator that powers Boston. For the past few weeks, I have felt the call of the wild, Destiny’s beckoning, the limerick’s lure. John the Ripper, Boston University student, charged with murder. Elevator shafts in Warren Towers getting stuck in mid-lift, and nobody making an ad hoc porno. (Title: The Meter-High Club.) Matt Gilroy, forever immortalized by his skillful hockey and the pun ‘Matty Ice’. I have never met you my friend, I’m too cheap to buy you a beer if I do meet you. But believe me on this: once we’re both gone from here, I’ll tell people we were buddies.

On the home front (that’s Bangladesh), they’ve let the King of Vulgarity out of his cage. That’s Monowar Hossain Dipjol, movie star turned Batman villain, jailed for 45 years on charges of murder, rape, kidnapping, extortion. They tried to make the tiger wear a chicken suit. But the skunks ate the chicken and now he’s back singing the songs we used to play on a Victor Victrola:

I will throw away your water containersThere will be a holeThe water will flowI will destroy my enemiesSeeing you girls makes me want to dance, dance, dance all night long.

If I sound like I don’t know what to say, it’s because I don’t know what to say. I feel like how Mario must feel if all of a sudden the Nintendo company says: ‘Hey, good job all these years, but you know, you don’t need to break bricks with your head anymore. Or be a plumber. Try something else – haberdashery maybe.’ What does Mario do? He can’t do anything else. He tries recreation, train rides, reading until late at night, romance. But he keeps on fingering starched-white collars, wondering if there’s a way to get them really white again, and Peach thinks he’s in Oslo, France. The situation worsens.

I feel the same way. Throughout these past nine years, even taking into account my five-year break, I got really good at being an undergraduate. It was a thing. I could hug it like a pillow. My life, filled with lies at the best of times, took on the shining patina of bashfully acknowledged failure. I would blush purple and say ‘Ah, er, um, I have a class or two left at the old alma mater.’ It was one of my standard lines, along with the one where I said ‘I’m sorry I’m fat, just FYI’ and the other one where I tried to blame the disappearing silverware on someone else.

Oh for a draught of vintage! Or to steal a spoon again. I’ve become Samson poring over blueprints, figuring out the points where he’s gotta push. My teeth are clenched. The limes duly sliced. The ride continues but I can hear the quickening footsteps, the pendulum, the roaring train.

Eight long years. I veni at 18, I vici at 27. We have yet to vedi if any of this does me good. Well, that’s not entirely true. With age comes fruition, rewards. One thing I have really learned to cherish these days is spite. Do you know, the girl I spent sophomore year chasing (with nary a whiff of pie) is now married to a man fifteen years her senior? And I have to say: her life is over. But me, I have carefully preserved memories of what might have been, played out over late night conversations with Jarett Kobek. (And one of her shirts that I stole back in 2002.)

This is my life. Choking on the ashes of gall, scheming over how to avenge petty nuisances, letting the bread bake till it’s hard on the skin and dry inside. But graduating seniors, I ask you, even the overachievers who’ve done it in four years: are you not afraid? Is there no cold weight on your chest when you wake up after a dream where Nick Menza, drummer for classic-era Megadeth, tells you he can’t feel his hands anymore? Do you not shiver feebly and find blood under your fingernails, and you know it’s yours, but you don’t know where from?

Probably not. Maybe the John the Ripper feels like that. We share a certain amount of personal experience. Except of course I have not thrilled at taking a life, sweet cessation of a prostitute’s tender-taken breath. I will at least acknowledge that he had a bigger ‘oops’ moment than any I can lay claim to.

Do you see where all of this is going? The time has come to say goodbye. The machine will spit us out into a pile of finished product and we’re going to be grinning like broken toys in a bucket while the world limps by, passing us over to lick its own wounds. Come on, bunky, let’s hear each other groan.

I’m being pessimistic. Not everybody’s going on to superstardom like Matt Gilroy, my old college pal, but most of us aren’t looking at life imprisonment either. I was being dramatic because I like attention. I’m sure that each and every one of us has years of joy ahead, though they may be split up and fractioned in between decades of <>. Who knows, maybe we’ll all see a girl we loved (or boy, or boy, or girl, you decide) caught in a hole and we’ll have the opportunity to chortle and preen. That’ll teach her to walk out on me in Major Authors: Milton.

What if someone calls and tells me that I got it all wrong from start to finish? And I could in fact reverse things, but I had to act right now and never look back for fear of turning into stone or salt? Would I be yanked from the precipice and suddenly be able to relive every wrong month, week, day, year, every breath I’ve wasted since I turned twelve and my life started going downhill? Or would I remain here, impotent, wistful, angry, foaming, rattling the chains that bind me to my plastic chair, the smell of turmeric and a life of regrets that the thought of my loved ones being even more miserable, even more trapped, not alive and not yet snuffed, slavering over tiny specks of lit dust that fly around like a bug, taunting you because it can escape and you never will? Is this all life is once I’m thrown into the lion’s pit? Is there no space for hope, none for pardon left?

Well, at least I have summer courses. What, you thought I’d be able to graduate in May? I wish!

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One Comment

  1. Sweet Christ, is this an opinion post or a suicide note?<p/>Maybe it’s just me but it seems like come graduation time, there’s always an influx of depressing opinion letters ranting about how graduating is like falling of a pinnacle into a dark and gloomy abyss. Funny how the authors manage to give a long list of all their undergraduate career highlights and yet never realize how fortunate they are to have had them.<p/>But what do I know? I’ve still got a whole year to go. Maybe I just haven’t yet seen the light.