Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (3 page)

You remember meeting these people as an adolescent. The ones who immediately intrigue you, who seem to intimate vast, unknown continents of knowledge and experience. Mike was one—a mysterious coworker two years my senior who went to school across town. Because we shared the same teenage passion for a very specific type of angst-driven British alt-rock—the The, New Order, The Jam, Paul Weller, The Style Council, Aztec Camera, Fun Boy Three, The Specials, The Cure, Depeche Mode—we became instant friends. He knew more about this brooding genre than even I did. But his greatest influence on me was his hyperinformed and deeply philosophical roots in left-wing politics.

Mike, like me, was working as a disinterested student, educating himself off curricula. Where I was self-taught by way of news media and pop culture, Mike was informed by the highbrow literary and philosophical tracts of obscure political philosophers. His vocal politics challenged the order that I had long taken for granted. After all, I had no problem with my life. In fact, I liked it a lot. But after years of going to concerts with Mike, and going to local coffee shops and visiting alternative bookstores with him, Mike, like a self-appointed
mentor, adopted me as a project. And since I was an avowed C+ student and secretly felt I deserved Ds, Mike’s intellectualism was the epitome of sexy to me. I not only started to read the works of Alan Watts and the ethereal musings of Richard Bach, I also delved into the
Utne Reader
and
LA Weekly
—both bastions of leftist thinking.

Needless to say, Mike was the exact opposite of my father. He was fascinating. He took the SATs for his friends at his high school. He even wrote papers for them. He got them into the best colleges. And where my father valued hard work above everything, Mike valued intellect above everything. My father had an innate moral compass; Mike had none. But his amoral righteousness was born of a contempt for the existing political and economic paradigms. Except for a self-made ethos of friendship, he reveled in being valueless.

Mike gave me a CliffsNotes version of the leftist point of view, a romanticized, James Dean–ish, moral-relativist, everything-is-pointless crash course on how thinking people should, in fact, think. I imbibed it without question. So when it came time for college, it was as if the professors in my freshman classes were speaking the exact same language he was. Through some form of osmosis, I considered myself a liberal. As a result, there would be no culture shock when I entered Tulane.

While skipping college was never a possibility, my decision-making process for choosing the right one was the exact opposite of all of my peers’. To quote the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I wanted to rock out with my cock out. After all, Mike had taught me that nothing mattered anyway. Might as well have fun in the meantime.

I put more effort into choosing the correct party school than I did into studying during my entire high-school career. And because I had older friends who went to state schools where beer bongs and
the frat boy experience were as generic as it appears in the movies, I believed that I had to go to a higher place. I had to up the ante.

New Orleans.

There happens to be a school there called Tulane. When somebody said to me, “Oh, it’s a respectable school”—bingo!

In one of the more popular college guidebooks, I recall Tulane described in terms of how many bars there were in the surrounding region. It said that you could go to a different bar every night during your time at Tulane, and never repeat. That book was not lying. The first two weeks of Tulane reminded me of basic training scenes in films where the recruit doesn’t seem like he is going to make it.

I thought I could drink when I came to Tulane. I had some hard-and-fast rules to prevent becoming an alcoholic, such as: don’t drink during sunlight hours. By the end of my time at Tulane, I was going to bed so early in the morning and waking up so late in the afternoon that this rule was almost impossible to break. Thank God I wasn’t developing a drinking problem.

Now, where I think I made a wrong turn was when I was taken under the wing of a very particular clique in my new fraternity, Delta Tau Delta. These guys were from the northeast tristate area: Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. And one from California—me. They wrongly assumed from the film portrayal of high-school life in the Hollywood of the 1980s (think
Less Than Zero
) that I was a hard-living, cocaine-fueled man of a thousand lovers.

Perhaps I led them on.

Because in no time, I was.

Any standards I had retained to this point, as well as that little thing I called my virginity, became objects in the rearview mirror very quickly. Not only were my new friends decadent, funny, and sick bastards, there was nothing resembling an adult authority figure in that godforsaken town. Moderation is just not in that city’s DNA.

On a Tuesday night, for instance, one could find himself at a drinking establishment by the name of F & M on Tchoupitoulas Street, dancing atop a pool table with twenty other denizens of New Orleans—black, white, and Creole; young, middle-aged, and old. Stumbling out of the bar, ready to head on to the next one, a police officer in uniform would stop anyone leaving with a bottle of beer—not to admonish the reveler but rather to helpfully remind him that he must transfer his beer into a plastic “Geaux cup.” I shamefully recall getting behind the wheel of my car with such a Geaux cup, lifting up the beer and giving an officer a cheer as I drove away, off to the Rendon Inn. Even the law enforcement in New Orleans reinforced the 24/7 debauchery.

Truth be told, I was at first horrified by the behavior around me. I do recall at one point musing about my choice of college, “This might’ve been a significant mistake.” But because I had my first serious girlfriend on campus, leaving was not an option.

So I distinctly chose to do as the Romans did.

With the passing of every drunken and debauched week, I could feel the acute sense of right and wrong that had been bestowed upon me by my parents fading further away. I started to see things in shades of gray. And the courses that I was supposedly taking, mostly in the Humanities department, seemed to jibe perfectly with this new outlook.

One day, I went to my campus mailbox and found a letter that informed me that I was months late in declaring my major. I had been avoiding the decision because not one professor or one class had sufficiently moved me like the young prep school stallions in
Dead Poets Society
had been. I would have been happy with Rodney Dangerfield from
Back to School
.

But no such luck. So as I walked out of the student union with that letter in hand, I marched up to an attractive group of blonde
coeds with whom I was socially familiar. Part to make them laugh and part to finally make up my mind, I told them that by the end of our conversation, they would decide my major for me. After less than five minutes of discussing my academic interests or lack thereof, we decided upon American Studies. What a stud, huh?

The virtue of the ambiguous American Studies degree for a creative loafer like me was that it was both an interdisciplinary and an interdepartmental major. I recognized that I could play the different department heads off of each other. To my English professors, I could say, “English is not my strong suit.” I also found out that this same tactic worked in the History and Philosophy departments as well.

American Studies etched my wayward trajectory in stone—it ensured I would accomplish nothing in the next few years. The visits back to my Los Angeles reality for Christmas and summer breaks became intrusions into my consciousness. I was becoming a dissolute Southern literary figure without the depth, character development, or literary output.

At this point, I was living in two worlds: my LA world and my New Orleans world. My LA friends, my New Orleans friends. My daytime, my nighttime. When I wasn’t busy loving my new life, I was horrified and self-loathing. There were only highs and lows. There were no mediums.

Around the beginning of my sophomore year, I made yet another excellent lifestyle choice and moved across the way from one of the country’s most notorious college bookies. So while my roommates were betting $50 and $100 per game on college football games on Saturday and pro games on Sunday (and of course,
Monday Night Football
), I opted to live vicariously through their wins and losses… for a while. And by “a while” I mean about a month.

I started to dabble in $20 bets. There was no pizza delivery route in New Orleans. So my money, at this point, was the $300 monthly
stipend my parents were giving me. But as the cliché goes, that $20 wasn’t enough action, and so I started getting into the $50 and $100 bets. I started gambling on backgammon, too (I’m not a bad player). This became another means of blowing money that I wasn’t earning. But thank God for my accelerating drinking problem—it cut down on the time I had to gamble.

My sleep patterns became so irregular that I started to resemble the characters in Anne Rice’s New Orleans–based works. The funny thing about sleeping—and this holds true to this day—is that as I would drift into sleep, that’s when the harrowing reminders of what my life had become would visit me. I knew that, at some point, I would have to do an about-face, to change everything. But I didn’t know how, and to be honest, the cons of this lifestyle had yet to outweigh the pros.

My favorite pastime during this four-year phase was to lure my high-school friends down to New Orleans for a weekend, preferably Mardi Gras or Halloween. During those two-to three-day forays, I would afford them the trip of a lifetime, showing them things that they couldn’t imagine, bewildering them with the euphoria of the 24/7 surreal New Orleans lifestyle. During these benders, I would try to convince myself I was having fun, too. But when I would take them to the airport to send them off, where they would thank me for the most spectacularly wild weekend of their lives, as they got on the plane, I’d feel the deepest despair. And under my breath, I’d say, “Take me with you.”

Did I mention that I liked a lot of the people that I was at school with? Some were funny. A couple of the ladies even let me be inside of them. So don’t get me wrong. My time was not completely misused. It just wasn’t productive in any way, shape, or form. And at heart, I knew it.

At one critical point in my sophomore year, I went to the head of my department to explain that I was in over my head, and to make matters
worse, I had just been dumped by my girlfriend. And she, one of the only ostensible adults in my life in New Orleans, suggested that I take a semester off and go drop acid in New York. She really said that.

Good idea, Teach! So I went.

You don’t need to hear about it—you can guess. I came back from a semester in New York, where I spent $23,500 that I had inherited from a great-aunt I didn’t really know… on nothing. Not to wax too philosophical, but beers in New York are twice as expensive as they are in New Orleans.

So with that valuable life lesson, I went back to New Orleans, $23,500 poorer, entering what would have been my junior year with the number of credits an incoming sophomore would have.

Now, don’t ask me how I did what came next. Even I don’t know. But somehow, I made a commitment to myself to graduate with my class. I had no great epiphany. I did not have a transformation that one could see in a montage in a movie where I started to hit the books frantically. I just willed myself to do it. I think it was some atavistic self-preservation.

I needed to reach the finish line. I needed to get out of that place.

I also vowed to rid myself of this nasty little gambling habit—and attendant debt—I’d developed. The low point: taking my friend Scott into my walk-in closet, saying he could have whatever he wanted for fifty dollars. He took my leather jacket. So one day, I called my mother and divulged my bind. In an exceptionally calm manner, she gave me the stern maternal talking-to that I desperately needed. She then sent me a check to cover my debt. I paid it. And that was the last of my dealings with my bookie. Moms can do that to you.

By now, I knew that graduating was less about getting the degree than it was getting my release papers from New Orleans. Pushing myself through my credit quandary would take more than will—it would take finesse. I hadn’t fulfilled my math requirement, mostly
because it was the only course that had a mandatory attendance requirement. I had dropped it my first semester, my second semester, and my third semester. At the time, I remember thinking,
By the time I’m a senior, I’ll have my act together, and I’ll pay attention. I know I’ll be a better student by my senior year.

Yeah, right.

So the last semester, I had to take math. If my Humanities professors thought I was giving them short shrift, this poor Chinese grad student whose job it was to instill in me the basics of precalculus got no shrift. He went shriftless. Going into the final, my last week of class during senior year, I knew less than the day the class started. My test-taking strategy for this, my last test of my woeful college career, was figuring
I’m twenty-two years old. I’ve
got
to know more about this subject than the average fifteen-year-old high-school student.

Wrong!

The test had twenty questions. As is customary, they required correct answers. And to make matters worse, apparently they wanted me to show my work. After a look through the twenty questions, I noticed that the first was the easiest, and each question was more difficult than the previous one, so that the last was the hardest. After I stared at question one for about fifteen minutes, hoping that I would be inspired, waiting for the math muse, I realized that today was not going to be my day.

I started to see my life passing before my eyes. I started to consider that maybe years of skating by, recklessly expecting everything to work out, had been exactly the wrong approach to derivatives. It was a big moment for someone raised on—and among—the trusty happy endings of Hollywood. Apparently, I realized, sometimes it
doesn’t
work out. Sometimes you have to
make
it work out. Which means: maybe values
do
matter. I took a deep breath, stood up,
walked toward the teacher, as the rest of the class scribbled away—and asked that he join me outside the classroom.