Slow to Grow

  Chapter 10

  The University had a healthy fraternity and sorority scene that held zero interest to Lloyd. He may have been a self esteem lacking, twerpy, sad sack, lonesome, homesick stick figured virgin, but a sheep he was not. That is how he viewed the fraternity scene, a lot of frothed mouth misogynists acting in a homoerotic fashion. Sort of like organized religion.

  There was one Jewish sorority. But, uh, the less said the better.

  There were two Jewish frats on campus and....whoa, whoa, whoa, did you just say frat, tough guy?

  Uh yeah, what=s the problem?

  Uh do you call your country, cunt? I DIDN=T THINK SO.

  Uh, sorry about that, uh, anyhow, the two Jewish fraternities were distinct in their personalities. One was made up of the studious, nerdy jews, (now there is a redundancy if I ever saw one), and the other was the tough guy Jew house (an obvious oxymoron.)

  They recruited Lloyd=s dorm rather heavily but somehow never tried to get him to pledge. He took that as an honor, like there was some list with all of the new Jews on campus and he was not on it. Maybe it was the Kulligan that threw them off. He was glad not to have to deal with any of that.

  He had heard rumors that as part of the hazing they were forced to shove a ham up their ass as some sort of Jewish blasphemy. Probably untrue, but he always wondered what hazing would constitute in a Jewish fraternity.

  Make them not study for two days? Uncurl their jewfros? Make them mow their own lawn? He never would find out.

  He was making a few friends on his own, and slowly but surely began breaking out of his shell that he had unknowingly built to protect himself during his high school years.

  For every day of his high school career he had worn gym shoes. In college he started to wear loafers. It was a veritable Pygmalion make over. He changed shoes! Well to Lloyd it was. He felt that every single move he made in high school was scrutinized, though the truth was far tamer. Nobody gave a shit. It=s an interesting dynamic with those with low self esteem. They think everyone is judging them, which is pretty arrogant if you think about it.

  He literally would think he would get made fun of in high school for wearing loafers instead of gym shoes. Same with blue jeans. He bought a black pair that he wore at college. It was an awakening, in regards to his self awareness. He felt no one would mock him for anything anymore. This was college, where people were freethinkers and unjudgmental.

  He was starting to adjust to life on his own, in fact he was only calling home twice a day by mid semester! Mark was dating Lana and wasn=t around much and Lloyd had latched onto another pretty boy named Clay. Women fawned all over him and his long hair. He was a soccer player with a good sense of humor. So far Lloyd had not reaped any benefits of hanging around Mark, and this friendship with Clay would also prove fruitless. But it did bring women into his personal space and that was better than nothing. It wasn=t calculated that Lloyd was drawn to these handsome guys but it might have been done subconsciously. He wasn=t gay, but he liked having a front row seat for what it was like to actually attract woman as opposed to repelling them.

  One night they were playing quarters with one such girl who had a crush on Clay. Unbeknownst to her, Clay and Lloyd had filled their beer cans with water and watched in glee as she got wasted. Though that reads like a lead in to date rape, it was not. She was slurring her words and finally let loose that she thought Clay was cute. She apparently felt bad for Lloyd and said he was nice, like her brother. She pulled down her shirt and showed her right tit and then puked under the table. His first live tit ever. Score!

  Clay was a townie and grew up in Lawrence, where the University was located, and he had a lot of lowlife friends in the area. One night three of them met up with Lloyd and Clay for dinner at a local diner. They had all planned to dine and ditch before going, which they murmured at the table, so Lloyd didn=t order anything. And then he started panicking, like how the getaway driver in a murder is still charged with murder. He should of gotten up and left, but he didn=t. He was nervous the whole meal. Finally, when everyone was done eating, the other four literally jumped up and ran out the front door. Lloyd didn=t know what to do and was a few steps behind them. The owner tried to stop him but he said he didn=t eat anything and ran out the door. They were all gone, they had ran to their car and took off without him. Those dicks. Lloyd saw the owner come storming out of the restaurant and he ran off into the woods. He climbed up a tree and hid there for about two hours. He always figured people searching for someone in a forest would never look up, and that was his theory and he was sticking with it. At one point he saw a police dog run by him. He knew he was dead meat. Though in retrospect the dog looked like a wolf and there was no officer with him. When it was dark enough, he snuck out and walked the two miles back to the dorm. He was so pissed at Clay for leaving him, until he found out that they were all pulled over by the cops, someone had got their plate number, and given citations for dining and ditching.

  The next day, Clay=s friends told Lloyd that he needed to go to the police station and turn himself in, that it would make it easier for the rest of them. Being the pushover that he was, he agreed, even though he hadn=t ate anything and wasn=t a part of it at all. They drove him to the station and as he was walking up the stairs to confess, he thought, Awhat the fuck am I doing?@ And went back downstairs.

  To this day he doesn=t know if they were just fucking with him, or had sold him out. He wondered if the cops would laugh him out of the station or arrest him. Anyhow, he wasn=t friends with Clay after that. He flunked out anyway after freshman year and Lloyd never saw him again.

  As his Freshman year progressed it was becoming clear to Lloyd that he wasn=t going to get anywhere with any woman. He may have loosened up on the outside, but on the inside he was as insecure as he had ever been. But there were so many good looking girls in the dorm. This wasn=t like high school, maybe seeing them in one class here, one there, they were there all the time. Everywhere around him people were getting laid. Ugly guys, fat girls, Pretty boys, hot girls, people were hooking up across the board. And there he sat on the outside looking in. At least he had his Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue pictures.

  He had a special blanked tucked away in his closet. He had pasted Elle Macpherson=s face on it and cut a hole in it where her mouth was. Yeah.

  So, one time he was plowing away on his blanket envisioning Elle Macpherson pleasuring him, when Joel burst threw the door and immediately started laughing. Lloyd was busted. He was stark naked and pounding away on his blanky.

  Mark never let him hear the end of it. They started to call his blanket Elle. How is Elle doing there Lloyd, she a good blow? Don=t forget his sister=s name was Ellen, too, and the family called her El. Paging Dr. Freud!!!

  Sometimes he wished he were a Eunuch. Though he pretty much was, if you think about it.

  And there were all these pretty girls taunting him with their tight bodies and pretty faces at every corner. They were on every floor, in every break room, every class, everywhere. Walking on campus was intoxicating, exhilarating, exciting and depressing all wrapped up in a giant ball of suck. He was a twitching ball of creepiness and desperation.

  The prettiest of them all was a girl named Annie. She lived in the dorm and was gorgeous with an unbelievable figure. He would just stare and stare at her. In the dining hall, she would look up from her table and he would be staring, transfixed. It had to be as creepy as Jeffrey Dahmer. But he remembered what had happened with Miverva, the girl from high school who told him his breath stunk like onions, so he kept his respectful distance.

  His lack of interaction with ladies also hindered him in other ways. Many times kids would gather in a room and get drunk and play sex games. Not actual sex itself, but verbal ones like, I Never or Truth or Dare. I never involved one person mentioning any particular sex act they had engaged in, and if someone else had also partaken in that particular proclivity they would have to drink.

  So if someone said,
I never had sex outside or something, someone who did would have to drink. Lloyd would be the soberest person in the room at the end of the night. He didn=t know why he even stuck around, maybe just to whine about never having done any of the things. One time it was Mark=s turn, and he said, A I never cut a hole in my blanket and put a picture of a supermodel on it and pretending it was giving me head.@

  Everyone tittered and looked at Lloyd. Being the good sport and pushover that he was, he drank.

  Only in later years did he figure out that everyone was lying about their sexual past and he probably should of faked it with the rest of them

  .

  One day he was introduced to a rather unattractive girl named Susan, whom he knew as Annie=s roommate. Of course he did. Maybe he could get to know her through her, he thought, in one of his lucid moments before the self doubt and self loathing could seep in. He wasn=t intimidated by ugly girls, like they weren=t worthy of his creepiness or something, so he wasn=t nervous around them. As he was about to introduce himself to her, she interrupted and said, AI know you, you are the guy who=s always staring at my roommate. You are pretty creepy.@

  He said AAnd you have an assface@ and left the room.

  He was always surprised to get busted on stuff like that. In his mind he was invisible and it shocked him to think he was noticed, no matter the circumstances. He was just an observer, an outsider to his own life. Kissing a girl seemed liked it was never going to happen, Sex? He would probably die of a heart attack if it even presented itself. It was like the world around him was a pet store or zoo and he had to stare from behind the glass at all the pussy.

  Oh, and assface was a pretty apt description of her. An assface is where it looks like a pair of eyes, nose and mouth are plastered on to an ass. Like butt. That sort of ass. The cheeks hang like butt cheeks. Hence ass face. Case closed.

  His was an odd existence. He was making some friends, but still desperately homesick, and making zero inroads on actually making physical contact with the opposite sex. He almost didn=t blame himself for the predicament, as if it was out of his control. In truth that gave him a partial excuse not to even try, he would think that if it was meant to happen it would have already. It wasn=t and it wouldn=t. Not for a long while.

  While not exactly excelling as a student, he was intrigued with his English Literature class and actually began reading some of the books, as opposed to buying the cliff notes. Ha, cliff notes. For you youngsters, the internet did not exist back in the Dark Ages of the 1980's. If it had Lloyd would no doubt have been kicked out of school for some sort of plagiarism.

  He felt very collegiate reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, with her suicidal heroine, Esther floating in the ocean debating whether to kill herself. He also enjoyed the Awakening by Kate Chopin. Her protagonist Edna comes to find that she is bored with her life and has an affair and leaves her family, with her Aawakening@ involving her going off on a search to find herself. That resonated with Lloyd. Was college going to be his awakening? He hoped so, if he could make it through his homesickness, I mean come on, he was wearing cool loafers and khakis instead of gym shoes and jeans, it was The Awakening circa 1986!

  In the end, though, Edna realizes she has lost everything and swims off into the ocean and dies. Just like the Bell Jar. Except in the Bell Jar, Esther tries to kill herself but chickens out and swims back. That was Lloyd, College was his ocean. Was he going to sink or swim?

  Though Sylvia Plath did stick her head in an oven right after the book was published. So, who knows.

  But the book that had the most influence on him was The Stranger by Albert Camus. Set in France, the book begins with the lead character Mersault not showing any emotion at his mother=s funeral. It sets the tone that he is an odd guy with a severe lack of expression and foreword thought. In the middle of the book he commits a senseless murder without really putting much thought into it. Ultimately he is convicted and sentenced to death on the grounds that he didn=t cry at his mother=s funeral. But the book was really about Mersault and his oddness.

  Mersault probably had Aspergers or Autism or something. Stupid French Vaccines. His indifference from society and his turning his back on religion really struck a chord with Lloyd. Camus once said, "What is absurd is the confrontation between the sense of the irrational and the overwhelming desire for clarity which resounds in the depths of man." Lloyd learned in class that Camus did not believe in a world with absolute and/or divine forces such as God or an afterlife. In his world, when one died, that was all. Camus also said that Athus, the striving by the majority of humans to make their lives meaningful in the face of God was absurd. It was a journey by which Camus is immensely intrigued. As was Lloyd.

  The book really touched on some aspects that Lloyd wasn=t himself able to verbalize but personified him. When Mersault is in his prison cell a priest visits him. AHe was waving his crucifix almost directly over my head. (2.1.10) [Y] drawing himself up to his full height and ask[ed] ... me if I believed in God. I said no. He sat down indignantly. He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless. "Do you want my life to be meaningless?" He shouted. As far as I could see, it didn=t have anything to do with me, and I told him so. But from across the table he had already thrust the crucifix in my face and was screaming irrationally, "I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive you your sins. How can you not believe that He suffered for you. Then he looked at me closely and with a little ... sadness in his face. In a low voice he said, "I have never seen a soul as hardened as yours. The criminals who have come before me have always wept at the sight of his image of suffering." I was about to say that was precisely because they were criminals. But then I realized that I was one too. It was an idea I couldn=t get used to. (2.1.12)@

  Lloyd listened intently as his teacher explained Meursault=s motives. APer Existentialism, Destiny is responsibility for one's actions and their consequences, because one has free will; Truth is in being consistently honest and direct; despite being judged amoral. Throughout the book, Meursault is impassive and accepts the destiny that comes to him. While Meursault takes "responsibility" for his actions by accepting the consequences, the motivating philosophy alters the actual intent. In the end, Meursault realizes that everyone's life ends with death. By accepting this, he also figures that the life one leads and the manner of one's death are completely irrelevant. Death is the permanent end. Illustrating this, Meursault never displays emotions he does not feel, nor participates in social conventions requiring emotional dishonesty. Although grief is the normal, socially acceptable response, he does not openly grieve at his mother's funeral, but his incorruptible honesty assumes a naive dimension in his murder trial when he questions the need for a defense lawyer, claiming that the truth should speak for itself.@

  Way deep stuff for Lloyd, and he liked it. It was his Awakening.

  AAm I an existentialist?@ Lloyd wondered. Typical idealistic college blather. But it seemed immensely important at the time.

  Mark was raised Catholic, and his mother was deeply religious. But he was like Lloyd, and they would have what they thought were deep conversations, but were in reality dime store college kid ephemeral claptrap.

  ASo, we are supposed to believe that if you pray hard enough, God will answer your prayers. Well he is an egotistical son of a bitch then, isn=t he,@ said Lloyd affecting a wishy washy yet condescending voice. AI will grant your prayer, but only if you ask nice. What a bunch of crap. In The Stranger, religion never played a role in Meursault=s life and supposedly he was too stubborn to try and be open-minded about the whole thing. Why should he be, I think he was right. You could even say Meursault was blind in a sense that he never opened up so that he could get along with others. He always saw life in a totally different perspective than everyone else and could never be rationed with...@, Lloyd patronizingly pontificated.

  Mark interrupted him, obviously
bored with the topic. He had never read The Stranger and didn=t care, but told Lloyd he had heard of the technique. Lloyd looked at him quizzically, and asked him what technique he was talking about. Mark explained that if you sit on your hand until it becomes numb, you can masturbate yourself and it feels like someone else is doing it.

  Lloyd was deeply intrigued and set about trying the maneuver. He sat on his hand for about five minutes and it only got a little tingly.

  He got off the elevator and headed to his room, but just as he was about to go in he heard some noises coming from the room across the hall, Paige and Helena=s room, the two transfer students from Finland. It sounded like screaming, and Lloyd peered through the open door. They were on the bed together giggling and roaming each other=s bodies with their hands. Lloyd accidentally made the door creak, and they stopped suddenly, scared at being caught, but intrigued by who was at the door. Paige pulled up her white panties and yelled at Lloyd and called him a pervert and a creep. He turned back to his room, but Paige yanked him back in and threw him on the bed next to Helena who had removed her Cubs Jersey. He touched her inner thigh and she smiled, he then grabbed his throbbing member and started cranking away...

  It was hard to move and it flopped onto his lap and tried to flail away. He couldn=t grasp Lloyd Jr. very firmly and found the whole experience wanting, until he caught Elle=s eyes coyly cooing at him from the closet. And all was well in the world. A Stranger, indeed.