Don Lee - The Collective

“It was all a lark to you. A little walk on the yellow side. You used me.”

“If anything, Eric,” she said, “we used each other.”

I brooded and cursed and cried in my room in Dupre, alone, the entire weekend, and then went down the hallway to Joshua’s room.

I walked in without knocking and sat down on his battered beanbag chair. There was detritus all over the floor: books, clothes, CDs, magazines, squashed cigarette boxes, food wrappers, an old guitar missing several strings. A red bandanna was draped over a lamp, batiks and posters of Sartre and Iggy Pop were tacked to the walls, and a black surfboard, inlaid with the prism design from Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon , hung down from the ceiling, held aloft by a fishnet. “Blister in the Sun” by the Violent Femmes was playing on his stereo.

For reasons unknown, Joshua was wearing a green Bavarian alpine hat with a tassel and feather and puffing on a big, curved calabash tobacco pipe. He was hunched over his desk, gluing together an arched, three-foot-long bridge, made wholly of toothpicks.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“These are catenary trusses,” he said. “Check this out.” He propped up the bridge so it spanned his file cabinet and desk, then, to a middle strut, he hooked a rope that was tied to a cinder block. Suspending the heavy, slowly rotating block, the bridge did not give. It did not bend. “You believe that?” Joshua asked, admiring his handiwork. “Fucking toothpicks.”

“You were right about Sourdough,” I told him. “I should have listened to you.”

He nodded. “I’ve missed you, bro.”

It was a school for the bookish and nerdy, for geeks and losers, for kids who liked to study, who actually wanted to learn. During our four years at Mac, we would read Foucault, Hegel, Derrida, Saussure, Gadamer, Lacan, Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari — never the full texts, mind you, just xeroxed scraps and smidgens that still we would not understand, but from which we could lap up the lingua franca of pseudo-intellectualism. We’d sling around words like synecdoche and hyperbole, ontology and eschatology, faute de mieux and fin de siècle . We’d describe things as heuristic, protean, numinous, and ineffable. We’d discuss Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Plato’s cave and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Laffer’s curve and Schrödinger’s cat. We’d embrace poststructuralism and existentialism and epistemology, semiotics and hermeneutics. We’d see everything as an allegory or a metaphor for something else, and ultimately we’d deconstruct everything as divisive or patriarchal or sexist or homophobic or racist or neofascist — a product of heteronormative exclusivity, a metanarrative propagated by the oligarchy. We’d answer almost every question by decrying it as a syllogism, or a trope, or tautological, or phallocentric, or reductive, or hegemonic (undoubtedly our favorite buzzword). We’d come to believe that any text — be it Shakespeare or a comic book or a supermarket circular — had the same intrinsic value, and we’d insist that all truth was relative, that there was no reality without signifiers, that there was no there there, that nothing, in fact, really existed. We’d argue and rant, we’d foment for empowerment and paradigm shifts and interstitial hybridity, we’d make grand, sweeping pronouncements about subjects of which we knew nothing. We would become articulate, well read, sensitive, open-minded, totally insufferable twits. We would graduate as nihilistic, atheistic, anarchistic, moralistic, tree-hugging, bohemian, Marxist snobs. We would love every minute of it.

All of this we did without a trace of irony. Only Joshua, ever the devil’s advocate, would call us out at times (although, on the whole, he tended to be the most pretentious and reactionary of any of us: “Hemingway was a racist.” “Flannery O’Connor was a racist”).

“Look, this is all just intellectual masturbation,” he said once in class. “The fact is, no one here will ever be poor. In ten years, what do you think you’ll be doing? Maybe the best-intentioned of you will be working for a nonprofit, but you’ll be living off your trust funds. More likely everyone will have caved in and become corporate attorneys.”

That spring semester of my freshman year, I took Problems of Philosophy, Metaphysical Diasporas, Faith and Doubt in Nineteenth-century Literature, and Introduction to Creative Writing. Jessica was in the first class, Joshua in all four. Our education began in earnest, and so, too, did our friendship, Joshua and Jessica working assiduously to lift me out of my funk over Didi. (I’d see her now and again on campus, and each encounter would fill me with heartache. I could not imagine then that, after a year, we’d reach a rapprochement of sorts, born mainly out of disinterest, since we’d both be involved with other people, and that eventually, when I left Mac, I’d forget about her almost entirely.)

Jessica got me to start running with her on the treadmills in the Field House. To counteract such a frightening aspiration for health, Joshua got me to start smoking cigarettes. We watched reruns of Magnum, P.I ., of which Joshua, peculiarly, was an aficionado, and for each viewing in the lounge, he’d make us wear Hawaiian shirts and drink mai tais. We visited the Walker Art Center. We spent hours browsing in Cheapo Records and Hungry Mind Books, inhaling the musty acid odor. We ate greasy fish fries (made with the ever-present walleye) at the St. Clair Broiler. We listened to live jazz at the AQ. We rolled frames at BLB, the Bryant-Lake Bowl, a combo restaurant-coffeehouse-performance space-bowling alley. We rented snowshoes and clumped up Summit Avenue, past the Victorian mansions, and trekked along the Mississippi. We had long bull sessions about the meaning of life (“Do you see the world as mean or sublime?” Joshua would ask, and he’d shake his head pityingly when we answered sublime).

We spent so much time together, people began referring to us as the three musketeers, the three amigos. “No,” Joshua said, “you know what we should call ourselves? The 3AC. The Asian American Artists Collective.” And thereafter, especially when we were drunk, we’d use the acronym as a rallying cry, a toast to our solidarity: “To the 3AC!”

Mostly what we did, though, was study and read (I entered college with 20/20 vision and left needing contacts). My grades had suffered the first term, and I was determined to do better overall in the spring. Nonetheless, the only course that I truly cared about was Intro to Creative Writing.

In the class, we started by reading selections from a poetry anthology and then taking a stab at writing our own poems. This was, without exception, a ludicrous exercise. None of us were poets. We didn’t understand poetry. We didn’t know what to write about. There were sixteen students in the class, and the majority were not English majors. Intro to Creative Writing was considered a Mickey Mouse course at Mac, and it fulfilled a fine arts requirement.

So we presented weepy elegies for our grandmothers and family dogs, self-pitying monologues about teenage angst, hackneyed pastorals about meadows and fluorescent moons, angry apostrophes to divorced parents, soaring heroic couplets about unrequited love, mawkish paeans to pain and sorrow, and fiery sonnets about loneliness. It was the most wretched stuff. Everything alliterated and rhymed. Most of it was incoherent drivel. There were repeated appearances of tears and rain, usually in combination. But, true to the ethos of Mac, no one in the class laughed or disparaged any of these sorry efforts. We were supportive and kind. We made gentle suggestions. We lauded the intentions.