The Ivy League kind, ma'am

Reprinted from a Facebook blog originally posted July 17, 2008:

Saying that I was difficult growing up is a bit of an understatement. No – my family never had to worry about me doing drugs or joining a gang or committing crimes. Although at times I think my mother may have preferred that. The problems arose from my sharp tongue and complete lack of respect for anything or anyone. I had no problem telling people what I thought, sometimes in the meanest most condescending way possible. Imagine get talked down to by a 12 year old? I’m lucky that no one beat me to death.

I have a vague fuzzy memory that’s imbedded in my head. It sounds like the sort of thing that someone would make up years after the fact to embellish a story but it’s one that I know for a fact happened. I recently asked my mother if I was remembering incorrectly but she verified that my memory is accurate. It was in the 6th grade and I was in the process of terrorizing teachers and spending nearly every 2nd or 3rd day in the principal’s office, all while getting straight As. My teachers hadn’t really seen anything like it before. I’m not sure what straw broke the camel’s back but I was called in to a parent/teacher conference with a few of my teachers and the school guidance counselor. They all sat me around a table and explained to me that I had a lot of talent and potential but I was wasting it by being a miserable and awful child. I was probably mostly just bored and wanted to get out of there and play video games (or eat something – because I was a fat kid)… but then they asked me what I wanted out of my life. Odd question to ask a 12 year old. Surprisingly, and to this day I have no idea what possessed me to say this, I answered that I thought that maybe I wanted to go to Cornell. I didn’t even know that Cornell was an Ivy League school until I got to high school. And so it began.

Eight years later I still remember the day I got accepted to Cornell like it was yesterday. All of the daily suspense was taken out of play early by the school. You knew right away that you weren’t going to find out anything at all until April 15th. On April 15th, 2000, I jumped out of bed before the alarm and spent most of the day pacing around like a nervous wreck. School ended and I distinctly remember my friend, Mike Struckus, racing ahead of me to his car and telling me that he was going to go to my house and open my letter before I got the chance. I ran to MikMobile v.1.0 (a teal 1990 Chevy Corsica – what’s up ladies?) as fast as my no-longer-not-so-fat legs could carry me and raced him the five minutes to my mother’s house (while obeying all traffic signals and posted signs obviously). He beat me there and jumped out of his sparkling red Dynasty…moving quickly toward the mailbox. I was nervous and hell and slightly furious. How could he? If he opened this before me and ruined my moment then I could potentially be spending the next four years in prison instead of Ithaca, because I was going to murder his ass (I would only come to learn later that prison is probably not much worse than Ithaca). I exploded out of my car, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice and wrip his windpipe clear out of his throat. A track star at the time, he obviously beat me to the mailbox. I quickly took stock of the situation, best planning on how to end the life of one of my best friends. He pulled the envelope out of the mailbox and then just calmly turned around and handed it to me. Phew.

I didn’t even have to open it to know. At this stage in the game every high school senior knew one thing when it came to college admissions. Big envelope equals welcome to our institution, please bring cash. Small envelope equals, “Well, there’s always community college. Try to reapply when you’re actually worthy.” Emblazoned in the upper left corner of the envelope was the Cornell crest. The envelope itself? Big. Fucking. Envelope. I just about burst into tears right there in my front yard. I knew that I had wanted to go to Cornell but if I was being completely honest with myself I didn’t think I was ever going to get in. I still remember riding in my car a few months earlier with my good friend at the time, Gene, who looked and me and asked me why I was wasting my time applying to a school like Cornell… I was only going to fail out and embarrass myself even if I did manage to get in. It’s at moment like that that you realize how lovely it is to have good and supportive friends. I spent the next few months wondering if maybe he was right. Maybe I was wasting my time. I still held out hope and on a beautiful sunny April day (note: weather may not be accurate – positive memories may be artificially correlated with good weather) everything I wanted was vindicated with one fucking envelope. Take that, motherfucker.

Most students who apply to schools in the Ivy League spend their high school careers studying for hours a night, taking AP classes in subjects they aren’t even remotely interested in, joining a million random clubs to superfluously pad their resume, and filling themselves with a genuine angst that getting into the nation’s top colleges is SERIOUS BUSINESS. Me? I took hard classes without killing myself, never brought a home a book to waste my time studying, skipped school to compete in prestigious Tecmo Super Bowl tournaments, listed baseball as the only club on my glorious resume and was once famously fired from a grocery store as a 17 year old for stealing hundreds of dollars worth of scratch-off lottery tickets. My college stock was solid gold.

Two of the “good students” in my grade also applied to Cornell. When I ran into them over the next few days the exchange with both was nearly identical. I asked them if they got in, they put their head down a bit and said no; no they had not. They asked me the same question and looked at me waiting for an identical response, waiting for the two of us to share in a mutual display of fake sympathy for the other. I replied with, “Well, yes, in fact I did get in.” Both of their faces immediately changed from the waiting-to-feel-sorry-for-you-as-a-proxy-to-feel-sorry-for-myself face to the “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?” face. While not being friends with or keeping in touch with these two people I know for a fact that they are both doing quite well for themselves, one a lawyer, the other a fighter pilot for our armed forces but in those breezy spring days when I was the happiest kid alive I was the one savoring my bit of glory.

To say I was on the low end of social class scale when I arrived for my freshman year would be pretty accurate. If it were a middle aged feudal society, I surely would have been considered a serf. So while I was at school I was a typical college freshman…exploring my freedom, making friends with as many people as I could, and basically wasting a hell of a lot of time. There – I was normal. When I went home for holidays and breaks, however, I was a monster. My sense of entitlement was probably only exceeded in size by, I don’t know, the Pacific Ocean? I took every single opportunity I could to remind anyone and everyone that I went to an Ivy League school. I’d find ways to drop this nugget of information into the most unrelated innocent conversations. “Boy, this grass sure needs to be cut.” “That it does. Hmm, grass. Reminds me of the grass at my college. Which is Cornell. In the IVY LEAGUE. Ok, well… see you later.” It’s a miracle that I was not beaten to death with a claw hammer at this stage in my life.

The greatest example of this happened a few years later during my senior year of college. I had calmed down a bit by then having lost some of my arrogance traveling the world and realizing exactly why Americans are hated everywhere else in the world (hint: it’s not apple pie). But the beast was still liable to come out every now and then if reasonably prodded. I decided to visit all of my best friends at their college for a big New Year’s party. I had been there before and knew a lot of the people in the area. My girlfriend at the time decided she would join me, this being our first new year’s together as a couple. I guess she did not want to come alone so decided to bring a friend. I had only met this girl, who we’ll call Megan, one time before and she seemed like a nice enough person. The more the merrier, right?

It’s a tradition among my friends and I to get either Japanese food or Chinese buffet on New Year’s Eve every year. We all went there and we’re being our usual selves; cracking jokes, busting balls, and being flat out ridiculous. My then girlfriend was a saint of a girl with a great personality and although they were both only meeting my friends for the first time she was taking the punishment and teasing my better than her friend. Megan started to be sour almost immediately. While everyone would tell jokes and maybe tease each other every now and then she would say legitimately mean things that made everyone uncomfortable. None of us were in love with Megan, to say the least, but hey it was a holiday and no one is going to ruin it for us.

We went to the party and it was a typical New Year’s party. What else to say about that really? Megan, to her credit, continued to be a tremendous disappointment all evening. Around 11:55, my girlfriend taps me on the shoulder and asks if we could go back to my friend’s apartment. I don’t remember exactly what my initial reaction was but I’d like to imagine it involved pointing at a clock of some sort and mouthing the words “are you fucking serious”? It turns out that Megan is having some sort of asthma attack and left her inhaler at my friend’s apartment and desperately needs it to survive or something overly melodramatic like that. I’m legitimately torn at this point. I want to spend the beginning of the New Year with my girlfriend, who I legitimately loved at this point, but on the other hand… I’m not leaving a New Year’s party at 11:55. Let’s just get serious. I said what I’d imagine any logical human being might say when confronted with this situation, “Can’t this wait five minutes”? Apparently it could not and off they went while I made the executive decision to stay at the party to the delight of my friends. Me being a glorious asshole always resulted in the highest of high comedy.

It ended up being the wrong decision in more ways than one (who could have ever predicted that?). For one, I had no fun from that point forward. I watched the ball drop alone while standing in the corner and gave a half hearted celebration, missing my girlfriend. At the same time I was wondering to myself what kind of special individual it requires to pull this kind of stunt at this particular time point. At no point did the fact that she might actually be telling the truth ever cross my mind. She was so negative all night that she definitely made this up. I think I wanted to kill her. I ended up walking back to their apartment from the party alone around 12:30. My night was already ruined but I had no idea how much worse it was about to get.

My entire walk consisted of me wondering to myself exactly how much trouble I was in and if/when I was going to get dumped for my actions. The two of them were “sleeping” on the two couches in the living room. The rest of my friends were still at the party, except for my friend Shawn, who was trying to seal the deal in a bedroom with a girl that may have actually passed out hours ago (it’s a mystery and for this kid, did it honestly even matter?). I laid down next to my girlfriend and did the smartest thing I could think of. I didn’t even give her a chance to say a word before I launched into a massive apology which included my rationale for staying. No later than the words “I thought she was faking it” had come out of my mouth; Megan had bolted upwards on the opposite couch in a full sit-up position like a demon zombie of some sort. “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE” she yelled starting off a long profanity laced tirade that I barely even remember while spittle flew out of her mouth like a rabid dog.

I’d like to say that I took stock of the situation and reacted in a calm measured manner but that…that is not something I can say. Do you know how sometimes a man goes on a killing spree, viciously murdering five people and then later claims that he has no recollection of even doing it? Well, I understand where he’s coming from because at this particular moment I lost my fucking mind. If I could describe what my mental state was at the time it would be equivalent to the white noise on a television set. Luckily I didn’t do anything stupid, although I think I might have been capable…because as I already mentioned I was in another world. What I did manage to do was to kick this girl out of my friend’s apartment (yes – I kick people out of places that aren’t mine and then you wonder if I’m the fucking man or not – the answer is yes) at approximately 1 AM on New Year’s Eve. Bonus points: the girl lives in New Jersey and we’re in Pennsylvania. My girlfriend, saint that she was, decided to stay with me and leave her friend to fend for herself.

I ran downstairs and at this point managed to snap back into consciousness. Without even realizing it, my face was covered in tears. Except – I wasn’t crying. No – there were intense anger tears. My friends came strolling around the corner at that exact moment. My friend Bob took one look at me and said simply, “I don’t even want to know – I’m going to bed.” And with that, I thought Megan was out of my life forever.

The next day I’m recovering at my mother’s house when I get a call from a number that I don’t recognize. I’m not the type of person to let a call go to voicemail to see who it is, so I pick it up. In a deep New Jersey guido accent I get “HEY YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE, HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING TO DO THAT TO MY SISTER?” Ruh, roh, Shaggy. Like most people would, I feigned ignorance for a bit. “Whose sister? Who is this?” Once that song and dance was over – I got to the heart of the matter. The girl really as asthma (asthma attack in question: still inconclusive). Megan’s brother thought I knew this fact and sent her into the middle of the night with not so much as a “goodnight, sweet prince” anyway. After I explain to him that I just met her and I had no idea he seems satisfied and calms down. I think that this situation is over and I’m ready to hang up the phone. Wrong. Here comes Momma Bear.
Again, in a deep New Jersey female guido (picture Susie Essman from Curb Your Enthusiasm) “YOU PUNK MOTHERFUCKER, YOU DO THIS TO MY DAUGHTER? IF I EVER FIND YOU I’M GOING TO CUT YOUR FUCKING BALLS OFF. YOU STUPID FUCK.” I’d like to transcribe the entire conversation but honestly I absorbed this for nearly 30 minutes. Being the bastard that I sometimes am, I tried to make nice while at the same time needling the hell out of her. After threatening to get me kicked out of school because she “knows the dean”, she was just about finished with her angry tirade and line of questioning, but I guess she had one more thing that she needed to know.
She phrased her next question very seriously when she uttered “what kind of scumbag would do this to a girl with asthma”? I was silent for a good 10 seconds, formulating my answer as the wheels turned slowly in my head. I paused another beat before uttering the phrase which would pretty much signify an entire ten years of my life. “The Ivy League kind, ma’am,” I said simply. She was appalled.

She probably had every right to be.

Five years later I am still forced to retell this story at parties on a regular basis. And if I am not there one of my friends handles the duties for me, filling in admirably even without all of the pertinent details. They aren’t needed. In the hands of a capable story teller, which I am and all of my core friends are, it’s a killer at parties. It has everything a funny story needs, including the transcendent asshole who utters a line so preposterous it feels like a team of Hollywood writers brainstormed around a table for hours to come up with a singular line that is at once both hilarious and repulsive. Am I proud of my actions? Not necessarily, but to paraphrase the great Steve Zissou… This story makes me look like an asshole. But I said those things. I did those things. I guess I’m an asshole.

These days when people ask where I went to school, I usually mention that I went to college in New York. I’m not shy to mention that I went to Cornell, as the follow up question is almost universally, “Oh yeah, where?” but I don’t trumpet the information like it’s a direct beacon from the lord himself. Every single day I try to be a better person and show humility. I often succeed and I think that most people who interact with me now on a daily basis would call me a good person. But every now and then these things slip out. When I get talked down to by person at work who probably shouldn’t be talking down to me, the first thing that pops into my head is along the lines of “bitch, please, I have two Ivy League degrees, which is probably two more then anyone in your family will have for the next two hundred years.” Is this a bad thing to think? Of course it is. But at least I don’t say it. It happens less and less these days and hopefully in due time it won’t happen at all. I’m not a special individual. I’m only blessed with the best memory of everyone I’ve ever met despite a real lack of any other tangible skills, (except hopefully comedy) often including motivation. I have focused and dedicated myself to working harder and being a better person every day. I guess that’s part of growing up.

Admission numbers at the Ivy League schools are now at an all-time low. In 2008, Cornell University saw a record number of applicants and accepted the smallest percentage of applications in the history of the school. And that’s just at one of the worst schools in the Ivy League. I’d imagine that similar stories are commonplace in every small town across the country. Every Ivy League student who isn’t expected to be there by birthright, who doesn’t belong to a country club or own a yacht, probably has said or felt something similar at least once in their life.

Like it or not, humans are prone to being proud. A job well done doesn’t seem worth it to a lot of us unless someone notices. It’s just human nature. I did something in my life that I was not supposed to do. No one expected it of me, including myself. And while I was extremely proud of myself, for many years of my life this pride manifested itself in arrogance. Unfortunately, one of the worst aspects of my current life is that I only get to see my best friends anywhere from 10-15 days a year. Hardly ever and not nearly enough. They still see me as the exact same person I was during my college years, which is fine, because I don’t need to impress them anyway and they would probably support me even if I lived in a van down by the river. The fact of the matter is, I will always be proud of who I am and what I have done, but these days are hopefully behind me forever. Much in the same way that I watch politics now, base nearly all my decisions on not only my own feelings but my dogs, or spend all my time and money worrying about how I can upgrade my house… I’m growing up. Some, including myself, would say that it’s about time.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and check on my “Ivy League Alumni” Facebook group.