Page Four
THE MICHIGAN DAILY
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Thursday; September 9, 1976
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My first t
By JEFFREY SELBST
THERE IS A SPURIOUS myth which abounds in the minds of
those who are about to scurry off to the Great Adventure-
which is to say orientation and the assorted joys of college-that
the experience is going to be fun, and make you all sort of world-
ly to boot.
Yok, yok, yok.
The truth of the matter is that my first two years at the Uni-
versity of Michigan were ones of rare, unparallelled horror.
Now granted I was sixteen, and impressionable as hell, some-
what shy for having been thrust into an alien environment of
eighteen and nineteen-year olds at Merry Markley, a world which
I could scarcely comprehend. But the fact is that I learned quick-
ly how to cope, and coping itself became the preeminent objective
of my school experience.
Jeff Selbst, a former Daily Arts Editor, left behind his per-
ilous University career this month for fame and fortune in the
Big Apple.
years:
Sad
but true
-..
ONE THING AT the University of Michigan
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IT ALL BEGAN AT orientation, with my sullen roommate from
North Carolina, a burned-out type who talked (when he talked'
f high school dope raids, and the Importance of Knowing Where
To Get the Best Acid. Then, to impress me lest I should fail t
t care about that, he told me how he was taking college classes a'
a nearby university when he was only sixteen and a senior in high
school. I was unimpressed, and he got more sullen.
His name was Mark Smith, and that was discouraging, for
that had been the name of a close friend of mine at home. Too,
the rest of my group had a kind of beery, jockish stupidity thai
I loathed, and so I stuck to myself mainly for three whole glori
ous days.
Then September came on little cat feet. I moved into the
dorm (Markley, which was to become my home for two long
years), and settled in to meet my first real roommate, and take
some challenging University-type courses. I was enrolled in Cal-
culus115, Astronomy 111, Music Composition 221, and French 103.
I nearly failed Calculus. The fact is, I did step on that damn-
ed 'M' on the Diag during orientation, and I failed my first exam,
which just happened to be in 115. I then compiled a marvelous
record of D's and E's which would have netted me my first fail-
ure ever, except that the munificent Math Department decided
that no student should receive any less for 115 than he or she re-
ceived on the final exam. I studied hard, and got a C.
FRENCH WAS A BREEZE, and Astronomy a sufficient bore
that I nearly failed that as well. Music Composition was fun,
and I toyed briefly with the idea of becoming a composer. But
my professor, a fat, sweaty, sadistic ass, successfully dissuaded
me from the idea by mere example. I got a B.
So, the nearly all-A student of high school troops home to
Mumsy and Papa with a big, beautiful 2.272 GPA to show for his
first term away from the nest. That Christmas was Trauma
No. 1.
At least, by Christmas I wasn't living with my original room-
mate any longer. Freddie Felix B., the boor from Dearborn
Heights, was to constitute my first exposure to living with other
people.,
HE WAS UTTERLY impossible, doing things like setting me a
bedtime to which he expected me to adhere (nice people
don't have to stay up past ten-thirty), sweeping his half of the
room only, and making up endless charts and schedules. I was
allowed to play my music (as he referred to it) only between the
hours of ten and bedtime. Thirty minutes a day. And whenever I
could sneak it in otherwise. Which was difficult. Because he took
naps. Every afternoon. For hours. Snoring. With the lights off.
Aaagh!
Two months were all I could stomach, and at Halloween I
moved in with someone I didn't know, on the other end of the
dorm altogether.
He was a half-crazed theatre student named Mark. But that's
something I'd still rather not go into.
Mary was the only friend I had in the dorm before Mark.
Mary and I went to the same high school, had both graduated a
year early, and were both fairly lonely. She joined the Word of
God, and I, though atheist, hung around the edges.
But it was Mary's roommate, Mandy, who got me back into
what I loved, the theater.
I seem to be getting ahead of myself.
I JOINED THE DAILY near the beginning of the second term,
and my stint there lasted three weeks (it wouldn't be until two
years later that I would rejoin). I was scared away from it by a
person whom I considered to be a petty tyrant and who also hap-
pened to be arts editor at the time.
It was at the end of my Daily time that Mandy enticed me
into working prop crew for the first original Musket musical since
1962, an allegedly-plagiarized bomb known as Counterpoint, pen-
ned by a pre-med student who taught a Course Mart course in.
Musical Theatre.
It wasn't a debit to me that the show was insipid, for I was
there to find companionship, a good time, camaraderie, and sex.
n What actually happened though, was that on closing night, while
) packing the prop truck somewhere after midnight, in the wee
e hours of April 1, 1974, I fell out of the truck and fractured my
o kneecap.
t Dauntlessly I went to the cast party ( ho ho; get it?), thinking
the fall had only occasioned a bruise. Later that day, around noon,
I was driven to the health service (when the limb steadfastly re-
fused to move at all) and my knee was diagnosed. Cracked.
, Splintered. In a cast for a month.
t
I HAD GAINED TWENTY pounds that year, and during the
month of April, moped a lot. The BEB (Blubber Emotional
Barometer) was a clear indication of my mood.
A rather uneventful summer came ane went, and lo, back to
Markley, only to find that;I had been assigned a psychotic for a
roommate. Everyone came to know and love this creep as "Shit",
though his real name putatively was Bill. Lots of lovely tricks in
his nifty repertoire, such as vomiting on my knapsack in the
middle of the night, destroying term papers I'd written, and oth-
er acts of willful nastiness.
Though my gradepoint rose that year, it was still incredibly
low. I did have one triumph (garnering my first A here to boot)
- -I was in a creative writing class, in which I wrote 'a funny,
cynical little short storyabout a pair of gayroommates, and it
won an Underclassperson Hopwood. I attended the ceremony
proudly, but my glory lasted only ten seconds-as I ran up, de-
corously grabbed the envelope, and ran back to my seat.
I had an incredible post-Hopwood letdown.
MY WRITING (which was supposedly what I was studying here
at the Big 'U') took a turn for the worse. I wrote some pedes-
trian fantasies (influenced as I'd been by Prof. Eric Rabkin's
Fantasy class), a comedy of manners, and one or two attempts at
Real Deep Stuff.
Why, I nearly laughed myself sick, when I thought about it.
The same year, a very close friend was sued in the Central
Student Judiciary. The suit was based on an illegality never com-
mitted, brought before inept judges, the trial was a zoo, and my
friend lost the suit. Whoever thought college could provide you
with legal hassles.
But because of that, I met a whole new clique, almost every
one of whose members I quickly came to despise. It was the sort
of clique that would provoke you into joining so they could have
the fun of rejecting you good and proper once you were in.
I WENT HOME, and got a job in a shortening factory for the
summer, and suddenly, school seemed greatly more tolerable.
Certainly more so than working with quantities, ofunrendered
fat day in and day out. Not to mention the glue I'd be covered
with at the end of the day.
And subtly, things seemed to change after that. I decided
towards the end of my second year that I really didn't like people
very much at all, so I rather had it in mind to isolate my person.
Where better to do it than go live in the Living Mausoleum, the
Vera Baits houses at North Campus?
So I went off to live there, and surprise, I had an ELI (Eng-
lish Language Institute) roommate from Iran, a charming fellow
by the name of Faramarz. Marz and I became good friends, and
by December, I'd half decided I approved of humanity again.
Now the problem was, 'with my new guarded optimism, I was
stuck out in the boondocks themselves, North Campus. By this
time, too, I had been called by the Daily, and been asked to re-
join the staff. The arts editor with whom I'd tangled was two
years gone-wouldn't I come back?
Who could resist such an appeal?
So it was only my first two years at Michigan which were
the most horrible of my life, and not, mind you, 'because of one
unbearably traumatic experience. No, my misery was fueled by
an unreasonably high proportion of minor catastrophes -- the
kind that every student expects to encouter in his of her first two
years at the University. Right? Wrong.
Don't think I mean that every entering freshperson will bs
unexpectably miserable here at school.
B ut open those starry little eyes folks.
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