Photo by Thanh Serious on Unsplash
“Okay, how about, ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’?” asks Evan. “‘…and go to the grave with their song still inside them.’ Fuck, only you would toss out Thoreau at this time while we’re all fucked up,” says Andy as he high fives Kip and me.
“Actually, in Walden, Thoreau never added ‘and go to the grave with their song still inside them’.”
“Really?” asks Andy. “How do you know all this stuff?”
“I read. Actually, my favorite Thoreau is, ‘Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.’ And that, gentlemen, is precisely what we do tonight!” Evan says as he raises his beer to us all.
We all raise our glass in return except for Kip. Instead, he says, “Ev, we’re not falling for that one. Andy nailed your question, so you and your team imbibe!” “Plus, you used the word ‘d-r-i-n-k’ twice, Ev, so you d-r-i-n-k two more!” commands Andy.
“Alright, I got one,” I say. “In honor of Mrs. Granderson: Chemistry. What is Avogadro’s number?”
“I know this one intimately as I practice it all the time,” Cary shouts. “It’s approximately 69 to the 69th power!”
“You practice 69 all the time with your two hands,” John retorts. “It’s approximately 6.02 x 1023 particles per mole. So drink, you imbeciles! Shit, I mean, consume!”
We’re all at Andy’s house for one last gathering of our Dead Poets Society before graduation. Andy’s parents have given us the run of the house tonight, supplied us with some fine refreshments that we’ve augmented with some drinks of our own, and constrained us with only one mandate: stay overnight so we won’t drive home drunk.
We’ve been drinking a while, so we all have the munchies. Andy dons a coonskin hat for some undisclosed reason and leads us on a snack run to Circle-K, about a twenty minute walk from the house.
“We should get some whiskey or something stronger,” suggests Cary as we near the store. “Don’t you have a fake ID, Kip?”
“No, I wish.”
“But even if he had one, you think anyone would believe he’s twenty-one?” Andy asks.
He’s got a point. Kip is about as adorable and babyfaced as Babyface, the singer. You can’t get much more pretty and babyfaced than that unless you are a baby. “Kip will probably be carded till he’s thirty and carrying his own baby in his arms,” says Evan.
I add, “Except, the guy at the counter will suspect Kip of borrowing the baby as a prop.”
We all laugh as we’re drunk off our asses, and in this state, we all think we’re extremely witty. We load up on carbs and oily stuff at Circle-K as these satisfy most
when tummies slosh with alcohol. The girl at the counter is cute, so of course, one of us has to make a play at her.
Cary steps up to bat and inquires, “Hey, so what’s a nice gal like you doing in a place like this?”
The girl turns an appealing shade of Amaranth while she attempts to focus on ringing up all our items.
Undeterred, Cary presses on, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.” We all groan and exit with our loot, leaving Cary to drown in a cesspool of his own making. When he rejoins us, Andy says, “Only you would use the oldest, lamest line in the book to pick up a girl.”
“Listen and learn, buddy. It’s the singer, not the song,” Cary says as he produces from his pocket an old lottery ticket with the girl’s name and number written on the back of it.
“That chick fell for your line?” Kip asks.
“Works every time when you got my skills,” says Cary as he flexes his biceps. “And these bad boys, of course!”
“Which bad boys?” asks John as he squints at Cary’s biceps.
As we walk back to Andy’s, I start to feel hot, so I whip off my shirt. John does the same. As one of the school’s best swimmers, John has an impressively buff yet streamlined body. By all rights, at this point, I should put my shirt back on. However, I elect to keep it off. All this beer is making me feel like an inferno inside. Besides, by now, I have fashioned myself a taut Body by 24-hour Fitness™ and don’t mind showing it off to friends and the general public, which is what I do as we amble down the street.
Moreover, although I am not as massive as John, I’ve got a golden tan genetically out of reach for him, which evens me up with his golden locks. For in the eighties, Americans, especially women, are crazy about tans. Even in Phoenix, where one can bake under the real sun pretty much year-round, Arizonans still find the means and time to bathe their bodies with indoor, artificial sunlight. Tanning salons sit on every street corner and in every strip mall, as ubiquitous as Circle-K convenience stores throughout the city. Most remarkably, instead of sunblock, people even baste themselves with suntan lotion to accelerate the tanning.
On the contrary, East Asian people, especially women, abhor the sun as they want to be as light-skinned as possible. Just as a tan in the West suggests being sufficiently wealthy to lounge under the sun while on vacation in Hawaii or the Caribbean, light skin in Asia means one is part of the elite class that does not have to labor under the sun. Ask a Japanese, Korean, or Chinese woman to choose between baking under the sun or having her hair, eyebrows, eyelashes entirely shorn, and most would have immense difficulty deciding. As an ABC who doesn’t mind getting dark, I finally enjoy a cultural advantage in tanning quickly and naturally by merely breathing and walking around under the sun sans shirt.
“Okay, I’ve got another one for Evan’s team,” says Kip. “What’s pi t—” “Pi. The Greek letter between omicron and rho,” answers Evan.
“Man, good thing you’re studying humanities at Stanford,” says Andy. “You’d die if you were in math or sciences.”
“No, ‘I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy’,” Evan replies.
“No more Thoreau,” groans Cary.
“No, you neanderthal. Not Thoreau. John Adams.”
Cary snakes out a bottle of whisky he convinced the girl to sell him and raises it to the sky, “Well, this neanderthal wants to toast Richard on finally getting straight-A’s in high school. To the only bastard who would work his skinny ass off this last semester while the rest of us partied and got straight-C’s!”
He takes a swig of Jack Daniel’s and then hands it to me. I take a meaningful swill as well. As the alcohol burns sweetly down my throat, I find myself relishing this macho display of hedonism. I did work my ass off to earn straight-A’s. While it may indeed be meaningless to UCLA and everyone else, it has come to mean the world to me. And to Dad.
Kip takes out a camera to document our odd migration back to Andy’s. Six college-bound friends seizing the night along with fistfuls of Doritos and Ding Dongs. We stumble along the road together for one more night but will soon scatter to the four winds. Andy to Yale, John to Harvard, and Kip to Duke. Evan heads for Stanford, Cary for UCSD, and I for UCLA. Steven, who isn’t able to make it tonight, has committed to Berkeley while Quen long ago took off for Amherst. So four to the East and four to the West.
As the night goes on, we don’t make heartfelt speeches or share nostalgic musings about the time we did this or the time we did that. We just drink and compel each other to drink. We make light of our lives and challenges, laugh at each others’ foolishness, and enjoy friendship and frivolity one last time before we step into the breach to seek our fortunes elsewhere. Perhaps Evan sums it up best with Thoreau when he offers one final toast before we all crash for the night, “Gentlemen, ‘we were born to succeed, not fail’.” As I drive home the next morning, two last Thoreau quotes come to mind. The first goes something like, “Life isn’t about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself. So live the life you imagined.” I abruptly and acutely realize that I have not yet started to create myself. I have lived for the expectations of parents, allowed the biases and misconceptions of others to ill-define me, and let fear and uncertainty shackle me to lead a life of “quiet desperation.” Fortunately, God has granted me a second chance in the form of UCLA. There, I shall not be the flower that weeps petals for the babbling brook, and I shall not take any sad song to the grave. Instead, I will drink the good drink, seize the day and girl, and make the girl mine…with her assent, of course. The second saying? “To have made even one person’s life a little better, that is to succeed.” Have my friends done this for me? Made my life a little better? Certainly. I just hope I did the same for each of them along the way. Because deep down in my heart, despite all the “I love you forever, man,” and “we’ll always be together,” I know separate paths lead to separate lives.
But no matter what, we’ll always have last night.
Richard Lin recently retired as a corporate executive to focus on family, philanthropy, and writing. "The Life Imagined" is one of Richard's short stories that focus on themes of interracial relationships, immigrant intergenerational conflict, and ethnic tensions in America, China, and Taiwan. He lives with his wife, three kids, and eleven hamsters in Shanghai, Taipei, and Portland.