This is Entry 7 of an ongoing serialized memoir.
Start at the beginning → Superpower
I had taken classes at Georgetown the summer after my junior year of high school, so going back doesn’t feel like much of an adjustment. I steal my oldest brother’s ID, so I have access to alcohol and bars. I try out for the crew team and have early wake ups, but I’m unfazed. Years of delivering newspapers and running cross country practice have prepared me for the grind. I even take a certain level of pride in being able to muscle through the early workouts hungover. Besides, I end up dropping out as soon as the workouts get really serious and making the team feels like a long shot.
Once I quit rowing crew, I’m free to fall into something more dangerous.
Study, party, study, party. Rinse. Repeat.
It also helps that I’m taking classes that I’ve already finished in high school. By freshman year of college, I already have two years of calculus under my belt — one of them taken at a local community college. At Georgetown, I’m back in Calc I. I go to three math classes. The first one, the midterm, and the final. A plus. I’m also in Chem and Bio I, both of which I passed the AP exam for in high school. For whatever reason, I never jump through the hoops to get credit for my high school efforts. I somehow think that I’m getting away with something.
I take a certain amount of pride in the belief that I’m a “safe” drunk. I can hold down conversations at parties without letting on that I’m blacked out. I do not get in confrontations or trespass personal boundaries. People I meet at parties approach me on campus to reengage. I do my best not to betray the fact that I have no idea who they are or what they are talking about.
Me squinting through the conversation as if I weren’t wearing my glasses.
Them walking away unsettled, as if they were in the presence of a ghost.
Semiconscious.
That limbo space between wakefulness and sleep.
My face driven hard into my pillow.
Head thumping from another night of hard drinking.
My tongue dry and cemented to the roof of my mouth.
The radiator steaming away.
I’m too hot under my sheets, but in too much of a torpor to move as I stew in that fucked up sense of accomplishment that comes with yet another night of blacked out drinking.
Flipping through the slides from the night before.
Click
Beers with friends downtown.
Clack
Frustration with the division of the bar tab.
Click
A solo walk home with empty pockets.
Clack
House parties that have spilled into the street.
Click
Chugging free beers with new friends who I won’t ever recognize again.
Clack
Home. Safe.
A yawn, a stretch and I reach down for an absentminded scratch.
Something’s different.
I feel around some more. Only scratchy black stubble where the coarse long pubic hair was before. I pull my fingers out and there are a few loose strands of hair stuck to them.
Somewhere, in between the slides, my balls have been shaved.
I swallow hard.
Chuck!
My roommate finds his glasses and blinks back at me.
Unh - Wh.. what?
What happened to me last night?
I don’t know. You came home. You went to bed. That’s all I saw.
More studious than I, Chuck does not share my affinity for night crawls. Probably worries about mine. He stays closer to home. Sipping beers and reading. Tending to his grades and his campaign for student council representative. Besides, he doesn’t have a fake identification.
No, Chuck, really, I’m serious. What happened to me last night? Did I say anything when I got home? Do you have any idea where I was?
No. I didn’t see anything. You came home. You went to bed. That’s all I know.
I try to shake out the cobwebs.
Snow globe.
In the haze, somewhere out in the wild, I must have passed out.
Somewhere in the night I became a joke. I replay the slides looking for the frame where the scene turns.
My comfort in the voids inverted.
How many might have been there during the act?
How did I get to be so compromised but still make it home?
Did anything else happen?
How can I know for sure?
On campus I move in the straight lines of a hunted animal. Room. Class. And, when I can stomach it, food. But I don’t want to linger in the open. With threats lurking everywhere, my chest is a fist. I can’t exhale. I suspect everyone. But short a perpetrator, I turn to self-loathing.
People on my floor start acting weird.
That barometric shift that makes dogs eat grass.
Maybe I’m just being paranoid.
Maybe people know more than they are letting on.
One night I find myself huddled with Nigel on the floor outside his doorway. More acquaintances than friends, we’ve gone to a couple basketball games together but mostly because we live on the same floor. He’s fastidious. Pressed and starched shirts. Ruler flat high top. In a semi-conspiratorial way, he may be letting me know that the ball shaving actually happened on our floor. He only gives me whispers of hints.
I press him for more.
Chris, you’ve got to look for your answers elsewhere. They’re around. You just have to look.
But, if you know something, why don’t YOU just tell me?
I ain’t no snitch. I’m just saying that you’ve got to look closer to home to see.
He says it with a finality that closes the conversation and, with that, he begins to walk down the hall.
I reach for the only leverage I can find.
C’mon, why won’t you help me. You, you, you ni—.
Even before the ugly spider claws its way out of my throat, I’m trying to choke it back down.
Nigel slows, stops, then circles back, gets so close to my face that I can breathe in the crispness of his freshly pressed shirt.
No. No. No. We are not going there, Wang. I get that you’re hurting, so I accept your apology. You should know that I want to help but I live here too. Either way, we are not walking down this road.
With finality, he enters his room but resists slamming the door behind him.
I’m left cowering in the shadow of the monster that Nigel protected me from becoming.
I’m covered in blankets when I make the call. The phone cord extended to the full length of its coils.
My mother’s voice explodes through the receiver. I can never tell whether the extreme with which she exclaims my name comes from unmitigated joy or surprise that I’m finally actually calling. Either way, I have to hold the phone away from my ear.
Chriiis!!! How are you?
Mom, I want to leave school.
Why, what happened?
Mom. Somebody shaved my balls.
What, your gi gi? Who?
Uncontrolled sobbing finally surfacing under the safety of my mother’s watch.
Chris! Who?!?
I don’t know.
How can you not know who? Were you drinking? How can you not remember?
I don’t know.
Chris, why do you always have to drink so much?
I don’t know. I need to get out of here.
Okay. I’ll see what I can do. You have to finish the semester though.
I know.
One of my mother’s gifts is an ability to open pathways where they didn’t exist before. She does not hear, “No” . Within a week, she has convinced Hamilton to honor a scholarship proffered me before I decided to go to Georgetown. I will be able to start there in the spring. I just have to make it through the semester.
I limp through the rest of my coursework, saved by the fact that I’ve taken most of them before.
In the absence of memory, I run the possibilities on a loop.
Maybe it happened in my room.
Maybe it happened while I was passed out in bed.
Maybe this was revenge for peeing in someone’s room during another drunken somnambulation.
Maybe it was a prank gone too far.
But “ha ha, we did this to you!” would let me in on the joke. There is malice in Omerta.
To think that it may have happened on my floor and in my bed and by my peers?
It means that I am not safe in my new home.
Worse still, for a nineteen year old kid who is establishing kin outside his family, it means something that takes years to fully arrive:
I am not liked.
The conversation with my Dean ends up being a short one.
So you don’t really know where or by whom?
No. It probably happened on my floor. People are being weird. But it is just not clear. I’m thinking I should just leave.
Hamilton says that they will reinstate my scholarship. I could go there this spring.
That would probably be a good idea.
I nod.
It doesn’t occur to me to ask if there are other options.
Okay, so I’m leaving school.
Okay.
My Dean doesn’t offer any.
Click there to go to the next installment —> Coma