I purchased "Thirteenth Step" by A Perfect Circle last week. I proceeded to listen to "The Nurse Who Loved Me" about 30 times (I listened to the album in its entirety three times) one day at work. One of my first thoughts was that this song reminded me of Spring 1992. Life was good. I was happy. Things had not yet gotten all fucked up. That last part was meant to be a bit flippant. However, looking back, I now realize that I may have reached my social apex at 19. For better or for worse.
I am sure some of my "success" was that I still believed in academia (private academia, to be more precise). Or maybe it was just that I still cared about school and grades in general. Or, rather, I cared about school and grades more than I cared about getting wasted. School had always come relatively easily for me, but attending a small liberal arts college allowed me to find new challenges and keep those intellectual forges stoked. At the end of my sophomore year in Spring 1992, I was proudly sporting a 3.93 GPA. I could more than hang with the big city kids and their pedigrees and their 13 years in private preparatory schools. Not to shabby for a public school teacher's son from middle-class middle America.
The pinnacle--at least, from an academic point of view--came at the tail end of the year. I was taking a History class on European Enlightenment. This was a great class in general because I got to read a good bit of Hobbes and Locke, two of my all-time favorite philosophers. Look at the world now and tell me that "nasty, brutish and short" does not accurately describe "humanity" in a state of nature. I have frequently gone back and forth between the two as to with whom I identify more closely ("Lockean existentialist Taoist" being my most recent incarnation), and I think the pendulum is starting to swing back to Hobbes. I guess I need to reread "The Leviathan." Well, Parts I and II, at least.
Anyway, back to European Enlightenment (the class, I mean). This was such a great class. We had to write a couple of short (10-page) papers and, ultimately, take a final exam. Unfortunately for me, my final was scheduled for the very last session during finals week, and I needed to leave a day earlier because my father needed to be back home. You see, I did not have my own car, so my parents took me and my worldly crap to school at the beginning of each academic year and hauled me and my shit back home at the end of each academic year; I took the train to and fro for the interim breaks. Being car-less, I really could not complain about meeting their scheduling needs. The actual reason for the early departure eludes me now; I just remember he and I were not on the best of terms at the time. Fortunately, all of our exams were on the honor system. Exams were not proctored, and you could take the exam anywhere in the building save the bathrooms or stairwells. Thus, it was relatively simple to make arrangements with the professor to take the exam early. When I showed up to meet him, he said something that I will never forget. "I suppose the noble thing to do would have been to just give you an "A" and let you skip the exam. But I wanted to have something to grade the other tests against." That is what I call affirmation, especially since I was the only sophomore in a class full of upper-class History majors.
And even though I was in a fraternity, the partying was not out of control. I chalk much of that up to the fact that I did not live in the house my sophomore year. So much easier to be a serious student when you do not live with 30 other people, one of whom you could always find for a round of Frisbee golf or breakfast bongs or going to a bar on a Tuesday night (the unofficial "night off" in college) "just because." Plus, I had not yet discovered the party all night--sleep all day--up all night--go to class--repeat approach to the traditional M-W-F academic schedule. In addition, I tended to stick to my rule of "two out of three ain't blacked out." The rule served me well (when I chose to abide by the same) and was relatively simple: of beer, hard liquor and pot, you can do any two without blacking out (absent obscene over-consumption). Yes, you need to follow other rules, like liquor before beer and such. And, yes, tequila was like red kryptonite: you just never knew what it would do to a situation.
Here is a good example of the vagaries of tequila. My brother came up to visit in Early Spring 1992, and we were hanging out with some TKE friends at their fraternity house. Well, my genius friends decided to introduce us to the "Excellent" game. I am sure you all know this. Much like the "Cocksucker" game when watching "Deadwood". Every time someone said "Excellent!" in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" the person who was "up" did a shot (this version involved rotating turns). So my brother--a bona fide hardcore drinker already at 17--proceeded to get completely shitfaced. He was looking pretty green, and he went out to the fire escape to get some air. I heard him start to hurl, so I went out to check on him. I did not want him to feel bad about puking at a "college" event, so I made myself get sick too (don't worry--I can do this by gut and esophagus alone; no finger-down-the-throat yukkiness). It made perfectly good sense at the time, all thanks to tequila.
You know, events like that should have been an early warning system that all was not, in fact well. Come to think of it, there were a few other incidents. Two of them involved my then-girlfriend. I would like to say that these were not really my fault, but we all know that wasn't the case. The first incident came shortly after our first breakup. Now, in my defense (if one can defend someone who often acted indefensibly), she really should have been smarter than to show up at a party at my fraternity. I do not thing I was completely shitfaced when she showed up, but I am sure I got there in a hurry. The end result was a shouting match that went all the way back to the dorms. Possibly with some threats of self-violence (evidently, chicks are NOT into that). Shockingly, about a month later, she said that she wanted to get back together.
The other incident came toward the end of Spring. Our school had a day each Spring where classes were cancelled and the whole campus became a party. The trick was that only a select few knew the actual date. The day of fun itself was not announced until about 5 AM the morning of the same. Well, on said day that Spring, I took a couple hits of acid as soon as the announcement was made. Shortly thereafter, I shared a joint stuffed to the nines with pot, mushrooms and hashish. Normally, this might not be reprehensible, except that I kind of promised her that I would not drop any more acid. I rationalized it by noting that I had agreed with my friends to drop MONTHS before I made my promise to her. Yeah, I was an asshole. I know. On the plus side, we got the fighting out of the way by 9 AM (this time SHE was the one threatening self-violence, but somehow SHE did not have to see a counselor about that--not that I'm bitter), had sex for about three hours (sex on acid: unreal) and rejoined the festivities. To quote Mr. Cube, "I gotta say it was a good day."
I was relatively new to acid at that point, but I think I had some proficiency with it. Or maybe just an affinity for it. Acid and I were introduced to each other earlier that school year (Parents' Day Weekend in Fall 1991, I believe--breakfast with the family the next morning was a bit of a chore), and we became good friends quickly. My second trip (a couple of weeks later) was so unbelievable that I do not know if I could accurately put the experience into words; certainly something worthy of its own post. And though I was known to drop several weekends in a row, I always observed the never-on-consecutive-days rule. I guess it was a natural progression, having tried pot for the first time in early 1991 and alcohol in late 1988. In contrast, one of my TKE friends was the exact opposite. He started with acid in high school, then pot and finally alcohol his sophomore year in college. Funny how things work.
Sometimes I do wonder if things would have turned out differently for me if I just skipped the alcohol phase altogether. Seriously. I never had any issues with any drugs other than alcohol--you know, the legal one that can be found almost everywhere in great quantities? I am by no means promoting illicit use of illegal drugs (*cough* legalize it, regulate it, tax it *cough*), but, for me, alcohol was always the one demon that I could never control. With family history, genetics and some anger issues, I guess the odds were stacked against me, maybe as high as 2-to-1. And, oh, how those markers did come in the following school year. If 1991-1992 was a peak, 1992-1993 was definitely a valley. But that is another tale for another day. Like I said: No peeking.