Authors: Aaron Thier
The Ghost Apple (6 page)
ENGL 410a
/ Senior Seminar: What Is to Be Done?
Beckford
An hour appointed by destiny has struck in the heavens above our beloved Tripoli. The declaration of war has already been delivered, and all students should pay heed: This semester we go to battle against the parasitic bureaucrats and check-licking administrators who, at every moment, have hindered our advance and have often endangered our very existence. Recent events can be summarized in the following phrases: promises, threats, blackmail, and finally, to crown the edifice, an ignoble siege by those who would refuse the gracious charity of that corporation which offers its hand in friendship. There is no required reading for this course. The time for reading and writing is at an end. Inactivity is death.
ENGL 411a
/ Senior Seminar: Reading Literature
Longman
Sterling R. Loman Distinguished Professor of English Language and Literature, forty-nine, seeks twelve undergraduate English majors for weekly discussions of the modern British novel, including works by Lawrence, Conrad, Ford, Joyce, West, Woolf, Forster, Rhys, and others. Enthusiasm a must!
I had originally thought that my undercover mission would last one week (two weeks at the most), but here I am in my fourth week as a Tripoli freshman, and I still have so much to learn! That’s why I plan to stay undercover as long as it takes.
It’s no surprise that dorm life has been a major adjustment: In Hogbender Hall, I sleep in a bunk bed, so my sleeping patterns depend in part on Akash, my roommate, a much younger (and much more romantically active) man. My room is too hot, my bed is too soft, and there’s always someone talking to me. The building itself hasn’t been renovated since I myself was a Tripoli student! Plus, it seems as if anything could happen at any time, whether it’s Lehman practicing with a small gong in the middle of the night or a lacrosse player discharging a fire extinguisher in the hallway outside.
At the same time, I find that I welcome the noise and distractions. My wife and I ate breakfast together every morning for years and years. We’d make steel-cut oatmeal and read the paper and we wouldn’t say a word, but after she died the silence was different. The silence was so loud that I couldn’t read at all. It’s nice to live in a place where there’s always something going on.
Tripoli at the Trough: Notes on Dining Services
I want to talk first about one aspect of student life that arguably has an effect on every other aspect, and that’s the question of what our students eat.
Tripoli has gotten a lot of attention recently because of what’s been called our “old-fashioned” (and sometimes, less generously, our “reactionary”) approach to dining services, and it’s true that we haven’t responded as quickly as some institutions to new and changing ideas about diet and nutrition. Part of the reason that some members of the community welcome the partnership with Big Anna® is that the company markets a lot of low-calorie foods. Professor Amundsen has even proposed that we source all of our food and food products from Big Anna®.
In the past, I ate in the dining halls once or twice a week, but I usually had other things on my mind and I rarely ate more than a salad, a piece of fruit, and maybe some bread and butter. My appetite isn’t what it used to be! Now, however, in order to get a better sense of how our students eat, I pledged to have the regular entrée and two sides at each meal. Little did I know how difficult it would be to keep that promise. At both lunch and dinner, Tripoli’s dining halls typically offer a choice of three entrées, not including the vegetarian option, but I’ve found that often there isn’t much to choose. On an average night, options might include old favorites like
Drippy Wrap w/Fish, Bacon Blast Pizza
, or
Soused Mackerel
, plus a vegetarian alternative like
Crushed Legume Patty
. Students ordering the
Legume Patty
can choose to have it “fully loaded”—i.e., served on a bun with pickles, pickle relish, mayonnaise, onion rings, barbecue sauce, garlic aioli, and ketchup—or they can eat it plain off a piece of wax paper. Side dishes might include
Potato Salad
or
Poached Green Beans
, but more often there are less nutritious items such as
Mini Tacos
,
Candy Apple Slices in Jell-O
(which is not considered a dessert), or
Deep-Fried Pasta
. Dessert options might include the popular
Nut Ball in Chocolate Sauce
—a frozen ball of peanut butter dipped in hot fudge—or a bowl of
Chilled Water Matrix with Flavor Compound
, our only low-calorie dessert option.
But as you can tell from reading any number of editorials in the Tripoli
Telegraph
, the real controversy has to do with our famous self-serve pudding bars (c.f. “The Problem Is in the Pudding,”
Tripoli College Telegraph
, September
4
,
2009
). Made possible by a generous gift from the Walker family, Tripoli’s pudding bars have always struck me as a fun diversion from the rigors of college life, but I soon discovered that the reality was different. At lunch one day during my first week, I was taking a breather before heading into the servery when Lehman sat down across from me with a full tray. He was wearing a suit coat with mesh gym shorts.
“You know the best thing about college?” he said. “I can have as much pudding as I like, or none at all.”
I thought this was a joke, since there was no pudding on his tray, but later he returned to the servery and came back with a bowl of
Butterychocolate Home-Style Comfort Pudding
topped with peanut butter pieces, whipped cream, and gummy worms. He dug in with a soup spoon and said to me, “Live a little, Grandpa.”
It’s one thing to say “live a little” before enjoying a small piece of chocolate cake after a nutritious dinner. After all, “live a little” is another way of saying “indulge yourself just this once.” But Lehman has a large bowl of pudding every day, and often twice a day. He is, you might say, living quite a lot. He told me that he’s gained six pounds since arriving at Tripoli, and I would guess that he’s by no means exceptional in that regard. Yesterday I saw a young man holding his stomach and resting his forehead on the table. There was a half-finished bowl of pudding on his tray and some pudding and whipped cream in his hair. Later I saw him licking the bowl clean.
The pudding bars have become so much a part of Tripoli’s identity that criticizing them is thought to be in bad taste, and it’s only the rare student (Akash is one) who seems inclined to give them a pass. But it’s worth considering what happens when an occasional indulgence becomes a daily habit. It’s worth asking, too, whether there are foods one should probably never eat, under any circumstances. We don’t say “live a little” in order to justify using hard drugs.
I hadn’t spent much time thinking about the consequences, as much psychological as physical, of eating in the Tripoli dining halls every day, but I quickly discovered that most of our menu items left me feeling sick and confused rather than fortified. I actually vomited after trying the
Mini Tacos
! I’d venture the argument that this is more than just a public health issue. Our students can’t hope to do their best work if they’re not well nourished. I’ve seen Burke and Lehman taking long naps after dinner, and sometimes after lunch as well. One night I heard Burke observe matter-of-factly, “Sometimes my vision goes all wonky after I eat.”
Nightlife
Let me shift gears now and turn to a topic that anyone concerned about the character of student life is going to be interested in—the elephant in the room, so to speak.
Ask a few Tripoli grads how they spent their college years, and inevitably a large percentage will say “partying.” Obviously, alcohol abuse is one of our major concerns in the dean’s office. We don’t mind if students have a drink now and then, as long as they do so in moderation and in a safe environment, but how much is too much? When, and why, does good fun become no fun?
It’s almost impossible for us in the dean’s office to get a good idea of how much the average Tripoli student drinks on a night out. I had seen Lehman drinking rum most nights, but I didn’t know whether he was representative and I was eager for the opportunity to get an insider’s look at a typical party. It wasn’t long before I got my chance.
One night I was having trouble sleeping, so I went out to take a short walk and smoke a cigar. When I got back to the room, Lehman and Burke had a case of beer open on the table and they were taking turns rolling a pair of dice and drinking from red plastic cups. They explained that they were playing a game, the rules of which they quickly outlined. I decided not to ask how they’d gotten the beer (they are both underage) and instead asked if I could join them.
I’ve never been much of a drinker. Usually, when I begin to feel “buzzed,” as my suitemates would say, I decide that I’ve had enough. But tonight was different. I couldn’t beg off and head to my room, because that would have been a violation of etiquette and it might also have jeopardized the trust my suitemates had placed in me. Plus, I needed to stay up and observe. So I continued to roll the dice, drink the watery beer (I promised myself that if I did this again, I’d spring for something better!), and listen to the loud music Lehman was playing on his stereo. As I did so, I began to feel a sense of ease and comfort that I hadn’t expected. Maybe readers will tell me that it was only the alcohol, but I think it was something more: It was a sudden realization of what was important, and what was not important, at that particular moment.
I looked around at my dorm room. Here was the old fireplace, its brick darkened by years of smoke (the flue was now blocked). Here was the bay window, with its blue curtains that moved in the cool night breeze. Here was the scuffed hardwood floor and dirty rug, and here was the desk lamp that shed a dim yellow light and left most of the room in shadow. Here were the old desks, the old chairs, the old black molding and door frames and window frames. And here
we
were: three college freshmen, content in one another’s company and excited about the possibilities of this September night. I remember thinking, What does it matter, what
could
it matter, that one of us is fifty years older than the other two?
Soon we were sitting on the window seat, laughing and drinking our beers and talking about all kinds of interesting things. They asked me about the Vietnam War, and I told them a little about it. I hadn’t seen much fighting, but I’d been stationed in Saigon in the late sixties. It was nice to speak freely with people who were amazed by stories that someone my own age would have heard thousands of times.
“Hey, man, listen, hold on,” said Burke, suddenly growing very serious. “It’s really cool that you made the decision to come to school and finally get your degree.”
Lehman nodded, and continued nodding, and took a sip from his beer. I knew that sometimes he simply ignored most of what we said, but I didn’t mind. I understood that this was “just his thing.”
“I don’t care if I get my identity stolen,” he said. “What I say is take it.”
Lehman wanted to go to a party his friend was throwing over at Farrier Hall. At this, the dean in me shook himself awake: Here was an opportunity to see more of the real Tripoli. I was feeling so comfortable at that point that I didn’t even worry about running into someone who might recognize me. We put some beers into our coat pockets and headed down into the courtyard, where there were lots of students laughing and talking and rushing off in large groups.
Although Farrier Hall was just across the street, it seemed to take an enormously long time to get there. We had to stop every few feet to talk to some people Lehman knew, and then we ran into Akash, who had a beautiful young woman on his arm. He said a quick hello as the two of them hurried away.
“He gets all the girls,” Burke said as we watched them go. “I’ve got to ask him what’s his trick.”
“Step one,” Lehman said. “Be about a million times more handsome than you are.”
“Well, he’s also pretty unscrupulous. He’ll say anything. He’s like, ‘Oh, okay, I’m Akash, I was born in a flapjack restaurant at the top of a runaway-truck ramp. I failed the drug test at the National Spelling Bee.’ ”
“Step two,” Lehman continued. “Be another maybe fifty thousand times more handsome.”
Then we were at the convenience store, where Lehman bought some cigarettes and I bought a few cigars. For some reason, I chose the cheapest I could find. Don’t ask me why! They tasted like coal dust and stove polish, and later Burke remembered me saying that I enjoyed the “heightened reality” of their flavor.
“Am I really so much less handsome than Akash?” he asked me when Lehman was distracted.
I told him that his features were just a little small for his head. They weren’t so bad on their own.
Everything seemed to be happening at once. One moment, someone was saying very earnestly that he preferred Mickey Mouse to T. S. Eliot, and when I turned to ask him what he meant, I discovered that I was standing arm in arm with two other students and we were all singing “Old Man River.” I wondered what my wife would have said if she could have seen me then!
