It’s 2009 still and nothing feels as new as it should.  The campus is entering the time my girlfriend (I’ll call her Sinead) says she likes best—the small, perfectly lined trees on the slow hill in the quad lose their leaves and turn to majestic twigs.  They look like something out of a Tim Burton movie, everything dead but beautiful and profound.  We sit at the green tables beneath them and drink tea and coffee and talk about her roommate problems.

“No one,” she says, “wants to take responsibility for the messes we make.”

Dishes pile in the sink and keys are jammed into broken locks.  They’re forced to leave their dead bolt on during the night.  Girls, no matter what kind, will spend every tenth minute fixing something around them.  The sink turned on to the warm water, the desk space cleaned to a disordered perfection.  Even if you’re standing there, hands in your jeans, kicking skid holes into the bottom of your sneakers, the rug burn.

I’m spending most of my free time at her apartment off campus or striding around the emptying buildings at night with my headphones on full blast, thinking about how much this life mirrors something I’ve probably read about.  We watch movies with my head on her shoulder and sit together in her art studio, doing our respective preoccupations, listening to the radio emanate from the back room.  She takes task “introducing me to film,” and I learn enough about her to ignore the problems we share.       

Sinead is someone my parents would not (and do not) approve of.  She smokes, drinks, and comes from some place of the mind that is staying on the other side of the tracks.  Her tattoos are easy to hide, but their presence radiates from her hidden skin like a smell.

In other words, during this time of my life I was in over my head.  I was 18 years old and infatuated with the wrong things.  Which is a mistake characteristic of the young, and in a special way, it’s unique for young men.  We all want to have our fists in our pockets, riding into the stadium on some grand horse with the flags of our adoring nation shaking in the sound of applause.  It’s the feeling I want to have when I’m at football games and our home team comes out of the tunnel to some elaborate set of visuals and music.  Other young men my age, or just about, beating their chests and roaring, striding into the sonic chaos wearing pads.   

At 18 I was searching for my own private bravado.  And since football has pretty much been out of the question for me since 2005, when it started to become about violence, I started to pool my resources. 

Freshman year for Sinead had been one big exploration.  While I’m taking a redhead ballerina to senior prom, she’s disappearing into the nooks and crannies of the fraternity houses, learning names that’ll form like numb wombs in her memory.  When I meet her I see the things she carries, or I think I do, and those signs were enough for me to gravitate towards her like some bloated moon. 

But the real story, the one about groping for manhood, comes a bit later.  It’s right before winter and Sinead wants to take me and another male friend (let’s say: Cameron) to a frat party.  She knows a guy who’s in charge, a barrel-chested Nigerian immigrant who promotes clubs and has a nice smile.  “He’s cute,” she says, nodding her head, as if that means better for us. 

Cameron and I look at each other.  We’ve been through this before.  The first week of school we were at a loss as to how we’ll be able to have fun.  It seemed like the most important thing.  “Where do we party if we’re not in a frat?” I ask my RA on the first night, with complete earnestness.  He tells me that’s something I’ll have to figure out on my own.

And Cameron and I know all the terms.  We’ve been turned away at the door, by now, too many times, the packs of girls in bright pencil skirts slipping by us with intoxicated purpose.  We walked home across the dark campus with unresolved pockets of energy, embarrassed and pissed off, mumbling to each other.   

We become those guys who hate the Greek system.  We lean against the walls of the dorm hallway as our female friends, our softness, crowd into the same bathroom and fog the mirror with hair spray and waves from the blowdryer.  We pontificate, waving our hands like blanched versions of Mussolini, sour jokes protruding from the stunted growths in our chests.  The frats, we conclude, are one big conspiracy against intelligence and respect.

We’re standing in front of a well-decorated house, crunching beer cans with our feet on the grass.  A Department of Public Safety officer tells us we can’t loiter, but we have nowhere to go.  Sinead is bartering at the door, lost within the walls of brothers milling around like the king’s soldiers with red cups and false armor.  I watched her dart into the crowd like a fish into a forest of moving leaves, as comfortable and at ease as I am few other places.   

Before we know it we’re being thrown away.  A fat lard in a Boston Red Sox hat is telling us that if we want to have a life we should rush a frat.  Cameron and I stand like statues, our breath like smoke or exhaust, before collecting Sinead, who looks up at us with apologetic puppy eyes, and shuffling down fraternity row.

This incident would be enough to fuel our flame for months.  But what lies beneath the surface for Cameron and me is that our manly bone structure had been momentarily jarred, sent out into orbit, by the rejection of this system.  It was like being cut from the baseball team at my all-male high school, filing up to the list a friend had yelled to me that I hadn’t made. 

The writer John Bennett, a lesser-known outlaw poet, said “Pain is when nobility has been battered into garbage.”  I came to college with a fragile male ribcage, just like every young man my age.  I suspect it’s the reason why the groupthink or retarded family aspect of the Greek system seems so comforting to so many.  And for that there is no one to blame, we all have the same problems that lead us to different actions.

I was dating Sinead because she adored something about me and I needed that.  She cursed along to my rants and sat with me under the trees, but we were not right for each other.  Our relationship, in retrospect, is indicative of a larger, universal meaning: that young men and young women are trying to establish and maintain something noble in the face of this society’s rejection and urge toward destruction. 

Look at the beer funnels and pencil skirts and Rufilin.  Look at the tattoos and movies on the wall and cups of coffee.  Being lost and in need of something is the young person’s subversive dictum.  We leave what we each have as a family and start standing alone for awhile, in an overcast yard, hearing descriptions of other people’s favorite things. 

After winter Sinead and I have a messy break-up that immediately pins us to opposite ends of the invisible globe.  “I don’t understand,” she’d say, and though it sounded rehearsed I knew it wasn’t. 

My first day back on campus without her I stared out my dorm window at the sun falling on the brick buildings where more of my classmates lived.  It seemed like the world was filling with sand, but I was just being dramatic.  

           

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