I got up there, and my friends had gotten into something I’d never heard about before called fraternities. Dorms and fraternities, all this was new stuff to me. A kid from my class background didn’t know this stuff. So they said they’re in Delta Upsilon, and I’ve got to pledge. “What’s that?” I asked. They told me to just come on around. I did. Adams, the most macho guy you’d ever want to see, was crying when he came out to tell me their decision. He said, “you can’t get in because you’re a Jew. I didn’t know.” We went to a movie so that we didn’t have to deal with our feelings.
From that point on, I was livid with rage, and hated the school, and hated the class stuff. It was very expensive for me there. I needed a job desperately. They were hard to get, but I got a job as a waiter—two meals a day for a sorority, and one meal a day as a cook’s helper in a fraternity.
We were not allowed to talk to the young women in the sorority. They would tell us what food they wanted and so forth, but we’d lose these hard-to-get jobs if we were caught talking to them. I’m washing their dishes, and I can’t talk to them. They’re upstairs studying for a test we’re both to be taking, while I’m preparing their food.
What the University of Michigan meant to me was not getting into a fraternity because I was Jewish, not being able to talk to certain people because they’re wealthy, and having to wait on them, while they’re upstairs competing with me. I didn’t think of it in class terms then – I just walked around with a slow-burning rage, generalized to anybody that looked wealthy.
These experiences rekindled feelings of being an outsider, alone, lonely, that had never really left me, except for a brief period in high school. I was terribly depressed, obnoxiously depressed. This was made worse by finding out that a women I was in love with was Catholic. I had no idea what a Catholic was— all Christians looked alike to me. She wanted me to convert. I’m angry at religion and angry at her. I was really in bad shape psychologically. I was very angry, drank a lot, and frightened a lot of people.
Dick Booth, the head of the fraternity that had rejected me, was from Cranbrook Institute, a really expensive, ultra-classy private school outside of Detroit. He dressed very preppie. Unfortunately, he lived in the room next to mine in the dorm. One day I was trying to study, and he’s got his stereo playing— before anybody ever had a stereo, he’s hi-fi. I go next store and say, “Booth, turn it down.” I’m not saying I asked nicely. I’m sure I was nasty. He gave me a look that almost made me kill another guy a couple years ago—a preppie kind of look. I grabbed him by the collar, and heaved him the whole length of the room, and crashed him up against the wall. It wasn’t until I saw the total fear in his face that I backed off. My dorm advisor heard of this, and said I ought to see somebody. He was a very nice man. I loved him dearly.
The fact that my behavior was frightening even a nice person like him made me worry. Most of the time I was walking around close to tearing somebody’s head off. So I went to the student health service, and I started to let out just a little of my thoughts and feelings to this social worker. I could just see she was getting scared shitless. That wasn’t a way to get me feeling confident to talk about this stuff. I needed good counseling, and I was disappointed. I was royally depressed. I said to myself at the time that I was depressed. I spent a lot of time thinking of killing myself. I was suffering, and I dealt with it by getting drunk. That’s what everyone did. “You’re depressed? Let’s go hang one on.” Typical.
I had no Jewish friends to support me. I was anti-Semitic. I hated Jews. Couldn’t stand them. I’d see these aggressive, pushy New York Jews with their damn accents, and I’d want to kill them. I was as anti-Semitic as a Klan member. I prided myself on having no Jewish friends. In those days I had no support. My relationship with Adams was seriously strained, because he was a member of the fraternity, and he felt so terrible about what they had done. It would have been very heroic in those days for him to have resigned. As it was, he showed a lot of love. He knew about my economic situation, and one of the jobs I got was in his fraternity. The bleeding-heart liberals1 in the fraternity treated me the way blacks were treated—condescendingly. They would go overboard to invite me to all their functions, and let me off having to pay social dues.
I was very much alone and very depressed, and very unhappy. I thought that nobody was as morose2 and as depressed and as miserable as I was. I was drinking very heavily and doing crazy things. I’d find myself in places that I didn’t know how I got to. The only thing that sustained me through that was how deeply I wanted to learn stuff to help me deal with the suffering of people.
I knew I was getting into a highly competitive field, and I felt that I couldn’t let down and indulge myself in this emotional stuff too much. Every test I took was competition for my survival. If I wanted to reach my goal, I had to keep my grades up. I did that in face of all of that depression by just pushing myself. Fortunately, I did it quickly for economic reasons, and to keep out of the army by tricking the Selective Service3.
I graduated in three years, thinking that if I get into graduate school before they notice, they won’t send me to Korea. I really burned the candle at both ends, pushed myself emotionally and every other way, got the grades, got accepted by the University of Wisconsin, and now I feel that the rest is honey. Now I’m in graduate school. Well, graduate school was even worse.
Next: Graduate School
1a person of left-wing or liberal views who is deemed to be excessively soft-hearted
2Someone who is morose is miserable, bad-tempered, and not willing to talk very much to other people.
3In the United States, selective service is a system of selecting and ordering young people to serve in the armed forces for a limited period of time.
- a person of left-wing or liberal views who is deemed to be excessively soft-hearted ↩︎
- Someone who is morose is miserable, bad-tempered, and not willing to talk very much to other people. ↩︎
- In the United States, selective service is a system of selecting and ordering young people to serve in the armed forces for a limited period of time. ↩︎