A L S O_ T O D A Y

Comics
Keith Knight: Cleaning out Gunther

Incoming freshman seek advice. Ask questions, give answers in the Education area of Table Talk

Financial roulette with Sallie Mae
By Kristina Blachere
Make no mistake, the corporate mistress of student loans will get you in the end, but in the meantime you can play her at her own game and sometimes win
(10/12/98)

Creeps on campus
By Dawn MacKeen
Do bad guys have a right to higher education?
(10/09/98)

My crabs or yours?
By Dan Stern
Protecting yourself from the creatures of the sexual swamp
(10/07/98)

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
Trouncing feminist film criticism and its cadre of ass-kissing puritans
(10/07/98)

Scholars of smut
By Carina Chocano
World Pornography Conference: Academics cheer as porn stars theorize
(10/05/98)

BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER
ARCHIVE

______G^{eometry and} HOT^pix
_______Nothing is so alien as your family
_______during a college break.
_______- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BY CHRIS COLIN | A Web site called www.hotfuck.com lets me download a picture called Bizarre647.jpg for free. Sluggish technology drags the photo open like curtains. There is a sky, I see, then a chin thrown up to it. There are shoulders, thrust back like the head -- someone invisible's pushing. There is a cheerleader's uniform, red and white with blue, minus cheerleader underwear. There are taut quad muscles and the suggestion of pubic hair. There is a young woman on a high school blacktop. She's sitting on a traffic cone.

My younger brother rehearses ninth-grade geometry like a parody of a bad actor -- all monotone, no recognition: rhombus parallelogram secant arc. A sphere's volume is 4/3 pi times radius squared. Cubed. Radius cubed. He would like to hate his mistakes, I imagine, but he doesn't believe what he's saying enough for that. He'll take a quiz Monday, the first of 15 this quarter. On the last quiz, 11 of the 25 answers he scribbled in were wrong. On the quiz before that, 13. Before that, nine. I daydream about patterns. I scrape at something on my shoe when he looks up, casual and unconcerned scraping, but I consider F words: flounder, flightless, flunking. My brother hands me index cards and I quiz him on formulas.

"You've got those down cold," I say cheerfully after he stammers through a dozen.

"I had them down cold last time," he says. He sighs and sinks into the couch. There's a pen and he begins designs on his palm. I lose him for the night.

I can't sleep. I turn on the computer. It's a habit. Or maybe I like it. I don't know. I would read but I dropped my book in the subway tracks today. Someone jostled me and I thought Undo. Maybe I ought to lay off the computer for a while.

The Web site about Asian bondage boasts three galleries, each the hardest core, the XXX nastiest, updated four times an hour. It's quarter till midnight, which means I'm looking at brand new Asians in brand new bondage. I don't know where the old ones went. They had their 15 minutes. Fans of porn like porn fresh. I click a couple places and there is a woman spread like a star over black sheets. Each limb pulls out to a bedpost, roped tight, and her face is saying no no no yes no. I have a lot of questions. I click more places and more women pop up, tied down. Sometimes someone's having sex with them. Mostly they appear to be waiting for me. I will disappoint them once again.

I'm visiting home for the weekend. I brought some clothes, a toothbrush, my laptop computer and a book. Kevin is about to fail geometry. My parents have hired a tutor and conferenced with the teacher, but he's shown no improvement. A symptom, I'm told in confidence, in italics. Maybe you can, you know, talk to him while you're here.

My parents have something like a slouch about them lately. They look like hell. They don't joke about the neighbor's lawn boy anymore or fiddle over soufflé recipes after work -- we have scrambled eggs a lot, pretty quietly. Dinner is grim business. At the table earlier this evening, I tried an impression of Jerry Lewis. Nobody really laughed.

"What's that?" my father asked, salting his eggs.

"Jerry Lewis," I said. "Jerry Lewis."

"Oh. Oh, right." He chuckled and salted.

A woman called Cherry Lewis can have sex with three men at once, and I don't mean one of them waits on the sidelines. She stars in a three-photo series -- "Series B3" -- performing this very feat. The three suitors look mad as hell. Maybe they've had a hard life. They seem content, though, to take it out on Cherry's mouth, ass and vagina. She doesn't seem as content, but she doesn't seem discontent either. For the subject of a photo, she fades nicely into the furniture she occupies. Cherry Lewis is a good name. Her hair is cherry red, of course, and what's more, how ironic to name a whore Cherry. There is a place in pornography's heart for irony. I once saw a Web page called Paradise Found -- wasn't this how we lost it in the first place?

The Net doesn't always catch me and I retire for the night. In bed I skim books with names like "Crying for Help," "The Troubled Teen" and "Please Hear Me." The writers of these books want the world to understand people like my brother. I try to learn their language. "Understand," in the parlance of understanders, means something like "accept." From what I gather, if you explain the Pythagorean theorem to these writers and they say, "I understand," what they mean is that they hear you and gladly accept your desire to teach them. Reading these new rules, something embarrasses me. I wouldn't want Kevin to know. I turn off the light and hide the books under my mattress.

At breakfast, for Kevin's benefit, my father launches into infomercial mode. It's Saturday morning and his campaign for a weekend of studying has begun. He's taken the reins lately while my mother backs off. I gulp some coffee and force myself to follow.

"What are you going to do today?" he asks me, intent as an anchorman.

"I thought I'd go to the library for a couple hours," I reply, natural as sunshine.

"Do you find it easier to get work done there?"

"Definitely," I say. "It's nice and quiet."

"Sounds good," he says, glancing my brother's way for a reading. But Kevin's eyes have glazed over, staring at a squirrel out the kitchen window. He's no simp -- he can play a role, too, if necessary. It's the part of the wayward son, oblivious to absurd and condescending lessons in work ethic. He won't return until he's ready, Saturday morning infomercials notwithstanding. I admire his fortitude.

But this is not in my father's script. Flustered, he moves in at a different angle.

"Kevin," he begins like a pal, "are you ready for that geometry quiz Monday?"

"I guess."

"Hmmm. It's on proofs?"

"Proofs?" my brother asks.

"You know, what you were working on the other night. Weren't those proofs?"

"Proofs?"

I jump in. "Kevin, why don't we go down to the park with the basketball later? Around 2 o'clock maybe?"

"OK," he says. "They just put new nets up."

"Good," I say and clear my plate. The squirrel outside notices us and stares. His black eyes seem to bug out of his head.

"Maybe I'll go to the library for a while until then," Kevin says and finishes his pancake. My father, I imagine, thanks some god.

The Fletcher County Library, I discover, has been remodeled. The unimposing brick building I knew as a child is missing, and in its place I find a sort of geodesic Plexiglas book center. There are weird chairs. There are 15 computers. There are ergonomic reading desks facing giant windows, behind which wave daffodils and impressively green grass. In the old library, cafeteria-style tables lined an ugly beige windowless wall: One read. I see two kids running through the biography section. The first, it seems, has a note that the second wants. Some books get knocked off their shelves.

"How often do you do your work here?" I ask Kevin. Perhaps -- I fantasize the instant before his answer -- the problem is but a matter of work environment. Who could possibly calculate circumferences in a funhouse like this? The solution was so simple, I imagine him chuckling to his former teachers years from now, gathered around him in appreciation of his slow-starting but unparalleled success, "I was studying at the wrong library."

But these fantasies never pan out. "I hardly ever study here," Kevin answers, picking up the books that were knocked over. "It's kind of hard to concentrate."

We manage to concentrate, finding a secluded little hideaway in a corner. For the next hour, I deliver a silent lesson in discipline, veiled of course; for me, even our most relaxed moments together these days are shamefully calculated. Kevin flips through his geometry textbook while I write letters. I try not to worry about whether he's flipping too fast. At noon, he announces he's left an important notebook at home. Can you study without it? I ask. No. We go back home.

In the afternoon we play basketball. Kevin plays hard. I take comfort in his commitment to winning, however brief. I play hard in return; he can smell a thrown game a mile away. My shots are on, his aren't so much. He takes it bad. Dear God, please let him believe in himself. Once he misses a layup and mutters, fuck, not quietly. I don't get it.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Some progress, and another half nelson