College isn’t the same as it was Jan. 13, 1986
Here again. William Paterson College.
Only it’s different this time, listening to Ripmaster’s tirades,
seeing photos on the walls of the admissions office that mean nothing to others,
but whose images bring back whole truckloads of memories – each frame a
familiar face, each scene exactly how I picture it in my mind. I am history
here, part of the pre-Reagan revolution of Michael Alexander and Michael
Reardon, Suzanne, Mary Kay, Roland and others, all gone.
The fact is I feel closer to the professors than I do to any
of the new students, having been here so long they almost see me as one of the
faculty.
When I first came here in the fall of 1979, I had great
hopes for change.
So much had happened in the year leading up to that moment,
change seemed inevitable, and school the vehicle I needed to help me meet new
people, to move out of my dead-end blue-collar world, the rags of that life no
longer able to keep me covered or make me feel secure.
I spent many hours a day during my unemployment reading
everything I could from history to literature, and such, even bringing books
with me to read while on the unemployment line, drawing strange stares from the
ragged collection of men and women who stood on that long line with me, the
unenlightened mass of men and women who were still stuck on the assembly line
of their own blue collar lives, aware perhaps in how trapped they were, yet without
a clue as to how to escape, as I had or as I believed I would if I could.
I felt the intense need to expand my mind, deciding finally
that I needed to go to college, and eventually made the journey up to the campus
on the ridge in Wayne, wandering among the brick and concrete buildings,
wondering what went on inside them.
It was spring 1979, a time when things started to bloom, including
me.
My decision was influenced by Tim Holly, one of the people I
had worked with at the cosmetics warehouse in Fairfield. He had come to work after
graduating from William Paterson, while waiting to decide his next big step in
life.
While I felt thrilled at being there, I also felt intensely
lonely, and the desperate need to meet a new breed of people, more
intellectual, people who could influence me like Tim had.
When I talked to the admissions people and they learned I
had dropped out of high school, they informed me I would need to get a GED to qualify
for college.
The thought terrified. Although an avid reader from when I
was very young, I paid very little attention to what they taught at school. I
knew I didn’t know things I was certain they would ask me on any kind of GED
test. So, I refocused and spent many, many hours hunkered down in the Passaic
Library, drawing the attention of Rich – the organizer of the monthly poetry
events there and a local high school teacher – who seemed to think I had taken
on a burden too great to handle on my own. He suggested I get a tutor or take
some GED classes. Being as stubborn as I am, I insisted on studying on my own,
going through piles of books on every subject, finding one very large book that
was designed to teach me everything I was supposed to have learned high school.
I did well in the English and Social Studies portions but struggled with the
math – especially algebra.
Eventually, the scheduled two days for the test came and I
went to Montclair State campus, finding the test less onerous than I had
assumed, later learning that I had achieved some of the highest marks possible –
even strangely in math.
The college accepted me. But I had to wait until fall to
start. But I made visits to the campus during the summer, wandering its paths,
poking my nose into the library and student center and some of the other
buildings which for the most part remained under occupied.
By September, I knew where everything was and only occasionally
got lost trying to find what classroom I needed. I felt the magic of the place,
and this feeling lasted well into the first semester, although eventually the
luster wore off and I began to feel the same aggravation I had felt with high
school, always struggling to keep up, running into my own limitations as I
realized studying for the GED had not really given me everything I needed,
everything a regular high school education had provided the other students. Yet
in some ways, I was way ahead of them, having spent time in the U.S. Army and
then ten years in the real world working. I didn’t fall for the hype the more
radical professors sold the way many of the other students did.
But I began to make friends a decade younger than the
friends I grew up with, people to study with, people to hang with, people who
were as interested in writing as I was, forming the foundation of a literary
circle that would inherit the literary scene from the previous literary elite –
we inheriting the literary magazine to which I would become editor.
School was never comfortable; partly because I had to make a
living, first as a roadie and sound man with the band at night, and then later,
more or less regular night jobs that allowed me to study by day. I got
distracted by romance, too, some more serious than others, distracted too by a
crazy uncle who I eventually inherited and had to care for, and forced me to eventually
leave school before I could graduate, vowing to return when life got a bit
easier, and while life isn’t easier today, I’ve made my way back to carry on
again.
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