I'm Back for More Cash

by Tony Kornheiser

  This is meant to make parents feel better when their kid winds up in some unaccredited two-year school, majoring in badminton or plumbing supplies. But who’s kidding who? Have you noticed the top of the political tickets? George Bush, Yale; Al Gore, Harvard; Joe Lieberman, Yale; Dick Cheney, Yale. Thank God for diversity.

  But you’d have to be a dope to miss the message. Recruiters from Dartmouth, Amherst, and Stanford can go on for hours about the superb quality of education at their joints, but, hey, if you can’t provide a shot at a national ticket, what good are you? If I were a high school senior and I saw I couldn’t get into Harvard or Yale, I wouldn’t crack open up another book until I got a job as a cashier at Barnes & Noble. I’d withdraw all my applications, find me a party school, and let the bons temps rouler.

  We divided the labor on our trip. Elizabeth visited the schools. And Michael and I played golf. That’s how I hoped she’d pick a college—by the quality of golf courses nearby. If they were topnotch, I might be inclined to visit her. I assured her that since I was going to pay her tuition regardless of what she decided, there was no point in me actually seeing each school. I told her the only thing that mattered about college was ingratiating yourself with the rich kids.

  “Is there anything in particular you want me to look for in a college?” she asked.

  “Wide-open fairways and not too much water,” I said.

  While Lizzie toured Cornell, we played golf at a Robert Trent Jones course on the Cornell campus. (The famous golf course architect was an undergraduate there.) While she toured Colgate, we played at a Trent Jones course on the Colgate campus. While Lizzie toured Trinity College in Hartford, we played the tour course where the pros play the Greater Hartford Open. And while she toured Connecticut College in New London, Michael and I played a Donald Ross course in Waterbury. I was so inspired, I suggested she consider going to the University of California at Pebble Beach.

  All in all, it was a very successful trip. Elizabeth found that in general she liked small colleges a lot more than she thought she would. And I learned to hit a flop shot with a lob wedge.

  I’m not quite sure how Lizzie felt about each individual college, since our conversations were somewhat limited. For example, I would ask her, “Did you like the school today?” And she would say something that sounded like, “Unnnnuuuhh.” And I’d be left standing there wondering if she’d actually answered my question or simply belched.

  “Do you think you could go into some more detail?” I’d ask.

  “Your questions are so annoying, Dad. Do you spend hours thinking them up?”

  I would then point out that I was simply asking if she liked the school—something I felt I had a right to know, since room, board, and tuition for just one year were going to cost me more than I had paid for the first house I bought. And at least that had resale value. What’s a non-Harvard or Yale diploma worth these days? You’ll be lucky to wind up with one of those dopey jobs nobody cares about, like secretary of commerce.

  But by then, of course, she had tuned me out completely. I may as well have been Al Gore.

  I expect to have a much better rapport with Michael when he takes his college tour three years from now. On Michael’s college tour, there won’t be any point in me asking him anything about the schools we visit, because he won’t even see them. We can agree right now on where he’s going to college: somewhere on a main road, like I-95 in Florida, at the University of Miami, Doral Campus.

  Hey, They’re Already Experimenting, Bub

  My sweet baboo Elizabeth is going away to college next fall, and her high school recently held a meeting for seniors and their parents. Its purpose was to smooth out the kids’ transition from living at home with Mom and Dad to living at college. I went to college in the ‘60s, and looking back I wish someone had given me advice on critical college issues, such as how to take care of money, how to budget my time, and how to keep a hash pipe lit while having sex with the dorm proctor’s girlfriend. (Whoa! Some demon must be inhabiting my body. Nothing like that ever happened to me. I spent all my time in the library. If you’re reading this, Lizzie, I was in the library.)

  The meeting featured a psychologist, who told parents: Give your kids freedom in their senior year. That way, if they make mistakes, you can help them through the rough spots—because next year you won’t be around to help. (That is, until spring semester, after your kid flunks out, comes home, and lies on the couch all day watching MTV and eating cheese fries.)

  I couldn’t attend the meeting myself. I was in the library. But my peeps were there. They brought back the psychologist’s specific recommendations:

  1. Stop waking your child up in the morning.

  2. Give your child a credit card.

  3. Don’t give them a curfew.

  4. Stop paying their parking tickets and library fines. (“Library fines”? Oh, please. Like my child has been in a library since seventh grade. The only way she’d walk into a library is if it advertised “Free body piercing.”)

  So let’s review:

  I should stop waking my child up in the morning?

  I tried that the next day. Here’s what happened: She slept until 5 P.M. She missed school altogether. I asked her why she bothered to get up at five. Why not sleep through? She said she didn’t want to miss dinner. I said, “What do you think this is, the night flight to Paris?”

  I have two teenagers at home. They are capable of sleeping through nuclear war. What do you mean, don’t wake them up? If I don’t wake her up, she will sleep through college.

  And I shouldn’t give her a curfew? If she can’t wake up in the morning now, what’ll it be like if she can straggle in at dawn? Besides, we’re not open all night. I’m not running Mel’s Diner.

  I don’t care if there’s no curfew in college next year. Next year I won’t be waiting up for her, pacing, wondering what sort of deadbeat she’s out with. The curfew isn’t for her. It’s for me. I want to get some sleep.

  And, come on, “give her a credit card”? This psychologist got his diploma where, Visa University? For her to get a credit card, I have to co-sign for it. I’m obliged to pay off her charges. Do you have any idea what kind of bill an eighteen-year-old girl can run up? Her hair products alone weigh over sixty pounds and cost more than a pardon for a millionaire fugitive. And let me tell you about her shoes. It’s like I’m living with Imelda Marcos. I open up my kid’s closet, I’m surprised Cole and Haan don’t fall out.

  The psychologist says: Your kids are going to be independent next fall anyway, so let them start experimenting now.

  By that logic, why not let the kid sitting in 22B fly the plane? I mean, he wants to be a pilot someday. Let’s give him a chance to make some mistakes now, with you in 22C.

  Does it ever occur to psychologists that the reason we are paying through the nose to send our kids to some distant campus is so that when they do “keg stand”—where you place your lips over the nozzle of a keg of beer, and a few of your pals lift you up and hold you upside down by your ankles, then open the tap, ka-blooey!—it won’t be our carpets they barf on?

  When I was eighteen I was a sophomore in college. There are three words for what would’ve happened to me if all the stuff I did in college I’d done in high school instead. Those words are: “Massanutten Military Academy.”

  Finally, everyone was asked to write down the best and worst aspects about kids going to college. Parents expressed sadness at setting one less plate at dinner. (My reaction: Some families have dinner together? With their own kids, or kids they rent? I’d have more success getting Barbra Streisand to perform another last-ever concert at my dinner table—then wash the dishes before she left.) On the plus side, parents look forward to having sex after their kids leave for college. (My reaction: Sex? Like with another person? I’ll be happy just to have my own bathroom.)

  The kids’ main anxiety was drawing a loser roommate; you know, someone who might study. But they were overjoyed at the prospect of having
sex, drugs, and alcohol whenever they wanted. (Obviously I was thrilled to hear that. Who wouldn’t want to cough up $30,000 a year in tuition so their child could go to Temptation Island?)

  Parents and children were also asked what their farewell words would be. The parents revealed deep emotion: “We love you.” “We’ll miss you.” “We’ll keep your room just as it is.” “We have faith in you.” The sentiments were very caring. Even the parent who wrote, “Don’t flunk out, dear; that’s what your brother did, and now he’s working at Jiffy Lube” clearly meant it with great affection.

  The kids saw the farewell as an opportunity to get something off their chests, then disappear for four months. My favorites were: “That money you had stashed in a shoe box in the closet? I hope you weren’t saving it for like a kidney operation or something.” “Um, the dog didn’t exactly run away.” “In retrospect, I may not have told the complete truth about her parents being home.” “I don’t trust you, so I’ve padlocked my room.”

  And then there was this one: “Don’t worry, Dad, I won’t get a tattoo. At least not first semester.”

  Ah, I’d recognize my child anywhere.

  The Commencement Redress

  Because my sweet baboo is graduating from high school this week I thought I might be asked to deliver the commencement address.

  I did it once before, and I was a rousing success—especially when I offered congratulations to “the graduates of St. Michael’s,” and the school was actually named St. Matthew’s. Okay, I made a mistake. But as I told them, “There’s a lesson in this for all of us. The lesson is: This is what happens when you don’t pay your graduation speaker.”

  It turns out I won’t be making graduation remarks this year. In a foolish moment, one they’ll regret during the fall fund drive for years to come, Maret School got some nobody to take my place. I don’t even know why I’m mentioning his name. Ted Kennedy.

  Not that I’m bitter. But let me say I won’t be at all shocked if he steers clear of a real meaty topic like “Is Maret’s Mystery Burger made from mad cow?” (“Steers” clear, “meaty,” get it? God, I’m funny! Those people don’t know what they’re missing.), and he concentrates on something a little less controversial, like “Contour Plowing in the Next Century.”

  Actually, a graduation address is a perfect place for that Kennedy fellow to show off his wide-ranging grasp of important issues that face us as a nation. With his decades of distinguished public service, he could really send these young people off with purpose, dedication, and direction. But isn’t that overrated? I mean, really, who cares? My advice to the graduates would have been, “Who do I look like? Ted Kennedy? Hey, figure it out yourselves.”

  I wasn’t going to make a speech, per se. But if I did, I’d have sprinkled it with a huge wad o’ cultured foreign phrases like “per se” and “up the ying-yang.” And I’d have thrown in some of them brilliant insights I’m famous for, such as, “I know graduation can be a frightening time. But remember, boys and goils, the word ‘commencement’ does not mean ending. Rather, it has its origin in an Old French word meaning “to cough up something bluish green.’ ”

  I intended to confine my remarks to practical advice gleaned from my hard-won experience. Like: “On job applications, when it asks you to list ‘personal achievements,’ do not write ‘got my tongue and nipples pierced.’ ”

  Stuff like that.

  Ah, what the heck. I might as well let you hear the rest.

  “Graduates, faculty, parents, and honored guests:

  “As the proud father of a graduate myself, I know I speak for all the parents here when I say to each and every graduate: ‘Clean up your room. It’s a pig sty. And believe me, the day you leave for college I’m going in there with a shovel.’

  “I have been asked to say a few words about what I’ve learned in my life. Here it is: Don’t make the same mistake I did. I waited too long to buy a gas grill. Other than that my life’s been pretty good.

  “Except for my senior prom. If I had it to do over again, this time I’d take a hooker. I hear hookers are terrific dancers.

  “My senior prom was a disaster. Carrie had a better time than I did. Carrie’s classmates had a better time than I did.

  “The girl I wanted to ask didn’t think of me in ‘that’ way; she thought of me in ‘this’ way: a cross between the most annoying person she actually knew—and Jerry Springer.

  “There was one girl who liked me a lot, and who I probably could have gotten to third base with (and remember, this was in the pre-expansion era, before the pitching was so depleted). I don’t want to say she was homely, but she was sponsored by Ryland. Not that I was some sort of prize. At my twenty-year high school reunion, everybody who recognized me said the same thing: ‘Wow, your face cleared up.’

  “I ended up taking Cathy, a girl I didn’t particularly like and who didn’t particularly like me. And by ‘didn’t particularly like me,’ I mean, when I picked her up at her house, she suggested we take separate cars. Wait, there’s more: She introduced me to her mother, who smiled and said, ‘I disagree, dear. This might not be worse than no date at all.’

  “During dinner I had an allergic reaction to the shrimp cocktail, and I started sweating profusely—right through my powder blue dinner jacket. It looked like I’d eaten dinner under a garden hose. I tried to be nonchalant, but it may have embarrassed my date when her friends wondered why she had agreed to go to the prom with Flipper.

  “The couple we double-dated with wanted to drive to the beach and stay out all night. But Cathy said, ‘I have to be home by ten. My father is performing elective gallbladder surgery on me in the morning.’

  “ ‘Wait a second,’ I said, thinking perhaps she was making that up. ‘I thought your father was a veterinarian.’

  “Her response reassured me. ‘He’s both,’ she said. ‘He operates on people and animals. He grew up in a very small town. It didn’t pay to specialize.’

  “Years later I ran into her and I told her the experience was traumatic for me. I said, ‘I never went to another prom, never put on another powder blue dinner jacket, never ate another shrimp, I never even drove to the beach. After that night I didn’t date another woman for four years! I wallowed in a black pit of self-loathing and … Hey, will you look at me monopolizing the conversation, going on and on about traumatic dates and how they change the course of your life forever. But I guess I don’t have to tell you that, Sister Catherine.’ ”

  Remembering Ricky

  Please forgive me if I don’t feel funny today. My cousin Ricky died last week.

  He was only forty-four. It seemed like he’d barely even lived.

  It happens all the time, in every family. He didn’t feel right. So he went to the doctors. The doctors said it was one thing. But it turned out to be something much worse. Colon cancer.

  They operated. They thought they got it all.

  They didn’t.

  I can’t say that we were particularly close. I don’t think I’d seen Ricky three times in the last fifteen years. So I’ve been wondering why his death affected me so—why a couple of days ago I found myself sitting alone in my house, at the dining room table, crying.

  Maybe it’s because Ricky was younger than I am. It’s a stunner, the first time somebody in the family younger than you dies. You feel your breath catch in your chest. Half of you grieves for him, the other half for you, because you might be next.

  It’s funny, but when I close my eyes, I don’t see Ricky as an adult. I see him as a child. I see him at ten or eleven, with a Yankees cap on, tossing a baseball back and forth with his older brother, Mike. One was Mantle. One was Berra.

  The two things they loved most were music and baseball, particularly the New York Yankees. Mike played guitar and did some folksinging back in the days when you could do that without being laughed at. Ricky played drums, and later piano. For twenty years he was in a band that did weddings and bar mitzvahs on weekends. He did it all the way into las
t year, when he got too sick to play anymore.

  We all went to camp together. A couple of summers I was Ricky’s counselor. I’m going back a lot of years now, but I remember one time when he got hit in the head in a baseball game, and I had to carry him up to the camp infirmary. I can see it so clearly, me carrying him in my arms. He had the softest skin. It felt like one of those chamois cloths you use to wipe an expensive car.

  The rest of the kids trailed after us to make sure Ricky was all right, and he was. All the kids liked Ricky—the wild ones, the troubled ones, the spoiled ones, even the mean one. Ricky was a nice kid. That’s the first word, and the best word, that comes to mind: nice. The others felt better about themselves just being close to him.

  My cousin Ricky was an ordinary man who lived an ordinary life. He lived in the same town on Long Island his whole life. In fact, when his parents moved to Florida, Ricky bought their place, so he actually ended up living in the same house his whole life.

  He married his high school girlfriend, Linda. He worked for a florist during the week and played music on the weekends. Flowers and music. So you see, everything Ricky did made people happy.

  A couple of weeks ago I found out Ricky was quite ill, that he might have just a short time left.

  I called his brother Mike and asked if Ricky was taking calls.

  “Not many, but he’d love to hear from you,” Mike said.

  I called that afternoon. Ricky was resting. His wife said she’d wake him up. She was sure he’d be excited to talk to me.

  I cursed myself for not calling earlier.

  “Hey, Ricky,” I said, trying to sound chipper. “I’m coming up for the bar mitzvah in a few weeks. I was hoping to see you.”

  Mike’s twin sons are to be bar mitzvahed in mid-May. I was holding the invitation in my hand. One of the reasons I’d made up my mind to go was to see Ricky, thinking it might be the last time.

  “I’m not gonna make it,” Ricky said.