I decided to check out California State University, Northridge (“Cal State Northridge,” for all you diehard Californians out there). It was close to home, I got in-state tuition, and their mascot was Matty the Matador. How could you not go to a cheap school where the mascot is named after you? Even if he is a bull-dodging foreigner in a stupid fucking hat.
My first day on campus was filled with a mix of emotions. There was the typical bout of nerves that comes with having a new experience and being in a new place. There was some excitement at the opportunity for a new beginning. But there was also a healthy amount of fear that, much like the people I met out at the bars in L.A., I would come to absolutely hate everyone and they would hate me right back. It was a reasonable fear. I was older than most everybody who would be in my classes. I was covered in tattoos, which wasn’t the norm back then. And I’d just gotten done fighting a war that pretty much every young person around me loathed and cited as one of the reasons they had voted for Barack Obama, who had just been elected.
My first stop before pulling the trigger on enrollment was the veterans’ affairs counselor in the registrar’s office. A lot of big state schools have one of these people nowadays. It’s a really great service. They help you get your GI Bill paperwork squared away. They help you transfer over credits from any relevant courses you took while you were enlisted. And they help you map out course selection based on what you want to study, even if, like me, you didn’t really know yet. They also give you what amounts to an informal orientation.
“Mat, we’re so excited that you are thinking about pursuing a degree here with us,” the counselor told me. “We try really hard to make our veteran-students comfortable in this different kind of learning environment, because we know how hard this transition can be for some people.”
Do you, now?
“It’s funny. Some of our veterans and our younger students have a lot in common. In many instances, they struggle with the lack of structured days in the same ways.”
The same? Oh, I doubt that.
I understood what the counselor was trying to say, but the way she was couching things made me start to wonder if my initial fears were well founded. Was this place going to be full of intellectual enemy combatants? When our meeting ended, I walked out and headed for my truck, which was parked way on the other side of the campus where I didn’t have to pay for parking. I was nearly broke and I am a natural cheapskate anyway, so I wasn’t about to give these people my money if I didn’t have to. I also figured having to walk across the large urban campus would give me a chance to take the measure of the place.
It met all of my expectations, and not in a good way.
The random snippets of conversation I overheard as I made my way out of the administration building were completely disconnected from any reality that I recognized. The young men and women whose words I was registering as I walked certainly weren’t ready for the real world that I knew, from experience, was getting ready to knock at their door and detonate in their faces. It takes everyone a little time to figure “it” out. I get it. But the fundamental lack of understanding of how the world works, the lack of awareness of how privileged they were, and the absence of basic respect for America that I heard coming out of the mouths of these kids was like listening to a sixty-minute loop of nails on a chalkboard. If these conversations were representative of the dialogue I would have to entertain while enrolled here, they were about as likely to survive in the real world as I was to survive on this campus.
I kept moving. I walked through this little park area called Orange Grove and past the campus duck pond, and I quickly realized that a disproportionate amount of my attention was occupied by worrying about some of these dipshits walking too close to the water’s edge. I honestly thought they might fall in and sink like the box of rocks they were. I was only twenty-three years old, the same age as many of the seniors and first-year graduate students at the school, yet I felt like I was their babysitter. Even a cursory evaluation of the students’ orientation to their environment revealed a general obliviousness that, in the real world, would have real consequences.
But that was just it. I wasn’t in the real world. I was on a college campus. My immediate concern for these kids was completely unwarranted. No one whose path I had crossed so far that afternoon had actually done anything to arouse real concern. And why would it? They all lived in a giant bubble. They’d experienced no danger, no risk, no decisions involving life-or-death stakes. And the entire system was set up to keep it that way for as long as possible. College wasn’t their proving ground. It was their playground, with no sharp edges and no one keeping score. Emotionally, they were lumps of Play-Doh drowning in Purell. Practically, they weren’t even that useful.
I stopped in the cafeteria to grab a bite before heading home. One of the students standing by the rack of trays noticed my tattoos and my lack of a backpack and asked me if I could go get someone to bring more trays out, like I was the janitor or a cafeteria worker or something. Do I look like a janitor, motherfucker? Wait, don’t answer that.
I ate my lunch in silence and absorbed more of the conversations going on around me. It felt like a giant dye pack full of stupid had just exploded inside a bag of stolen money (their tuition, maybe) and covered me in the residue. It was more frightening than anything I’d heard out in the open air of campus. It was as if their unlimited meal plan somehow made the cafeteria their safe space: If I can eat any amount of this ridiculous shit I want, I can say any amount of ridiculous shit I want too.
Witnessing all this, I had a choice: I could rage at them for being such thoughtless, clueless, careless, gutless, spoiled garbage people, or I could get up, throw away the rest of my lunch, quietly walk out, and never come back.
The correct choice is pretty obvious, but it wasn’t easy. There was real, actual rage flaring up inside me. It had started to come out more and more in recent weeks at bars my friends and I would go to. I would drink aggressively. I would spend aggressively. Recklessly. I made fuck all in salary while I was in the Army, that is true, but the real reason I went through my savings so fast was that I drank most of it and pissed the rest away. I’d wake up really mad—mostly at myself but also at the people around me. People like these shitty college kids. Actually, no, it’s not totally their fault: people like their parents. I would get so mad at the parents that I wanted to punch their kids right back up into their urethras and undo their births.
That’s normal, right?
As I drove home from Northridge, all I kept thinking was, “Okay, Mat, you have to stay active if you’re going to make this transition. You have to keep moving.” It was not unlike my time in the service. If you want to clear through the objective, you’ve got to keep pushing forward. If you stand still, you’re a sitting duck. If you go back, you just make it easier for whatever is chasing you to catch up. But how do you push forward in this scenario? Push forward to what? What is there that is even remotely stimulating? With college out the window for now, what was I going to do?