Inklings of a Problem: College Try becomes College Fail
My first two and a half years of college were, socially, more or less a disaster. Upon arriving in Chicago, I went to ROTC indoctrination week, a requirement of my scholarship. Lots of yelling for what seemed like no real point at all except to keep us on edge. “Discipline,” I think, is what they were going for; however, I’ve come to know discipline as awareness plus choice. They seemed pretty keen on reducing choice to bare minimum and making us very aware of it. Such was this mini boot camp.
Returning to campus, I was a freshman plunged into the festivities of Rush Week. I found a home that I liked and people there seemed to welcome me; as it turned out, the fraternities at Illinois Institute of Technology were a much better environment than the dorms, now overrun with other ROTC members from all services as the school was actively recruiting ROTC students, offering to cover the balance of what the military didn’t cover. Rush week was, of course, a big party.
I met a girl — we’ll call her E — and we seemed to hit it off. Good conversation that flowed easily (a remarkable thing for me at the time); open and accessible body language; what appeared to me to be mutually positive vibe. I was still high from the summer with V and full of confidence.
One evening we’re walking back to the dorm conversing, and I felt the timing was right to kiss her. I wasn’t fast or aggressive about it; it seemed to happen naturally, or at least mostly naturally. After, the conversation died down pretty quickly; I said goodbye, waved, “see you tomorrow!” She even waved back, and smiled. I thought things were going great!
She never talked to me again, the whole time we were there. Five years. I found out the next day through one of my fraternity pledge brothers that she didn’t like being kissed, hadn’t felt that way about me, and now didn’t feel safe around me. I felt worse than horrible. She was unwilling to come to my house for events. Through the same pledge brother I offered an apology; it didn’t matter. That relationship was destroyed, permanently. I was stunned, ashamed, and powerless to change it. To say I didn’t see this coming was an understatement. I didn’t know that was possible… until I did it. That’s not a good way to learn when the stakes are that high.
This story is was less bewildering than downright embarrassing. IIT was a relatively small school, with about 1500 undergrad and 1500 grad students. The undergrad population about matched what my high school was, perhaps a little more, except in high school, gender demographics (for the early 90’s) were pretty well balanced. At IIT, The ratio of male-bodied persons to female bodied persons ran about 7 to 1. In a strange way this made it a great place to get an education… because there wasn’t much else to do. Particularly for those not yet 21, because Chicago at its social heart is a drinking town.
Anyway IIT did not have a football team. The headline sporting event was the girl’s volleyball team. And of course I had a crush on one of the girls on that team. She was kind of a crazy one, very socially outgoing, boisterous, hot and she knew it. I’ll call her HVC. I don’t recall exactly how in my mind it wound up happening, but the team needed some idiot to be the mascot. That idiot, for a brief moment, was me, done in the name of chasing HVC.
I wasn’t very good at being a mascot. At one point, HVC said, ‘you need to be a lot more drunk for this.’ And I was dumb enough to try it! Fellas, testosterone is a dangerous, vicious drug. Stay away from it. Seriously.
Up to this point it was a fairly anonymous gig — as long as I kept the costume on, no one would know it was me. Aaaand I got really drunk for the next game. So drunk I fell on my ass and the head came off, revealing it was me. I was mortified.
I picked the head up, put it back on, and finished the game with the same ineffectual attempts at entertaining wackiness I’d been using up to that point. After the game was over, I returned the costume and quietly retired from the mascot industry for good.
Apparently the rumor got around, because later one of my fraternity brothers asked me about it. He was like, “You don’t have to explain; you don’t have to elaborate. I just want to know. I’ve heard that you were <name of mascot>. Is that true?” I replied with, “Yes.” He nodded thanks and the conversation ended there.
I will say those costumes are crazy hot (as in temperature, not attraction). My compassion for all the other mascots who are more successful at being wacky on demand than me and have to suffer in two-and-a-half inch polyester fur indoors.
During my sophomore year, I was visiting a school a bit south of me, where T (yes, the same T from high school) and another friend I’d met through chess, C. C’s friend Z was very spunky and energetic and bounced around the room in quite a lovely way. We seemed to hit it off, I liked her, she seemed to like me, I thought there was mutual affection happening, and… I went in for a kiss.
This time she was very adamant about not liking that at all, right from the get go. In fact she seemed shaken. I moved away quickly and apologized; she ran off…
Clearly I’d f’d up again. I wasn’t happy about that, and retreated to the room where C was, and flopped down on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and waited for the inevitable. It came; I got a pretty sold chewing out, which I neither resisted nor argued against. I left and never went back. I didn’t want to know T’s thoughts.
I was done. Whatever mystery there was to connecting with women I liked, there was more to it than acting on feeling, because that had blown up ugly twice now. I didn’t know how to solve that problem and the damage being done by trial and error was too steep. There were no available resources, no hope, and no changes on the horizon. With few exceptions, the rest of that year was pretty bleak. One evening after class, I was in my work area on the 12th floor, looking out in to the city lights. Someone said, ‘don’t jump,’ despite the inch thick glass between me and the outside. Kind of a crass way to empathize, though I suppose they didn’t know what they were doing.
Next Up: Dancing
