Brad

When I returned to college for the second semester of my sophomore year in January 1996, I found myself all alone. My girlfriend of the semester prior promptly dumped me, my girlfriend from the years before that had dropped out after trying to kill herself, my roommate had deserted me for a girl, my inability to play the drumset had become glaringly obvious (as a result of a tryout with a jazz trio to be in a Christmas concert in which we were essentially the only group not selected and my drum brush playing was solely and unanimously blamed) and I was beginning to realize my God didn’t exist.

During the month of January, I spent my days listening to mostly Led Zeppelin (a needed distraction from my jazz obsession), reading philosophy and receiving crank calls from someone who literally never said anything. (Although it was probably my suicidal ex, I preferred to hope it was my more recent ex, as I was still in love with her but knew I couldn’t call her.) I spent my nights reading poetry anthologies. I couldn’t sleep.

Eventually I had had enough of eating in the cafeteria alone. I had met and occasionally hung out with two guys, Phil and Cullen, who lived two floors above me the semester before. I went up to their room to ask if I could eat dinner with them, but they weren’t home. A passerby told me they were in room 921.

Timidly, I knocked on the door. There was a whole group of people crammed into this cigarette-filled room, watching “The Young and the Restless.” When the soap ended, we played some hockey on the Sega and then all went and ate together in the cafeteria. This became our daily routine for the rest of the semester, except I quickly learned to go up to room 921 after the god-awful soap opera had ended.

The undisputed leader of this group was Brad. He was smart, cocky and judgmental. He let me borrow his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl. I don’t think he’d ever read it. I think I read it twice. Me and another guy Eric, who later would become an extremely important person in my life, would stay up nights and pick Brad’s brain as they picked mine.

By the end of that semester I was a whole new person. This was verified to myself on the Saturday before finals week, when I finally ran into the ex from the semester before. I looked at her through my blue-tinted John Lennon-style sunglasses, hiding my new contacts, with my hair to my shoulders, wearing Skechers and holding my not-quite-broken-in hacky sack, and realized I had no feelings for her anymore.

We all left for the summer. I missed the whole crew, but especially Brad. I looked forward to more late night philosophical talks when the new semester began in the fall. But they had all changed. Brad became singularly interested in drugs, and most of the rest of the crew followed suit. I was much too curious about the nature of existence and motivated to explore the possibilities of existence to lie around doing nothing all day. I continued to hang out with them, especially at night, but as a self-aware observer. I spent my days reading the Existentialists….