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Gates
By Lionel Beehner
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Memories of my college years - some good, some bad - came stampeding back at the sight of the gates. Those gates, with their imposing, imprisoning look and pointy tops, nearly drove me mad, leaving me feeling like a hostage. They were supposed to keep the nearby city’s riff-raff out and the good, wholesome and hardworking college students like myself in.
They worked all too well. Sure, they were welcoming freshman year, when I arrived with my parents, towing suitcases on top of suitcases full of dorm room essentials; like microwave popcorn and a foamy futon. I think the gates even had purple and white balloons affixed to them then. But by senior year they stared at me maliciously, looking more brooding and ominous by the day. Soon they would spit me out and into the world jobless but ever hungry to fulfill commencement’s overarching message: make a difference in this world, kiddo.
I revisited these gates last month for my five-year college reunion, having spectacularly not made much of a dent in "this world." The event was well attended. More than 300 of my fellow classmates passed through the gates (out of 600, so we’re batting around .500). Funny, I was still jobless, but nevertheless a happy enough writer living in New York City with a good crew of friends and a new apartment with funky orange walls and a grill-equipped backyard.
But the sight of the gates overcame me like a sudden storm and plunked me back in 1998. They were now the Pearly Gates and I was being judged. They seemed to be asking me: Can you explain your nomadic five years? Your meager income? Your smug lack of school pride? Your failure to get married when nearly all your friends are en route? The gates once again changed me, or rather left me feeling unchanged. Nothing in my five years after college had happened or mattered. I hadn’t aged an iota. Nor had I matured or gone to grad school or moved to New York or done anything else.
College, for all our talk of its requisite part in the maturation process, is about as real as Disney World. True, behind the ivy-coated buildings are real offices with diplomas from fancier universities than the one I attended hanging from the walls and real professors administering and mentoring real students. The only facade was perhaps the manicured golf-course-green lawns which only hours before my arrival were an altar to beer cans and Dominos boxes.
But the college experience is an unreal one. We’re plunked in cubicle-sized rooms with strangers and communal baths and given ID cards and parental monetary handouts and textbooks with fancy-sounding stuff in them. We arrive armed with an SAT vocab - words like ‘overweening’ and ‘vituperative’ trickle awkwardly out of our goateed mouths and into Political Philosophy 101’s discussion. Cliques form. Cliques fight. Cliques then get kicked off campus. Many slap a Greek title on to their houses and ask for “dues,” but not my school. We had sports teams for that.
Parties, of course, abound. Sweat-drenched throngs of cup-holding denizens, undaunted by mountains of foam in their beer, mingle and move their drunken bodies to the pop music of the day. There’s usually one standout in the crowd with a massive mound of curly hair. There’s also always one underachieving but oversized Belushi-sort whose hand is readily available for a high-five or two.
Revisiting these memories was scary and surreal. I retreated into my old habits, my old vices. I shied away from pretty girls. I nervously tugged and ripped at the Budweiser label of the bottle I was holding. I talked shop with the guys. Topics of conversation rarely strayed from familiar terrain - jobs, girls, drinking, how great the beaches at Rio are. I found myself peppering my conversation with phrases like “that’s cool” and “no way”. I slouched when I spoke; I didn’t want to look like an overachiever.
But the entire reunion experience had me feeling unsettled, insecure. Not because surrounding me were successful doctors and lawyers and bankers wearing nametags and energetic, hard-earned smiles. Not because I hadn’t donated a nickel to the class alumni fund. But rather all my insecurities and peccadilloes from the past came rushing back to haunt me. I felt guilty for things I did or said, or might have said or might have done, eight years ago. I felt nervous. I never shut up in most social situations. Yet here I couldn’t speak - too conscious of sounding fake or saying the wrong thing or revisiting a distant memory that should remain a distant memory. These were people, after all, whom I’d spent four years of my life with. Yet I felt like a stranger among them. They looked at me like I was a lost tourist asking for directions. Sure, there were half-hugs and backslaps, jibes and praises, but my five-year reunion left me feeling somewhat empty and removed, something even the free alcohol couldn’t remedy.
Then, before I left campus, I dropped by Mass to get some genuflects in. As I exited the church, the Jesuit giving Mass reached out his hand, smiled and said, “Hello, Lionel.” His was a familiar face and voice on campus. Mine wasn’t. I had only met him once before. I stuttered a hello back and then glanced down to see if I was wearing a nametag. Nothing. I left feeling surprised but kind of good, almost special, that this priest knew whom I was. For a second, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, the college’s gates took on that welcoming look they had freshmen year.
In the end, I’m glad I went to my reunion and met up with old acquaintances. But I left realizing that life on this side of the gates suits me just fine.
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Lionel Beehner is a freelance writer living in New York City. He can be contacted at [email protected].
©
2003 Me Three