When I first read about the recent college admission bribery scandal, I thought of when I had applied to transfer to Brown University. I had attended Hofstra University on Long Island my freshman year but hadn’t enjoyed it. So, I returned to my native Providence, where I took a year off. While working in a restaurant, I met Brown’s new sprinting coach. Having done some hurdling in high school, I arranged to begin training with him…and soon. Though neither enrolled nor accepted, I found myself working out with Brown’s track team.
Ultimately, I decided that I would go to Brown. It seemed like a great school, and getting in didn’t seem problematic in the least. Aside from training with their track team, my mom was an alumnus. Moreover, I had received a glowing recommendation from the man who administered a scholarship for students that attended Rhode Island high schools that didn’t normally send students to Brown. My high school didn’t normally send students to any college. Plus, a bunch of my friends studied at Brown and, frankly, they didn’t seem any different than anyone else.
When I got the rejection letter, anger immediately drove me to call the admissions department. “Was it money?” I asked. “Was that it?”
“Maybe,” they said.
My family didn’t have any money, you see. If I had gone, I’d have paid with scholarships and loans. As a result, I went to Rhode Island College, instead, dropping out midway through my first year there.
It was an odd time because I was always around Brown students. First, I shared a house with two friends who went there and would talk to me about their semiotics and literature classes. Then, I started dating a girl, whose father was the Dean of the Education Department. I ended up, more or less, living with her in her little dorm room. I even attended a couple of classes with her, occasionally helping with her homework. She had always felt guilty about going to Brown, figuring she’d never have gotten in if her father weren’t a dean. She may have been right.
After we broke up, I got a job in a busy barbeque restaurant on Thayer Street, the main retail drag that ran through the heart of the university. I was always serving students. I took great pleasure in carding underage Europeans, who had drunk legally in their own country for years. Even though I had no interest in returning to college, I still resented Brownies just a little.
No one used the word ‘privileged’ in the 80s like it does now, but it should have. I sometimes hated them for that difference, for sort of buying their way into something I wanted. But, it was complicated. Even though some of them were friends of mine, I didn’t want their lives. I didn’t want their parents, siblings, friends, or their ambitions. I just didn’t want to feel less than them. The moment I felt ‘less than’ I started hating them, me, and just about everything.
What I hated most of all was the idea that just as there was a finite number of students accepted each year, there, too, was a finite number of opportunities floating around the world. You had to grab what you could, or you’d be left with nothing. When I saw life in this way, everyone was my competitor and mortal enemy. It was an ugly, pointless world that I lived in and I wanted nothing to do with it.
By and by, I left Providence for the bright lights of Hollywood and a brief foray into screenwriting. Part of my day job was helping to audition actors for low-budget slasher movies. We only had a few roles for these crappy flicks, but attractive young men and women lined our offices when we gave the casting call, nonetheless. I left for Seattle after nine months, where I moved in with the woman I would soon marry and started writing my first book.
I struggled plenty through the pains of an excruciatingly slow-growing writing career over the next twenty years. Though, I never believed that things would have gone easier for me if I had gone to Brown. The only thing that could have made things easier for me is if I had accepted at a very young age that happiness and well-being are not achieved or acquired, but expressions of our natural states of being. College certainly couldn’t have taught me that. Living life did, however.
It’s easy to be angry at those parents who wanted to bribe their kids’ ways into school. Yet, what did they really think they were getting for their deceit? Security? Opportunity? Happiness? No college degree, no job, no publishing contract can assure these things. Like it or not, life is mercilessly fair and ruthlessly equal: everyone will suffer, as long as they believe what they want and need resides outside of themselves.
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