SharpNose's Journal: Crying Uncle

The four years I spent in college were racked by social and emotional misadventures. I went in messed up, with a distorted and negative self-image, and I came out not much different.

About five years ago, I think it was, I decided to see if I could rejoin the Alumni Band, which plays at the Homecoming football game in the month of October. This decision came about during a time when I sought to come to terms with aspects of my life that went badly - aspects about which I was still angry, frustrated, and sad. It was this process that would lead me to embrace Ladder Theory in a couple years' time.

I made the necessary arrangements to do Alumni Band, which were unusual because the instrument I would be playing was electric bass, which requires some accommodation with respect to power and amplification. Anyway, the Alumni Band had a get-together at a bar in town, and I went to that. It was a letdown in that I really didn't know a soul there - most everyone seemed to have come though the pipeline about seven years after I did. Afterward, though, I drove over to campus to have a look around.

Homecoming at this particular school is interesting in that there are all kinds of preparations being made around campus the night before - I won't go into what all is being prepared, but suffice it to say that you can stroll around and see dozens of kids working on weird, outlandish stuff and having a good time doing it.

Walking the grounds at night is one of the more persistent memories I have of the place. It's an ugly campus, set between an urban landscape and an industrial one, and by that time, it was a crazy quilt of structures and edifices built from the 1920s to the 1990s. I found it preferable to wander the campus on weekend nights than stay in my dorm room when I had one for the first three years. I can still easily visualize traversing heaved-up concrete sidewalks and mostly empty parking lots, picking up blasts of beer and sewage smells, hearing and seeing signs of social activity of which I had no part and in which I had no context.

The walks were not always uneventful. It was on such a walk that I saw Jane's unmistakable silhouette as she walked arm-in-arm with her roommate. Once, I thought I saw Elvira riding with a bunch of people on the back of some flatbed truck that a fraternity had rented, not long after I went out with her that one time. I once had a small pumpkin rolled in my direction from a moving vehicle; attached to the pumpkin was some sort of party invitation, so I left the pumpkin for the girls at one of the sorority houses, knowing that it would be they, not I, who would really be welcome. Another time, I had a long chat with this lovely young woman from off-campus who called herself C.J.; she was there for a frat party, saw me, and apparently found me interesting despite my shitty attitude...at first (a guy I knew saw us and horned in; the three of us went into the frat party and I left quickly, having been summarily abandoned).

So, it was a familiar thing, to be walking there more than 20 years later. However, I became aware of something stirring in my psyche. The best way I can think of to describe it is this. I imagined myself as being like an uncle to a student who had lived and worked here 20+ years before - a nephew that I had been very close to; one who had struggled mightily here, yet persevered and was able to graduate, only to die sometime after. He and I communicated often and in depth; I knew very keenly what was on his mind, how he fought to keep himself together despite the isolation, the bitter emotional coldness he endured, the lack of moral support and the unreasonable expectations coming from the rest of his family - the small things that gave him some sense of hope, some satisfaction, some pleasure, just to keep him getting out of bed every day.

Certainly you've figured out that the late, tragic nephew is me.

As I walked around, I thought of all the days and nights my nephew must have walked on this very sidewalk...set foot on this very pavestone...surveyed this very scene through his own eyes.

Something truly profound happened to me that night. I felt love and hurt for my nephew. I felt like I and I alone had an obligation to honor his memory, and to recall and tell his story. You see, no one really knew him like I did; he would be almost totally forgotten if not for me.

He would talk to his friends about getting shit on by X one day and shit on by Y the next, but he didn't let on how deeply troubled and wounded he was to them - how much about his past he stuffed down and didn't talk to anyone about. Nevertheless, he did make a few good friends, and despite caring deeply for several girls who showed varying degrees of disinterest, he only managed to fine one who cared about him in some form or fashion partway through his senior year. If only she hadn't been bad for him; he eventually couldn't stand her but was so hard up for sex and affection that he put up with a lot more than he should have.

He tried to keep up a relationship with a girl he met on the Europe tour right after he graduated high school - that was another case of trying to hang on to someone who'd have him; they were so rare
. Meanwhile, the girl he loved the most didn't want him. Needed him for entertainment value, for intellectual stimulation, but that was all he was good for to her, so that's all she took. He just got to look at her. Clothed.

This bifurcation in my head enabled me to feel love and pride for myself in a way I never had before. It was strangely liberating.