by Guy Branum
* * *
1. In the Heat of the Night can go fuck itself.
2. Largely through the work of sitcom reruns, as we discussed in a previous chapter.
3. Telling a kid in 1967 to get into plastics isn’t morally empty, it’s just good advice.
4. Films of the latter half of the twentieth century are very certain that we should care about the ennui of straight white men. It’s like the only thing Woody Allen wrote about, other than fucking teenagers.
5. Behaving as though this quality is no longer true is not entirely accurate. I loved Jupiter Ascending and honestly thought Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets was pretty great, too.
6. Theta Xi, I believe.
7. As Lindy West notes in her masterful analysis of Ursula in Shrill, “History is written by the victors, so forgive me if I don’t trust some P90X sea king’s smear campaign against the radical fatty in the next grotto.”
8. If you don’t know what Mildred Pierce is about, I don’t know why you’re reading this book, but it’s a Joan Crawford movie about a lady who selflessly makes pies to give her daughter a better life, then her daughter fucks her boyfriend.
9. If you don’t know what Mommie Dearest is about, I don’t know why you’re reading this book, but it’s a Faye Dunaway movie about a Joan Crawford who selflessly makes women’s weepy films to give her daughter a better life, then her daughter writes a really mean book about her.
10. Not to be confused with the previously referenced Friends With Benefits, the other fuck-buddy rom-com staring a Black Swan cast member and featuring a bald, gay friend. Fuck-buddy rom-coms were the dueling lambada movies of 2011.
JOAN DIDION SLEPT HERE
LET’S BE HONEST, I went to college begrudgingly. Sure, I know, I’ve spent all of this book telling you how much I wanted to get out of Yuba City. Isn’t that supposed to be my liberation? The moment when everything gets fine and my story becomes boring and I’m rendered successful and self-assured and perfect: Isn’t this when I, like Oprah, become fixed?
No, because people are fundamentally dumb animals, and like dumb animals, we rarely accept what’s good for us.
I was mad at Berkeley because I did not get in to Stanford. That is why everyone goes to Berkeley. It is a state-funded second prize for overachievers who did not overachieve quite enough. I knew one person at Berkeley who’d gotten in to Stanford and still chose to go to Berkeley. I’m sure she regrets it to this day. Hell, Joan Didion didn’t get in to Stanford, and she invented California. It is my considered belief that not getting in to Stanford builds character.
There were other issues with going to college. First of all, no one I knew, except for my teachers, had done it. Second of all, it was a new life. I’d hungered for this life deeply. If popular culture had taught me anything, it was that going to college was a way to ensure you could become a person whose clothes never had roofing tar on them. But when actually presented with the opportunity to start my new, sophisticated life among people who would probably never run a trenching machine in their lives, I started to worry about how I was going to make friends.
I’d been obliged to make friends twice in my life: in first grade, when I switched schools, then in ninth grade, when I went to a different high school from most of the kids in my junior high. I hadn’t done well on either of those occasions. In first grade, the closest thing I had to friends was two girls who regularly cheated off my worksheets. As discussed above, being a chill-tight bro at the beginning of high school had been impaired by my growing sexual awakening and having to spend large amounts of time around my potential bros while they were naked. It’s hard to breezily chat with someone when you’re terrified that he saw you staring at his abs before football practice yesterday. And I was.1
So now I had the opportunity to make friends on my own terms, to be myself, finally, thank God. I could just be me. Unfortunately, I had no idea who me was.
Like, you’ve read this book. You get that me being “the smart one” was a key part of my identity. But I was not the smart one at Berkeley. No one is the anything one at Berkeley. There are 40,000 students. You’re at best one of the smart 3,600, and I wasn’t.
The truth, which you probably have been able to suss out, is that I was reasonably terrified of what it meant that I was no longer living in a prison of ignorance and almonds. Three hours of nonconsensual football practice a day may have made my life grueling, but it at least helped me avoid some questions. And I think you know which questions I mean.
Now that the external barriers were removed, the barriers that remained were mostly in my own head. If I were going to change my life, first I had to change my brain.
Since childhood, I’ve had an obsession with movies in which lives were transformed by education. Well, mostly Educating Rita. It was my first Pygmalion story, and every boy’s got a soft spot for his first. All I knew was that Siskel and Ebert had said that Educating Rita was good, and Siskel and Ebert were my real connection to the conventional wisdom of the coastal elites when I was nine. So, when I, a fourth-grader, saw the VHS at the video store, I tugged on my mom’s sleeve and asked her if I could watch the film adaptation of a beloved West End stage dramedy. She said yes, because she’s awesome, and we watched Educating Rita.
Educating Rita is about a working-class Liverpool hairdresser, Susan, who is dissatisfied with her life so starts calling herself Rita and enrolls in Britain’s Open University, a then new program to allow anyone free and easy distance-learning classes. Well, it’s mainly about her relationship with her professor, Frank, a jaded drunk who doesn’t understand why anyone would want to learn or pretend to be fancy. Rita runs headlong into this new life, and Frank teaches her but is an asshole. Of course, they kind of fall in love, but that’s not the point. The point is that Rita realizes the lives of the educated classes aren’t perfect, and Frank sees the richness of his education through someone else’s eyes. They learn from each other and grow, and then the movie ends with them acknowledging that and moving on to their new, separate lives.
That’s a lot of emotion for a probably-going-to-be-gay fourth-grader to handle. The ending made me feel a mix of happy and sad I’d never felt before. The film loomed large in my mind, and as time went on and I was exposed to My Fair Lady, Never on Sunday, Born Yesterday, and even Trading Places and, God help me, Back to School. I was drawn to comedies that centered on education leading to liberty, which made the protagonist’s life . . . not better, not just better, but bigger.
There’s a moment at the beginning of Educating Rita when Rita/Susan is going to her professor’s office for the first time. She passes a group of young, regular university students who are making fun of someone for not knowing what “assonance” is. A brief, pensive look washes over Susan’s2 face. These students are mocking someone as a moron for not knowing what this word is, and she doesn’t know what it is. Susan has to wonder if she’s a moron, and Rita cannot be a moron.
That look was my life. You know that by now. That look was my first seventeen years. That look isn’t about education. That look is about class. We know what assonance3 is, and we know it doesn’t matter. We know that Rita knows thirty songs with good examples of assonance, and if you asked her what made the songs good, she’d be able to identify “all the words have that same ‘oo’ sound in them.”4 What Rita is trying to negotiate in Thatcher’s stratified but purportedly meritocratic Britain is a litany of shibboleths5 that will mark her as a person unworthy of note, along with the ability to speak the language that her betters use to discuss their management of her world.
I wasn’t trying to learn things because learning is noble. I was trying to learn things so I couldn’t be quite as easily turned into an economic cog as my parents had been. And their parents, and all of my ancestors back to working-class, lunch-bucket primordial ooze.
Because what I wanted wasn’t to be smart—I mean, I wanted that, but it was part of a larger idea. I wanted to succeed. I wanted
to be respectable. I wanted the centuries of dirt hosed off my genes and to know that I wasn’t someone whose life was being controlled by distant other people who barely knew I existed.
I had never seen anyone do it, and I didn’t precisely know how I was going to. “Get in to a good college” was the step that television had been telling me for decades. I had only moderately succeeded at that. Now what?
Well, one answer is “Get good grades.” I didn’t. I got okay grades. My first semester, my mom told me to take an unusually large course load. “You don’t have a job. You can handle it.” I got behind on reading, I missed morning classes, and by the end of the semester, I had a mix of A’s and B’s. I was proud of myself. My mom was unimpressed. I’d brought her nothing but A’s while I was in high school. She wasn’t happy. I was at a top-flight research university, expected to work at a caliber I never had before; I was taking way too many classes; and I was having to do my own laundry for the first time in my life. Perfection wasn’t going to happen. She thought I was just being lazy, and I did, too. I slunk into a funk,6 and my grades got worse.
Another way to “succeed” is to do something empirically noteworthy in an extracurricular activity. I did not, at this point in time, understand that extracurricular activities at Berkeley did not matter. With the exception of NCAA sports, no one really gives a shit what you do after classes. This isn’t the Ivy League, with touring a capella groups or all-male musical theater troupes. It’s a state-run public research university. If you want someone to care about your hobby, your hobby has to be curing lymphoma.
The practical effect was that I spent the better part of my first two years at Berkeley obsessed with student government. For someone who’d obsessively studied parliamentary procedure in high school, the idea of an actual student senate running according to parliamentary rules, governing the student activities fees of forty thousand students, was intoxicating. That’s what seems interesting when you have yet to taste a dick.
My freshman year, I interned for the president of the student government. He was at least moderately corrupt and appointed me to three or four moderately powerful university committees for which I was in no way qualified or valuable, just in case he needed to pull a string. From the foot soldiers of his moderately evil administration, I learned the rules of student politics at Berkeley. There was, for some reason, a highly sophisticated and stable system of student parties at Berkeley: First was a vaguely moderate party run by and for nice, privileged kids from the suburbs. While I was there, it was called the Coalition, and it actually consisted of several sub-parties that pandered to specific sub-constituencies: Asians, STEM students, members of the Greek system, and people who lived in the dorms. Then there was a deeply leftist, no-white-straight-males-need-apply party steeped in Marxism and revolution. Then there were several niche parties, including one representing the far-right students on campus, and one from the campus humor paper. Many of these parties had existed for decades, and no one at Berkeley knew they existed except the student government dorks and any fool sad enough to be fucking one of them.
At this time I still identified as a Republican. My parents were Republicans; George H. W. Bush seemed nice; Rush Limbaugh made long car rides with my dad more interesting; and Margaret Thatcher was dashing and impressive. I mean, I can’t really behave as though I was just a naive idiot who hadn’t thought about these things, since I’ve spent much of this book bragging about how I thought about everything always. My understanding of politics was deeply rooted in Thatcher’s idea that it’s better to create a world where people choose to be good rather than are compelled to be good. There was a lot of stuff I hadn’t thought about, but mainly, I was wrapping myself in Republicanism to have one quality my dad would approve of. I was Republican in the way you like the Kansas City Royals or are Catholic.
This meant that at Berkeley, I would instinctively side with the Coalition. I even joined Berkeley College Republicans. Then I actually met them. They were all rich kids from L.A. or Orange County whose conservatism was rooted in the idea that they didn’t want their dad’s plastic surgeon income taxed too highly so they could afford a new beach house. They shouldn’t have been at Berkeley.
Anyhoo, my first year I ran for student senate with this party of frat boys and engineers, and I’d done absolutely nothing to make myself popular or interesting, so I lost miserably. I got really sad. Around the time of the voting, Nixon had died, and I may very well have said, “They won’t have Guy to kick around anymore” in my head. (This was working from the false assumption that anyone cared about me enough to kick me around.)
But this misguided run for office did have two significant externalities. The first is that it was the first time I’d spent time with gays my age. They were, of course, candidates for the opposing party, so most of our interaction involved yelling at each other and tearing signs down in the still of night, but seeing gay men who were actual people, not caricatures written by straight men for film or TV, was shocking to my mind. I kept wondering, had they played with G.I. Joes when they were young? Did they like swords? It’s ridiculous in so many ways, not the least of which is that I had no fear or even awareness that I might read as suuuuper-gay to these other gay guys. I was lusting after boys constantly, but I refused to understand how that made me gay. Meeting real gay guys, however, forced me to start accepting that gay men were not sinister, effeminate creatures of the night. I guess this maturation was a good thing, but I kind of miss seeing all gay men as inhuman incubi—it was sexier that way.
The other thing that came from running for office was chalking. Twenty years ago, when you ran for student government at Berkeley, you were supposed to go out at night and write ads for yourself on concrete all around campus. An enthusiastic, diligent campaigner was working from dusk until dawn, we were told, and I was willing to be that campaigner, regardless of what it meant for my grades. However much I may have rejected my father’s teachings, I was deeply invested in his work ethic.7 Like, not in practice—I was mostly super-lazy—but I liked the idea of working hard. Chalking sidewalks was exactly the sort of thing that felt like work but was really just a nice waste of time.
We all know I lost, but I did get a lot of positive feedback on my chalking. Not for its artistic merit but for its wit. My slogan was the simple and alliterative “Guy is Good,” so I tried to connect it to things around campus. Next to our campus bell tower I wrote, “Clocks are Good. Guy is Good.” Outside of Café Strada, across the street from campus, I wrote, “Strada is Good, Eric Estrada8 is Good, Guy is Good.” I didn’t win, but people told me I was funny, and I liked being told I was funny.
The following year, despite my assurances to politics that it would not have me to kick around anymore, I wanted revenge. I had seen the process play out, a couple of popular rich kids from one side win, a couple of shouty politicos of color from the other side win, and a couple of randos slide in. Those randos were the interesting part: They were nearly a third of the senate, and there were always one or two from the campus humor paper, The Heuristic Squelch.
Every college campus has a humor paper, and all of them call themselves “Tulane’s Version of The Harvard Lampoon” or whatever. Since I am someone who, as a professional comedy writer, has spent more than enough time with alumni of The Harvard Lampoon,9 I can assure you that they cannot roll their eyes enough at assertions such as this. While they will, among themselves, admit that the Lampoon is a work of adolescent mediocrity that barely manages to print four times a year, if you ever dared to assert that your humor paper from the University of Florida were remotely similar, they would act as though you were conflating angels and insects, then tell you about a very amusing A. S. Byatt joke that they included in the Fall 2009 edition of the Lampoon.
So let us not curry ire by making any such dramatic comparisons. Instead I will say that The Heuristic Squelch was Berkeley’s version of the Florida State Eggplant.10 In their antiestablishment, nihilistic comedy tear, they’d starte
d a habit of running a slate of candidates for student office every year, and always getting a few elected. They would talk a lot of shit at senate meetings but usually end up being responsible, good kids who tried to help the university community. I realized that one way of getting in to the senate would be to join the Squelch.
I didn’t do that. Ironically, for someone who spent his adolescent years loving running for office, I have a general assumption that no one will like me. I was certain that joining the Squelch would just result in awkward group politics; plus, I had a real fear of the kind of upper-middle-class Southern California gentry who populated Berkeley’s least responsible diversions. I didn’t trust myself to mix well with them.
I decided to do them one better. I was going to run for senate on my own humor platform. Specifically, I registered a party called Cal Undergraduate Masturbators (the CUM party) and established a platform to make the campus more attentive to the needs of students indulging in self-love. My victory was resounding.
I also spent the spring running the campaign of Jeff Cohen, the guy who played Chunk in The Goonies, for president of the student government. He was the biggest, most dazzling star our school had ever seen.11 He was an RA, football mascot, rugby player, and cultural icon. He wanted to Schwarzenegger that popularity into political respectability. He noticed me hanging around the student government building a little too much and asked me to be his campaign manager. He’d created a mainstream center-left party to partner up with the radical leftists of Cal-Serve, and we’d all had a nice victory and were in solid control of student government. Then, like a week into his administration, I got in a fight with him and quit as his chief of staff. We eventually made up, and he is now my entertainment lawyer.