A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Sexual Orientation (2 page)

I was so shattered from losing the closeness I had shared with her that I didn't date again until I was a senior. Even then, that relationship only lasted a few weeks before I got dumped for a pizza boy. He was apparently willing to deliver the kind of pepperoni I wasn't.

Suffice to say that neither of these experiences did much for my self-esteem.

Dating was just entirely too depressing to deal with after that. The loneliness and bouts of depres-sion were worse some months than others, but I got through it and graduated. Most of the four hundred students in my class could have gone to hell, and it never would have fazed me. In fact, I often told them to, since I was also known for being a smart-ass.

I have a very simple philosophy about this matter: I was born a dumbass, have since become a smartass and one day aspire to be a wiseass. It used to get me into a lot of trouble because my comments bordered on downright cruelty and bad taste, but that was because I was using them to cover up my own insecurities by exposing others'. I wanted to be nicer, but it's just that there wasn't a great deal of opportunity for a person to change or evolve into someone other than what one's peers perceived them to be. That's why I was looking forward to college so much.

While others went off to places like Michigan State, U of M, Western, Eastern, a few to Northern—nobody ever seemed to go to Southern—I chose a university in the cornfields. My reasoning for this was simple; there was a smaller student-to-teacher ratio than at the elite schools and my parents had met there. They weren't such bad people, so maybe I could straighten my life out there like they had, come to my senses and find some nice young woman to settle down with.

Unfortunately, aside from that motive, I really didn't have much of an idea of what I wanted to do professionally. I wondered if procrastination was a major. Well, that decision could wait.

Another thing I didn't realize was that I was moving to an area of west Michigan termed “the Bible belt,” and the people in this churchgoing farming area disliked sinning college students, which was basically all college students in their minds, alcoholic beverages other than the wine at church, stores open on Sunday, people doing work on Sunday, and McDonalds.

Why McDonalds? Well, it went like this. The people in the little town where the university was located fought to keep all fast food restaurants from within their city limits because they felt it would bring the town down. Apparently, eating fast food meant one had fast morals. I would have thought that after smelling cowshit for an entire day, a Big Mac would really have hit the spot, but apparently I was misguided.

McDonalds just happened to be the one franchise being persistent in trying to obtain a permit. In response, the townspeople started a boycott against this heathen chain. Like that was really going to hurt them.

The first semester of my freshman year turned out to be hell. I was homesick, my roommate was rarely around, I was still in denial, and I ended up on academic probation because I failed chemistry. Oh, yeah, now,
there's
a worthwhile class. It ranks right up there with “Theories of Adult Pornographic Videos.” I would no more sit down with friends and discuss why the director chose a specific noir lighting technique on the woman's breasts than I would what the delta heat of some varying degree on a stalactite might be.

Between that class and others, figuring out a major and listening to the preachers who roamed the campus telling us all that we needed to be saved, I didn't have much time to think about romance or even sexuality in general.

On a positive note, I did take my first writing class. Dr. Lockman essentially geared it towards working on smaller essays about ourselves and then combining them to create a single autobiography. I hated English, and had low self-esteem, so imagine the pleasure I derived from writing about myself.

I did learn three major things in that class. First, what a comma looks like and how to use one; second, that I had been taught how to write a paragraph incorrectly in high school and third, that I really could write. In a sea of core classes designed to give me a well-rounded education, like chemistry, I discovered that I not only enjoyed writing but was fairly good at it, too.

Before the semester ended, Dr. Lockman recommended that I jump a level and take a literature class instead of another “write a new paper each week” class. His enthusiasm and support convinced me it was the way to go. I finally had some direction.

Second semester was much better than the first. I started going out to see comedians, movies and concerts the University sponsored. Hell, I was even social and talked to someone next to me once in a while. Aside from that, I also began writing a music column for the campus newspaper. It didn't pay much and the hate mail was considerable, but I was writing and expressing myself in a rather uncensored and often unpopular fashion. I didn't have a great deal of money to go out every week and buy a new album, but it was easy to tell what people were listening to, since one could rarely sleep during the weekends with the sound systems blaring to cover up the number of one-night stands going on. I just listened to what they played.

As for sexual encounters of the college kind, the guys on my floor were particularly notorious for that sort of thing. All they had to do was look at a girl once, and they could tell what kind of night she was going to have. My notes on their pickup lines and nonverbal methods of communication are extensive.

The lit class Dr. Lockman suggested I take turned out to be one of the best classes I could have taken to continue my interest in writing. The catalogue listed our professor's name as “Staff,” which of course just meant they hadn't assigned an instructor yet. The man who walked through the door that first meeting was a kindly gentleman in his forties who seemed very open to different interpretations of literature and writing. Much to our amazement, the name on the syllabus he passed out was, indeed, “Professor Staff", which meant he either had a sense of humor or that was actually his name.

Either way, he had us all wondering, and I received my first look at his true colors a few weeks later when he was handing back our first papers. A group of us had been slaving over them for two weeks, helping each other as much as we could and really looking forward to seeing our grades. Wasn't that stupid?

My paper was on William Wordsworth. The Professor, as he politely insisted we call him, passed my desk and handed me my paper with a twinkle in his eye. The moment had arrived, and considering the look he gave me, the prospects for a decent grade looked fantastic. There in my hand lay the fruits of my labor for the past two weeks. Here was where my writing would really take off!

I took a long, deep breath and flipped to the last page. A few comments were written down ... blah blah blah ... There it was! Or, rather, there it was.

I felt my stomach drop and my lip curl. B-minus. Wasn't that quaint?

"Son of a bitch,” I muttered. My own mother would have been hard-pressed to hear me, and she'd had years of practice.

"Andy?” The Professor was looking at me. “Why don't you stay after class, and we'll talk about your grade?"

I couldn't believe he heard me! It was both unexpected and unsettling—mostly unsettling—and I thought about just how good a chemistry class would be right now compared to the horror of having been heard swearing by the man who made or broke my grade.

Bile rose up in my throat on more than one occasion, and my stomach began doing flip-flops while I was waiting for class to end. The minutes passed by with my insides in agony until it was finally time to leave. Maybe I could play like I was stupid or an inbred child from the South here on a scholarship. Hey, they gave them to everybody else. Just the other day I'd seen a kid who couldn't even spell his name, and he had a scholarship.

Of course, my roommate told me later the kid was dyslexic. Apparently, there weren't enough minority students enrolled at the university with that ethnic background. Still, just because he has a foreign heritage didn't mean he couldn't learn how to spell.

"I take it you weren't happy with your grade?” The Professor looked at me with kind eyes. If he was upset or angry, it didn't show.

"I was just kind of surprised. A group of us worked together pretty hard, and I thought I'd done better.” So much for the inbred act. “It, uh, probably wasn't the ideal paper for straight-up, cut-and-dried factual statements with appropriate ob-servations in the analytical style and accepted APA format, but that's because I hate writing something dull and didactic. I end up adding personal com-mentary but tried to keep it from influencing or hampering the general narrative structure too much."

For God's sake, I was practically giving him the formula for glue instead of just telling him that I liked to make quirky little comments for no good reason other than for my own entertainment.

"Well, I want you to know that I can appreciate that kind of writing, and I think commentary does liven up a piece, but you should also know that there are going to be instructors here who don't."

He paused as if pondering whether he should say anything further. At least I felt like we were making some kind of one-on-one connection. How many students at Michigan State could say their instructors knew their name?

"If you would like, I'd be willing to help you develop your writing skills for this and other classes so you could get away with what you're doing."

I was starting to like him.

"You have some talent in writing, but it's raw yet. You need to strengthen and hone it, though. If you want."

I did.

The rest of the conversation was uninspiring, but I left with a really good feeling. My stomach wasn't acting up like it had before our talk, and for the first time, I was starting to see the possibility of being adopted by someone who would act as my mentor and guide me in the strange and mystical ways of the Writer. Or whatever.

It was back to beating chemistry again.

I went from there over to the Commons, and after an extremely unsatisfying dinner to the campus library. I doubt I will ever forget how exhilarating it is to smell the scent of freshly thawed fertilizer wafting over the campus from the neighboring fields. Expressing my gratitude to Mother Nature for this unusually warm day wouldn't have come out very nicely.

Then too, there is a saying in Michigan: “If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes.” It's true, and at least I now knew the reason my roommate had asked me to look up some topic for him that he had to write a paper on. I think he was still probably enjoying his dinner at Burger King or wherever in Grand Rapids he went, wonderfully ignorant of what I was going through.

Since the computer system in the library was probably the quickest and most convenient way of looking up my roommate's subject, I found a machine that wasn't occupied and sat down. I typed in “Youths in Asia,” and when the computer came back with “No Subject Found” I typed it in again anyway in case it was mistaken. It wasn't. I tried every single spelling combination I could think of until I was a smelly, sweating ball of frustration. Why was it so damn difficult? I mean, what the hell did Asia call its youth, anyway?

It followed that Asians would be found in Asia, not like that entire Canada/Canadian thing a friend played with my mind about. Because of her, I could never keep them straight. Basically, she told me that if I went to Canada the people there would be called Canadans. Consequently, if I was among Canadians, wouldn't I have traveled to Canadia?

This is one of those reasons my parents tried to dissuade me from drinking at college. They knew that, with the friends I had, my young and naive existence would be confusing enough without alcohol.

I ended up leaving in disgust and headed back to my dorm.

Why some parents ever complained about guys and girls living together in the same dorm building is beyond me. It wasn't like we were on the same floor and sharing showers and bathrooms or anything like that. Large metal doors separated the two sexes at all times.

Granted, that never really seemed to matter when it came time for the two sexes to partake in a little sex, but that's beside the point for the moment.

Guys and girls living together created a balance. One floor smelled like old sweat socks mixed with Old Spice and the next like perfume and potpourri room fresheners. One floor looked like the remnant of a World War II battlefield and the next the Rainbow Bridge. The whole thing evened out, and I came to think of it as like the collegiate version of yin and yang. Of course, the guys were constantly trying to stick their yang in every girl's yin.

Then too, many of the girls were using their yin to get all the cute guys’ yang. This effectively cut me out of the entire rat race, as I was neither interested in any girl's yin nor good-looking enough, in my opinion, at least, to attract one. I was also resolved to ignore any impulse towards any guy's yang. Again, it was a strange balance.

The lobby of the dorm was a flurry of activity when I walked in. Going on were some intense study groups in one of the well-lit alcoves, drug deals being made in the dimly lit one, three guys bragging about a recent female score and realizing they'd all had the same girl one right after the other, a resident assistant complaining to the building manager about a dead rabbit found impaled on his door with a hunting knife, two people bitching about the latest music review in the paper, seven people trying to get the combination locks undone on their mailbox and one girl on the phone bragging to her friend that she had just slept with three guys one right after the other and, unbeknownst to them, given them crabs.

I didn't know how I wanted to remember my college years, but this definitely wasn't it. There was no way I could blend in with these people, at least not at this stage of my life. Hell, I was still a virgin, and it wasn't as if I wanted to be one. It's just that I never went out of my way in the past to make myself physically desirable, like Fabio, so why should I do it now?