Tales of Fitchburg, Part 1 (The Beginning)

My brother Ed had filled me with visions of college as an Eden. No one there was unkind. Everyone was more interested in learning than popularity, and athletics were not necessarily a prerequisite for sexual congress. This Eden theory was the opposite of my high school experience, which scarred me and left me an outcast virgin with no more than a social triangle to call my own.

I may disappoint the irony-hungry by saying that my brother was generally correct, although college was never an Eden.

Fitchburg State College, my alma mater, is a small state institution located in a hilly former mill-town in central Massachusetts. Mill towns were apparently huge during and after the industrial revolution, producing textiles and the like before dying somewhere around the great depression and never fully recovering. The City of Fitchburg was no exception. Main Street, running through a dead downtown, is lined with formerly beautiful buildings with marble foundations and proudly chiseled construction dates over elaborately tiled doorways. And all over the city there are abandoned mills, factories and warehouses, sometimes in large, interconnected lots which might span a half a mile.
A famous train-line which ran from Boston to Fitchburg was a favorite stomping ground of Henry David Thoreau’s. In his day, Fitchburg was a hilly paradise, barely settled and eminently rural. He would escape there from time to time by following the railroad that ran right past Walden Pond in Concord.

To this day it is still the last stop on one of the MBTA lines from Boston. Every now and then I’m sure a foreign traveler, accustomed perhaps to arriving at a major city and riding a train out to its last stop as a way of getting to know a new country, will pause with nauseous horror as he emerges from the train to see this city--its rotting bones stuck in the 1930’s and its draping flesh a modern American tide pool for the socially abhorrent. It had become a joke of a city, populated mostly by toothless white people with greasy ragged hair and oily fingers. We called it “the Burg”, and used the expression like it was a synonym for the joint or the slammer.

So I was eighteen. I was trolling for colleges. Speaking of Transcendentalists from Concord, I wanted to go to Emerson College. There were many people who applied to Emerson only to wind up at Fitchburg.

Emerson was an expensive communications college in Boston. I had decided I wanted to be a filmmaker because I had obsessively co-created a few raggedly assembled sketch videos and enjoyed myself tremendously. That was all I needed to uncover my life path.

After a college fair I found my first choice: Emerson. Beautiful, private, Boston-based Emerson. Being somewhat of a worrier I decided I better find a more affordable college as a second choice: FSC. Small, state-run, Fitchburg-based FSC. It held no interest. But it was affordable and one needed to have a no-frills back-up plan in suburban, middle-class, dreamless Billerica, Massachusetts--my home town.

Emerson cost about thirty thousand dollars per year. Fitchburg cost seven. I was accepted to both. I applied for financial aid.

My idealistic, genius, Boston University graduate brother Ed not only told me that college was Eden, but that I could find a way to afford any program. This mythic way did not readily present itself. And I had a friend, Randy, who had also applied to Emerson and Fitchburg, and he wound up in the same situation: accepted to both, but without enough financial aid to afford Emerson.

I remember our first open house. It was a program called, ingeniously, Fridays at Fitchburg. We took a Friday off from high school and drove my gold, 1986 standard shift Hyundai Excel fifty plus minutes to our first glimpse of rotting, hilly Fitchburg. It was raining.

The FSC campus is your traditional quadrangle--a few brick buildings surrounding an acre of neatly mowed grass and a few beds of yellow flowers. In the center of the campus, just outside the dining commons was an enormous, blue smokestack, affectionately nicknamed by my friends “the big blue dick.” I have no idea what this monstrosity was for, except to serve as a sickening beacon to prospective freshmen arriving freshly from their shattered expectations.

After we were shown all over the school, we walked back to a parking lot to retrieve my gold hatchback. We weren’t saying much to each other. I can’t say that I was impressed or disappointed. I felt the usual numbness I feel when I try to consider any choice that involves a potential for enriching experiences. I didn’t know this then, but I am a terrible judge of fun and rely solely on others’ lusts for adventure and newness. Like most people are with meeting friends, I generally need to be introduced to a good time in order to get to know it well.

Randy was my ambassador to fun. He would disagree with this as he probably considers he was generally miserable during this time of his life, but it was how his misery manifested itself that led me to so many places. Randy had a kind-of persistent longing. He was never satisfied, always looking to move on. My life, though like his not always a happy one, was at the very least persistently enriched.

The rain had stopped but it was still cloudy and wet. Randy was walking with his hands in his pockets, his well-hair-sprayed head hung downcast. The two of us, with near identically slight frames and short skeletons, shuffled into the McKay parking lot on that rainy Friday.

I broke the silence.

“That wasn’t so bad,” I said.

Randy nodded almost hypnotically. A moment later he began shaking his head and slowly erupted with “No man, that placed sucked.” A pause. I smiled. “It sucked!” he repeated, also smiling.

I nodded, certainly aware of Fitchburg State’s mediocrity, but again I relied on Randy to teach me the intricacies of any good or bad experience.

“I guess it does kind of suck,” I said.

“Totally,” he emphasized. “It totally sucked.” We laughed. There was an atmosphere of release and I found I did have a lot of things I could complain about if I tried hard enough, and we complained together over our drive home.

Again we would be stranded in an idiotic school and we would have each other. That was what we were used to. So it didn’t feel like the end of the world. It was, however, the beginning of a new one.