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C HAPTER 23 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 A Need for Relief LAMAR'S MASCOT WAS A BIRD, THE CARDINAL, AND THE COLLEGE WAS CALLED, by the young of the Golden Triangle doomed to attend it, Tweety Bird High and Peeker Tech, and any other names we could come up with to demonstrate our understanding of our situation and where we truly were. We knew we had to do that before anyone else explained it to us. When I arrived at Lamar in 1957 and began to attend my classes in physics, chemistry, calculus, dynamics, statics, strength of materials, I discovered to my dismay that the constructOI'll of the examinatiol15 at Tweety Bird High were as interested in the arcane and the abstruse and the quantitative as the ones who had built the tests that stopped me from going to TexasA&M on a free ride. It was hard. It wasn't interesting, and the courses that I had to take in general education proved to be as easy as the ones I had aced in high schooL I made As in English and history and political science, but I struggled to get Cs in the courses taken by serious students ofengineering, those who would go on to real jobs in the petro-chemical industry in Beaumont and Houston and New Orleans. I was ashamed ofmyselfas a student for the first time. Not only did I not rank in the top group in my classes, I dwelled with the ordinary, the slow, the confused, the witless. And the As I made were in female-dominated subjects. I could read the poems and stories assigned in my English courses with greater W1derstanding than anyone around me, but I kept quiet about that, instead bemoaning falsely with my fellow engineering students the difficulry ofwriting assignments . I found I had to lie in a new way, downplaying my successes and inflating my weaknesses. It made for headaches and confusion. When my mother would ask me what grades I was making, I lied by citing only my high marks in the liberal arts courses, those beneath contempt for an engineer, and I con95 96 HOME TRUTHS cealed the Cs and occasional Os on work in the real courses, those that could result in an actual job with real pay. I avoided all mirrors in my first two years at Pecker Tech, and I fotmd more need to make things up than I ever had before, even in East Texas. Life was supposed to get easier, but it hadn't. I was still an accomplished and adept liar, but I was feeling the strain. I did get to date girls at Lamar, though, since so many ofthem had never known me in high school and consequently didn't realize my true ranking as an impossible sexual partner. In a short story I wrote years later, I had a female character, drunk and miserable with her weakly inept husband, advise another woman. "Don't never," she says, "date outside your high schooL You'll never tmderstand what a slack-twisted, French Club-going, Student Council-representing drip you're about to hook up with unless you've had the chance to see him in high schooL They can't lie to you if you knew them then." The girls in my classes at Lamar looked like grown women to me, dressed in their penny loafers and plaid skirts and white blouses adorned with circle pins, with their hair cut short and maintained by heavy-duty hairspray, and their ccdly distant facial expressions. They were datmting, but they were from outside my high school and tmfamiliar with the males they were allowing to take them ro movies and dances and hanky-tonks. They didn't know any better about the nature ofthe strange males they were dealing with, and I saw no reason ro disabuse them of their misconceptions. Arotllld them and in the htmt, I found new reasons to exaggerate and inflate , to imply a storied past ofdissolution and familiariry with the social scene, and to lie baldly and outright when the need arose. Once when I was invited to a fraternity luau held on McFadden Beach near Galveston, I was forced to come to painful terms with how easy it was for some Lamar females to see all the way through me. I had asked a particular woman to go with me to the event because I had learned she was already divorced , as yOtlllg as she was, and I was...

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