When I got to college they called me “undecided.” I wasn’t undecided. Undecided is vacillating between options, you can’t make up your mind – bacon, ham or sausage? It wasn’t that, I didn’t even know what the choices were, I was uninformed, unaware, unfocused. The world could call me undecided but I was unfazed, I mean, how much different could it be from high school? Turns out, not that different, especially if you never go to class and blow off most assignments.

Oh, I was totally focused all right…on the football team. If you get accepted into more than one college or university you should pick the one that has a football team. If they all have football teams, pick the one that has the best team. Ultimately, the success of your school’s football team has enduring value—your diploma, not so much.

My first semester in college, the fall of 1979, I got a D in Spanish I, dropped one class midsemester, pledged a fraternity and attended five home football games. In progress toward my degree in who-knows-what I tallied eight credits (including my less than bueno performance in Spanish) and my grade point average, if it registered on the scale at all, was not something that could be spoken of publicly. Again, I wasn’t so much undecided as I was uncommitted, the pile of my dad’s money I wasted, unconscionable.

The moments I spent as a fraternity pledge at, let’s call it Blotto Delta Blotto, were most certainly not my best or brightest, but then I was naive and looking for a major. Maybe there was one at the bottom of that bottle of Stroh’s, maybe drinking games was a major? I could do my dissertation on words that fuckin’ rhyme with Nantucket.

I don’t know what excuse the other guys, my pledge brothers had, how they rationalized what was essentially six full months of public drunkenness. They were nice guys, many of them were bright, had majors, shit, some of them had minors, some were rich, from influential families and here they were, pledging a fraternity, hanging with the bros, drunk every night, hungover most every morning. Some guys were far away from home, some were valedictorians at their high school. In the frat, in this particular pledge class, the socially awkward came nose to nose with Mister Congeniality; the weak and studious, for the first time in his life, sat across from superjock, and on a typical Wednesday night all these dudes, maybe twenty-five total, college freshman, strangers thrown together by fate, would jam into a bro’s apartment drinking beers, burning buds.

Bravado, confessions, damn lies, rock & roll, dreams, regret, high hopes, vulnerability. There was a brotherhood thing that happened, but it had nothing to do with the fraternity, or the multistep handshake, the wooden paddle or the fuckin’ Greek alphabet. It was deeper than that, more fleeting, more fragile, more human, urgent. As it rushes back, there was testosterone and beer to be sure, but the true revelation, the one I see clearly now, is a group of boys, scared shitless.

The inner city, looming manhood, expectations, uncertainty, insecurity, suffocating doubts and inadequacy, these emotions, viewed in the rearview mirror, create fertile terrain for teenage psychosis, for donning masks, for boozing and barfing and whoring and peacocking. For telling boys you just met how much you love them (sentiments probably never spoken to parents or family), for the sudden, urgent need for the fellowship of a secret society, for reveling in activities that would have triggered revulsion six months earlier.

A lot of whacky shit transpired in those six months. Most of America’s college campuses in 1979 had Greek systems that were living on the faultline, and pledges were typically broken down like Marines in boot camp. If a voice of reason existed it was shouted down. The sorry-ass pledge would have had no way of gauging what was normal, would have had no resources or status to gain any semblance of moderation, so we were sent on impossible nighttime scavenger hunts, were commanded to perform demented physical gymnastics and, on a daily basis, required to kiss the ring of douchebag frat house members who under normal circumstances you would have just kicked in the balls.

It seemed that someone needed to tell the bros to go fuck themselves and at the worst possible time in the most awkward of moments, I did. The bromance ended that day, not in an act of courage—just an immature occurrence of instinct and fear. If anything close to friendship existed within that group of scared strangers, it ended that day too, the secret handshake, the rules and magical rhyming patterns of seventeen drinking games and a measure of innocence lost to history.

♦

My college experience was a five-year execution of a four-year plan … the earliest tangible proof that I was behind the times, times that I’ll never catch up with.

But they catch up to me, usually uninvited, when the air is perfumed in a certain way and the radio’s tuned to a certain frequency. Bruce Springsteen was a thing (will always be a thing) during that last Autumn of the 1970s, and in certain “Boss” moments, I’m taken back…I remember being in a ghetto two-room apartment, the door locked like some sort of Last Supper for sinners. Beers, a couple spliffs of homegrown, and those twenty-five freshmen, my bros, those temporary bros, away from their hometowns on a hall pass, screaming the words to “Thunder Road.” Meaning it. “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves . . . ” Asbury Park angst acted out in a nothing corner of L.A. resulting in a bond that felt real. “It’s a town full of losers we’re pullin’ outta here to win.”