Sleep-away college in New England changed everything again.
Thousands of girls my age, free from their parents for the first time,
just beginning to experiment with hard liquor and soft drugs, and each
of them with their own dorm room. I went hog-wild. Perhaps it was the
wide variety of innocent young middle-class Northeastern preppy white
girls, perhaps it was the cheap drinks at the local bar, perhaps it
was the sea of throbbing hormones with their nightly tides, but in any
case there were bodies in abundance. I didn't bother with antiquated
notions like beauty and personality.
Availability was the key concept, and any lingering co-ed left at the bar at closing time was likely prey. What I lost in developing mature relations with women I gained from the experience of seeing so many of them naked and
naughty.
At first I didn't care if they were chubbettes, Republicans, psych.
Majors, or even hard-core preppies. When a girl stared at me
longingly with her mascara'd eyes, I'd oblige her. But then, after
dozens of mornings of bad breath, sagging faces and vacant spirits, I
started to take their lack of character personally. I began to loathe
their innocent trustfulness, their sappy, imploring eyes staring at me
when I pulled the sheets over my head in the morning, their
inexperience with being humped and dumped, their liberal faith in the
goodness of their fellow man. Almost every girl who passed through my
arms came to hate me, as I usually did my best to avoid them after our
night of limp, liquored lovemaking.
I felt that if all these tacky tarts hated me, I must've been
doing something right. But convincing myself of this was sometimes
hard. There were times, usually when I was hung-over and underslept,
that I loathed myself for sliming these girls. I knew that, beneath
their make-up and suburban veneer, they were almost human. I began to
see myself as the Devil, taking advantage of the ignorance and frailty
of non-sinners. But then, in the afternoon, I'd come to the
conclusion that they were evil, that these powdered-pink girl scouts
were the ones warping my soul, tempting me to my ruin, trying to
convert me into one of their own: a suburban drone, a college clone.
It was a rough time for me, going back and forth from loathing myself
to loathing everyone else, from hiding away from all life-forms to
throwing myself into groups of giggling girls. I hardly bothered with
my classes anymore, I seemed to be losing my hair and my youthful looks rather quickly, and people began to jerk away from me when I
passed them on the street or in the hallways.
