John,
Surprisingly, it’s early (10 a.m.) and the Grind is packed. It’s a miscellaneous crowd, and I’ve been forced to take a corner seat. I’ve stopped smoking, just randomly. Not everyone can do this, but I was in the bath last night and decided. I didn’t start in earnest until seven years ago, November 2003, the month I broke up with Trish for the first time. I was finishing my degree at Penn at the time, and standing outside Bennett Hall with a gaggle of fellow travelers, it clicked that I wanted to smoke perpetually. In all honesty, I can’t say my experiences over the last seven years have been enlivened by cigarettes. Is an evanescent addiction even an addiction? But cigarettes are a good social lubricant if you want to bond with degenerates (like me), and a pain in the ass if you’re staying with prudes. Trish and Tob were right: only smoke it if its green.
The way the day is structured, I have to wait all day to teach. Late afternoon classes are a drag, and at thirty-four most of these students are little more than half my age. Some of the girls give me sex vibes, and, after certain semesters, I have slept with students before. Oh, the days Julie used to follow me here, the torment, temptation. Truth be told, I haven’t done anything seriously transgressive since. This semester has generated no stalkers, only a crew of bashful adolescents who might well wish to do me to secure their grades. One, in particular, was in my office doing our conference and began hyperventilating. But I share my office, the risk is too great, and I actually do have some ethical standards. The interesting thing to me about these kids is how little passion they have. Unless pushed, they make only minimal responses to my queries. I was different at eighteen— a twisted ball of raw energy. My first semester in State College, I got a sense of my own twistedness for the first time. All these normal, football-loving kids over here; me, hell bent on being a great rock artist, over there, and full of exaggerated pretenses contingent on songs I’d already written. It was not only culture shock; I felt reduced to a defensive position all the time, especially when the guys on my floor decided to stage a mutiny against my songwriting. I was extremely disciplined, and never let anyone stop me. First semesters at American universities are always nuts— everyone’s in and out of new groups and contexts all the time. Kathy was my early trophy, a cute and ample blonde who I met some ridiculous way, probably playing my guitar outside. We fastened the two beds in my room together (my roommate went home weekends) and went to town. To think, that some people in 1994 actually took their studies seriously— it would take me over half a decade to get my ass in gear this way, by which time I was at Penn and had pulled off the unique trick of bettering myself. Kathy remains in my heart as the real first. She was born, November 22nd, “to autumn,” right?
Were Kath and Jena a little too gentle? It’s funny, about the two of them in State College, not really preparing me the right way for a slew of hyper-urban bitches later. As is funny about Kath and Jena, both were too tender, for example, to give blowjobs. The streak of wholesomeness, right down the middle of them, dictated that that particular craft-skill was not a necessary or desirable one. Many of the ladies who would come later, Trish, Tob, Heather, and the rest, were not so demure. Trish, Tob, and Heather, especially Trish and Heather, became famous to me for that their adroitness at administering skull-crushing, consciousness-annihilating head to whatever victim was at hand for them, including me. Female painters, I learned, always give head, as do serious female politicos. Hand in glove. If Heather or Trish felt like making a clean sweep of your brains, the possibility of doing so was always open to, or for, them; along with an earned sense they had that they could control you, too, buddy, if you were wondering, if you cared. It’s not wholesomeness sacrificed at the altar of power, exactly, for these ladies; just the sense of a unique, goddess-engendering version of wholesomeness, which giveth and which taketh away. Easy to see why Dana has such a hard time getting under my skin. The brain-shredding head girls laid down a gauntlet that can’t be faked, even if Kath and Jena had a magic charm on them too, of original innocence. The progression: the semi-urban into the triumphantly so.
Sucking in the Teens,
Adam
