by Aisha Tyler
Nowadays, the area around Hanover, New Hampshire, once completely desolate, is only slightly less desolate—a place for which the arrival of a Ben and Jerry’s shop is enough to elicit mental breakdowns and uncontrollable tears of joy. This place is in the middle of nowhere. A place full of hormone-filled kids, living on their own for the first time, in the middle of nowhere.
There is bound to be some drinking.1
I am not boasting about this. It is just how it is. Young people are stupid. Aggressively stupid. Now put them in a context in which they are essentially unsupervised. And make that place very cold and very far from anything worth doing at all. And now remove girls.
You can see how the social culture at Dartmouth would form almost exclusively around drinking.
Dartmouth College is not special in this regard. All colleges have drunken dummies.2 And I don’t think Dartmouth is even the biggest, or even the tenth biggest, party school in the country. But it is the preppiest. And the one where you are most likely to get terrible frostbite if you pass out in the wrong place.3 When Dartmouth kids party, they are serious. There is a saying at Dartmouth—more like a war cry—that people use when they are partying: “Boot and Rally.” This is when you drink so much you have to throw up, then turn right back around and put more booze into the happy void created by all that vomiting. This is not just a slogan, but a rigorous practice and source of pride among students. If you are on the verge of “booting,” you may even pull the trigger to get things started, something that might be shameful if you are a thirteen-year-old girl trying to lose weight, but is a puke-green badge of courage if you are a nineteen-year-old premed student with an organic chemistry midterm on Monday morning.
You are tough. You are motivated. You love fun like it gave you a blow job once. You will not let a little nausea or overindulgence put you on the sidelines. This is your last chance to let loose before you pull a thirty-seven-hour cramming marathon (remember that college bipolar disorder I explained). You. Will. Not. Fold. You boot. You rally.
Blood vessels and brain cells be damned.4
Because the school is so isolated, not only has it developed an intensely competitive culture around drinking, but it has also developed an intricate and hoary social structure revolving almost exclusively around fraternities and sororities, or “Greeks.”5 These organizations have had a death grip on the social life of the campus since ale was transported to campus in casks on the backs of pack mules, along with hardtack and smallpox-infested blankets. Members of the Geek culture will tell you they are critical to promoting a sense of brother- and sisterhood, responsibility, civic-mindedness, and philanthropy. Mainly they are just ways for people to feel like they belong, for other people to feel like they don’t belong, and for other other people (girls, and a few boys) to flirt with guys and gain access to mass quantities of free beer.
I don’t know how it works at other schools, but at Dartmouth, all the houses had beer on tap, pretty much all the time. When I arrived, this was akin to entering an academic building and realizing it was made out of marshmallows, with candy cane rails and hot chocolate faucets. Beer. Available any time, from beer taps. Unsupervised beer taps.
Heaven.
I did not behave delicately when I found this out. I have never had an excess of self-restraint, but in this case, I lost it. I was Augustus Gloop at Willy Wonka’s place. I had my mouth around those spigots like they were dispensing test answers. As any proud American wandering a Costco with a tummy full of “some kind of meatball” will tell you, anything free is absolutely worth having, and worth having twice.
I didn’t even really like beer that much at the time, but let’s be reasonable. Turning down free booze is like turning down free money. It’s just not done. Not only should you accept when it is offered, you should do your best to drink more than your fair share, just in case someone finally gets their wits about them and decides to bring a halt to this whole Christmas-morning-all-the-time thing that’s been going on.
Now, this beer may have been free to me, but it was not truly free. It came out of the fraternity dues that members paid their respective houses, all of which was put into purchasing alcoholic beverages, and none of which was put into improving their infrastructure or caring for their landscaping or hiring some kind of hazmat team to spray out their biological hazard of a bathroom with toxic chemicals Silkwood-style. All of their money went to beer. The floors were sticky, the windows were missing panes, and several brothers were missing teeth due to falling through broken treads on the stairwell. But there was always beer.
And because non-house members knew this, we would sneak in at odd hours to slake our thirst, or perhaps try to impress visitors from other campuses with the beer-soaked wonderland that was our beloved alma mater. I distinctly remember doing this with a visiting high school friend. “You can have beer anytime you want! At one-thirty! On a Wednesday! Rich people are awesome!”
The houses got hip to this and started to lock up the taps, but this felt rigid and un-American (and super un-fun), so they started to assign brothers to watch the taps and make sure that the beer was dispensed fairly and properly, which is to say, only to brothers, the friends of brothers, and any girl within a twenty-five-mile radius who looked even remotely thirsty. If you were a female student at Dartmouth with most of your faculties, you could be sure that a plastic cup of lukewarm beer would be sloshed into your hand by an overeager fraternity brother the minute the previous cup even approached empty. Gee, thanks buddy! Can’t wait to choke down another eight ounces of Milwaukee’s least finest!
But it was free. We’ve established how I feel about free.
The concept of tap duty started to dominate the social conversation sometime around my sophomore year. You’d be talking to a guy, and if he wanted to get out of the conversation, or seem important, or had to pee something fierce, he would say he had “tap duty.” This quickly became a target of wide ridicule. “Tap duty” is not a job. Saying you have “tap duty” is akin to saying you have to go home and wash your hair. It’s a non-activity. You can say it’s important, and act like it’s important, and even tell yourself it’s important, but really, it’s total bullshit. You might as well say you have to run home and finish your needlepoint pillow. There are plenty of dudes to run the taps. Beer comes out of them. Trust me, there are always volunteers.
This annoying self-importance got to be so pervasive that I would make fun of it constantly. No matter what was happening, tap duty was more important. Adopting a low timbre and douchey facial expression, I would smolder in masculine fashion and wail to my friends about how tap duty was eating my life. In the soul-crushing throes of a breakup with your boyfriend? Can’t talk, I have tap duty. Parents getting a divorce? Would love to talk you through it, but people need beer. Berlin Wall coming down? Sure, would love to watch this once-in-a-lifetime coverage, but how will people get lager out of those faucets without my expert supervision? Want to have sex? Man, I do love to bang, but how can I make sweet, sweet love to you when tap duty calls, like a siren in the night? Duty cannot be shirked.
Of course, when one of my friends was on tap duty, I took total advantage of it. I’m no dummy.
After a while, we decided our singing group needed something to separate it further from the other groups, an element that would distinguish us and make us special, or at least more special than our workmanlike abilities and overweening earnestness had done so far. We decided to do some comedy sketches in between songs, as a way to break things up and increase the length of our shows (which to this point had been on the brief side, as we were still building our repertoire). We worked on a bunch of less-than-SNL-worthy ideas, settling finally on a bit built around this douche bag fraternity brother for whom duty always called. And naturally, because I was the largest and most masculine of the bunch, I would play him.
For my very first sketch character, I performed in drag, if drag meant that I put on a baseball cap . . . and then turned it backwards. That w
as all it took to turn me from delicate, feminine lady to giant, lumbering, grunting dude. Sadly, it was not a big stretch at all.
We debuted the sketch at an outdoor concert on the main green one warm spring afternoon. The sketch was poorly written and even more poorly delivered. I rushed my dialogue. I missed my cues and bobbled my lines. I had poor posture and terrible projection.
I was awful.
No matter. The crowd loved it. This was a guy they all knew. Some of them were this guy. And at least a third of them (not all female) were sleeping with him. We had hit the sweet spot of campus zeitgeist, and it was a damp and beer-soaked bullseye.
Despite my lackluster performance, I loved it even more than the audience. Getting laughs was the most intoxicating sensation I had ever felt. It completely beat drinking watery beer from a cup that only moments before held cigarette butts or chew juice before being rinsed out by a lazy fraternity brother and reused; plus, no hangover. I was hooked.
“Fratman” was a hit. It would become one of our signature bits, and my own signature character, for the rest of my time at Dartmouth. It was my first foray into sketch comedy, and I was completely in love. I didn’t know it at the time, but those early laughs, so delightful and addictive, were like the start of a bacterial infection—the spread of which would come to slowly and inexorably change my life forever.
Even though I wasn’t very good, I knew what I wanted. And I knew what I needed to do to get it. Work harder. Train longer. Get funnier. Stop sucking so much.
And that’s what I did.
I performed. I studied. I practiced. I watched comedians. I wrote sketches. I performed again. I started learning about comedy and how it works, and for the rest of my time at Dartmouth, I made it an increasingly large part of my life. Even though my early performances weren’t much to look at, I loved how they made me feel. And I wanted to feel that feeling more.
Because it doesn’t matter how badly you suck when you start. It just matters that you start. And if you hit a speed bump, you stop, re-orient, and start again. And again, and again, until the speed bumps feel like nothing.
In life, like in sport drinking, you boot, and then you rally.
( 19 )
The Time I Killed a Hobo
“He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
“This is definitely gonna leave a mark.”—AISHA TYLER
Calm down. I didn’t actually kill a hobo. My big pile of middle-class guilt just made me feel as if I did.
And as any recovering Catholic or cookie-stealing preschooler will tell you, guilt is a dastardly bitch.
When I graduated from college, I returned immediately to the welcoming, familiar bosom of my hometown. San Francisco, besides being perfect in every way, is a city renowned for several things: hilly terrain, a killer food scene, and a kickass rotating army of fierce gay fabulosity.1 What people may not know about SF (or what we self-obsessed natives call “The City”2) is that it is also the number one choice of residence for our nation’s unmoored or, as demographists like to call them, the homeless.
Or as I often refer to them, hobos.
Wait for it.
I prefer the term hobo because it sounds jaunty and upbeat. A homeless guy smells like pee and is struggling with mental illness or addiction. A hobo rides the rails and roasts his baked beans and hot dogs on an open flame, harmonica ’tween his lips and a song in his heart. This is, of course, a concept that dismisses entirely the fact that most people on the street are struggling with mental illness and do need help with addiction. But it helps (me at least), put the hobo-pedestrian relationship back on even footing, and gives the homeless person some transactional parity. Instead of feeling pity or looking down on them as less fortunate, I choose to see them as equals, with hopes and dreams of their own and a colorful, vagabondian history. Plus, hobos get to carry that little stick with the gingham kerchief on the end. See? Jaunty!
I am not making light of homelessness. I grew up with very little, and there was a portion of my time in high school when my father and I lost the lease on our apartment and were without a place to live. Luckily I was able to stay with a friend’s family and continue to go to school, study, and live life, for the most part, uninterrupted. I was incredibly fortunate. That said, we had a working-class existence, living paycheck to paycheck; there were moments when my father was in the grocery store with his last twenty-dollar bill, wondering what to do next. So while I would never have claimed to be in legitimate crisis, there were times in my youth when we struggled, and where the line between us and the street seemed razor-thin.
So no, I am not making fun of homeless people or homelessness. It is no fucking joke. The fact is, I grew up around homelessness, and spent a good part of my life seeing, talking, and interacting with homeless people on a daily basis, in a way that emboldens me to speak of them in brazen fashion, but definitely does not make me in any way uniquely qualified to speak about them or on their behalf.
That does not mean I will not do so anyway.
Homeless culture is a part of life in San Francisco, unlike almost any other urban city in the world. There are more homeless people in San Francisco per square mile than any other American city.3 When Ronald Reagan signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act into law as governor of California in 1967, he dramatically altered the healthcare landscape for those struggling with mental illness in the state. While seen as a great step forward in the movement for patients’ rights (the law made it harder to commit and hold someone against their will), the Act had another effect, which was to greatly reduce the facilities and services available to people needing psychological help. For those who aren’t criminally insane, but just good old-fashioned batshit crazy, the system was no longer welcoming, and many people struggling with mental illness were catapulted into the street. That single act, and the budget cuts that followed, unleashed a small army of the unmoored that has since grown legion. And because San Francisco is such a bleeding-heart fruitcake lefty hippie bastion of a godforsaken city, full of lovey-dovey huggers and soup kitchen hipsters and people who live on quinoa and fermented flower petals, it is homeless freaking Mecca.
The homeless seem to migrate to San Francisco, drawn by temperate weather and promises of organic milk and fair trade honey in the streets. And they are everywhere. In city parks, bus stop benches, subway grates, street meridians, in doorways, down alleyways, obstinately guarding the entrance to your favorite Starbucks like a bobbing, nattering sentinel. They are numerous, they are perceptive, they are driven, and, most of all, they are organized. The homeless are so organized here that San Francisco has a hobo town, an organized tent city with hobo police and a hobo mayor and a tiny hobo coffee stand.
I am only mildly exaggerating.
The homeless people in San Francisco are so focused and effective that several years ago the city drafted a law to tell them where and how they could conduct their panhandling, as they were loitering perilously close to ATM machines and hitting people up as they stumbled away with their pockets full of Jacksons. This may have made the withdrawers uncomfortable, but as a strategy, it was unimpeachable. It’s hard to tell a dude sleeping on a piece of cardboard with a broken radio and a hairless cat that you can’t spare any money when he just watched you pull a wad of green out of a magic hole in the wall.
So if you live in San Francisco, you quickly come to the realization that interacting with the homeless is a part of your life. This is not necessarily a negative thing. Firstly, it brings you closer to your own humanity and the humanity of others. Living in Los Angeles, as I do now, one can quickly become divorced from the reality of poverty and suffering, especially when one is whipping around town in a Bentley doing blow off the perfect ass of a reality-star-slash-hand-model-slash-yoga-instructor.4 The homeless are not in evidence here, and even if they were, people in Los Angeles are dead inside and feel nothing unless they are told to by a director, or unless the feeling is surgically inserted into their chest under
general anesthesia alongside a couple of plump sacs of saline.
Living in a place where you don’t actually see poverty and its effects every single day can have the effect of muting your response to it, and perhaps your compassion as well. It can make you forget all about poverty, skew your sense of need and entitlement, until you think it is perfectly normal to spend $200,000 on a car and $1,700 on a bottle of wine that you saw someone drink in a rap video. People who live a rarified life gradually forget than any other kind of life exists, especially if they never have to confront it at close range.
You can see how the homeless could have a generally positive effect on people’s behavior, if engaged properly.
In San Francisco, you see real poverty every day. What’s more, you talk to it, engage with it, and occasionally step over a running stream of its urine as you hustle to work each morning. It is a part of life there, like biodiesel and vegan pot cookies. It is just something that you do.
And do you must. When I worked there, in my first job out of college, I made very little money. So little, in fact, that when I would get paid every two weeks, most of my money was gone before I even deposited it. Each pay period I would have twenty dollars with which to recreate. That’s right. One crisp, disposable twenty, to do with whatever I wished, for the following two weeks. Which, it turns out, wasn’t very much.
