I Am Ken Breadner

I have finished Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. For all its flaws (and there were several, some of them major), this novel was an entertaining read. It also had the effect of catapulting me into my past.
The titular heroine is a poor but brilliant girl from Sparta, North Carolina, population 900 and most of them, you get the feeling, inbred. Despite her intelligence, she's fantastically naive about the world beyond. Because of her intelligence, she's got herself a one-way ticket deep into the heart of that world beyond: a full scholarship to Dupont University, the place Harvard and Yale dream of being. Charlotte undertakes an journey of self-discovery in what proves to be an environment entirely unlike anything in her experience or imagination...a place besotted, not with intellectual pursuits, but instead with sex and booze and status.

I was nowhere near as intelligent as Charlotte when I ventured out from my little town of Ingersoll, population 8,000 and most of them, I got the feeling, parochial in the extreme. But I nearly matched her for naivete. A clue to what awaited me was hung from an overpass just before the cut-off to Waterloo. Had my mother been driving, I do believe she would have turned the car around when she saw the sign reading


FATHERS THANK YOU FOR YOUR VIRGIN DAUGHTERS


Like Charlotte, I made a supreme effort to distance myself from my parents the instant we arrived at Wilfrid Laurier University, not out of shame but out of a fervent desire to assert myself. Luckily, I knew my residence room-mate going in...I'm honestly not sure whether I could have handled trying to befriend anyone on top of everything else that day. My brain bobbled. On the one hand, the first music I heard blasting way on campus was You May Be Right, by Billy Joel: not my favourite song in the world but certainly more than tolerable. Big relief: a part of me was expecting something truly vile. On the other hand, my welcome-to-Laurier kit contained some sort of rubbery sheathy thing I'd never seen before. It took almost as much brainpower as I had available to determine it was a condom. Had my parents seen that, I'm certain I would have been yanked off campus almost before I was on it. Oh well, guys, you were the ones bound and determined I get here a year ahead of my high school cohort...
Of course, it wasn't until slightly later that I realized just how young I was. Like later that day, when most of the people on my floor went out and got themselves stinking drunk--for the first of probably a hundred times that year. And Kenny (right about then I felt like Kenny, even though I'd been "Ken" since Grade 6 or so) stayed back...not only because he had no interest in booze, but because he wouldn't be legal for six months.
Laurier had outlawed panty raids the year before, so of course there were panty raids galore that week. It wasn't three weeks later, en route to my dorm room, that I stumbled upon three people having sex in full view of anyone who cared to look. Was that before or after the naked guy in the tree outside my window? I can't remember. Sleep was pretty hard to come by that year.
There must have been thirty or more people doing everything short of jamming alcohol down my throat in the first couple of months, and I did myself no social favours by absolutely refusing it every time. Most of Mac 2 West plotted for a week or two before my birthday about how they were going to get me out of my shell and get me plastered...and knowing that, when the day came, I made every effort to elude them.
I was only Mr. Goody-Half-A-Shoe by then, though: I'd successfully avoided alcohol only to fall into the snares of a few other vices. I'd found a use for that rubbery sheath in January, for one thing. For another, I'd bled money from every pore. It worked out to $16.33 every day from September to Christmas. It was perfectly clear I was in no way prepared for the distractions that university throws at you. But what the hell, I was having so much fun...
Academically, I got by that first year pretty much the way I'd gotten by in high school. Most of what I 'learned' I had already known, and it didn't take much effort to synthesize the rest. I hadn't...quite...fallen out of love with the classroom. Not yet.

In Tom Wolfe's novel, Charlotte Simmons eventually carves out a place for herself somewhere near the very tippy-top of Dupont's social scene, an unheard-of elevation for a freshman. I didn't do that. I couldn't, much as I may have wanted to. Macdonald House was a train wreck of eight months' duration; living right in the middle of it, I eventually developed somewhat of an immunity, but never felt much of an urge to jump in...that way lay a kind of suicide. I envied my room-mate...he'd arranged his classes such that he had Fridays off, and so went home every weekend without fail, thus avoiding the weekly 72-hour party which seemed to be the only reason most of my floor came to university.
My strategy was different: I'd cast my mind out, out from M2 West, out from Laurier, out to my girlfriend at Humber College, my best friend at Queens, and others hither and yon, creating one hellacious phone bill after another. I sent and received more "snail mail" than most of my floor put together. I clung to these lifelines out of Laurier with dogged determination: making friends has never been a forte of mine, and I was quite content with the coterie I'd already made, thanks.

Charlotte Simmons found an identity at Dupont...not one she would have recognized before and certainly not what her parents had envisioned for her. My identity was still in flux when I left Macdonald House, as it was two years later when my university career whimpered out. That wasn't what my parents had expected of me, either. Hell, it wasn't what I had expected. I don't know what I had expected, but it wasn't this.

I left residence with one ironclad certainty: it should be avoided at all costs. I had been steered into "res" by well-meaning people with no idea what lay inside those walls. They felt I'd make social contacts that would serve me well the rest of my life. It's true that my roomie became one of my closest friends, but that was born out of an "our room against the world" mentality. I've long swept my brain clean of everyone else from Laurier.
I still live here in Waterloo. Although I'm in an area where many students live, I'm far enough from the bar scene that I don't have to worry about my house being vandalized on a weekly basis. At this time of year, when students flood back in to the city, the twin thoughts recur: I was once one of them; I was never one of them.
I am Ken Breadner.