Story of Dan, Part Four
BORED, SUBURBAN WHITE KIDS IN THE CITY
I can’t properly explain my college years without talking about TRASH. TRASH was like that cool, yeasty, and bittersweet smell that hits you when you walk into an old riverside bar. TRASH was a concept, an outrage, a figment of our imaginations. TRASH was that group of guys that you pass by on the street during a wild night and they’re laughing and shoving each other at their own private joke and you want to turn around and hang with them. “TRASH!” was what that tall, willowy black girl who worked behind the snacks and magazines shop in the IIT Student Union building would yell when we would pass by, her fist in the air. TRASH was a manifestation of what was hiding in me all along, that same thing that haunts me today. TRASH peaked (piqued?) too early.
It started innocently enough at the BOG, the Illinois Institute of Technology campus bar tucked away in the basement of Hermann Hall, after an odd night of too many beers at the end of a week of too many late nights in the computer lab, early in my junior year. The same EE and CS students were showing up on Fridays after class, and so we decided to make it a more formal thing. Some background in the social milieu of ITT is in order. A hot Saturday night was watching the CS students riffling through their Hollerith punch cards (yes, I’m that old) in the dorm lounges. There were advantages to having Comiskey Park (now Guaranteed Rate Field), where the White Sox play, to the west across the Dan Ryan Expressway along with the CTA Red Line, but at the time Stateway Gardens (a notoriously crime-ridden housing project) was just to the south. As a prank one year, a frat had one of the pledges walk two blocks to a pizza joint in the projects to pick up an order. The kid was shot and killed. A real vibrant campus.
To this we decided to bring equal parts party, poetry, and mayhem. We were mostly suburban kids who commuted by car or train to school every morning and night. My first visit of freshman year was to my HS buddy’s fraternity. I met Ed, pretty much their Minister of Propaganda, and Ed was in his room smoking weed and listening to a Dead bootleg, both of which he was more than willing to share. As part of Rush Week, they invited me out to Gino’s East for pizza and to The Second City for improv comedy, which was my introduction to the nighttime delights of the city. Being a commuter, I didn’t pledge with a campus frat but they included me anyway. The city became my playground, and by the time we formed TRASH (a/k/a jokingly dubbed Total Radicals, Anarchists, and Social Hedonists), taking the train or road tripping to Rush Street or near north bars was an ongoing thing. Friday was typically gathering in the campus bar for beers, and often a stunt (like moving all the Student Union building furniture to the quad lawn at 2AM). Saturday was usually for going to the clubs. I was nineteen, of legal drinking age (at that time), and the strange thing is that in 1978 both disco and punk music were at their peak. I’d go to the local discos in my neighborhood to dance with a group of friends from HS. With the guys from IIT, I went to downtown Chicago punk clubs to just bounce off the walls, with barbed wire on the ceiling, and sweat and blood on the floor. We didn’t realize it then, but it was a special time.
TRASH became the instrument of our wants and interests. We organized and held mixers with live bands for the student body. When they were planning to reinstate the military draft, we set up a informational symposium with a spokesman from ROTC and a lawyer from the ACLU. We road tripped to Milwaukee twice for brewery tours, softball games, bar crawls and crashing (and trashing) in hotel rooms. We used to pick a classmate and show up at their house unannounced with 25 people, our own sound system, keg and food and just take over.
JOBS
I had difficulty finding a gig after frosh year, so a friend of my uncle set me up at Wilton Industries, which specialized in cake making & decorating doodads. I spent hour after hour in a warehouse pulling merch pick stock from trays, carefully packing it in boxes, then labeling and prepping boxes for forklift pick up for shipping. One day I pulled a double shift and was so hungry I dropped by Mickey Ds on the way home and ordered and ate four Big Macs one after the other, a family record that still stands. I liked the job because it was utterly brainless which meant I got to bullshit and have fun with the people I worked with all day long.
After my second year I worked the summer at Allis Chalmers, where my job was (and try to contain your excitement) revising bills of material for forklift trucks (which means it’s kind of an extension of my first job), moving specified hardware from the mast subassembly to the truck subassembly for model after model. It got to where I knew all the standard prefixes for electric vs. gas powered kits. The office secretary was Laura, a very cute, willowy brunette about my age with braces who drove me absolutely insane. I think I asked her out about a dozen times, and she was unfailingly nice every time she shot me down.
During my junior year, I co-opted at SPD Services, which provided electrical controls for local businesses and utilities. I was a draftsman, which is now a lost art – dealing with mechanical pencils with leads of varying size and hardness, and T-squares and triangles and rubber crumble erasers. I made detailed technical drawings of the inside of electrical NEMA enclosures with circuit breakers, transformers, annunciator racks, and alarm lights, intended for proposal responses. The place was a gloomy walk-up small office in an industrial area of Forest Park next to the CTA tracks. It was ultimately wrist-slitting sort of stuff, run by two sadistic middle-aged mopes.
After junior year, I worked at COPAR, which designed digital controls for high speed glue guns used by corrugated cardboard box companies, which was the inspiration for the fictional company featured in my first novel. This job was fun, because I hung out with the technicians in a cage where we would complete our circuit board build & tests early and spend the rest of the day basically fucking off. Good that I got all that out of my system before I joined Motorola and things got serious. But I’m never too serious, as you know.
ACADEMICS
With all these hijinks, you would think that my grades would have shown it, but I found most of my coursework to be easy and fun. My favorite class was Optics where we wrestled with two-dimensional matrices of eigenvectors to calculate the focal lengths of lenses. Well, it was fun for me anyway. One of my close friends from TRASH was Ray (and we’re still close friends today). We were both fledgling writers to boot. On a lark, we decided to enter IIT’s poetry contest as seniors and ended up splitting the prize. Later on, he became involved with Naperville’s Writers Group and a contributor of poetry, and I’m still agonizing over my twisted prose.
MUSIC
This was when I really started to immerse myself in live music. The Grateful Dead twice, big arena shows with Pink Floyd and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. The full flowering of punk with The Ramones and The Clash, and Chicago’s late lamented Tu Tu and the Pirates. Smaller shows with Chuck Berry, Southside Johnny and Tom Waits. I saw Aliotta, Haynes, and Jeremiah a few times at the late, lamented Ratso’s near Lincoln and Fullerton and talked with the guys over beers after their set.
SEX (?)
You’d think it would get better in my college years, wouldn’t you? I went out with my sister’s friend for about a year’s worth of movies, parties and kissing. She was very Italian Catholic and any thought of crossing The Threshold was strictly proibito. I did date two of the ten total women who attended IIT, but those were one-and-dones. The most interesting girl was Jane (not her real name), who I discovered practicing on the tennis courts of my old High School. I was 20, she was 26. We just would play tennis then talk in the car. Eventually we went on dates like a ChicagoFest at Navy Pier, or out for quick eats. We always met at an arranged location, and never at her place. I suspected she was otherwise involved or married, but I never brought it up.
In my senior year at IIT, one of my TRASH brethren threw a party at his house. He was a skinny, shy guy who was 2nd generation, 100% Irish. At the party, I met and danced with his pretty, older sister. She would be my first serious relationship.