Memories of graduate school

May 22


I was a shit in graduate school. On the first day, I taped a sheet of paper over the 8x10 glossy of Steve Martin with an arrow through his head that my office-mate had fixed to the painted cinder-block wall behind our shared cubicle. “I can’t stand him looking at me!” I scribbled on the paper in blue ink. My office-mate was rightly incensed; I have a memory of her tossing her hair and harrumphing indignantly at the edge of my vision. But she said nothing to me, and neither did any of the dozen other first-year grad students who shared the remaining cubicles. I was left to slowly recognize on my own what an ass I’d been. It took about a week, and I was much too shy to apologize.

This had been, and to some extent remains, the pattern of my interactions with people. Long bouts of vacuum-packed silence punctuated by eruptions of inappropriate boldness or ferocity. A kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing. My parents used to call me Vesuvio.

The result was that after that first day no one talked to me—no one except Howard, a shaggy, gangly 6-foot-6 inch Thoreauvian from south of Pittsburgh who happened to be a born-again Christian. Howard was drawn to me by his intuition that, unlike the others, I did not reflexively condemn his religion. He took a big brotherly interest in me, often talked to me about his church, but was never pushy. “Don’t you like people?” he once asked me after I expressed a distaste for crowded suburbs. It made me think. Howard would die of melanoma within a month of getting his Ph.D., leaving a wife and infant daughter.

Silent as I was, I spent a lot of time listening to conversations from behind my smoked-glass cubicle walls, quietly admiring the self-conscious repartee. Are there any souls more pretentious than graduate students in English literature?