The summer of 1992 was sandwiched between my freshman and sophomore attempts at becoming a college student. Paired with the upcoming fall semester and my full initiation to the Oklahoma State University campus, it would become one of the most formative and confusing times in my brief life. I was an impossibly well mannered and bright kid who was on a mission to tear apart any semblance of my former personal history and strike out new in an effort to recreate myself.
I had taken up residence in an apartment complex not too far from the neighborhood where I had grown up. This was a snap decision made one night at a party where I had run into some old friends from high school and drank way too many beers out of a plastic cup. The buildings in the apartment complex were painted a cappuccino color with dark brown accents and had all the charm of a minimum security prison with only a little less privacy. But the best thing about them was that neither of my parents lived there.
When we first moved in, I had a job washing dishes at a local restaurant. But I quickly figured out that I had saved more than enough money in the previous year to quit that job and spend the summer at my leisure. My father had agreed to provide me with a stipend of $275 per month as long as I was attending school and making good grades; an agreement that I made him regret almost immediately. Since I had decided to share this two-bedroom apartment with three other guys, our rent and bills when split four ways totaled roughly $150 per month. This meant that I had and extra $125 per month to spend on beer, marijuana, and compact discs to round out my growing music collection. It seems crazy now, but $125 was more than enough and I rarely even had to dip into my savings unless I wanted to attend a concert or buy food.
My days were spent employing the apartment complex’s many amenities. Never one to enjoy an indoor gym, I opted instead to split my time between the faux beach volleyball court and the miniature pool that happened to be within earshot of my bedroom. This was a lucky break for the other residents of the complex because I was able to wedge my stereo speakers into my bedroom window and direct them at the pool area. That way we could all enjoy the bootlegged Grateful Dead performances of the last 30 years, 4 hours at a time. “Don’t worry,” I would say to a young mother with her toddler in tow, “after this one is over it will immediately switch to the next tape. We can hear the entire set from the 1978 show at the pyramids before I have to reload.”
On occasion I would visit my father for lunch and the customary pay out of our agreed arrangement. At some point he would inevitably ask, “So, what do you do all day?” I couldn't understand it at the time, but it frustrated him to no end that I had decided not to work through the summer. I have to give him credit for keeping up his end of the deal, and I can't really fault him for rescinding it later on that year in an effort to put his wife through school instead. Although it did sting quite a bit to lose my financial padding to my stepmother, it was a much more sound investment.
Finding something to occupy my time that summer wasn’t really as much a burden for me as my father might have imagined. I would wake up when I was tired of sleeping, eat whatever I could find leftover from the previous night, take a shower, and prepare to start my day promptly at noon or so. By this time someone was usually hanging around looking to drink beer at the pool, smoke a joint and drive to the lake, or maybe just watch some movies. It was a time to ease into the day, make friends with it, and see where it was going to take you. This was also a good time to get some reading done, explore some of my roommate’s cd collections, and gather a mental schedule of which of my buddies would be available to hang out on that particular evening and which ones might have to work.
Also of prime importance was phone answering. In the days before cell phones and absent an answering machine, it was imperative that someone be there to answer the phone in case a person might call with information regarding a party or a trip to the lake involving a borrowed boat. On this front, I was invaluable. I can’t remember how many times I waited with great anticipation for my roommates to wander in so I could tell them what information I had gathered during the day. Mostly I can’t remember, because I smoked too much pot.
And so the days went, the most delightful rut I had ever had the pleasure of being stuck in. I had worked every summer since I was 13, but this summer was mine. It would be the first and last of its kind.
The fall semester at Oklahoma State University brought with it rampant change and confusion. I moved in with some acquaintances from the summer; a group of cowboys that had been kicked out of their fraternity house the previous semester and were now renting a huge 4 bedroom home near campus. The rent was cheap and I probably could have gotten by without working, but as luck would have it, one of my new roommates got me a job at a record store in town.
The excitement of meeting new people at my job and through my new housemates was overwhelming. I looked forward to school and enrolled for the fall semester. Never one to be accused of being a show-off, I signed up for 4 lectures and a lab, totaling 13 hours - one more than the necessary 12 required to be classified as a full-time student, therefore securing my financial aid. I could barely contain myself as I breezed through the first week of classes, until I attended the biology lab on Thursday morning.
I walked into the lab and chose to sit next to a fairly attractive girl whom I had hoped would become my lab partner. After several minutes of awkward chatting, our attention became focused on the figure that had entered and set up camp at the teaching station towards the front of the room. He was a tall, slender man and not having much experience with non-native people, I strained to guess his origin. He announced his name was Manu, and that he was originally from Ethiopia. He told us that he lived with his wife and three children in the married student housing complex on campus. After disclosing a few more facts about his life, he went on to instruct us that we should not call him by the title of professor as was customary, but simply by his first name. The reason for the informality was that he was also a student working on his master’s degree. He spoke of himself in the third person and gave us an example of the protocol we should use in addressing him. “If you see Manu walking on the campus,” he said, “do not say, ‘Hello professor’, but instead you say, ‘Hi Manu, hello to you!’” This he exclaimed with tremendous enthusiasm as if he were putting us all at great ease. “We are the same,” he said, “all students.”
These were some of the last words Manu said that I ever fully understood. And as I left the lab that day thinking of his words, I couldn’t help but think that we were not the same at all. Outside of the fact that we both had bursar accounts, I couldn't think of one thing that we had in common. I was a boy attending college in my own hometown hoping to change myself into the adult I thought I wanted to be. Manu was a man, a husband and father, thousands of miles from home, struggling to grasp the language, to fit in and become a part of our society. In addition, he was tasked with teaching an entry level laboratory class to about twenty kids who had little or no interest in his knowledge. Truth be told, the lab could have been completed by simply following the manual that was purchased for the class. There was no real need for an instructor except to call roll and make sure that we didn’t cheat off of each other on the quizzes, which Manu called “cuses.”
Still, I was sorry when Manu took our failure to learn personally and claimed that our performance on his quizzes, “gave him great pain.” I know that more than one person went to their advisor and complained that Manu’s english was so poor that they could not learn the material, and it made me sad to think of this information ever getting back to him.
Out of pity and middle-class guilt, I decided to remain enrolled in Manu’s lab while others were dropping and adding like flies. My rationale was that I probably wasn’t going to do that well in biology anyway, so why blame it on someone else? Besides, I was an english major, and what more could you want but an interesting person like Manu to write about? I had fantasies of becoming his friend and helping him to navigate the troubled waters of first person speaking. Perhaps he would teach me about life in Ethiopia and enlighten me in the ways of the solid sciences.
In the end, I didn’t get to know Manu that well. The truth is, I made no effort. I didn’t even get an opportunity to casually cross his path and fulfill his dream of shouting, “Hi Manu, hello to you!” I suspect this had more to do with geography than anything else. Manu’s life was towards the west end of the campus, grounded in the earth sciences and their laboratories while mine was towards the east end, near the bars and sandwich shops.
As the semester dragged on, Manu and I struggled through it together but separately. His english never improved much, nor did my understanding of cellular mitosis. And when the time came for our last class, we parted ways more or less as we had met, with our only common bond being enrollment at the same institution. He, presumably moving on and fulfilling his requirements as a master’s student and me, preparing to go home for the holidays and explain to my parents why I had made many new friends, but few passing grades.
