“If I Were That Guy, I Would Scream”: My College Years

CW: violent crime, sexual harassment, mental illness

In the winter of 2019, a clinical psychologist dropped a bomb on me: I had suffered from schizotypal personality disorder since I was a teenager. I was on the schizophrenia spectrum. Even though I had not experienced the worst form of this illness, my condition had still been debilitating. This diagnosis revolutionized my conception of myself. I had recognized before that I had acted very strangely in the past and had provoked a lot of anger, even outrage. Nevertheless, I had never entertained the idea that I might be mentally ill. I had never suspected that I might have something in common with the homeless man bawling profanities in the street or the shooter who opens fire on a crowd.

Yet, as I thought about the matter, I found the hypothesis that I had suffered from a personality disorder increasingly plausible. I had had an uncle who suffered from full-blown schizophrenia, so the gene was likely in my bloodline. I had never been homeless, but I had also been unsuccessful in adjusting to any workplace that I had been part of and had never been able to hold down a job. I came from a wealthy family and had survived mostly off the money that my mother had given to me. I don’t think I would ever have ended up homeless without this money, but I might well have been very poor without it, perhaps desperate. I was also haunted, tormented even, by horrible memories from my past, which I couldn’t explain. I had committed acts of violence. For virtually my whole life, I had been ostracized by whatever group of people I found myself in. They had reacted to me with bewilderment, ridicule, and disgust. No one had ever directly confronted me about my mental health, but they had made veiled references to insanity in my presence, which, I realized in retrospect, were obviously directed at me. People had often remarked on my oddity. They had told me that they had never met anyone like me, that there was something wrong with me, that I was the strangest person they had ever known, and other such things.

You may wonder why, all this being true, I had never come up with the hypothesis that I might be mentally ill on my own. The reason was that I had developed over the course of my life a hidebound personal myth that caused me to interpret all rejections as evidence of my special genius. I will describe this myth in the body of the essay.

Eventually, I got a prescription for an anti-psychotic. I started using marijuana and continued in therapy. This combination of treatments brought me some clarity. I began to research schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) so that I might understand the person I had been for most of my life. However, I found this research frustrating. Even as I was becoming more convinced that I had indeed been mentally ill, I began increasingly to doubt whether “SPD” accurately labeled what had been wrong with me. For example, one of the central traits of SPD is belief in the paranormal. Schizotypals believe that there are occult forces at work in the world that only they understand. However, I had always scorned such superstitions. I also came to doubt whether SPD was a coherent concept that labeled a natural kind. Wikipedia presents a good summary of the diverse definitions of schizotypy, which underlies SPD, and you are free to judge for yourself whether they are compatible with each other. I do not find them to be so.

So I have decided to write my own description, explanation, and history of my madness. This essay deals with my time in college, when I was at my craziest. I will begin by describing my behavior, then give the best account I can muster of why I did these things. I conclude with some remarks about how educational institutions should deal with students like myself. All person and place names, including my own, have been fictionalized to avoid unnecessary embarrassment.

Crimes and misdemeanors

First the facts. I got my BA in French from Dartleyherst College, an elite institution in New England that is routinely ranked among the top liberal arts colleges in the country. I studied there between 1987 and 1992. In case you conclude that I must be brilliant, I should make clear that my grandfather and uncle went to Dartleyherst, which undoubtedly gave me an advantage over other applicants.

My behavior has never been more chaotic than it was during my first year at Dartleyherst. Freed from the supervision of my family for the first time, I conducted radical experiments in living. I was obsessed with transgressing boundaries, which led me to criminal behavior, including by far the most horrible action that I’ve ever committed.

To begin with, I did a lot of stealing. I think this stemmed from a legitimate need for money. I don’t recall what my allowance was, but I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, an expensive habit that my parents were not inclined to finance. However, I think that I had a legitimate need for nicotine, as it has a calming and sobering effect on me. I quit smoking a few years ago, but I continue to use nicotine in lozenge form, as without it, my mind goes haywire. The nicotine was a form of self-medication for whatever was wrong with me.

This need for money led me to steal what money I could from my fellow students. Most students left their doors unlocked, and, when I was confident that the rooms were deserted, I would go into them and steal any money that I could find. I still find it unbelievable that I did this. It is amazing that I never got caught or that no one ever confronted me about the stealing. They must have figured out who was doing it or at least had suspicions. But all they did was start locking their doors.

The stealing was motivated not only by a need for money, but also by the thrill I would get from placing myself in danger. So I also stole things I didn’t need just for the sport of it. I would steal from stores in the town of Dartleyherst. There was one store that sold college paraphernalia like T-shirts, shot glasses, and so forth. I would go in with a large coat, stand in front of shelves of sweatshirts or whatever, wait for the store clerk to look away, then stuff these knick-knacks in. I felt like I was on a different planet when I did this or as though I were in space feeling the blast of the solar wind. I stole from a few other stores around town and also from the campus gift store, from which I lifted some shot glasses that I had no intention of ever using. I stole multiple times from the gift store, and the student employees there clearly knew what I was doing it, as they started following me around when I would come in. However, the college never confronted me about this behavior.

A whole slew of odd, obnoxious, and even criminal behavior focused on sex. I will tell here two stories about my worst incidents in college.

The first is the story of Ella, who was a young Latin American woman who lived in the same dorm as I did freshman year. I met Ella early on and attached myself to her. I would always want to be with Ella, accompanying her to the dining hall for dinner and also for coffee at a nearby café. This was at the time when I was committing all of my other acts of delinquency. I think she was fascinated by my zany chaotic nature. The problem was that I wanted sex from her, and she didn’t want it from me. There were various episodes of struggle between us, where I would try to disrobe her and she would resist. She went on being my friend in spite of all this, which was a mistake on her part. I believe she considered me her special cause.

Towards the end of our freshman year, she met someone that she did like sexually, a guy in a rock band named Ryan. I was devastated by her choice, not only because I believed myself to be in love with Ella, but also because I hated rock music. As I will explain, I was an aesthetic elitist who revered classical music. I thought rock was basically bad music: self-indulgent, maudlin, and trashy.

So on three consecutive nights, I went outside Ella’s windows and threw large stones through them. Of course, this was on another level from my other acts of delinquency. This was assault with a deadly weapon, a violent felony. Fortunately, I didn’t hurt Ella or her roommate, but I could have. There would have been nothing to stop the bricks or the glass from hitting them.

It was by far the worst thing that I’ve done in my life. I am condemned to hear those windows smashing until I die.

I will detail my thoughts on how the college should have handled this incident later. Of course, I should have been expelled and been made to spend some time in jail and to face a judge for this terrible crime. However, the university responded merely by sending me a letter stating that they were “disappointed” in me and placing me on disciplinary probation. The next semester I stopped doing any coursework at all and failed all my classes, but I was still not expelled. Rather, I was also placed on academic probation and made to spend some time away from college and to make up the semester that I had failed somewhere else.

The result was that I returned to Dartleyherst at the beginning of the 1990 school year. It was a terrible, indeed an insane, decision on my part to return to a college where I had such a reputation and which was so full of awful memories, but return I did.

I had changed in the intervening time. I had gotten over the stealing and all my other most chaotic behavior. I was no longer the sort of person who would throw stones through windows. My coursework had also improved, and I was getting A’s in most of my classes. However, I was still deeply ill and dysfunctional.

One of my peculiarities was my tendency to gaze or even stare intently and rudely at people. (I have also written a poem about this habit and its consequences.) When I was in a class and we were sitting in a circle, I would spend my time inspecting the students. Usually, I turned my eyes when they looked back at me, but not always. How and when we look at people has a social meaning and is governed by social conventions that normal people pick up intuitively. However, I had little awareness of these conventions, and I was also inclined to break them because of my anger at the college and the world, which I will discuss later.

It was most thrilling and fascinating to gaze at women whom I found attractive, and I was particularly attracted to women whom I believed to be my opposite. Of course, I knew little about who they really were, but I projected my fantasies on them. The best way I can describe them is to say that these were the women who seemed like they were at home in the world. They dressed well, they smiled, they were beautiful. It seemed as though they had found their place in the world, and, as it were, grew naturally there, as though this earth were their native soil. I never felt that way. I always felt the world was a foreign and hostile place where I didn’t naturally belong.

I was also fascinated by men who fell into this “at home in the world” category, though I had no sexual feelings for them. I was at once angry at these natives of Earth, enthralled by them, and envious of them. So I would gaze at them in class in a way that surely made them uncomfortable.

I became a French major, and I did a semester abroad in Paris with a foreign exchange program connected to Dartleyherst and other institutions of higher learning. In August of 1991, we met for a series of orientation classes where we were to hone our French skills and be taught how to deal with the Parisian university system.

On my first day of these classes, I became fascinated by three women who arrived in the class together. One of them, Fiona, turned out to be from Dartleyherst, although I didn’t know her. The other two turned out to be from the prestigious Russet University, one of the top universities in the USA.

These women were all very beautiful and fit the “at home in the world” image. I began to watch them. The way their different types of beauty merged together was fascinating to me. Fiona with her short blonde hair, Heather with her bright orange woolly hair, and Suyin with her sleek black Asian hair. They seemed like an image of paradise.

I began gazing at Heather. Normally, I would gaze at women until they turned to me, when I would look away, but this time, I met her eyes when she turned to me and didn’t look away. I did this a few times over the next few days. Usually, I was afraid to talk to the women I gazed at, but in this case, I decided that I should man up and stop being such a coward, so I made every effort that I could to talk with Heather. It is clear to me in retrospect that she was repelled by me and my creepy gazing, and she did not wish to talk to me.

The class took a field trip to see the chateaux of the Loire valley. We stopped for lunch at a wonderfully well-preserved French town, and I joined Heather and Suyin for a walk and tried to make conversation with them. The next castle that we visited was a gorgeous building with high-ceilinged rooms decorated with glorious rococo patterns. It came to pass that I was standing at one end of one of these chambers, and Heather was across the room with a few others. She said to them in quite a loud voice and rolling her eyes, “Don came up to us at lunch, and he was nervous, and it was like love, but I don’t want to see any more of Don because Don is pathetic!” Then she looked at me.

I was crushed by this episode, but I was also angry. I decided that I couldn’t bear the disgrace of what Heather had done, and I decided to try to get revenge on her. It is crucial to realize that I believed myself to be the victim in this encounter. If I had been a reasonable person, I would have been able to see that I had acted rudely and offensively to her through my gazing, that I had ignored her signals when I was trying to chat with her, and that I had just screwed the whole thing up. She didn’t want to have anything to do with me, and she wasn’t sure that I would ever get the message, so she called me pathetic in public. I was clearly in the wrong, and her actions were understandable.

But I was not a reasonable person. As I will explain, I interpreted the world through the lens of a personal myth that made me interpret all such rejections as acts of aggression against me by a cruel and unjust world.

So I decided to get my revenge on her. I prepared a little speech to deliver in class the next day. Heather and her beautiful friends thankfully skipped that class. I waited for some pretext from the professor and said, in French, “This thing happened to a friend of mine recently. He’s a nice, kind of shy guy, and this girl treated him cruelly just because she could. Because cruelty is her way of distinguishing herself and of forming her own identity. Because she has nothing to distinguish herself other than cruelty.”

I felt as though I were going to faint as I said this and undoubtedly looked rather peculiar. The teacher of the class immediately suspected something was up. She said, “A friend? (Un ami?)” incredulously. Various of Heather’s friends and acquaintances were in the class and knew what I was talking about, and this undoubtedly got back to her, and from there it got back to Dartleyherst. Everyone found out.

I know that everyone found out because of the way I was treated. When I got back to classes at Dartleyherst, and started once again my wretched habit of inspecting people in my French class, there were women who saw me and took action. They would do a little shivery motion and look at each other. When one of them did it, two or three others would see her, and they would do their shivery motion as well. My eyes would dart around the class as they did it. After a few classes of this, I wanted to show them that I gave in, so as soon as one of them started shivering, I would look directly up at the ceiling. And I stopped looking at them.

The women of Dartleyherst seem in retrospect to have been of two minds about me after this. One faction sought to redeem me. The fact that I had stopped my weird gazing meant that I might have gotten the message. Some of them acted quite friendly to me, greeting me in hallways as though they wished to talk with me. However, I rebuffed all such overtures. I interpreted their friendly behavior as being motivated by pity. As I will explain below, I harbored a deeply sexist, macho worldview, and I refused to accept the pity of women.

Another group of women just saw in me a disgusting piece of garbage, and, while none of them confronted me directly, they made their feelings known through their words and actions. For example, once I was sitting alone in the dining hall, and a woman drew notice to me. Her friend said, “If I were that guy, I would scream!” Another example came during a gathering of German students for a year end party—I studied German as well as French in college. The German teaching assistants asked us to gather in a circle and hold hands while they delivered some kind of motivational message about community. I grasped the hand of the woman next to me, but she wriggled her hand out of my clasp. Everyone was holding hands except for me and her. I had literally become untouchable.

Causes of my madness

As I have examined my time in college in the past few years, I found the way acted so strange and self-defeating that I couldn’t even explain it to myself, let alone others. The difficulties were as much emotional as intellectual. I could scarcely bear to contemplate what I did, and speculating about my motives brought me even more shame. However, years of poking and prodding at my memories eventually yielded a plausible theory of what had caused my madness.

Childhood alienation

My childhood environment undoubtedly contributed to my future illness, but I do not believe that it was a primary factor. It is tempting to blame the difficulties one has in life on one’s parents and other environmental pressures and influences. If your background is at fault for your difficulties, it means that they are not due to your nature, and so they ought to be easier to correct. However, it would be unfair and self-deceiving for me to blame my parents and peers for what I became.

My parents’ outlook on the world diverged radically from that of most of my peers’ parents. I grew up in the highly conservative small mid-western city of Bouville. My mother was a liberal feminist who founded the women’s studies department at the local university. My father was a communist religious studies professor who decided that the USA was fundamentally wicked and irredeemable after the election of the radical conservative and fanatical cold warrior Ronald Reagan. My parents had divorced when I was five, and I grew up with my mother and visited my father during the summers. I attended an expensive private school, and my peers came from the wealthiest families in Bouville. They were, by and large, conservative families who viewed Reagan as a savior from what they perceived to be the socialist drift of their country. They were also getting rich, as my family also was, from the stock and bond bull market that was unleashed partly as a result of Reagan’s policies. They were embedded in a culture of local churches and country clubs and other organizations of which my mother and I knew little.

The other children declared their group allegiances in their appearance. They were a bright mass of Izods and Ralph Lauren sweaters and polos. I envied them for how they looked. Although my mother would eventually become wealthy from family money, she was at that point raising a child on an associate professor’s salary, which was not lavish. Even if she had been willing to spend the money on expensive clothes, she would have had to have figured out how to make me look like my peers, as I didn’t understand how myself. As it was, I spent a lot of time flailing around in the clothes section at the malls trying to achieve the right look.

I was ideologically opposed to my peers as well. My mother raised me with feminist and liberal values, which I was wont to air in the presence of my peers, and my earnestness provoked much mockery.

Because of these differences in background, I came to view myself as isolated from my peers and to view them with a mixture of hostility and envy. These feelings no doubt contributed to my illness.

Mind-blindness

However, while these differences in background contributed to my alienation, I do not believe that they were decisive. I’m no expert in child psychology, but I believe children normally manage to get over disparities in cultural background much greater than those that existed between me and my peers. When their nature is the same, children usually come to see eye to eye. I believe that I was alienated primarily because I was different in nature from my peers.

An inability to understand the motivations and feelings of others, which I will call “mind-blindness,” characterizes many mental illnesses, including SPD and Asperger’s syndrome. Mind-blindness can be more or less severe. I believe that I suffered from a moderate disability that prevented me from forming a realistic understanding of the motives and feelings of others and developing a normal capacity for empathy.

My inability to understand people’s motivations is evident in the Heather story. Any normal person would have been able to tell Heather wanted to be left alone. For that matter, a normal person would of course not have gazed so aggressively at others. A normal person would have been able to put themselves in the place of the object of this harassment and felt their annoyance and anger. I can do this now, but the idea of putting myself in the place of others just didn’t occur to me as a young man.

I remember an occasion when a fellow student who knew both Ella and me tried to explain to me how putting oneself in the place of another worked. I was no doubt angry at some slight from Ella that showed that my feelings for her were not reciprocated. He said, “Try to imagine yourself in her place. Say a girl was hanging around you a lot, but you weren’t really attracted to her. How would you act?” This thought experiment was, however, impossible for me, and I rejected it as nonsense. It was partly because my vanity bristled at the suggestion that I was unattractive, but it was mostly because I viewed myself as so different from my peers that I couldn’t imagine being one of them at all. The next section will delve into this matter.

The Personal Myth

As a child I was, then, alienated both because of my background and my nature. Dealing with my peers was frustrating and painful for these reasons. I needed some way of coping with this pain and forging an identity that I could take pride in.

And so I created a defensive personal myth. It was derived from the story of the gifted child being misunderstood and mistreated because of their gifts. I heard many versions of this story as a child. I used this story to explain any rejection that happened to me whether it fit or not. In this way, I came to see all rejections as evidence of my giftedness. If the world praised me, it was because I was gifted. If it insulted and rejected me, that was also because I was gifted. I couldn’t lose, at least in my own mind.

As I grew up and enlarged my horizons, I augmented this personal myth with more adult narratives, just as a bird pads its nest with scraps of ribbon and candy bar wrappers. The film Amadeus came out in 1984 when I was 15, and I immediately identified with Mozart, and made this character central to the way I saw myself. Like Mozart, I was a genius who was ahead of my time and persecuted by my envious contemporaries. However, I would be recognized by future ages. This need for a defensive identity contributed to a passion for classical music and opera as I grew up.

However, the vehicle for this genius could not be music. I played viola as a child and was never much good at it. There was no piano at home so I couldn’t learn to compose. So I decided that my genius was literary. Hence, I started writing poetry and doing very ambitious readings, as befitted a great mind. Back in the 80s, the notion that there was a canon of great books that represented the peak of human achievement was still relatively unchallenged, so I spent a lot of time poring over Moby-Dick and Don Quixote and other such weighty tomes. Many of them I didn’t really understand or enjoy, but I kept plugging on because my identity depended on it.

Although my mother was not religious and never took me to church, in my aesthetic adventures, I naturally came across the story of Jesus. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, a musical telling of the crucifixion story, was a work that I did genuinely understand and appreciate. I embellished my personal myth with the idea that I was persecuted for my great goodness like Jesus. But I was also much influenced by the enemy of Christianity, Friedrich Nietzsche, who announced that God was dead and demanded that we become supermen who forged their own values. I was both Jesus and the Superman at the same time, a weird, self-contradictory hybrid, held together by my need for a highly adaptable personal myth.

By the time I got to college, my belief in my own special nature was so extreme that I didn’t recognize any shared humanity between myself and others. I believed myself to be made of a different substance than the beings I saw around me. I believed my true companions were Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats, and the like. I was an angel who had come to live among mortals or an anthropologist among a troupe of gorillas. Of course, these beliefs are obviously absurd, and I would have rejected them if I had been able to assess myself critically. I didn’t consciously believe in the occult and miraculous. But these beliefs were under the surface of my consciousness, feeding my grandiosity without making themselves known.

This personal myth explains a great deal of my behavior. When I went around stealing from people and smashing windows, I was the Nietzschean Superman forging his own values. I felt I could do as I liked because I was of a higher nature. The personal myth also explains why I thought Heather was in the wrong after she justifiably put me down in public. Deep down, I was still the child who believed who believed all rejections of me were due to the resentment of my giftedness. I suppose I saw Heather as a sort of playground bully.

Intellectual frustration

My defensive personal myth was one of the main causes of my dysfunctional behavior. But the consequences of the myth weren’t all bad. My identity depended on the notion that the classics of art expressed a transcendent good because I needed to believe in my own transcendence. I was thus motivated to consume art with attention and reverence. I noted above that I forced my way through a lot of books without enjoying or understanding them. However, many of them I did develop a real taste for, and these broadened my mind. If my personal myth was a prison, it was at least a prison with an excellent library.

In high school, I became an avid student of French and started reading poetry in that language. I became especially enthralled by Baudelaire. I well understood what this poet means when he describes the low, heavy skies weighing like a lid on a pot and torrential rain imitating prison bars. We have probably all experienced moments of despair when hope seems as absurd and out of place as a trapped bat crashing into the ceilings of a small, dark room. These images are so apt and original that you feel like you’re being inhabited by another person who is altering your brain.

I well understood how the developing variation of a Bach prelude traced a train of thought through all of its windings. I felt myself breathe more freely in the great space created by a Beethoven piano concerto.

This legitimate appreciation of great art fortified the personal myth that I described above and intensified my investment in the notion of a canon of great art. I had encountered people who contradicted my beliefs about art. There was the bookstore owner I knew who said jazz was just as good as classical music. There was the student in my high school English class who flippantly said that he thought Shakespeare was overrated while we were studying Hamlet. It made me angry that there was nothing that I could say to these people to prove them wrong.

I was also frustrated that I couldn’t explain my feelings about art. Why were the works of my idols so effective? What exactly were they doing to me? I ruminated on these issues, but an explanation eluded me.

I expected that all of these confusions would be cleared up in college. The professors would explain great art to me. They would explain why some art was great, and some just good, and some just bad, like rock music and jazz. They would explain why the art that I enjoyed had the effect on me that it did, and they would explain why my taste was better than other people’s.

Of course, the professors did not explain this to me because a credible system for objectively establishing the relative merit of different types of artwork has never existed. Nor is there any established and satisfying theory about why art has the effect on us that it does. I was dismayed to find that aesthetic interpretation was an activity without rules or method or any definition of success or failure.

I’ll give an example of the frustration while learning about literature and the other arts. During my first semester at Dartleyherst, I took a class on 20^th century American poetry with the eminent Scott Drood, who was himself a highly-regarded poet, though I could never figure out what his poems were about. Through this class I discovered a love for Elizabeth Bishop, and I had read her poem, “The Armadillo,” so often that I was on track to memorize it. The poem was written during Bishop’s travels in Brazil and described the custom of launching sky lanterns during festivals.

I had never encountered words that were more effective in conveying the visual impressions of the poet. I loved the precision of the descriptions in the poem: the owl “stained bright pink underneath,” the comparison of the baby rabbit to ash with ignited eyes, the image of the lamps drifting so far up into the sky that they became indistinguishable from heavenly bodies. Drood had given us some critical articles on Bishop’s poetry and one of them had referenced her “stunning accuracies of perception and comparison.” Yes, this was exactly right, but what made for a stunning accuracy, and why were they so interesting and engrossing to me?

I was eager to hear Drood’s interpretation of this poem so that this question and others would be answered. He focused on Bishop’s use of metaphor, and thus spent a lot of time on “egg of fire” and “intangible ash.” “These metaphors suggest the unity of birth and death,” he said softly, standing in front of the class and holding the book in front of him, without looking up. “The balloons are a symbol of hope, lighting up the dark sky. Bishop even calls them ‘eggs’ to emphasize their life-bringing power. But these same eggs bring destruction. The poetic word is a sort of violent birth in this poem. And if the symbols of life bring death, the symbols of death bring life. Thus ashes turn out to be vitally alive in the image of the baby rabbit, whose ignited eyes animate this symbol of death.”

Then Drood discussed the dedication of the poem. The poem had first appeared in a journal in 1958 without a dedication, but when Bishop had republished it in 1965 as part of a collection, she had dedicated it to her friend and fellow poet, Robert Lowell. Drood had a daring and original interpretation of this dedication: Lowell was an Vietnam War protester, and the poem could be read as an anti-war poem, about how the weak suffer from the conflicts of the great powers, just as the animals suffer from human practices.

I found all of this quite arbitrary and rambling. Of course, you could interpret the poem Drood’s way, but why? Why prefer this interpretation to any of the others possible? Reflecting on the matter later, I thought a better explanation of why Bishop had used the “egg of fire” metaphor was simply that it gave the reader a feel for what the lamps looked and sounded like when they flew into the cliff: the lamps were fragile like egg shells, the fire must have exploded out like an egg yolk, and there might have been a splatting sound. Above all, I was confused about what the goal of literary interpretation was, as Drood understood it. What were we aiming for, and how could we distinguish a good interpretation from a bad one?

The part of the lecture about the dedication was equally unsatisfactory to me. It was possible that this poem was indeed an anti-war poem, and it was impressive that Drood knew the historical details surrounding the publication of the poem, but his interpretation didn’t capture anything about what was going on at the heart of the poem.

Eventually Drood opened the discussion up to the students, and whenever he did this, the class always degenerated into farce, to my mind at least. One of the students, a senior who was no doubt going on to grad school, started talking about religion in the poem. He mentioned the shrine of the saint on the mountain, Venus and Mars, both Roman gods, and the Southern Cross, which he took to be a religious symbol. I wondered whether it was though. The Southern Cross was just a cross that people saw in the sky, not the Christian cross, or was it? Anyway, this guy thought the poem was about the Christian view of an ordered cosmos was contradicted by the chaotic nature of the splattering lamp.

All of this made me angry. It frustrated me that I couldn’t respond, “No, the poem isn’t about that. Your interpretation is wrong. Bishop mentions Venus and Mars because the lamps come to look like planets, not because she has a religious message.” But I had tried this sort of thing before, and I realized it would go badly for me because there was simply no definition of what a good and bad interpretation is. “At least, I will never be that guy,” I promised myself. “At least I’ll never be a literature grad student.”

However, I did become one. No matter how bored I was by the students who were on the literature grad student track, I lived a painful existence, and the arts were one of my few sources of joy. Closed off from the world as I was due to my inability to understand and communicate with others, I didn’t explore other options for my future. So I chose to spend my life with people I disliked.

My intellectual dissatisfaction resulted in disrespect for Dartleyherst College and society in general. It depressed me to discover that, rather than explaining the essence of poetry, literature professors were promulgating a pretentious and obfuscating kind of pseudo-knowledge. I couldn’t quite articulate the reason for my anger yet, let alone mount a serious challenge to the prevailing norms of literary interpretation. Therefore, I expressed my anger through disruptive behavior.

Sexual confusion

I have described two fundamental reasons for my acts of violence and sexual harassment: mind-blindness and intellectual dissatisfaction. But obviously sexual harassment has to do with sex. What was going on with my sexuality?

My repugnance for this topic long delayed my quest to understand my younger self. My parents’ generation rang in the “Sexual Revolution” and declared victory over their parents’ prudery. I have been told constantly throughout my life that I should not be ashamed of sex and sexual desire, that sex is a beautiful and natural thing, and other such slogans. However, I have come to recognize that the prudes had a point: my sexuality may be natural, but it is certainly not beautiful, and I am justifiably ashamed of it.

I suffered from a deep and galling sexual confusion as a young man because my sexual feelings were so different from the ones that were considered right and acceptable by my family and culture.

Most of us are brought up to believe in some version of what I will call the “default romantic ideal.” This standard is inculcated in us by the example of our parents, or at least the public image that our parents project, and the romances we see on TV and at the movies. According to this ideal, love and sex should be based on mutual respect and commitment. The default romantic ideal is a vision of companionate love based on friendship and mutual support and nurturance. The ideal may or may not permit a period of promiscuity in youth, but ultimately all versions of the ideal insist that we should ultimately choose a single life partner.

As the son of two left-of-center professors, I was taught the feminist version of the default romantic ideal. While the traditionalist version of the ideal prescribes different roles for the sexes, the feminist version prescribes equality. Both the man and a woman in a relationship should have careers, and both partners ought to consider the woman’s career as important as the man’s. They should equally divide the responsibilities of housework and child-rearing.

Of course, people’s actual desires often diverge from this ideal, but most people, and particularly the type who attend prestigious liberal arts colleges, manage eventually to adjust their desires to make them compatible with this standard.

Intellectually at least, I believed in the feminist version of the romantic ideal. I have mentioned that I struggled to form an identity that I could be proud of in high school. I formed a defiant identity in opposition to the conservatism around me, and the feminism that my mother bred in me was part of this identity.

However, my sexuality has always been deeply at odds with all versions of the romantic ideal, and especially the feminist one, resulting in sexual confusion. I was horrified by what I felt. I couldn’t acknowledge the desires I had, and I couldn’t even describe them until recently. I don’t believe that my sexual tastes were due to a choice that I made, nor were they the result of culture, although culture shaped them. My sexuality was a destiny.

I learned about sex from pornography. Because of my alienation from my peers, I didn’t have any first-hand experience of sex or dating during high school. However, I did have access to the Playboy Channel. We had basic cable at our house, and the Playboy Channel was an optional add-on to basic cable. Of course, my mother didn’t subscribe to this channel. But back in the 80s, the cable companies hadn’t figured out how to do cable quite right. You could still see something when you turned the dial to the Playboy Channel even if you didn’t subscribe to it. You could see it the programs in a distorted form, a wavering, zigzagging, unsteady image. And although there was a little buzz, you could also hear all of the dialogue.

Misogynist porn flourished in the 70s and 80s, and most of the content on the Playboy Channel, and the type that I liked best, was of this sort. I returned to it night after night in fascination. These films depicted a sexuality that was based on male coercion, bullying, shaming, aggression, even violence, and it was this type of sexuality that most aroused me.

One of my favorite films was Talk Dirty to Me. Although I couldn’t see it clearly back when I watched it in the 80s, I have managed to find it online so I could fill in the blanks. The film deals with the adventures of Jack and Lenny. Jack is a drifter pickup artist who lives by his wits, and Lenny is his mildly retarded companion. The two have a completely hierarchized relationship, with Jack deciding what they’re going to do and Lenny following along, though occasionally whining and pleading. However, the relationship is basically affectionate, with Lenny providing watchout services during Jack’s sexual escapades, and Jack providing protection to Lenny, who would otherwise be helpless.

Jack’s chops as a ladies’ man are established early in the film when the two meet Patty, sexy in her tight sweater, who almost begs Jack to for another date. Jack is interested in pursuing fresh game, however, and Patty explodes in rage before his indifference. When Lenny points out that Jack had promised to pass Patty onto him, Patty pushes Lenny into a ditch.

Lenny now has a sprained ankle, and the subsequent scene in the doctor’s office was one that caused in me such a welter of emotions that it would stick in my mind for the rest of my life. Jack is napping in the waiting room when the doctor, who turns out to be a beautiful blonde, comes out and sits at her desk. Jack asks, “Is it broken?” and the doctor responds that it’s just a sprain and Lenny will be fine. Jack then opens the pickup. “You’re a damned fine looking woman,” he says. “Did anyone ever tell you that?” The doctor ignores him and goes on writing the bill. “That’ll be $45,” she says. “Oh $45,” Jack says, “I bet you’re worth a lot more than that.” And here he approaches her, leans over the desk, and talks into her ear. “But not from me! I wouldn’t pay you shit! But I bet some heavy dude would pay you big bucks to get in your pants.”

This shaming and intimidation of the doctor continues, even though she threatens to call the police. As it happens, she shows signs of smoldering arousal. Finally, he promises he will be the “best fuck of you ever had,” and even begins waving his penis around in front of her to prove it. At last, she surrenders. They go into the office, and during the ensuing sex scene, the doctor says, “I don’t know why I put up such a fight,” and she blames herself for having been “proud and prude!”

After that, the film presses on ever further into its fantastic universe. Jack decides to target a housewife for his seduction and employs various stunning tactics in pursuit of his inevitable conquest. One of these is to break into target’s house along with a couple of girlfriends and have sex them outside the housewife’s bedroom as she is sleeping. The sounds, and possibly the odors as well, are supposed to arouse her. She burns, resists the burning, and finally succumbs. And after that, it’s on to Talk Dirty to Me 2. The franchise was extremely successful and had many sequels.

I found myself deeply aroused by this film and others that depicted dominance, aggression, and violence towards women. For example, in one of the films a man spanked a woman who lived in his house, and this punishment proved the gateway to love. And then there was the one where the man entered a woman’s bedroom and growls something like, “I saw the way you looked at me earlier. Now spread your legs, you spoiled bitch!”

You can imagine what a war there was in my psyche. I was supposed to be a feminist, and yet I longed to degrade women the way that Jack, and my other porn heroes, did. Today, I might have been able to label and understand my desires as a “kink,” but there was no such context for understanding sexuality back then, at least not in Bouville. It was as though I lived in a dark room with an unseen monster.

These films, then, molded my underlying sexual confusion into a toxic monstrosity. Even as they aroused me sexually, they put obstacles between me and the attainment of actual sex. Sex in the world of these films was a heroic endeavor that required men to perform actions of great daring, even lunacy, such as waving around their penises in a doctor’s office. If this was what sex required, how was a person like me ever to attain it? Moreover, these films taught me that the way to arouse women was to belittle and bully them and to behave aggressively towards them. I think we all know that this type of behavior is likely to be counter-productive to the attainment of sex in real life. Finally, the films inculcated in me a fiercely macho sexual identity that isolated me from women. I recounted above that many women, seeing my struggle to deal with the world, reached out to me, but that I rebuffed them. I could never accept help from a woman because doing so was incompatible with my need for male dominance.

What should Dartleyherst have done?

Now that we have gained some clarity about the nature and causes of my mental illness, we can turn to the topic of what should be done about people like me. Of course, I am responsible for my own life. I can’t blame my choices on my parents, my college, or pornography. Nevertheless, I believe that my life could have gone better if I had been treated and educated differently. What angers me most about my past is that no one staged an explicit and unsparing intervention into my life. No one confronted me about my obvious insanity even though many of my actions justified, indeed cried out for, such an intervention.

The subject of how to deal with the mentally ill is vast, and this is already a long essay, so I will deal only with how colleges and universities should deal with people like me.

Of course, all of the events described here happened more than 30 years. Campus policies have changed a great deal in this time. Mental health services are more plentifully available. Sexual harassment is more likely to be recognized, reported, and addressed. It may be that the following criticisms of Dartleyherst’s treatment of me are only of historical and personal interest. I certainly hope so.

Ever since I started thinking about my life clearly, I have been aghast at the laxity of Dartleyherst and other educational institutions in confronting my misbehavior. I gave signs of severe maladjustment and desperation early on in my freshman year of college, the most serious and harmful of which was my stealing. As I explained above, many students had to have known about this. Why then didn’t the college confront and discipline me? Doing so might well have prevented my criminal behavior from escalating.

But escalate it did. After I committed a violent felony against Ella and her roommate, not only was I not handed over to the police for arrest and made to spend time in jail and face a judge, I wasn’t even expelled. I was placed on probation and allowed to continue at Dartleyherst. I can only imagine how Ella and everyone who knew about my violence must have felt when they had to go on looking at me for years into the future. I can only imagine their feelings of outrage and betrayal. Not only that, they were probably scared off me as well. Fortunately, I did no worse, but people couldn’t have known what to expect of me.

They were victims of the college’s laxity, but so was I in my way. Unable as I was to understand my life, I took advantage of the college’s indulgence and returned to a place where many must have regarded me as a ghoul. It was a terrible situation for me, and it shouldn’t have been allowed to arise. Also, if the college had turned me over to the police, I might have been forced into treatment with mental health professionals who specialized in the criminal mind and who might have gotten me the help I needed.

Finally, after I had caused outrage through my habit of rude staring, neither Dartleyherst nor the foreign exchange program confronted me about it at all. Nor did any of the students tell me exactly what was wrong. Instead, they availed themselves of various forms of indirect communication. I was, however, not in a state to reasonably interpret these hints and decipher what they were trying to tell me. I needed someone to tell me straight out how people perceived me.

It would have required courage to frankly confront me about my actions and probe the pathological personal narrative that caused them. I might not have been receptive to such an intervention, but that is what would have been most likely to work.

I can only speculate on the reasons for Dartleyherst’s lax treatment of me. Incompetence and cowardice of various kinds seem the most likely explanations.

Perhaps the college hadn’t put into place effective policies for finding out about and reacting to criminal behavior among students. Reports of my behavior might not have made it soon enough to the college authorities, or these authorities might have lacked an institutional framework to address the problems that I posed them.

Perhaps Dartleyherst wanted to hide the fact that students like me existed. The college had a certain image to maintain. The pictures in the brochures the college printed showed smiling students receiving wisdom in personal conversations with professors or studying together in the library or playing hacky sack out on the quad in front of a venerable statue or ancient oak. They couldn’t ruin this idyllic image by drawing attention to the fact that at least one of their students was a fearsome criminal.

Maybe the college didn’t want to offend my family. As I mentioned, both my grandfather and uncle attended Dartleyherst, so the college might have been afraid of alumni backlash.

Maybe the college didn’t want to ruin my career by handing me over to the police. After all, I would probably have emerged from that encounter with a criminal record, which would have been a handicap to me in the job market.

Maybe the explanation is just that directly confronting me about my behavior would have required an icky, unpleasant conversation that no one wanted to have.

All of these rationales are mere excuses for cowardice. Colleges should be open about the problems they face, and they should focus on the well-being of the victims of aggressive behavior, rather than that of the aggressors.

Critics of American society claim that there are different laws for the privileged and underprivileged, and my case seems to prove that criticism was valid 30 years ago. Perhaps it still is today. According to these critics, we turn a blind eye to the misdeeds of the wealthy and powerful and get tough on the poor and powerless. The film American Psycho expresses a grotesque and comic version of this notion. The hero, Patrick Bateman, is a Harvard-educated investment banker who secretly murders his friends and associates in his fancy apartment. He gets worried when a detective comes to question him about the murders, but it turns out that the police don’t even consider Bateman a suspect. The detective actually tries to curry favor with Bateman, rather than investigate him.

My college years had an American Psycho vibe. There should have been consequences for what I did, and there weren’t any. As a student of an élite college and the scion of a privileged family, I was pretty much untouchable.

Bateman ends the movie unpunished and seemingly intent on further murders. He says that his pain is constant and sharp and that he wants his pain to be inflicted on others. At the end of college, I also was unpunished and set for a miserable lifetime of further sexual harassment and other obnoxious behavior. The best opportunity to intervene in my life had been missed by everyone, and I would continue to suffer and make others suffer for decades afterward.