Desperate Leeches, Sentimentalists and Myrtle Beach (oh my!)

The slightest sheets of sunlight wiggled their way in between the drawn window shades, offering our bloodshot eyes the first indication of the rising new day. It was 6:30 a.m. We had been in a smoky, stale room on the third floor of the Social Sciences building for the last six hours, and finally, finally, the real show was to begin.

We had just sat through endless campaigning and haranguing and hulla-buloo--the type of stuff that, although interminably dull, needs to get accomplished at a last fraternity meeting of the year. But now, as sensible folks along the eastern seaboard were rising to the bugle sound of another work day, we were treated to an uncharacteristic burst of authentic emotional honesty. This, the real show, occurs when the seniors attempt to sum up what their last four years looked like while also trying to come to grips with their next four, or 40, or basically until they die.

Up until this point in their lives, everything had been laid out. Grade school... middle school... high school... college. Sure, there was a struggle to get from one designated post to the next, but that's the point: It was designated. Even when life didn't always make sense, the path did.

And now, suddenly, it didn't. On this particular early morning, I heard an account dripping more with fatalism than fear that I have consistently wrestled with ever since.

I heard a man equate graduation with death. In leaving Duke, the place where you had come to define yourself for the last four years, he told us, a major part of you would be dead. Eventually, you would become little more than a drooping black-and-white photo on the commons room wall, and the parties, the lithe lifestyle, the until-the-sun-rises-on-a-Wednesday drinking binges would be murdered by the double-headed hydra of work and responsibility. A job, a wife, 2.5 kids, income taxes and a nice plot in the ground. Live it up when you can boys because these are the best years of your life, and when the ride's over, well, shit....

Two years later, and eight days before my own graduation/death, I careened down I-95 toward North Myrtle Beach, doing my darndest to outrun the Reaper. Hell, with no more finals, no more school, and no discernible sense of responsibility, Myrtle Beach seems the last place you'd think to associate with death. But this year, the once-a-year playground of the rich and careless was an entirely different beast.

How far it had come, too. Several weeks before my descent, I had spoken to Ruth Wade Ross, Trinity '68, for a project I had to crank out for Recess, that estimable weekly insert in your estimable daily paper. Launching into a glory rant on the good ol' days--"dang, college was a good time; you should relish it while you're there"--she recounted how tightly Myrtle, through several yearly spring semester visits, had woven itself into the fabric of her Duke experience. To hear her tell it, golly shucks, Myrtle was Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello and Beach Blanket Bingo, and it was hopping on every long weekend, as well as many other short ones.

Eventually, Myrtle transformed into the four-day debauched fest we'll fondly reminisce about when we're too old to know better. No pre-draft, pre-Watergate naïveté here, just your standard issue post-rational exuberance adolescent malaise: 10 a.m. games of "Asshole" by the pool, drunken putt-putt, "Case Days" and utterly meaningless meat grinding at the Spanish Galleon. That's all Myrtle is now--no apologies, no huzzahs.

Until this year, at least. Always an undercurrent, never a rip tide, in years past, a vast sense of desperation crashed fantastically over these festivities. There had been no time when Myrtle wasn't an escape of some sort--from school work, from summer joblessness, from love woes--but, across the board, this year's edition brought escapism to fearful new heights.

A sense of foreboding danced ominously around all the proceedings as nature had its way with our pale and prone bodies. Hoping for the night's ocean breeze, we instead were showered with tornado warnings and flash floods. Waiting for a flurry of sunbeams, we were fogged out on all but one day, which itself didn't come until long after most of the crowds had already headed north to Durham.

So, we raged against nature the only way our collegiate-level brains knew how: We drank harder, with greater conviction. By the time the roads had dried after the first night's freakish downpour, stories--some true, others not--filtered in from distant outposts like By the Sea and Mayday Golf: Three fraternities had been sent home; a fire had blazed at the Bahama Sands; 13 people, bludgeoned hideously in one way or another, spent the night in the hospital.

Then, there was the problem of having no central point of congregation. In previous years, Swells stood in graciously, harboring our sick, our tired, our horny, our stoned. Now, it was the Big Tuna or the Ugly Tuna Saloona--either way it didn't matter, for the place was a mere shell of a bar, housing the hopeful on the first night, but serving no greater purpose thereafter.

Instead, this year's Myrtle was a lesson in cabin fever. All drinking and no sun makes Greg a dull boy. And it made the fuchsia glow of the tackiest beach town north of Panama City and south of the Jersey Shore that much dimmer.

Combine the storms and the scatter with the deadening weight of being a senior, of replaying those words that thundered through you at 6:30 a.m. two years ago, of seeing through bloodshot and beer-drunk eyes your bore of a future that would include countless four-day stretches, but none quite like this one. It was enough to drive a man crazy, and sure enough, it did. Friends, acquaintances, otherwise sensible people, morphed into desperate leeches, clinging onto whatever could distract them from their present reality for a few fleeting seconds. When they saw an opiate--booze, drugs, sex, religion--they took their fix and instantly went scrounging for the next.

The cadence of my classmates' speech even took on that of an incurable addict. One friend, his cheeks puffed and eyes sunken after three straight days of raging excess, stammered up to me to announce his intention to hurl himself into a injurious fling with a floozy whose heart he'd before: "I just need to one more time, man. I mean, it's the last time I'll ever fuck as a college student. Just one more time. That's all I need, man. Just one more screw."

Such delusional yapping, however, was a welcome diversion from the mealy-mouthed myopia of the sentimentalists. Oh, those inevitable sentimentalists with their incessant babbling about times passed, half-empty bottle of wine in one hand, soiled Kleenex in the other--"You remember that time, you know, when Claire vomited on that sketchy Florida State kid on spring break. Wow, you guys are the... [sob, sob, tear, tear], you're the greatest." Although everyone has occasionally wrapped himself too tightly in the past, and although these handkerchief hounds bleat with the best intentions, what is implicit in these teary diatribes is the sentiment that as soon as graduation comes, these memories will disappear. There is a finality in their tone, death in their words. A job, a wife, 2.5 kids....

Being a senior in Myrtle isn't raging against the dying of the light; it's running up to the light, incoherently yelling at it for a couple minutes and then passing out. Powerlessness set in for us at different times throughout the school year, at the point when we finally realized the imminence of this unwanted change. But desperation, in its basest, most wickedly vindictive form, didn't set in until we holed ourselves up in dingy hotel rooms 200 miles away. And this booze-fueled last gasp did nothing but increase the hurt. As the weekend progressed, the addicts plunged deeper, the sentimentalists whimpered louder, and everybody, in their own way, sprinted farther and farther away from any possible peace of mind.

I didn't die upon receiving my diploma. Of course not. As uncomfortable as leaving your friends and your home behind always is, and as swell as it would have been to disappear in the warm embrace of academia for another year or two, it was time to go. From the lecture halls of the Sanford building to my fraternity's malted hops-soaked commons room, I had experienced what I came to Duke for.

Let's face it, too: Shortsightedness, that unavoidable defect of youth, characterized those four days in Myrtle--and much of the four years before that. Its concrete grasp over our thoughts drove me and most of my classmates to believe that college truly was our last hurrah, that it was our last barbaric yawp before boredom staked its claim and suffocated us under stifling heaps of electric bills and Medicare payments. So, if it took graduation to realize that life could actually grow fuller after those collegiate glory years, then it was a death penalty I gladly accepted.