Also
showing how making common cause with peers from far-different backgrounds
happened so fluently during college
[Edits done 3/1/13. More edits 3/7/13. More edits 3/17/13, important between asterisks.]
If you felt
that my series on the Marvin
Center had its
interesting points but by and large seemed a little dry or irrelevant, now we
deliver some rock ’n’ roll. There is indeed a meaty story to be told here that,
rather surprisingly, has some relevance to office conundrums and such about 30
years later. It involves, among other things, the theme of highly personal
behavior intruding on the workplace, and even some criminal situation regarding
which I, as were numerous others, was questioned by GWU’s Security department.
Andrew S.
Cohen, “Andy” or “A.C.,” a friend of mine from that time and the central focus
here, is significant, and useful to discuss, for several reasons. Because
his story is so substantial, I split it into three parts, each pretty beefy. He
is a good measure of the colorfulness of working at the MC, when I was in my
more seasoned phase there. He was a personality so impressive that I based a
character, JN, in my novel from 1986, A
Transient, partly on him—and the character impressed fellow writers who
read parts of the novel at the Johns Hopkins University writers conference I
was at in June that year (though whether they were so impressed by the Andy side of him, as opposed to other
sides I heavily incorporated, is doubtful). Much later, in 2001-02, I wrote a
chapter on Andy in a nonfiction mode, as part of an unpublished
autobiographical work that (not so much of interest to you) covers my adult
years through about 2000, and I am basing these Andy-related blog entries on that
chapter—with important updates.
As I also
found only in 2006, and after I had not communicated with him since late 1986, Andy
had died in January 2003, at age 44. There is a paid, family-arranged obituary
on him in The New York Times’
obituary database (dated January 31, 2003), which I will quote from, and the
honorific things said there about him accord fairly well with the guy I knew
from later 1983 through spring 1985. Andy left behind an ex-wife and two young
sons, who today would be about 15 and 16.
In a sense,
Andy has lingered in my mind for many years, even when, of people I met at
college in the first half of the 1980s, the subset with whom I still have been
in touch have been in touch over a far longer time. Further, at least one of them (A.V., actually, not someone in my college class, but who was a law student, and whom I befriended as a housemate) I
know a lot better than Andy Cohen, and I certainly have done more creative
things with him (A.V., including in the 1980s). Yet despite Andy Cohen’s memorability,
some details have faded in my memory, while others certainly do not. I also
find from my 2001-02 book chapter on him that some things about my years at the
MC are more certainly remembered there, which I was foggier about recently.
Goes to show,
with old, important times in your life, if you want to memorialize them, sooner
is better than later, especially when earthquakes (which may affect your
longer-term memory, though who knows why) happen resoundingly in your life, as
have for many of us in the past decade-plus since 9/11.
Yet the thing
about Andy that makes certain things remain in my memory for so long is that,
as his obituary does not specify, he was a heroin addict, and this played a
role in his dropping out of college when he was at GWU, apparently ending his
college career for good (he had attended at least two other colleges
beforehand). This also makes for something that has downright puzzled me for
years—whether he had a role in a theft of fairly valuable material at the MC in
1985, which I will look at in a little detail in the second third of this blog portrait
of him.
If these
latter two things (addiction and possible implication in a crime) seem like
details his survivors would not want publicized, I can understand. But as with
so many other stories I’ve told on this blog, to feel I should tie my hands on
something I consider important (to convey in this sort of forum), which someone
else might consider too embarrassing to reveal, could well end up intruding on
my rights, or perhaps the rights of someone else whom I’m trying to defend by
wanting to tell the story—and this intruding may be more than is justified by
the protection of the interests of the people who want to suppress the story.
Does this sort of consideration sound familiar? And I think as I unfold this
story, any of Andy’s survivors who might see it—I am less thrilled about his
sons seeing it than the older generations of his family—might realize that in
focusing on the positive Andy I knew and who made such an impression on me, I
am not detracting from him too much—I am even telling more of the sad soul that
those close to him knew he was—in my talking about some of the stark negatives.
Further, this
story brings up in case in point about frivolous complaints of “sexual
harassment”—made not less peculiar, when implying the harassment was of a
homosexual sort, in a work environment that featured numerous homosexuals where
how such an allegation was handled faced all kinds of questions of taste,
embarrassment, and so on, not least for someone like me who was (as I am)
straight.
Lastly, the
issue of Andy’s heroin use, and most darkly the puzzling incident of stolen
goods, brings up the question, What if a
coworker goes downright crazy with some moves that are so outlandish that they
leave close associates at a loss for even how to deal with them professionally,
especially when the associates are young (twenty-something) workers?
A sketchy outline of the friendship
Through just
about all my school years, as my own inadvertent “practice,” I had basically
one really close friend per school year, or maybe per two-year-or-so period; I
did not surround myself with a clique of “not-so-close” friends. In college I
did roughly the same thing, though sometimes the “close friend” could be one of
my roommates. Actually, during college, some of my friends ended up being from
among my coworkers at the MC—work generally proving to be a good source of a
certain kind of friend, as I found starting even in late high school, and still
have found in recent years.
From, I
believe, sometime in 1982 to about spring 1983, my “best friend” at the MC was a Randy
Klemp, who was a countryish-but-hip guy a few years older than I, who was
pre-law—and ended up attending law school (not at GWU, I think) and becoming a
lawyer. [Slight correction: From an early-1980s diary, I find that Randy Klemp was gone from the MC by the start [?] of summer vacation 1983. Also, this diary says he worked at the MC only two semesters, which would certainly include fall 1982, when I know he worked on my car. The diary also says he was 26, and characterizes him as a former hippie (take that for what little it's worth).] Last I knew, he practiced out in Oregon,
as I found from the Internet in recent years. He was fun to joke around with at
the MC—he was one of those friends who managed to bond with you despite obvious
differences between you. He was mechanically inclined; he serviced my crappy VW
Dasher one time in, I believe, fall 1982.
Randy, as I
seem to find from memory that I joggle in different ways, finished school at GW
in spring 1983 (it’s possible he worked there through summer 1983 [words deleted that were inaccurate]). But I know Randy was around (briefly) when
Andy Cohen was on the scene, and it seems from an earlier draft of this account
that, after having been away for some time, Randy visited the MC (and GW) in
fall 1983 [yes, this did happen], and Andy happened to encounter him briefly then (I know Andy did
form a surface opinion of Randy).
In any event, Andy
became a student manager at the MC the way so many young men randomly did, then
could well end up being a friend for a time. He was first friends only (or
mainly) with fellow student manager Jeff Barth, but the three of us—as I’ll say
later—became something of a work-friends trio, and that’s how Andy started
associating with me. Ultimately, as Andy and I became closer, Andy seemed to
fill the slot Randy did, for me, pretty neatly.
Andy, who I
believe was 26 when he first arrived at the MC, represented my first richly
positive friendship with a Jewish male since my roommate Eric Patent in 1981-82
(and less in 1983-84; Eric and I roomed in the dorm system in two separate
school years, in different rooms). From another angle, Andy ended up—in a
series of situations we’ll see below—being my first longish-term friend at
college (or even compared to high school friends), who wasn't a roommate or
academic competitor of any sort. Andy was also, I believe, the first such male at
GW I socialized with as much as I did during free time, of which I had more
following graduation. (That is, I did other things outside work with him than
simply occasionally go to bars or the like, as I did “per the usual
expectation” with roommates in earlier years—which is the sort of thing I hate
to think about today, because of how dreary I remember it as being.)
Andy also had
a clearly different background from mine—as reflected in my once jokingly
calling him, as he allowed, “Mr.
Park Avenue.” We were friends well for over a
year. And yet the friendship ended abruptly (and this ending directly
paralleled his dropping out of the MC orbit), and the big mystery about this
fact wasn't so much that it was caused by the more generally understood disloyalty
of a hardcore drug addict—though this certainly played a role—as it was the
fact that I couldn't see the end coming
the way it did and couldn't explain why it happened the way it did. This,
of course, reflected my level of maturity at the time; but there were certain
mysterious things about my association with him, broadly speaking, that are not
completely resolved even today. In a way, saying that Andy was a drug addict
and had additional, fairly stark personal problems seemed only an easy
explanation for how the friendship ended, as could be offered by people who
weren't bound up in the relationship with him.
The heroin
addict side may set off bells in your head. I don't think I knew about this
side of his life until many months, perhaps a year or more, after I'd begun to
form a friendship with him. And then how he revealed that side of him and it
turned insidious and ultimately subversive would seem, in retrospect, to have
been par for the course. But it left me baffled and hurt, I suppose, and yet somehow
I've never been entirely dismissive of him, which may reflect how he, somehow, not
only charmed me but really was an ambiguous person, though maybe not simply a
dark or very difficult one.
Andy’s 2003
obituary, by the way, includes: “Andrew loved reading (even while in the
shower), long motorcycle trips, talking about and eating great food, East
Hampton, Bob Dylan, falling asleep virtually anywhere[,] and being with his
family and many friends.” Except for the focus on East
Hampton and Bob Dylan (both credible associations with him), I
would second all this—and it’s interesting how even his first-degree relatives,
presumably, sought to cement his memorial portrait in these terms: Andy as a
sort of hedonistic but resourceful bohemian, you might say. More: “…Andrew will
be remembered most as a profoundly kind and gentle man who loved his sons above
all else. Embodying a unique and wonderful mix of intelligence, curiosity, wry
humor, sweetness, and a limitless capacity for unconditional love, Andrew, a
man like no other, will be greatly missed.”
I would agree
with most of that (on other parts, I don’t have all the direct evidence that I’m
sure others do). Even accounting for the tendency of eulogistic memorialization
to gloss things up a bit, this still seems to give a pretty fair impression of
him. Thus it may seem all the more unfortunate to look at some of the dark
things, but the larger picture of who he was, and why I deliver this story,
will come into helpful focus, and both adds to my Marvin Center story and goes
beyond it.
Andy as measured as an inspiration for fictional
work
It may seem
tedious that I make allusions to fictional works of mine that weren’t
traditionally published, but here the reference is very useful. Skip this
subsection for now, if you want.
It’s important
to note that when I talk about Andy being inspiration for part of The Folder Hunt, this doesn’t simply mean
that the way he “informed” a “dark” character in this novel was better than how he positively inspired my later novel, A Transient, or that the 1985 novel itself was better than the 1986
novel itself.
The darker
side of Andy seemed—by spring 1985, when I was in a more doubtful phase of my
post-college life, in part stimulated by Andy’s tribulations—good food for
shaping a dark character in my first novel, whose composition at the time
required a daring I was not used to then (or which I had to embrace, with risk,
to become more of a writer). As I drafted the present account as a nonfiction chapter
in 2001-02, I became amazed at how similar to my fictional character of Samson,
the heavy-handedly posited “bad guy,” Andy was. [An important note putting this into perspective will be included in Part 13, the final part of this series.]
In fact, I believe
that in late 1984 or early 1985, I started drafting in more explicit terms the
character of Samson, as a key figure in the novel The Folder Hunt that I worked on steadily but with a generally
seeking attitude (I gropingly sought plot and incident and a general moral point in it—while trying to find my writing voice
with it). Though Samson was present in the novel from very early in the writing
of the novel (probably in the rudimentary chapters done before I met Andy), the
novel became more solidly, coherently, and darkly plotted when part of the plot
involved the more pointedly nefarious actions of Samson—who worked for a
housing construction company—against the protagonist, Harold McCord. Samson
engages in certain machinations to victimize Harold, the hapless but mostly genuine
character who once worked for the company, and through the novel is flopping
through a difficult transition between longer-term jobs.
In a plot
twist that I think I determined only in spring 1985, one of the things Samson
does is jeopardize some aspect of Harold’s fate by revealing that Harold takes a
certain kind of psychotropic medication. I'm pretty sure I didn't have Samson
do this until Andy Cohen's and my friendship was already in the fairly-decisively
downward part of its arc, and Andy turned out to be (rather surprisingly)
unwilling to receive any sorts of lessons from me about how he could rescue
himself from career failure despite his (to use a rather old-fashioned term) neuroticism
and (still a valid term) drug use. By offering lessons, I mean whatever lesson
I thought I could offer based on my own health-related life (which I’d
theretofore kept a secret from Andy, as well as from others). This’ll all sound
less cagey and quaint when I get to the second half of Andy’s fancy story.
In 1986, roughly
a year later, when I was writing my novel A
Transient, in much different circumstances and aptness to be creative than
in 1984-85, I based the character of JN in part on Andy, as to certain playful
and “friendly-neurotic” characteristics. So
there—in very florid and fun form—was
the positive Andy. And I’ve always felt that A Transient was the better novel than The Folder Hunt.
Just after arrival, Andy shows non-bitter
colorfulness; and what his school situation was
For a good
while, times with Andy were, as he used to say in a mildly slangy,
faux-Southern-accented, long-voweled way, “Fiiine!” (He was from New York City,
of course.)
As I said, Andy
first was friends with a fellow student assistant manager named Jeffrey (Jeff)
Barth, who was in my year in school (Jeff, independent of Andy’s affairs, lived
in one of the nicest rooms in the upperclassman dorm of Milton Hall [where I
also lived then, on the fourth floor]; Jeff roomed with the president of GW's
student association, Bob Guarasci, who, as I said in another entry
in this series, would end up heading the New Jersey Community Development
Corporation in Paterson, N.J., by about 1995).
Andy and Jeff
hung out (at least at work) with their affinity that, I would assume, was based
at least on being Jewish males, perhaps with similar interests (including talk
about girls). But I guess it was because Jeff had already been working at the
MC with me, and I had a cordial relationship with Jeff, that Andy came to be
friends with me. And just as I’ve said Andy and I came from quite different
backgrounds, he would also (before long) develop some close accord with me.
Soon enough, Jeff, Andy, and I were a threesome of friends, but then Andy’s and
my friendship grew to be something different from his and Jeff’s, or from mine
and his and Jeff’s together (Jeff’s and my association was the least close). I think in a way, of us
three, Andy and I became the closest duo for a time (at least through later 1984).
Andy was, in
the 1983-84 school year (and at age 26), at either the sophomore or the junior
level (while Jeff and I, both about 22, were at the senior level). Andy had
attended what I would have said was at least one other college, and which I see
from his obit were the two colleges of Hampshire
College and the University of Vermont.
GWU was his third try (and would, as far as I know, be his last).
As I've said,
he was being given a sort of last chance of getting his degree while, I
believe, he was being bankrolled by his parents. He had three sisters—I think
he was the second or third of four siblings—and his father was a lawyer and his
mother was a psychologist. He especially spoke approvingly of his sister Emilie
(I never knew her name was spelled that way until I saw the obit).
He was, in my experience,
a classic (and, for me, edifying) case of a young Jewish person with a jaunty,
musing-and-quick-witted, relaxedly bohemian way of carrying on. He had critical
and satirically humorous things to say, but he wasn’t rudely opinionated. He
was warmly approachable to those whom he let be his (college-time) friends, and
he could be, as he wished, casually friendly to strangers whom he encountered
in the huge tide of people coming and going at the Marvin Center,
and on the streets of the busy university campus.
This carefree
social side of him was remarkable to me. He also had what seems to me a classic
satirical attitude toward certain Jews (often based on appearance) that a range
of young Jews could have at the time (how things may differ now opens up a
topic too complicated to address here). One of his playful moves was to point
discreetly at a JAP (a “Jewish American Princess”—a subcategory, defined
by Jews at the time, that I do discuss elsewhere) who was walking nearby
and suddenly—with subversive irony, sotto voce and with mock-innocent furrowed
brow—say to me with mock curiosity, “Is she
Jewish?” He would do it so the woman wouldn’t necessarily see him and be
offended.
He allowed me
to playfully join him with some of this sort of joking—of course, not a whole
lot (it was all a complex area of “edgy taste”)—as I generally learned about
that joking approach from him (and from others at GW). Once, drawing or typing
on paper, I made a joke advertisement of my own obviously outlandish “fantasy”
of some kind of Jewish-related event—this playful flier (on its narrowly
technical side) took clues from how we building managers dealt in some way with
the manner in which programs were promoted at the MC. The flier just (not
following any MC standard), in a
clearly burlesque way, heaped on a lot of clichés about Jewish life that, one
would have thought at the time, couldn’t help but appear in jest. It included flung-around
terms such as “Borsht belt” and maybe seltzer
(I wish I could remember the “copy” more)—and Andy thought it was hysterical.
But my joining
him in joking about Jewish cultural styles and the like could have its limits
(which may have been a function of his being a bit moody at times). Later in
our relationship—to show how edgy we could be—he went along with (ironically,
somewhat affirmed) a playful comment that I made, that if he seemed like an anti-Semite who really loved Jews, I was an apparent philo-Semite who was
really an anti-Semite.
One other time
I made a joking comment that clearly was so satirical, it couldn’t be taken to heart, and it only-formally echoed some of the
daily work business we dealt with: “Andy [or maybe I called him by some
nickname such as we used], Adolf Hitler just called and wants all Jews out of
the building.” (In those days, such satire wasn’t so outrageous. There was a
fake, comic newspaper—Off the Wall Street
Journal—that was circulated in about 1984 in D.C., and I think elsewhere in
the country, that was written by satirists many of whom, to judge by their
names in the publication, were Jewish. It included such an article as something
on matters related to Ariel Sharon—this was only a couple years after the
controversy over his handling of the Sabra and Shatila [sp?] camps in Lebanon—where
it talked about Israel having an “Ashke-Nazi” party that was interested in
finding “lebensraum” on the West Bank, or such. Obviously, this would raise
major hackles among some today.)
We engaged in
witty jokes about passing items of interest—and some jokes not-so-witty: once
he thought it was hugely funny that we had come up with the idea in a playful
conversation that the Library of Congress was only for members of Congress to
take out books, as if it was their own private library. (Today a wide range of
people could lampoon Congress for being as baldly presuming, but in
specifically far more outrageous ways.)
We engaged in
playful word-riffs and had certain pet phrases—we were a little neurotic or
precious with this—some or most of which were derived from some of the verbal
mannerisms of one of our supervisors, the full-time staffer Wil DeGrasse (see
this Part; there, I have not elected to talk about Mr. D’s pet
verbal expressions; I also found from an early draft of this account on Andy that
Mr. D had been in the Navy).
Socializing outside work—when our times were best in
1984
Andy and I
socialized outside of work. I went to a few apartments he rented; one, actually
a cruddy old house in Arlington,
was infested with fleas. (I forget how they got there.) And once, in summer
1984, for a sort of day trip, we went to a farmhouse being rented by the
third-shift MC building manager, Zak Johnson (he is briefly mentioned here), who was an enterprising character and a friendly guy with a
not-too-bad subversive streak who could always be professionally serious when
it was needed. The farmhouse, a nice old place, was in the Virginia
countryside some miles west of Arlington
and had a cornfield nearby. Andy and I once walked through the cornfield, just
to see where our walk would lead us to (basically, you went to not much else
than more cornfield).
There were a
lot of fun times we had. The friendship seemed (on a subjective level) to last
a good while—I think it was (objectively) over a year and a half. (This was
longer than my friendship lasted with Randy Klemp, the 2002 draft of this says.
Today, I can’t fully remember how long the Randy friendship was—probably a
little over a year.) Andy and I went through the cycles of one full school
year, then part of another; and this period included similar cycles at the MC,
with the various demanding events for which we had to provide support, and the
changes in the building's schedule from busy season (the school year) to the
not-so-busy season (summer). We went through at least one summer there together
(1984), when the place was half a ghost ship and yet you still found ways to
make the job more than a matter of biding time in excruciating boredom or in
reading magazines, etc.
He was glad
for me, on some level, when I graduated in May 1984. He advised me to “glory in”
the occasion. He really had some generous warmth for me then.
Quirky, not-all-ominous sides to Andy
That he was a
character quickly enough became clear to some. Angie White, the worker at the
MC’s Information Desk (see Part 1; and Randy Klemp had known her better
than I), remarked to me that Andy would be walking along—then, she said, he’d
suddenly abruptly turn around and head off somewhere else—as if he’d remembered
something he had to tend to—all while reading what he had in his hand. As she
first described this, in an instant I could picture him in his characteristic “pose”
of walking to do his duty somewhere, at a relaxed pace, in his rather sloppy
semi-prep clothes, reading something (usually, I think, part of The New York Times) as he went—mystifying
me how he could read while walking through a sometimes moderately
people-cluttered building. (I never saw him read in the shower, as his obit says, but that sounds plausible.)
I knew what Angie
meant. Andy had those half-organized mental states. He was (very generally
speaking) like me in this, but I didn't freely or proudly own up to this. From
a longer-viewed perspective, our ways of developing competence were far
different, based in good part on background if not also character. (Minorly,
and said with warm humor, I didn't abruptly change course in walking somewhere,
as to be witnessed, quite as he did—at least in those days.)
Little
sidebar: This is rather clinical talk. And the
focus on personality issues, on a sort of fussy level, seems like the sort of
thing people in their twenties would be concerned with. You could also toss in
here, for fun, how this story—inevitably shaped by memory—may go hand in hand
with the kind of cultural assumptions that were current then, like the
drug-abuser component of that movie (featuring the “Brat Pack” of that time) St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), which I don’t
know if I fully saw, which had the dorky theme song written/performed by some
rocker (whose name escapes me) that included the harebrained lyric, “I can feel
the St. Elmo’s fire / burning in me!” If you knew what St. Elmo’s fire was, you
know that if you felt it burning in you,
you would have a curious case of swamp gas: St.
Elmo’s fire is the same as ignis
fatuus, a light caused by swamp gas that has some chemical interplay going
on where it gives off some light.
But anyway, I
was never finky to Andy about his being a character. I was loyal to him—to a
fault, as it would turn out. (One of his favorite locutions was “It turns out
that....”) I showed faith in him by being close friends of a sort despite our
differences—differences such as my reserve, and his more promiscuous (not to say sexual) way of having social
relations.
I almost never
confided in him the kind of medication I regularly used: but once, I finally
started to do this later in our friendship, by early 1985, and did so—if
naively—to try to show how I understood about grappling, as he needed to do,
with a severe neurotic problem or some such thing. In response, he said—with a
sort of composed, vaguely friendly-humorous tartness that was one of his
deviations from his usual friendliness with me—“I don’t want to know” or “I
haven’t the slightest interest,” or some such self-defense. Actually, for him
to be so aloof at that point (maybe January 1985) showed how the friendship was
on a downward trajectory, if a gradual and befogged one, at that point. (In
short, I thought, probably, that he
might benefit from taking a psychoactive medication. We’ll see in a future
entry the vivid background of why I did this.)
That was in
the days before Prozac and people being freer to talk about such meds and the
reasons they use them. Claims of nervous breakdowns are more freely tossed off
today (almost as to trivialize them, sometimes) than in the mid-1980s.
His trouble finishing with college, and the start of
his downturn
The following
is on the impressionistic and eulogistic side. The next two thirds of Andy’s
story, when they are posted, will focus things pretty incisively.
Andy
accumulated his college credits slowly: he took maybe two or three classes a
semester. He wasn’t taking classes fast enough to graduate in the foreseeable
future. I don’t know if he got especially low grades. He did get an A or B that
I was aware of; there also was an “incomplete” he got and then seemed slow, or
unapt, to rectify. He seemed warmer to an English-related class than to others,
and for this he once wrote a “book report” (as the professor apparently had
called it; I was amused it was referred to this grade-school way), which was
one of the items of work of his that I saw and that he found fun. In fact, he said
he liked in general to write such a “book report” because, as he explained, he
did them like the New York Times book
reviews. (He’s the one who got me interested in reading those reviews on a
regular basis, which I did for many years. Only the 2008 financial crisis has
slowed this practice of mine down.)
I remember pointedly
trying to help him study or do some paper (I don’t know if it was this same
book report); this situation was such as allowed it—I wasn’t being a noodge
with him. In general, he, in some “idealistic”
sense, wanted to finish college, but he couldn't do the work. This seemed
less a problem in 1983-84 than it was in 1984-85.
At some point,
in fall 1984 I think, his father visited GW, largely to speak with him in a big
effort to try to stave off the final unraveling of Andy’s school career—that
is, to get him to make a last strong effort to be serious about himself. (It’s
possible Andy had an “incomplete” and/or other inadequacies in his grades for
the 1984 spring semester, as the reason for this. I can’t remember if Andy had
taken a class in summer 1984.) On this visit, his father happened to greet me
(as it happened) at the MC’s game room, and he was generally genial to me. His
father even commented enthusiastically about The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth's novel that he saw I had been
reading: “You'll be so sad when it's over,” he said.
(Of all the
parents of people I’ve encountered who had the type of long-term psychological problem Andy
had, as we’ll discuss more later, his father was among the very most cordial.
Other parents, of young people I’ve run into problems with in media workplaces
in more recent years, have been distinctly cooler, but that is likely, I think,
because the “encounters” have usually been on the phone, which never allows for
as fair a quick assessment of you as meeting you in person; and the problems that
had arisen with the young coworkers were also far weirder—due to the problems’
ethically questionable intrusion on the workplace—and more apt to be presented
one-sidedly to their parents by the coworkers.)
Andy went with
his father to dinner that night—I can picture the scene at the game room: Andy
seemed resigned, slightly embarrassed...he seemed as if he knew that there
wasn't all a fun conversation ahead. There was a little more to the picture
than this, but you get an adequate idea.
Meanwhile, on
a more general level and as Andy had said (probably sometime in 1984), he felt that
I “had it together” or however he put it; in relation to what the conversation
was about, he thought I was composed and efficient, and, accordingly in some
general and “eminent” way, different from him. (Once, I think unrelated to
this, he spoke as if he thought I was from Connecticut—as if I was a standard-issue
preppie, I assume he meant. I was surprised he didn’t know I was from New
Jersey or hadn’t asked to know where I was from. This was a surprising deviation
in his way of being appropriately curious and interested in a friend.)
I tried to
help him study just to try to be a friend and, whenever this could tastefully
be done, to counsel him to get past the block to achieving his way through
college that he admitted was there. I wasn't condescending or smug, or nagging,
in my approach. (Once, showing how free we could be, and this could well have
not been in the context of my more serious “counseling,” in connection with his
freely, half self-conscious and joking reference to his “analyst,” which I
readily assumed was Freudian, I referred—in what might seem to you hypocritical
coolness—to his “psycho-babbulist.” In those days, Freudian analysis, on the
practical level, was considered quaint, and maybe extravagant for some people
to choose it as a therapeutic option for themselves. Freudianism was by no
means a main area of the very rich variety of psychology courses I had taken in
my major.)
Andy worked
well enough in the MC itself. He was a “functional” substance abuser, as the
more modern jargon would be. After all, in some sense, that job was not
terribly demanding in terms of work over time, but it did require enough
knowledge of the minutiae of managing and securing the building, as well as a
sense of responsibility, including in a building emergency. Andy took this job
as seriously as most other student assistant managers there—perhaps a little
more so, I would assume as a function of his older age.
The job could
also have long, sometimes very late hours, as when you had to stay to close up
after a late-running party or the like. The third shift was usually worked by
Zak Johnson alone (see Part 1 on Zak), but sometimes was filled by
a student when Zak was off or on vacation, and this shift was a relatively
trying thing of its own accord. Students usually worked that shift, if at all,
during vacations or the summer, when the school schedule didn't make it
prohibitive. Probably starting in very late 1984, Andy worked the third shift
more than any other student manager, and as it happened, as could only be
appreciated later, this was more as his academic career unraveled; his drug use
was part of the picture of this arrangement, as we’ll see.
One night, I
think sometime after he’d revealed his heroin use to me (which was no earlier
than fall or very late 1984), he worked a third shift and, in the morning, he
met me at the administrative office door by putting his head against my chest
and wimpering or such. (This might have been partly in response to a recent,
more-personal communication we’d had some hours previously.) He did this
spontaneously, a little surprisingly, but knew it would be accepted. He
probably had gone many hours without sleep, and I'm pretty sure he'd been on
drugs (heroin) overnight.
