Eventually I did. But I’m still a driving prodigy, and one day you and everyone else will see the way.
Nemesis
As a tried-and-true nerd, I’ve always suspected that finding one’s nemesis was just another step in the process of becoming a man. You grow hair on your body, your voice changes, and you find your ideological counterpart to stand in stark juxtaposition to, highlighting your own heroic tendencies in the process.
Spider-Man had the Green Goblin. Hulk Hogan had King Kong Bundy. And I had Nick Forman. As with nearly every other aspect of puberty, I didn’t discover my nemesis until I was in college.
I didn’t learn much of anything during my time at Rutgers. I was an American Studies major. I signed up for it because my only goal was to graduate while doing as little work as possible. American Studies was great because most of the class titles could conceivably end in an exclamation point. “Urban Adventure!,” “P.T. Barnum!,” and “Murder in America!” were just a few of the notables from my transcript.
One summer class I took was titled “The Cowboy in Fiction and Film!” We watched a movie during each class, one of them being Shanghai Noon starring Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan. I didn’t read any of the books. Each week I’d put my head down and fall sound asleep immediately once class began.
But one day a discussion about a book titled The Virginian was keeping me awake. The professor was describing a scene involving a chicken sitting on a rock after its egg had been taken from its nest. He asked the class about the symbolism behind the chicken’s behavior. I hadn’t read the book, but the conversation was annoying enough to interrupt my slumber, so I took action.
“Chris?” the professor asked when I raised my hand. It’s always a sign that you’ve slacked off when a teacher calls on you in question form.
“Yeah,” I said, wiping sleep from my eyes. “Here’s the thing. Even though it was just a chicken it lived life and, therefore, had dreams. That egg represented its dreams.”
Everyone stared at me. For the majority, it was the first time they had heard me speak.
“When the egg was taken away, the chicken sat on a rock,” I continued. “Why? Because even though it knew its dreams wouldn’t come true, it still had to chase them.”
I squinted and melodramatically gazed out the window.
“It’s something all of us would be well served to learn,” I said. “Achieving your dreams is not always the most important part of life; having dreams is.”
“Exactly,” the professor said. He smiled at me.
With that, I dropped my head down on my desk and fell right back asleep.
The only downside to my major was that it required me to take two real classes through the history department. I took mine with a feisty Southern professor named George Kayne. To this day, he’s the only person I’ve ever seen manage to look tough while wearing a sweater vest.
“If you ever have to take a history class,” my friend Sean Gorman told me at the beginning of freshman year, “take it with George Kayne.”
“Why?” I asked. “Is he easy?”
“No, he’s hard,” Sean said. “But he’s insane . . . in an entertaining way.”
Legend had it that Kayne used to be the chair of the department, but got demoted for punching another professor in the face. He would stalk around the room shouting like a bulldog and turning red in the face. I once watched him make a girl cry on the first day of class for no reason. He even laughed as she exited the room.
“Your tears mean nothing to me!” he exclaimed as she fled.
With such a badass at the helm, you’d think I would have shaped up. But I remained a slacker. Due in part to a nasty addiction to Mike Tyson’s Punch Out on Nintendo, I managed to screw myself for finals week and had to scramble to get all of my work done. I’d lost the syllabus for Kayne’s class and was forced to email him the day before a paper was due. Out of fear, I used a fake email address—[email protected].
“Hey Professor Kayne!” I began. “It’s CG Dupree from your Monday/Wednesday class. I’m psyched to get crackin’ on this paper, but I just realized I lost the topic. If you could email me back with it, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks!”
I woke the next morning to an email from Kayne in CG Dupree’s inbox.
“Dear whoever you are,” it read. “There is no one registered in my class under the name CG Dupree. Furthermore, anyone who would start a paper of mine with less than a day to go is destined to fail—not just the paper, but at life in general.”
School wasn’t doing it for me, and the more I drifted away from having any sense of academic standards, the more I felt like I had no place there. In movies about the college experience, the slackers and outcasts find each other. They live together, bonding over their own idiosyncrasies and turning them into their greatest strengths. The helpless freshmen in Animal House learn to idolize Bluto. The Lambda Lambda Lambdas form their own frat, boxing out the rest of the Greek system. I wanted to find my own band of brothers to embrace my outside nature with, to unite together against the mainstream. And for a brief window in time, I thought I did.
My sophomore year I moved into a house with five other guys, each one of them a social misfit. Mark was an aspiring rapper who lost his mind freshman year and dropped fifty pounds just to see if he could. Anthony literally never stopped playing video games. The only break he’d give himself was to attend his Chinese calligraphy course. Jesse wore a trench coat—as he had all through high school—despite the fact that Columbine had happened just six months before we moved into our house. His refusal to alter his fashion in reaction to Columbine only made him seem more Columbineish. Eric was a lovable Taiwanese goofball who had never drunk alcohol before living with us. Within weeks of shared residency, he’d become a champion booze-bag and was piously dedicated to online poker.
Over the course of one painfully long year, our house became a pressure cooker that would drive each of us to the brink of madness. The first sign of impending disaster was an infestation of camel crickets—bugs so big and terrifying we once crushed one with a dictionary and flushed it down the toilet only to watch it climb back out. If I had to give you a proper description, I would say a camel cricket is basically a cross between a grasshopper and a dragon and that its natural habitat is the nightmares of men.
In addition, our house was robbed multiple times. We figured the person robbing us was the man who we routinely caught staring into our basement windows, but the crack patrol down at the New Brunswick PD told us that this wasn’t enough of a lead to go on.
Without question, the place was a hellhole. But it was also just bizarre. For example, a radiator was mounted on the ceiling directly above Anthony’s bed. There was also a hole in the floor directly next to where he slept. We’d drop items down into it and never hear them land. Anthony developed insomnia caused by the knowledge that even if he somehow managed to dodge the radiator that could fall onto him at any moment, he would likely plunge into a bottomless pit in the process.
The list of insanities went on and on. A bat attacked me in my bedroom. The toilets often clogged and my roommates were inconsiderate—a deadly combination that eventually led to a toilet explosion that ended with me crying in the shower, desperately trying to scrub my legs clean of the drunken diarrhea Eric had left behind. It was enough to question the value of our society, let alone our education system.
It’s fair to say that in the face of such madness and atrocity, my final roommate, Nick Forman, was actually the one who was able to hold it together the best. At least up to a point. When Nick broke it wasn’t the living in filth that got him. It wasn’t being attacked by insects from another planet.
In the end what destroyed Nick Forman was the movie Fight Club.
Fight Club was released a few months after we moved into our house, and something about the experience of watching it transformed Nick overnight. He went from being a weird nerd like the rest of us to an intolerable nightmare of a human being. It wasn’
t just that Nick saw the movie and got excited over it. It wasn’t even that he walked away inspired by it. I legitimately think the experience of watching Fight Club rewired the kid’s brain chemistry. Afterward, he walked differently, his posture self-assured and confident. He reacted to things differently, his love for Dungeons & Dragons replaced by an obsession with sports. The most evident change, however, was that he talked differently. Inexplicably, he adopted an outdated hip-hop vernacular and began referring to all of his roommates as “Cousin.”
“Yo, cousin, you want to get some food?” he asked no one in particular as the assembled roommates hung out in our living room one afternoon.
“Nah, Nick,” Jesse said, “we all just ate. Sorry, man.”
“Yo, cousin,” Nick answered. “That’s fine. Let’s rock some Tecmo Bowl, yo.”
“Dude,” Eric said, “stop calling everyone ‘cousin.’ And we’re not gonna play Tecmo Bowl right now, you can see that we’re all watching TV.”
“Whattup, cousin?” Nick replied. “You busy being a studio prankster?”
You have to realize that Nick was the most stiff, stuffy white guy I’d ever met. His natural voice sounded like the one every black stand-up comedian uses to mock white people. So to have him call us “cousin” or a “mark ass buster,” to have him throw fist pounds and talk like a ’90s rap-era gangsta, was at first amusing, then confusing, and then, after a few days, deeply and profoundly irritating.
After his Fight Club–driven renaissance, Nick somehow managed to befriend a crew of guys from a nearby frat house. He was thrilled to hang out with these guys, though it was clear from the outside perspective that they brought him around as a joke. Nick once regaled us with a tale of how he’d gotten into a “fight” alongside his new buddies.
“You go out and get in fights now?” Mark asked.
“Yeah, cousin,” Nick answered. “It’s awesome. It’s just like Fight Club. Fa’ real.”
“What happened?” Anthony asked.
“Well, we were at a party,” Nick said. “And this guy stepped up. So I was like, ‘Yo cousin what’s the problem?’”
“Stop saying ‘cousin,’ ” Eric interjected.
“So he kept talking shit, like a punk,” Nick continued, “and my friends took him down. I ran up and kicked him a few times. It ruled.”
“So you just kicked a guy who was already beaten up?” Jesse asked.
“Yeah, cousin,” Nick answered. “No doubt.”
“You understand that’s not being in a fight, right?” Mark asked. “That’s just kicking a guy when he’s down.”
“Word up,” Nick answered.
No one believed Nick’s stories and he must have sensed that his phony posturing was annoying all of us. It was obvious no one wanted to hang out with him, and he began to realize that when he was home people found excuses to leave. So in what was a deviously clever move, he tried to win back favor with our housemates by targeting me.
Meanwhile, I’d also spent the semester slowly losing my mind due to the physical condition of our house. It was completely disgusting. We’d all moved in thinking we would live that fun Animal House archetype, an anything-goes, lovable lifestyle. But in reality, living in filth and mayhem is unsanitary at best and maddening at worst. The smells that emanated from our kitchen didn’t belong in first-world nations. I was the only roommate interested in cleaning and I once spent an hour searching our kitchen for the source of one foul stench, only to find a completely full gallon of milk under a pile of pizza boxes on the floor. Between the camel crickets and the stench, I was at my limit.
I begged my roommates to help me clean, and on a few occasions I lost it and yelled at them. Nick knew that the other roommates bristled at me for this. Nobody likes getting yelled at, especially when they’re nineteen. Nick turned his insanity in my direction, and the other roommates egged him on, finding humor in how angry he could make me. If he couldn’t get them to like him on his own he would try to bond with them by tormenting me.
I once came home to find Nick in my room, rifling through my mini-fridge. I’d wondered who’d been stealing my food for a while, and was glad to catch him in the act.
“Yo, cousin, you need to clean this thing out,” Nick told me, nonplussed at being caught. “This pasta’s been in here for, like, a week.” He grinned and left. I became the butt of jokes about the incident for a full week or two.
On another occasion, I was alone in the living room watching television. Nick walked out of his bedroom and, for no reason, went up to the television and shut it off. Then he laughed at me and walked away.
“Yo, cousins,” Nick said to the rest of the roommates later that night, right in front of me. “You should have seen it. I bitched Chris hard and he didn’t do shit.”
It was all beginning to add up, and the thing that finally pushed me over the edge was the infamous donut incident.
One night I came home from class and my roommates were sitting in our living room. I walked into the kitchen and saw a ravaged box of Dunkin’ Donuts on our table. Icing was smeared everywhere and the torn and empty box lay on its side.
I calmly walked back to the living room.
“Guys, I don’t know whose donuts these were, but they should probably clean up that mess before the camel crickets descend upon us,” I said.
Some of my roommates snickered. Others looked awkward.
“Yeah,” Nick grinned. “The owner of those donuts should clean them up.”
Everybody laughed. I rolled my eyes and walked away. I wasn’t going to play another one of Nick’s weird games. The next day, Eric and I went out to lunch and he let me know that I had already been playing one unwittingly.
“Those were your donuts,” he told me. “Your brother dropped by the house in the afternoon. Your mom sent the donuts with him. Nick ate all of them to fuck with you.”
When I was in college, a dozen donuts were worth as much to me as roughly $4,000 cash would be today. I was heartbroken. My mom had sent them. And Forman had removed that act of goodwill from my life before I even knew about it. And eating twelve donuts in an hour isn’t a pleasant experience. That can only be done as a malicious act. It’s silly to say, but out of all the things Nick did to me, I don’t think I would have hated him half as much if I’d been able to eat one measly donut.
It broke me. I spent as much time as possible outside of the house, and when I was home, I tended to sit in my room and avoid everyone. Nick had won.
That year I had joined a comedy troupe that performed shows one weekend a semester. Looking back on it now, I’d have to say the troupe wasn’t at the cutting edge of comedy. We played those painful-to-watch improv games where you have to wear funny hats and shit, and where halfway through a scene you have to all of a sudden pretend you’re Nicolas Cage, things like that. But it was my introduction to performing, the first comedy I’d done, and it was the only thing I cared about. I wanted it to go well. I needed to prove that I had what it took, and if I bombed I wouldn’t be asked back.
As that semester’s shows approached I told a few of my friends about it, and word spread to my roommates. Of course, Nick heard about it, too, and despite the fact that he and I never spoke anymore, he tagged along. The show was going along fine until about five minutes before intermission.
“Yo,” a voice shouted from the crowd. I froze as I recognized it was Nick.
“That girl,” he continued, “is not funny.”
The crowd gasped, and my friend Jill, who was in the middle of a scene, went white with embarrassment. A dark energy came over the room as Nick continued to heckle us intermittently.
After intermission, he launched into a full-on assault.
Among the many things he shouted were the phrases “Chris Gethard is a trick ass bitch,” “Fuck you studio pranksters,” and the one that he repeated over thirty times for no reason, “Free Mumia.” He was relentless.
Afterward, I was furious. The show had been ruined and since Nick was there
because of me, I was responsible. The cast told me not to worry about it. We hung out that night and I didn’t get home until late. The next morning, I wrapped a towel around my waist and headed upstairs to take a shower.
To my surprise, a dozen of my friends and roommates were gathered in our living room. Sitting in the middle, holding court, was Nick. When I entered, everyone stopped talking. I continued toward the bathroom. I had no interest in reinitiating the drama from the previous night, but Nick had other plans.
“Yo, cousin,” he said, “you want to talk about what happened?”
“Nah, I’m good,” I replied, “let’s just forget about it.” I smiled and kept going.
“I had one thing I wanted to say,” he yelled from behind me.
I stopped.
“At least one of us was funny last night.”
Everyone burst out laughing. I had officially reached my breaking point. Steal my food? Sure. Target me for the amusement of others? Why not? Insult my friends? You’re pushing it, but if they manage to calm me down we’ll be fine. Tell me I’m not funny? Apparently that’s what it took to send me into an unrestrained blackout rage. I turned and sprinted into the room, holding my towel tightly around my waist.
“What the fuck is your problem, dude?” I screamed in Nick’s face. “What are you going for? You want to fucking fight me? Let’s fucking fight, then.”
Dumbfounded, Nick just stared at me. The room was completely silent.
“It’s been all year with this fucking bullshit,” I shouted. “Why don’t you fucking get up and fight me right now, motherfucker?”
There was a long pause. Nick was frozen with confusion, and the rest of the onlookers were horrified—either at my behavior or at the sight of my pale, spindly body. There was a long stretch of quiet as Nick stared at me. Finally, he realized I wasn’t going to back down this time.
A Bad Idea I'm About to Do Page 12
