When I was eighteen I talked myself into going far away for college, to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They offered some decent financial aid, and I had romantic notions of reinventing myself whole along with some family history in North Carolina that made it seem like a less drastic step than it was.
But oblivious, I moved into Hinton James Hall and waved goodbye to my parents, my college experience impatiently beckoning. I woke up that first night, oppressively mugged by the lack of air conditioning in late August, at five in the morning in a bed lofted six feet off the ground, and decided to get up for a glass of water. I chose to just hop down instead of climbing, and managed to slip, fall, and fracture my right wrist by way of a pratfall that only gets more hilarious in retrospect.
After a panicked wait and an embarrassing trip to the student health center, I ended up with a cast on my arm for the next month and a half. I went to classes but I couldn't take notes. I became a point of conversation to everyone I met; too guileless to invent a cover story, I had inadvertently reinvented myself as the boy that fell out of bed.
It was too much: I hit the panic button, which for me involved staying in my room for two months, watching a bunch of downloaded Family Guy episodes over and over (this was 2002) and tracking the Pittsburgh Pirates latest doomed season on internet message boards. I wasn't a new person, I was the same kid I had always been, green and afraid and painfully shy, and the visions of academia I had were blinked out of existence. Like Little Nemo, I woke up on the floor in the real world and just wanted to go back to sleep.
So I went home, to Milwaukee, and I went to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which is by all accounts a fine school, but not much of a college. There aren't old buildings with stately pillars, sartorially fussy deans shaking their fists at belligerent fraternity members, or even that many dorms and places to sit on the lawn at UWM. I got an education, and I made a few friends, but I never shook the feeling that I had missed out on something.
It's not that I've ever wanted to get drunk on a regular basis, or sing a fight song for some sports team I don't care about, or organize a mass prank, or something. But I had always imagined a sort of middle stage between childhood and adulthood that entailed becoming part of a vague society of the aimlessly enrapt, of being forced into the trenches with my peers and having that post-adolescent confusion in common at the very start.
Obviously I should have gone to a liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere, fallen in love with the wrong girl, spray painted a statue of the school founder, gotten in a mild tussle with some townies once I was drinking age, join several extracurricular groups and get all of my romantic notions and thirst for mild debauchery out of my system, but this was not meant to be.
Instead I found comedy nine years later.
Here is what I do these days, I walk into about a half dozen bars and comedy clubs and sundry venues of other types and I say hello to someone. And the person they're standing next to. And usually the bartender, and three other people over there, and then another person that was facing away when I walked past claps me on the shoulder.
There are a dozen places or so we all do comedy regularly, and different people come to each one. It is not unlike going to different classes within a major. We study the same things, talk about the same concepts, and bitch about the same people and problems. I have made faster friends than ever before, and it's because we all have something in common, and it's the nameless confusion that I expected so long ago, forced into words by a narrow social pool and the compulsion to speak that comics have by nature.
I realized, talking to other comics on Tuesday, that I can count the non-comedy friends I've made here on less than one hand. It's not intentional, but it's as if comedians treat everyone else like the locals that know they'll be gone in a few years. Comedy is like a perpetual college experience, regardless of age or life experience.
Maybe it means none of us have grown up entirely, but I'm starting to think that's a sham proposition in the first place. After dedicating myself to stand up, I found myself all but compelled this time to move somewhere new, but not to reinvent myself so much as expand outward for the first time. It's easy to speak louder and invent faster, to take longer strides with an entire class of peers everywhere I find myself compelled to go.
With any luck, I won't step off the bed and fall back to reality this time.
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