Tales from the Dad Side (16 page)

Can I Pay with Bonus Miles?

T
he University of San Diego is a stunning movie-set campus atop a mountain. My daughter Mary was very interested in attending, and I could see why. Some campuses have tanning pools; others, sushi bars. This one had both, and an In 'N' Out Burger down the hill. After a ninety-minute tour, we walked through one of the dorms, which had an impressive security system and the homey smell of just-popped corn, and there was not a single beer can in the recycling bin.

“I love it here,” Mary told me in a hushed tone so the tour guide could not hear that they were about to hook another student.

Then I saw a twenty-year-old guy just exiting the shower walking directly through our group, wearing only a towel. “Coming through, excuse me.” He was parting our tour group in two, like Moses in terry cloth.

A genuine glimpse of college life. I was intrigued that the surfer dude was so comfortable that he could parade barefoot and practically naked past forty total strangers. Then it hit me—it was three thirty on a Thursday afternoon at a Catholic college, in a
girls'
dorm.

Boy in towel + girls' dorm = over my dead body.

Why didn't the admissions office warn students, “We've got prospective applicants coming through this afternoon; please wear pants”?

During their high school junior years, my children started asking
us to take them on college tours across the country. We would spend hours listening to dynamic student salesmen as they described meal plans, campus parking, and Wi-Fi hot spots, all while walking backward.

In the almost thirty years since I'd gone to college a lot changed. On my first freshman day at the University of Kansas, I registered for classes, opened my first bank account, and met a blond girl at a dance in the dorm parking lot who showed me how cute she could be by puking her guts out in my lobby's garbage can.

“You okay?” It sounded like I was worried. In reality, I just hoped she would not notice that I was not using either her first or her last name, both of which I'd forgotten thirty seconds after we met. It had been a mistake for my roommate to invite her over to our dorm, and I could tell by how fast she was drinking that sloe gin, and by how much, that she was clearly a party girl who probably grew up playing with Divorce Barbie, which came with all of Ken's stuff.

“It's probably just the liquor talking,” I said, but she snoozed through whatever I had to say. That very morning my own father had told me to make the most of my college days because I was the first member of my entire family tree ever to enroll in college, and he wanted me to experience something that he never got the chance to.

“Need a Tic Tac?” had been a thoughtful question on my part, but that night I learned that the alcoholically comatose generally don't worry about how minty fresh their breath is.

Suddenly I felt more than a little guilty that my parents had trusted me to be responsible, and there I was with a newfound independence I'd never imagined, as evidenced by the deeply breathing blonde who just needed a chalk outline. It was one of those “You're not in Kansas anymore” moments, but I was still in Kansas.

“Dorothy…?” Was her name Dorothy? Debbie? Denise? Darn it, never mind.

Why did I go to the University of Kansas? Easy. I was almost a native, and with my grades they had to let me in. I entertained the idea of an exclusive school in the East, but my parents insisted that they
could never afford to send me anywhere past St. Louis, so I passed on the chance to go Ivy, where I would certainly have inexplicably affected a Belgian accent.

Instead I went to KU, where, thanks to my family's income level, I got grants and scholarships and loans, and I was able to work my way through college, eventually graduating with distinction, magna cum lucky. My Western Civilization instructor told me at the conclusion of his class, “You, sir, have the greatest vocabulary I've ever heard.” I thanked him for the compliment but made a mental note that he was from Pakistan.

When I became a father myself, I discovered that nothing proclaimed that you were a successful parent more than the window sticker of a really prestigious college in the back of the station wagon. Harvard, Princeton, and Yale all trump Hooterville State University, which would not impress anybody unless your neighbor is Larry the Cable Guy.

Still in his high school junior year, our son, Peter, seemed content to live at home forever with no interest in leaving the cocoon. Eventually we forced him to sit down and draw up a list of schools. He really didn't care about his future academic career. At that point he would have put down College of Cardinals and filed for early admission.

“Hey, it says here you have to be a priest!” he'd realize, filling out the College of Cardinals application. “I don't want to be a priest. They work weekends.”

Eventually a list was drawn up, a series of campus tours was made, as his mother wore off five thousand miles of tire tread so that he could eventually winnow his favorites down to two.

“Let the brownnosing begin.”

At one of the top schools in America I was told point-blank, “Relax, he's in.” That from a university official who had that week donated a million dollars to the school. Not leaving anything to chance, I also ingratiated myself with one of that university's most powerful graduates, who at that moment was mounting a run for president of the United States. His letter of recommendation arrived on impres
sive U.S. Senate stationery; we knew that it was the icing on the college cake. April first, at five in the afternoon, I logged on to their .edu website and got the good news.

“Admission denied. Have a good day.”

This same school had all but promised another family that their student son would also be admitted, and with that they wrote a one-million-dollar donation for an open-ended research program where students probably stand in lab coats and watch
Oprah
. That rich kid also was denied,
after the check was cashed
. Cue up the theme song to
Shaft.

Luckily Peter's other first choice, Villanova, said yes, and invited him to spend the next four years in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia. As a parent I was filled with a stratospheric sense of pride as I applied the prestigious Villanova sticker above the defogger strips in the back window of our car. Of course we would no longer be able to buy gasoline, because that sticker would cost me $42,703 a year for the next four years, not including stuffed-crust pizza.

Years earlier I lost track of the number of times I'd wake up in the middle of the night, doing college tuition computations: “Three kids, four years each…” Then I'd move a decimal point in my head, content to know that my deserving children would all get world-class educations, and all I'd have to do is sell one kidney.

“I forgot to tell you when you got home,” my wife said middinner. “I mailed his tuition yesterday.” That sent a jolt of electricity directly to my gizzard. It wasn't due for two months.

“You did what?”

I'd been doing mental gymnastics figuring how I'd eventually finance college by borrowing money from my 401(k) and then transferring it into my checking account at the last possible moment, but my wife short-circuited the entire process with a check she wrote on the way to pick up the dry cleaning.

“I paid early because I didn't want them to change their minds,” she said, and it seemed to make perfect sense, so I excused myself to do some emergency online banking.

“I thought we were going to check with the bursar's office to see if we could pay with bonus miles.”

The money part was terrifying only until it was time actually to start college, when a lifetime of a parent's hopes and dreams and fears amount to a single haphazard pyramid of clean laundry, desk lamps, and cheesy crackers piled on the curb in front of a dorm. Just as Kathy dropped him off for his first day of kindergarten, my wife was the one who dropped him off at college as he made the official transition from our house to frat house. Kathy called me every half hour with updates, but the most wrenching was her final report: After a prayer for the students everybody said good-bye to their students only to get into their cars and pull out at exactly the same time. Stuck in a colossal traffic jam, there was not one horn honking.

“Everybody in every car is crying,” she whispered.

“He'll be back. He needs stuff,” I assured her, which was easy for me because I was six thousand miles away with his sisters, still on vacation. Her heart was broken, so I reminded her, “It's only three weeks until you see him again. We'll be there for parents' weekend.”

It was there that I was introduced to Peter's roommates, which was in itself surprising because he was supposed to have only one. They were very nice guys, but the dorm room was built for two humans. Due to an enrollment boom, three testosterone factories would be holed up in a nonventilated twelve-by-fifteen cinder-block room for an entire academic year. In college terms it's referred to as a forced triple; it should really be called a sinus volcano.

Disillusioned at Peter's being warehoused in a small room for a year with two guys, I tried some positive spin. “It's college, not a Canyon Ranch spa,” I said. Then I did the math in my head, and four years at Canyon Ranch would actually cost me less than this place.

When I stood up from his desk chair at the end of my first dorm visit I discovered that I'd unwittingly sat on a damp towel and the crotch of my khaki pants was soaked, which explained why for his first two semesters Peter's friends would refer to me as “the Depends dad.”

Thus started Peter's career in college. He got great grades in every class except Italian, for the simple reason that those confounding people in Italy insist on not speaking English.

A towering six five now, he is regarded as literally the big man on campus: an announcer at the basketball games, active in the fraternity scene, student politics, and the college radio station. So we were surprised when he reported that he was outright barred from entering an important lecture.

“Why can't I go in?”

“Sold out,” the guy with the walkie-talkie told Peter.

Whom would college kids stand in line to see and hear? An aging radical or dissident? A skinny despot from a dangerous country building a nuke reactor? No and no, Peter was not allowed to see the band Hanson.

“Full house. One more and the fire marshal will close us down,” the security guard told him, waving him away, but Peter would not take no for an answer.

Hanson's song “MMMBop” had been the single tune at our house that all three of our kids of various ages could sing together, because that was all there was to the lyric: “Mmm bop, Mmm bop.” With his childhood idols just on the other side of that closed door, he knew something he could do to crash the gate. He dashed up the hill to the campus bookstore, where he bought the fattest, blackest marker manufactured. Then in what I would like to think was the first time he'd ever stripped to the waist in the dining hall restroom, he practiced tracing some words across his chest. Confident that he had the spacing right, he took the cap off the marker, stared into the mirror, and wrote nipple to nipple
Hanson #1
. It was big and bold, and why wouldn't it be? He'd used the Sanford Magnum 44 Permanent Marker. The 44 apparently stood for the IQ of a college kid who would write the name of an aging boy band on his chest.

“You don't see that every day,” one of two dozen visiting priests said as my shirtless son speed-walked across the quad past their tour group. Surely they were thinking that he was a wayward young sinner
who'd made many bad choices in life and that was why on this, the coldest day of the year, he was walking around with some devil-message chest tattoo. If he'd been strung out on heroin or a speedball, the priests would have stopped to straighten him out, but the free buffet lunch in the president's conference room was about to start, and they didn't want to miss the appetizers.

“Now can I come in?” he asked the arena guard who'd shooed him away fifteen minutes earlier. The guard forsook his fire marshal threat, and surprisingly, Peter was admitted through a stage door, and found himself instantly the focal point of six thousand female Hanson fans.

“Hey, come here,” a total stranger beckoned, turning his camera phone Peter's direction. “I want a picture with the
Almost Naked Hanson Fan
.”

As soon as they posed, a wave of applause swept across the giant room. Sensing that his audacious stunt was being warmly received, Peter shut his eyes and blew a kiss toward all, Sinatra style, and then took a deep and dramatic bow, and with that the applause crescendoed into a deafening tribute. Too bad it wasn't for him.

The Hanson brothers had entered through another stage door, and every set of eyes in the place was on them, not my son, who was basking in the applause. Returning upright, Peter saw that everybody in the facility was facing the other end of the stage, and he became as embarrassed as a person who was stripped to the waist could possibly be.

Taking a chair, he was delighted to be inside with the pop idols of his childhood. After an hour his bliss turned to boredom. Hanson did not sing. They did not dance. His Magic Marker self-mutilation had gotten him a ringside seat for a mind-numbingly lifeless presentation about the accounting problems of independent record producing.

MMmmm boring!

Permanent black Magic Marker ink does not come off with a squirt of Neutrogena; two or three showers a day for a week and it was still visible on his rib cage. For a kid who'd grown up listening to Hanson,
he'd moved on musically and was in fact a rap music aficionado, taking part in a weekly “rap-off” where he would compete against the other lyrical impresarios, many of whom were on the school's nationally ranked basketball team. Imagine ten of the tallest young men on campus standing in the hall of a dorm, with a boom box rhythm track blaring as they all tried to outdo one another's rhyming and rapping, and for some enigmatic reason all of the guys were shirtless. Apparently rapping was easier if the artist was not encumbered with a shirt that could ride up on his creativity.