Celebrating Jack History Month
They say the hand that rocks the present rules the past. Not much is going on in my life right now except work, and I never talk about that since the amazing-looking receptionist quit. I thought it might be time to delve a bit into the shocking origin story of me, that superhero of everyday insight, Golden Age Jack Task.
I don’t have anything planned for a while, so welcome to several weeks of filler. Welcome to Jack History Month. Up first: I move to New York City.
I am a New York City loyalist, and in many ways a New York City product, but not a New York City Department of Health registered birth. That happened in another country, not my own, which is still known as California. We split from there when I still a little kid, and except for my being originally blonde, not much came of it. My mother is a stalwart Wisconsinite by heritage and habit, so we kind of rolled back there. Like many a celebrated denizen of the Middle West, I stuck around for a while, even as far as enrolling at one of the seven hundred branches of the University of Wisconsin, which is sort of the local version of 7-11 or Circle K.
But perhaps it was the reverse manifest destiny in my soul: I wanted to get the fuck out of there. And I knew it wasn’t going to be California, for various reasons we may discuss in another chapter, to be entitled “My father is a big asshole”. And since I was wont to think big, that left either the French Foreign Legion, or, as in Warner Brothers’ Television’s Felicity, New York City. But the Foreign Legion had rigorous entrance requirements, so I transferred to New York University.
I did this more or less on a whim, and without much preparation, let alone discussion with those close to me, which would have been no one. It was just a big fuck you to everything that had come before, which was necessary. I had never been to New York. I had never much left Wisconsin except when I was required to go to L.A. to see the man who was required to be my father. But I was familiar with the New York literature, and I knew how to find the Algonquin Hotel if all else failed. So when I came home from UW in May, I got my mother on the line and told her that I didn’t need a ride to campus in the fall. I needed a plane ticket.
This went over about the same as anything else with my mother, which is to say “mezzo mezzo”. Mostly she was concerned as to if she had the time to adequately decide what I needed to bring with me — and if she didn’t have those important ten minutes or so to devote to it, perhaps I had better not spend the next three years doing what I wanted to do. Well, I got a suitcase from a friend and I just took what it said to on the list they sent me. I figured even the NYU admissions department probably wasn’t going to get it too wrong.
Academic excellence was not my goal, but I was trending up. My enrolling at what Frank Lloyd Wright would have known as UW-Racine but a more enlightened age had rebranded as UW-Parkside — the antecedent institutions, the university at Racine and the one at Kenosha, were combined because everyone knew what those names meant, but no one had any associations with the Anglo-Saxon fluff “Parkside” — was sort of a disappointing event in my mother’s life, who had a Master’s from a practically-first-rate school and everything. But it was a compromise, as my original ambition was to be the world’s least educated man. However, the heavy competition was not for me. NYU was also below her radar, but it encouraged her that I was not letting the campus quad grow under my feet. At this rate, I might end up at Harvard in time for the revolutionaries to burn it down.
So with what passed for parental consent from the remaining parent, I struck out East to find my fortune, or at least make it with those sophisticated NYU girls, most of whom were most likely also from Wisconsin. I suppose one of the reasons my mother was ultimately accepting was that it meant I could leave behind the girls next door she didn’t like. With my family, it’s the enemy you know, always.
However, they weren’t too much to give up. In our idyllic Lutheran parallel world, it had taken me all of high school to find a girl who’d fuck on the first date, and most of the time after to get a second date. The girl who said she “loved me” was sort of scrawny and didn’t put out at all, and I figured we could always talk on the phone, since it was about the same and I didn’t have to buy beer.
Which is a lot of talk to say that I arrived at LaGuardia Airport, shortly thereafter downtown Manhattan, and didn’t look back. I used to be a homebody provincial type in Racine, now I’m about the same in Manhattan. I think this is trending up, also, but that’s what us provincial snobs always think.
We’re talking about events of a decade ago, but I still remember the thoughts I had in the taxi to my dorm. I was looking around, and nothing seemed too familiar, except from movies, but it seemed normal. I knew it was going to be my place, because I decided it. It was the first time I had ever done that. My father had his town and my mother had hers, and now I had mine, which necessarily was different, and, let’s face it, better. It was goodbye to all that. I could start being somebody I liked.
Well, that last part didn’t pan out. But I did score a bunch of women that I liked at the time.
Next week, as Jack History Month continues: My first night in New York.
by Jack, February 9, 2004 12:08 AM | More from Foundational Issues | More from Jack History Month
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