Page 218 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
pizza (no beer; in Massachusetts the drinking age was twenty-one, violated on campus only through some kind of unspoken agreement with the local police), and you’re competing with a junior at Yale or Dartmouth who has a car, alcohol, and all the other necessary conve- niences at his disposal. What do you do? You lose.
Only two, hopefully winning, strategies presented themselves. The first, as they said in Animal House, was “road trip.” I believe that I took one such journey when I was a freshman: I somehow got a (very long) ride to Syracuse in a snowstorm and ended up sleeping on a couch in the living room of a fraternity, learning about Mount Olympus, Comstock Avenue, and Iota but little else of social value. Unlike Otter (who scored by saying that he was from Amherst and was the boyfriend of a coed who, he had learned, had been killed in a kiln accident), I really was from Amherst— but it was to no avail. The road trip did teach me, however, that high-rise female dormitories were intimidating, but not as intimidating as the girls who resided in them. When I finally had my own car, I would occasion- ally take a road trip, more successfully, to “date Skidmore.”
The second, and more tried and true, strategy was to have an “import.” I believe that I did that all of three times, inviting high-school- age girls to visit, to stay in some woman’s house in town, and to be “wowed” by going out with a college guy. I remember no positive out- comes in that department either, but it did wonders for my mode of speech. After I had grown accustomed to the way in which non–New Yorkers expressed themselves, I found the Brooklyn accent of one of the young ladies who came to visit to be absolutely jarring. I then realized that I did not speak too dissimilarly. I believe that it was then that I came to realize that one’s female sibling was called a sister, whose last letter, the r, was actually pronounced—not a “sistuh,” where it wasn’t. Sud- denly, I not only did not entirely fit in to my new environment, I felt apart from my old world, and, I’m embarrassed to say, I was somewhat actually put off by it. While my speech tended to improve with, as Kathy would gently say, a touch of the New York (not “New Yawk”) neverthe- less remaining, I was soon proud once again to be a representative of Brooklyn, if a slightly refined (not “refoined”) one.
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