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Dark Hotel: Every night is orgy night in the CIA safe house

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In the Bad Line
By Isaac Zava
Purgatory is standing with a hangover in a queue of non-tuition paying students
(12/02/98)

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
More darts at Foucault's scrawny haunches
(12/02/98)

Hell no! We won't grade!
By Sean McMeekin
Will the upcoming strike by University of California graduate teaching assistants raise them from their serflike status -- or spell their eventual doom?
(11/30/98)

Debunking the myths of the Puritans
By Maria Russo
A revisionist argues that historians have turned the authoritarian, conformist Puritans into reflections of their own complex, Harvard-educated selves
(11/25/98)

It's all about parties -- and the bottom line
By Jason Zinoman
Every year the Radcliffe Publishing Course inducts another group of recent graduates into the glamour and drudgery of publishing
(11/23/98)

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GETTING THE BOOT | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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I decided to skip the inquisition. I told my girlfriend, Lisa -- the partially clothed woman -- about my plan. I was going to put the you can't run away from your problems theory to the test. She wanted to go too. So we packed up her little MG in the middle of the night and went zooming down I-95. We looked at a map and decided to head for Charleston, S.C. I can't remember why we chose Charleston. It just seemed like as good a destination as any. Sunshine. Folly Beach. Fort Sumter. Whatever.

We took a vacation from reality -- I understand that now though neither of us saw it that way at the time. We were too busy talking ourselves into the fantasy. We'll go to Charleston, we said. Ditch the old messed-up life, start a new one. We'll get an apartment. Get jobs. We raised a canopy of starry-eyed logic to shelter the absurdity of our delusion. We had about $1,000 between us; we figured we could live off that for a while. Then, when we got employed and the cash started coming in, we might get a little house. Settle down. Live like regular folks. It didn't sound insanely undoable at the time.

Oh, another thing. We hadn't told anyone where we were going. So when the dean called to notify my parents, they got a double-whammy: Not only has your son been nailed for immoral conduct, he's gone AWOL with ... the partially clothed woman. For almost two weeks, my folks didn't know where I was. They didn't know if I was dead or alive, and I couldn't work up the nerve to contact them. To this day, I feel terrible about what I put them through. At the time, though, I felt like the evasion tactic was my only option. I knew that, if I had to face my parents, I would be squashed by the sheer enormity of their disappointment in me.

I should mention that I'm the son of a Baptist minister, and I have three older sisters, all of whom are angels. Growing up, my sisters never did anything wrong -- or they never got caught -- and I was always doing awful things, and I always got caught. I totaled the family car. I got kicked off my high school track team for drinking. I was an indifferent student, so when college time rolled around I went to Campbell because my grades weren't good enough to get me in anywhere else. All my sisters had gone to Campbell; they were star students, campus leaders. My mother had gone there too. Our family had a sort of exalted legacy at Campbell -- until I stepped on campus, that is.

Once we got to Charleston, Lisa and I stayed in a hostel-type motel that doubled as a Pentecostal church on Sundays. The manager looked like Charles Manson, with those dark, crazed eyes. His name was John Pope; he showed us his license to prove it. He invited us into his room to see his surgical instruments -- scalpels, scissors, clamps, all polished and gleaming on his bed. He'd been a medic in Vietnam, he said. He offered to perform first aid on us anytime, no charge. We left.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. The happy homemakers go bonkers