There is something too daunting about an unknown future, about the years to come, which are as cloudy as an overly chlorinated swimming pool in suburbia. Just rent the 1967 classic favorite, "The Graduate," and sympathize with Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock, a post-college soul so confused that he's seduced by Mrs. Robinson, the middle-aged neighborhood seductress who obviously was looking for more than a friendly "hello" when she peeked over the backyard fence.
However, the affair probably was more exciting than the aimless weeks that followed, when (accompanied by a melancholy Simon and Garfunkle soundtrack) Benjamin takes refuge from the real world by drifting in an inflatable raft in the deep end of his backyard pool. With a beer can permanently attached to his hand, he has to endure motivational father-son talks like this one:
Dad: "Have you thought about graduate school?"
Benjamin: "No."
Dad: "Would you mind telling me then what these four years of college were for, what was the point of all that hard work?"
Benjamin: "You got me."
Even at the turn of the 21st century, the distressed Benjamin, alienated and confused by the plastic values of his generation, is all too familiar.
After graduating from the University, a guy I know - we'll call him "Dustin" - behaved identically, though I don't think he had an affair with a middle-aged seductress. (You never know though, since he did spend an exorbitant amount of time "golfing" and was known to hit it off with the older Law School girls who frequented the Biltmore).
Day after day, when the UV index was at its peak, I could find Dustin out on his back patio, sporting his old O.P. trunks and 80s Varnet sunglasses. He seemed to be going for the half-and-half look, with his chest and stomach a deep bronze and his back a pasty white. Forget college graduate - he looked more like a washed out lifeguard.
Occasionally he'd flick on the half broken boom box he'd gotten way back in sixth grade, but most of the time he'd just stare blankly at the rhododendrons, mentally trying to relive the past four years as he contemplated his future.
Wallowing in this state of real-world denial, Dustin decided to join with others like him and skip the country, hoping to find clarity on the coast of Spain, in the Swiss Alps and in the arms of girls who spoke no English.
Yet, clarity did not come with a Eurorail pass and the group's attempts to forget their troubles went awry at a sketchy bar in Rome. There, one of the travelers accidentally ordered a coded $150 drink, which unexpectedly solicited a prostitute who lingered in the kitchen. Next, Dustin, still in his post-college daze, missed his flight home to the United States. Not that this amounted to an entirely bad deal. He just had to suffer through the plush amenities of the executive suite at the Charles De GaulleAirport Hotel, the only room available. It came with a little butler who knocked on the door every hour, he informed me over the phone when he called to ask the time.
"What time is it!" I yelled, worried about that stop he had made in Amsterdam. It was time to calculate the price of a ludicrous call from France to Connecticut. "Why don't you call the front desk for the time?" I questioned.
"I don't speak French," Dustin replied.
"You took it for seven years!" I reminded him, wondering where his little butler was when he needed him.
Meanwhile, at dinner parties, the distraught parents of these befuddled college graduates attacked their beef tenderloin with the steak knife, and mutilated their souffles as they struggled to brag about their children's new career paths.
- "My Johnny has just finished up at Dartmouth and now has chosen to delve seriously into fraud and sell vacuums door to door in New Hampshire."
- "Well, our boy just dropped out of med school and now resides on the quaint New England island of Martha's Vineyard, where he is a popular bartender. He was headed to be a cardiologist like his father but now makes a mean martini."
- "I'm sure the girls who loiter the docks just love him. Well our twins went off to be ski instructors in Jackson Hole."
- "No, Mary-Lou, what were they thinking? Jackson Hole was the thing to do last year. Dessert anyone?"
Months later the graduates emerged out of their dark and murky confusion and floated to the surface, like a plastic scuba-man who has been released from an entanglement of seaweed on an aquarium floor. They took off their 1980s Varnet sunglasses and realized the light was bright, but fresh and different. It was not the white of the walls in Bonnycastle, the lines of the football field or an answer left blank. It was the white of a diploma, a job offer letter and a plane ticket. It only blinded them temporarily, like a new pair of running shoes before they hit a muddy puddle and become comfortably broken in.
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