CHAPTER 1: PORTRAIT OF THE ASS AS A YOUNG MAN

I wasn’t always an ass. But that’s what I became, to my great sorrow and consternation. No use denying it or mincing words. An ass, plain and simple, is what I was. When I glimpsed my reflection in a muddy pool of water, I saw nothing but a brutish animal. Looking at me you would never guess the complex thoughts percolating through my mind or fathom the intricate workings of my brain. You wouldn’t know what memories I cherished or what hopes sustained me, or have an inkling of my true worth. To you I would be nothing but a thick-skinned, braying, four-legged beast with a shaggy, frazzled tail and pointy ears.

“Whoa! Hold it right there,” I hear you say, a bemused, incredulous smile on your face. “Are you telling us you were once an ordinary person and got turned into an ass?”

I know how absurd it sounds. I didn’t believe it myself – I didn’t want to believe it – so I understand your skepticism. But bear with me and I’ll tell you the whole story from the beginning.

***

I was a young man in the prime of my life. I’d just completed my studies at the university. It took a while, I admit, but not because of lack of intelligence or diligence. I’m sure I’m not the only one to spend seven years as an undergraduate. It took me a while to find my niche, to locate a suitable field of study. Maybe you had a similar experience yourself. I floundered around for a time, switching majors and universities again and again before I homed in on what I was meant to do with my life.

I started my college career in the humanities and was much taken with literature and philosophy and those big questions about the meaning and purpose of life. The sweet odor of pipe tobacco that wafted through the halls of the quaint old building that housed those departments, and the sonorous voices of genteel professors clad in tweed jackets with elbow patches, beguiled me. I felt at home there. For some reason or other, I took a fancy to 18th and 19th century European literature and became so immersed in that bygone world that I felt more at ease with the fictional characters who came to life in my mind than with my contemporaries. Consumed as I was by the ethos of a far off time and place, I felt awkward among my peers and even more so in the real world I occasionally encountered when I stepped off campus.

Unhappy about my growing alienation from the world around me, I changed direction and turned to philosophy, the mother of all disciplines, but got bogged down in the long discourses I read. My mind became muddled with the compelling but contradictory ideas that confronted me. One day I’d be totally convinced by Hobbes’ argument that humans are brutish by nature and then find myself in equal agreement with Rousseau’s thesis that man is inherently good when not corrupted by society. Both outlooks made perfect sense and I tended to be swayed by whatever I was reading at the moment.

I sought to clear my mind and cope with the doubts that plagued me by resorting to a variety of pharmaceutical palliatives of the type that, although illegal, are nonetheless readily available on any college campus. But rather than improving my concentration, they had the opposite effect. In my self-medicated state, ideas and concepts became blurred to the point that I could no longer distinguish Locke from Hume or Hegel from Kant. In fact, the more I relied on those substances, the harder it was to distinguish reality from fantasy.

My grades plummeted and I began to question the value of what I was learning. I came to realize that I wasn’t that interested in philosophy and ideas after all. I had no talent for philosophical reasoning. The thing that piqued my curiosity was what spurred those ideas and how they played out in interactions among people. It was the human element that I wanted to explore. Likewise, my earlier fascination with literature wasn’t driven by the literary and aesthetic aspects of the texts I read, but by the characters who populated them. I was interested in people and what made them tick. The answers to the questions that consumed me were to be found not in the humanities but the social sciences. I needed a fresh start. I switched colleges and majors to pursue my new interest.

My first classes in psychology and sociology provided just what I was looking for – theories and explanations for why people behaved as they did. Good riddance to entanglements with fictional characters and long philosophical excursions that left me utterly bewildered. My studies exposed me to a world of brand new concepts that I eagerly applied to everything and everyone around me. I analyzed the interactions with each person I came in contact with. I re-evaluated my relationship with my parents, relatives and friends and found behavioral influences that I had never dreamed of before. It was as if all life had become illuminated in a new way and I was able to see things that I had been completely blind to before.

The funny thing is that the more knowledge I acquired about people and the mechanisms and motivations of their behavior, the more my relations with others soured. I don’t know why but old friends abandoned me and new acquaintances with whom I attempted to strike up relationships seemed to avoid me. For some reason they didn’t appreciate my brilliant insights into their character or the free advice I generously bestowed upon them. They were even unmoved by my passionate harangues about the brilliance of B. F. Skinner.

The more I came to understand people and what motivated them, the less able I seemed to be to get along with them. I became irritable and depressed. Aside from the havoc my psychological preoccupations wrought on my social life, in time I also became disillusioned with the softness of the social sciences. There were too many alternative explanations, too many holes and weaknesses in experiments and theories. I craved something more concrete, more reliable. Quite naturally I gravitated to the physical sciences. It was time for a new major and a new institution of learning where I could begin anew.

At last I felt that I had discovered my true calling. After all the fuzziness and lack of precision I encountered in the humanities and social sciences I arrived at a place where hard, cold facts and true objectivity reigned. What a joy it was to be in this domain where everything was clearly defined, measured and quantified and where mere opinion and speculation were scorned. This world of indisputable data was where I belonged and I thrived in labs where I collected and collated crisp, clear columns of numbers. Let the philosophy and literature majors engage in their nebulous discussions and let the social scientists pretend that the psyche is a physical entity that can be probed and comprehended. Science provided clear, indisputable facts, so much more concrete and defensible than the wishy-washy, half-baked theorizing of social scientists.

Yet after some time, I started to become disillusioned with science as well. I began to see how the same objective results could be used to support wildly different hypotheses, and that even here, the accuracy and absolute clarity I craved were elusive. Furthermore, there was a disturbing gap between the pure sciences and the real world in which I lived that began to trouble me more and more. Instead of explaining the phenomena of existence as I hoped it would, science seemed like a world unto itself, completely separate and isolated from the real world.

The chasm between what my senses told me was a solid brick and what science described as “electric charges in violent motion” was too wide. I could comprehend the two realms well enough separately, by themselves, but not simultaneously. It was like the picture in my psychology textbook that I used to stare at for long periods of time, which sometimes appeared to be a young lady and sometimes an old hag, but never both at the same time. I just wanted a brick to be a brick.

By now, perhaps, you’re asking, “What does all this have to do with you becoming an ass? Why are you telling us about your whole college career?” Let me be clear. I’m barely even scratching the surface of my college years. I’m merely hinting at some of the shifts of direction that characterized my student days. Let me assure you that this isn’t idle chatter but pertinent background information that will help you better appreciate the story I’m about to relate.

After so many years of college and changes in direction, I began to despair of ever finding a subject area that was right for me. My parents, too, were wondering if I’d ever complete college and be able to earn a living on my own. They started pestering me about when I would graduate and told me they couldn’t afford to pay my tuition and other expenses indefinitely. I was feeling very low and on the verge of packing it in. I considered quitting school and looking for a real job.

Then, almost by accident, I found it. It was the perfect major, a field of study that utilized scientific precision but was aligned with the most practical aspects of living. It wasn’t concerned with abstract knowledge for its own sake but related directly to the material world. What could possibly suit me better than my new major, engineering? It was a way to bridge the divide between academic study and the real world, between the thoughts that occupied my mind and the reality I perceived with my senses. What career choice could better suit an idealistic young man like myself? It was a thoroughly practical major, and the prospect of my having a lucrative career in engineering after graduating was not an insignificant factor in my parents’ decision to continue subsidizing my education.

I relished the thought of improving the world around me and turning my ideas into something concrete. I’d effect changes, leave my mark, have a genuine impact. Engineers are the alchemists of the modern world, sorcerers who can turn dreams into reality. I would take abstract plans and give them substance, endow them with tangible, material, real-world actuality. This was work I could immerse myself in. This was the vocation I was made for. As an engineer I would transform the world.

After all my floundering I settled down and finally graduated. Even before I was handed my sheepskin I had a job lined up and waiting for me in Des Moines at the end of the summer. If I’d graduated as a humanities major I’d probably have ended up handing out burgers and fries from a drive-through window. Delighted with how things turned out, I was eager to start my new career and close the seemingly interminable student chapter of my life.

But seven years of college is a long stretch. I was exhausted. I needed, I deserved, a break. Who would begrudge me a short holiday after all those years of arduous study? I had time to kill, more than two months between graduation and my first day of work. A road trip would be the perfect way to unwind. I longed to see the world and would make a start by first becoming familiar with my own country. Somehow or other I managed to make it to my mid-twenties without ever traveling outside my home state of Iowa. I felt rather embarrassed about that deficiency, a bit like a forty-year-old virgin – inexperienced and chagrined about my lack of experience. But I would soon remedy that. I’d drive the length and breadth of the country and travel through as many states as I could. I’d pass through dozens of cities and towns and get to know every region of the USA better than any of my erstwhile college buddies, even the sophisticated ones from back east.

Excited about the adventure I was about to embark on, I packed up my old Tercel. I’d rely on a tenuous network of distant relatives, friends, and friends of friends to visit along the way to defray the cost of a prolonged trip. When anyone mentioned an acquaintance or relative in a distant town or city, I’d press for a name and phone number and jot them down. From out-of-the-way places like French Lick, Frogmore and Fairplay to the great metropolises of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles – I’d see them all. I had potential contacts everywhere. So what if I had to pick up a phone and say, “Hi Dan, I’m a friend of your third cousin’s brother-in-law,” as long as I could get a free night’s room and board out of it.

I wasn’t shy about collecting contacts. One time, I recall, I was sitting in a Burger King, going over some notes for a test while I chomped on a chicken sandwich. I always found that eating while studying helped me remember information. A theorem got linked to the taste of French fries and a mathematical formula became firmly associated with the sweet frothiness of a chocolate milkshake. If music was playing in the background, so much the better. The more senses that were involved, the stronger my memory would be. Anyhow, I was distracted by a loud conversation between a man and woman in the booth behind me. At first I was annoyed because it kept me from concentrating on my work. I twisted my neck and glared at the inconsiderate diners, but they were so engrossed in their gabbing that they failed to notice my silent rebuke. I was just about to ask them to keep their voices down when I heard a snippet of their conversation that made me change my mind.

They were talking about a trip they took. My interest was piqued and my annoyance evaporated. I strained to hear what they were saying and was rewarded with the information that they had just visited a nephew in a town called Paradise. Imagine that, Paradise. I couldn’t resist. I wanted to be able to say that I had been to Paradise.

So I turned around again, cleared my throat and struck up a conversation. Admittedly, it was a bit awkward at first, but after a few blundering stabs at small talk, I managed to win them over enough to get a conversation going. It was an older couple, maybe in their forties, so I didn’t have a lot in common with them, but being a student helped because they had a daughter in college. I had no idea where Paradise was but soon learned that it was in northern California, not far from Chico, a name which brought a smile to my face as I thought of the madcap Marx brothers. I’d have to stop there too. Before I got up to go to my next class I had their nephew’s address and phone number scribbled on the back of my notebook. I was quite pleased with myself. Collecting addresses had become a pursuit in its own right and every time I added a new one to my collection, I congratulated myself on my achievement.

Despite my eagerness to be on the road, it was daunting to leave the comfortable college life I had grown accustomed to. Over the years I had accumulated lots of stuff – books, records, clothing and knickknacks, not to mention countless notebooks filled with my scribblings. I thought it would be hard to part with all these treasures and was surprised at how liberating it turned out to be to discard boxes of books and clothing that I would no longer need in my new life, and pare down to the bare essentials.

I consigned most of the relics of my student life to the Goodwill bin or the trash can and threw the stuff I wanted to hang onto into the car. I’m not nomadic by nature and two months would be a long time to be on the road, but it was precisely what I needed: a good long break before settling down to a routine of work. Clear my mind out on the open road, sow some wild oats, that kind of thing. By the end of the summer my wanderlust would be satisfied and I’d make my way back to Des Moines to settle down to serious work.

I said my goodbyes to friends and family. My trunk and back seats crammed full to capacity, I was ready to bid goodbye to Iowa City and journey forth into the unknown.