Leaving College at a Bad Time

The howling begins close to midnight, which in my old age is when I'm reading in bed. Dude, dude, dude. Nah. Nah. Okay, bro. Screaming and whooping, they slump along my bucolic street and they break things. It usually lasts until 3, an hour after bars here close. Girls giggle and hector. Yo, Tony. One morning after a particularly energetic howling, I left my house to go to class and found a green chair shattered for 50 feet. Someone threw it off a neighbor's porch onto the sidewalk and kept smashing. Usually there aren't any traces left behind.

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.

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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.