Leaving College at a Bad Time

That night
I was reading a prolonged moan by Robert M. Solow in The New York Review
of Books. Cheekily, the editors chose to jointly review the Economic Report
of the President and the Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers
(Government Printing Office, 448 pages, $34.50) as though they were spring fiction,
and enlisted Solow, who was the council’s senior economist in the early
Kennedy administration. I will most likely never read a CEA report in my life.
It’s a gloomy text, and in Solow’s judgment one that becomes "obsequiously
political" at points. Solow exercises caution at the point in his review
where it becomes necessary to forecast the next year’s economy. "The
early tea leaves for the first quarter of 2002 seem to suggest a continued gain,
though slow and possibly reversible," he writes. "Corporate profits
and investment spending have not yet turned around, for instance; and most of
the surge in consumption was clearly unsustainable bargain-grabbing by purchasers
of automobiles." The analysis was punctuated by beer bottles shattering
outside–Tony again. Someone gunned his Hyundai. Why bother trudging through
the rest, I thought.

•

In a month I’m going
to graduate from college. The city’s unemployment rate is above 7 percent.
This is all a massive mistake. I came to school in 1998, when Robert Solow lamentations
were unimaginable. Now the world wears a giant smirk.

Everyone’s
rubbing his temples. At barstools, friends tell me they don’t know what
they’ll do. Crop didn’t come in, Earl. Got the creditors on the phone.
I can’t pay for this drink. Students are fleeing from the job market, waiting
it out in graduate school. I’ve become deeply ashamed of myself, bitter
over the economic tide I’ll be wading in, discovering an ugly sense of
entitlement I nurtured through years of watching the dimmest bulbs shine the
brightest. In the first years of college, everyone’s e-mail came from a
business domain. Now it’s back to Hotmail, or school accounts that are
still active.

The equilibrium
state at present is panic. I’ve abdicated all presence on campus and try
my hardest not to see anyone. Stroll to class through erratic weather, ride
the buses, visit the library, get the hell home. I’m a shut-in, needing
a haircut, and I can’t find the nail clipper. The most mellifluous voices
I hear come from Brian Lehrer and Leonard Lopate. During the last three meals
I ate in restaurants, I wanted to upend the table and escape mid-salad. It turns
out to be amazing, the effort it requires to read a book or an article in full.
Preferable, in the last month insulated from the world, to grab snatches of
words and have my eyes dart elsewhere. Like in Solow–"But this is
only a jaundiced impression; the underlying problem is inescapable."

That shame
I mentioned. It really did seem for a while that job opportunity was omnipresent.
I remember walking through a career fair in 2000. They packed the multilevel
dining hall and the student center full of New Jersey’s most generous prospective
employers. It was a seller’s market only two years ago, and people just
two years older positively swaggered through, shoes squeaking from display to
display. Recruiters sought resumes from everyone they could find, asking for
the minimum skill sets, slipping pens and keychains forward to lure in employees
before they reached a competitor’s kiosk. Some seniors wore suits, but
others, following Tony, opted to strut around jacketless, one ostentatious shirt
button open too many. I was amazed. Everyone was on a first-name basis, recruiters’
sweaty palms rushing to grab a cool student hand. I watched one pharmaceutical
company rep after she forlornly failed to attract Tony to her display table.
Next to her elaborate stand, where the display showed kids in a field frolicking
free from allergies, was a clipboard holding a piece of paper marked for internal
use only. On the form, her employer made her document how many eager undergrads
expressed interest in the company. I got the sense her job would be the first
one offered to interview candidates.

The shame
comes from viewing that job fair as a bygone salad day, to grow wistful for
such a glut. The world’s smirking, and it ought to be easy enough to crack
my knuckles and say to myself, Come on.

•

My housemate has a serious
problem with Tony’s howling. He’s a light sleeper, and the crescendo
of after-hours hollering keeps him awake. Did you hear that last night, he asks.
Swine. All of you–shut the fuck up! In bed, I’ll groan when I hear
the howling mount, but I sympathize. Tony’s got to shuffle on in one month.
Back home for a little while. You know, laundry’s there and all.

It took
me a week of college to be entirely sick of it. The experience is not pleasant.
Raise an eyebrow at all the fond memories. I moved into a high-rise residence
hall where people threw up into the urinals. I had poor expectations of what
college would be like, nurturing an unarticulated vision that the summer after
high school marked a profound disconnection from all previous behavior. Time
to put on a crisp shirt and onward to maturity. I hung a newspaper snapshot
of Alan Greenspan on my door and read reports of an imploding Asian market,
a crisis averted by sensible austerity measures and force of Western will. When
I came back from class one day, I found that my neighbors had ripped out half
of Greenspan’s face. Tony again. Fine, I thought. We’ll go our separate
ways. At the end of the semester I canceled my housing contract and moved in
with friends at a condemned, heatless building that to me was like a Black Sea
spa.

Ever since,
I’ve looked forward to leaving college. Each passing semester I spent less
time on campus, going back home to New York City where I felt comfortable and
could get a decent, boiled bagel. Living with people off campus became like
renting a hotel room for a month–exotic playtime with an endlessly deferred
adulthood, growing more squalid as cigarette ash sunk into the carpet.

Outside,
I thought, was where hopeful days passed by with brisk conversation and little
time to reminisce. These days, my favorite engineering daydream involves taking
a generator, armfuls of foam rubber and insulation rolls, and yards of tubing
to construct a massive artificial womb. Pump water into a closet, hang a phone
repairman’s belt from the clothing rack with the tubes in my mouth, strap
myself in and float forever. I want to draw a bath and practice. Every other
year here I’ve been forcing myself to mature, a self-conscious and foolish
effort. And now it seems a better option–7 percent unemployment back in
New York–to find a womb without a mother and hope no one needs anything
from the closet. Outside it’s a shattered chair, gravelly laughter and
Yo, Tony, all night.

•

Last year, Rutgers’
Career Services director, Richard White, appeared on the evening news for a
moment, asked by Peter Jennings to grade the job market. "A B-plus,"
was his answer. "And most people would take a B-plus." He gave 2000
an A, following the exemplary performance of the elusive and longed-for 1999,
the high water mark for finding employment.

This year
is a C. "It’s a tough time to be coming out of school," he admits.
I prided myself for not grabbing his shirt collar and crying. The seniors he
and his staff counsels are understandably exhibiting fear and anxiety. "Think
about your senior year," he explains. "You happen to be born 22, 21
years ago. So you started life. And your senior year happens to fall, you know,
Sept. 11, worst job market since the early 90s, first war since the early 90s,
although a much different kind of war. That’s a very anxiety-generating
formula."

The world
is smirking because it sensed within its pampered ones the surreptitious expectation
of eternally maintained ease and comfort, and now it rejoices in a righted wrong.
And I sympathize with the world, ashamed of a deeply selfish and sniveling yearning.
But as the howling comes back, louder each night, the throbbing womb is more
enticing.