A L S O_ T O D A Y

Dark Hotel
Sternelli's grand -- and fatal -- climax with Virginia; Burroughs breaks the code

T A B L E_ T A L K

The state of sexuality on American campuses: Are students doing it more or less? With what consequences? Contribute your thoughts in the Education area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Breasts on the brain
By Lori Gottlieb
Putting mammary-hungry college boys to the test
(12/09/98)

Is Mike Davis' Los Angeles all in his head?
By Veronique de Turenne
He's been lionized as a prescient Marxist prophet of end-of-the-continent doom and gloom. But a growing number of critics charge that the author of "City of Quartz" has feet of clay
(12/07/98)

Getting the boot
By Jon Bowen
Kicked out of college for immoral conduct, the only son of a Baptist preacher takes a vacation from reality
(12/04/98)

In the Bad Line
By Isaac Zava
Purgatory is standing with a hangover in a queue of non-tuition paying students
(12/02/98)

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
More darts at Foucault's scrawny haunches
(12/02/98)

BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER
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E M P O R I U M
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___campus groupies

 
Between the library and the classroom lives a world of wild characters, and none of them are students.

BY ALLISON LANDA
In Santa Barbara, the fog lingers around the ragged coastline long past daybreak, hugging the land as if to insulate it from the world outside. As a student at the University of California there, I always thought the mist lay especially thick over our seaside campus, creating a vacuum, an unbreakable seal shutting out what we viewed with a jaundiced, wary eye as the real world.

We drank in that rarefied air as eagerly as we sucked down our weekend beers at Giovanni's Pizza, gladly forfeiting an existence outside psych class, quarterly registration fees and our student mecca, the town of Isla Vista. Swathed in our own self-absorbed, self-induced stupor, we happily lost any concept of what lay beyond the ivied boundaries. Such a glorious forgetfulness.

It took a would-be poet in his 50s who spent more time wooing my roommate than composing verse to jolt me into seeing a life outside the academic arena. By his own estimate, the joyfully unemployed Jesse spent 60 hours a week on campus -- he'd met Katerina while monopolizing an ancient Macintosh next to her at the student computer lab -- and the balance of his time warming our third-hand La-Z-Boy.

Jesse had his routine down cold long before Kat or I ever came to Santa Barbara. He'd be up in the wee hours of 11 a.m. or so to catch the No. 11 bus from his shabby boarding house over to campus, where he spent all day and part of the night slipping into the student fitness center, napping on one of many rolling emerald lawns, grabbing an illicit bite to eat at a dorm cafeteria. Jesse had never once set foot in a lecture hall. He had no reason to do so -- he wasn't a student. He just played one in his own mind.

The fling with Katerina didn't last long. It couldn't, what with my doing my best to sabotage it. After a few weeks of his dirty feet on our coffee table, his discarded socks on our kitchen floor, his charming habit of urinating with the bathroom door half-open, even Mother Teresa would have snapped. And I've never been accused of possessing her virtues.

Blessedly temporary though his furlough at our place was, it set me to seriously question my own future ambitions. Would I someday awake as another Jesse, borrowing student registration cards to surf the Internet and get whopping discounts at local stores, writing rambling editorials for the campus newspaper and penning odes that were stunningly beautiful -- if only in my own eyes?

Suddenly, I realized that to do otherwise meant wresting myself from the cushiness of academia and plunging full-force into the fabled shark-infested waters of the Other World. Now, two years after making that leap, I concede that it's a rough transition. My antipathy for Jesse has faded with the working world's challenges; I've come to see that fear as well as fervor led him to seek campus refuge. Really, it's hard to blame him ... at least in hindsight.

For someone like Jesse -- low on the marketable skills, high on the illusions -- the ivory tower is a haven. A sad, out-of-place footnote on Main Street USA or in corporate culture, he's found his comfortable, ragged niche in the tolerant foothills of the university environment. He's hardly the only one. Colleges across the spectrum, from right-wing to bleeding-heart liberal, draw hangers-on who flock for some reason. Some are eccentric but basically sane students who never quite managed to graduate. Others are stark-raving lunatics wise enough to know that the campus is a far kinder asylum than any state ward. They're the groupies -- and without them, college life would lack a vibrant and essential dimension.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. UC-Berkeley's three musketeers