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Fight, Fight, Fight for the Red and the White

SP�s little sister is about to finish her first month at college, and she has been calling us regularly to keep us up to date on all the boys and alcohol and drugs. God, I miss college.

I grew up surrounded by the raw beauty of Colorado. The mountains were proud and ominous, and commanded that you stop and take notice, no matter how many times you had stared at them before. The snow blanketed the streets nearly half the year, and it was so cold sometimes that the moistness on your eyes would create tiny icicles on your eyelashes when you blinked. It was so beautiful. Beautiful� and unspeakably boring.

When I was young, we had the choice of buying our back to school clothes at either Gibson�s Discount Store or K-Mart. If you wanted to eat out you had your choice of McDonald�s or Burger King. And in terms of groceries, there was good old Safeway and City Market to choose from. There was two of everything, but only two. Although the town could barely support two grocery stores and two department stores, not giving the residents some choice scared them into thinking that maybe they weren�t living in a real democracy. If you liked shopping at K-Mart, you were lucky. But if you had no choice but to shop at K-Mart, it was a government conspiracy.

I made it to about the age of 13 before I started calling college recruiters with my adult voice and begging them to accept my application a few years early. Despite my efforts, I was largely ignored. Unfortunately, I never got into experimenting with drinking and drugs and sex like most kids, and I ended up taking harder classes, joining every club you could imagine, and working three jobs to stave off the boredom. For four years, I poured all my energies into being the best nerd I could be, continuously applying for colleges in exotic places around the country like Ithaca and Irvine. Finally, my acceptance letter came, my shining beacon of hope with two red capital T�s on the letterhead, one smaller one superimposed on a larger one. Texas Tech University wanted me as a student, and they were willing to pay my entire tuition if I�d accept their invitation. I�ll see you in the fall, y�all.

With the money from my three jobs, I bought myself an 11 year old Honda CRX, the smallest car known to man, and packed it tight with my worldly possessions. A coffeepot, one mug, a microwave, some big fuzzy slippers that looked like bear paws, and a shoebox full of pictures of friends and notes passed in classes throughout the past 13 years.

Fourteen hours later, I arrived in Lubbock, Texas. The stench was overpowering. They never mentioned in the brochure that Lubbock is home to one of the largest stockyards known to man. I should have known. I got there in the middle of the night, August 26, at 103 degrees. �But it�s a dry heat,� oh fuck you, I�m from Colorado. It doesn�t matter if it's a dry heat, my left lung just collapsed and my toes have all melted together.

When I found my dorm room, I was introduced to my roommate, a lanky and obnoxious Beastie Boys fanatic from Galveston, who�d flunked out of community college and transferred to Tech. Our room was 105 degrees. No air conditioning. No ceiling fan. No end to the Beastie Boys greatest hits. I was surprised, and not the least bit overjoyed to discover most of the other dorm residents had already had the same idea I did when I found the community shower. We stood there together, naked and embarrassed as we turned on the showers as cold as we could get them and motionlessly let the icy water pour over ourselves.

I didn�t know a soul in Texas, and soon intended on keeping it that way. The first people I met outside of the communal shower were fellow students enrolled in the honors program waiting outside for a class to start. I interrupted their review of the previous night�s sorority party/orgy to introduce myself. They said, �Well you sure do sound funny. Where ya�ll from, anyhow?� Since we were all honors students, I tried to impress them by talking about the local politics. George W. had recently unseated the Queen of the South, Ann Richards, for the right to be governor of the great state of Texas. I always admired Ms. Richards for being so classy and such an interesting speaker. The looks on their faces told me that I was in for quite a debate. �What ya�ll talkin� �bout? Classy my foot, that bitch tried to take our guns away from us.� They both turned in a huff, and I was marked and never to be spoken to again.

Subsequent attempts were less successful. So I signed up for hard classes, got a part-time job, and joined every club that would have me.

I eventually found my crowd, mostly of students from California and Illinois and Maryland who felt as alienated as I did. Together we made fun of the sorority girls who wore dresses to 8am classes and the annual calf fry eating contest (they can�t get enough of those cow testicles in Lubbock). Although Lubbock had absolutely no record of any crime of any sort, the locals wrote bitter editorials about the nude painting at the local art gallery and how the blatant display of nipples was going turn their little town into a crime ridden cest pool. I had traded in the most boring town in Colorado for the most pathetic town in Texas.

After two years, I just couldn�t take it anymore, and I went on a six-city tour of the East Coast and applied to every university I saw. When I was visiting Temple University � the home of Bill Cosby himself, in an area of Philadelphia known mostly for it�s excellent heroin, I overheard a prospective student asking our tour guide about a rumor she�d heard. It was confirmed that there was a murder on campus the night before. As she described how it happened in the middle of the night, something gang related, I breathed a sigh of relief and said aloud, �Oh thank god, I finally found it. This is the school for me.�