The Young Americans Project

Over the Mississippi and into the West – home of cowboys, wild animals, farms, and enormous malls.

We left Lacrosse, Wisconsin on Sunday, thought about making Harvey the RV ford the Mississippi (Oregon Trail style) just for the hell of it, but decided to take the high road instead. Our destination was the Mall of America in the Twin Cities. It’s the world’s largest shopping center, and if Lewis and Clark were a pair of 21st century explorers, they certainly would have stopped there to provision with California rolls from Tiger Sushi and slacks from Banana Republic.

Driving to the MOA, even in an RV, is like walking through the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids park at MGM Studios. The MOA is like a normal mall, but on steroids. We parked near the Ikea, which is to other Ikeas as Barry Bonds’ skull is to a regular human being’s head.

After parking Harvey, I hopped out and walked to the Mall while Matt and Wigs did some work. On my way to the Mall, a man stopped me and asked if I was a trucker.

Do I look like a trucker? This guy, unknowingly, had just given me one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received. If you look like a trucker, you look like a man. Or in my case, I look like a man who hasn’t showered, exercised, or shaved in weeks. This is what life on the road does to you.

He had wanted to know if I drive a big rig because he didn’t know where to announce his cargo. He had driven all the way from New York and it showed – he was limping, either from a hip problem or from the worst case of road legs I’ve ever seen. You know about road legs, when you’ve been driving for a while and you get out of the car and you can barely stand up, so you have to stretch, or you’ll crash onto the curb of the rest area sidewalk. (Later, after checking out his website, I would learn that he’d been injured “on the job” as a rodeo cowboy.)

I talked to the trucker, John Henry Dam, on the walk to the Mall. This turned out to be a long, long walk, because the parking lot is so damn big. We probably trekked a half mile before we arrived at the Mall entrance. As we parted ways, John handed me his business card. I was expecting his occupation to be listed as “driver,” but instead it said “author/poet.” Who knew? I said, “Hey, no way! I’m kind of a writer, too!” but I don’t think John believed me because I looked like a dirty old trucker.

See, John proves that some books can’t be judged by their covers. We’re reminded of this maxim everywhere we go. John has written a novella, The End of a Beginning, which he self-published. You can read an excerpt and order the book by visiting his website, www.JohnHenryDam.com. Here’s how John pitches the book on his website:

Laugh at it, hate it, and cry about it. Thats right feel it all in this new book. Rudy a man of character and finds that life is not a walk in the park when his son informs him that Mom is having an affair. Then a life is lost and Rudy is about to give in. You'll have to read and see if poor Rudy is a surviver or?

Check it out if you get the chance. You can buy his ebook for $3.95.

After saying goodbye to John, I walked laps around the mall. Having nothing to buy, and no money to spend on anything anyway, the stores were just mean displays of forbidden fruit. Do you know how hard it is to walk by a novelty store that’s selling a luminescent framed airbrushed painting of Dale Earnheardt, Jr. and NOT buy it? It’s really really hard.

In the middle of the Mall, as focal point to all the Gaps and Starbucks, is an indoor amusement park. It’s got a colossal roller coaster and everything. The MOA is more than a mall – it’s a destination. Families come here from miles away to play the carnival games and ride the rides.

Question: What does the fact that so many Americans flock to a mall, of all places, on a Sunday say about our devotion to commerce?
Answer: I have no idea, but it probably says something.

Personally, I couldn’t escape from the mallness of the place. Even in the amusement park, everything is trapped by the stores on the sides and the skylights above. After a couple hours walking through the MOA, I’d had enough and I had to go back to Harvey to rest. I’ve always felt that spending time in a mall is one of the most exhausting experiences out there. It’s so hectic. Every store is yelling at you with a different pop song or trendy trance beat or surfer riff, depending on whether you’re walking by an Abercrombie or an Urban Outfitters or a Pacific Sun.

I was effectively trading posts with Matt and Wigs because they were already on their way to the Mall, cameras in hand, ready to get young people on camera. They interviewed two Miss Teen Minnesotas and a Miss Teen Wisconsin who were all helping to promote a Children’s Hospital and the Relay for Life. Several Vikings cheerleaders were helping, too, because Americans are apparently much more likely to hand their money over to charity if there’s a hot woman at the cash register.

Matt and Wigs also talked to an Ecuadorian immigrant living in Minneapolis, a black record producer from the Bronx, two local girls, and an artist who made his living sketching mall customers. One thing about the MOA – it really does present a wide spectrum of Americans.

So this is how we entered the West: through the gateway of a giant mall. For me, it was a reminder that I wanted to get outside, onto the plains, and away from the Gaps and Starbucks.

I’m contractually obligated here to mention the other things that happened on Sunday:

1. We had dinner with Amy, Wigs’ first cousin, once removed. Thanks, Amy, for taking us to Chevy’s. Those were good fish tacos!

2. We picked up Ben at the airport and managed to shut down an entire terminal’s traffic flow by going through the wrong entrance. Apparently we don’t count as a “taxi” and we don’t “fit” under bridges lower than 12’. So we had to back up, pull a forty-three point turn, and drive in the wrong direction out of the airport. This was all aided by a friendly airport police officer who escorted us back to the proper road. He was on foot, running like a Secret Service officer next to the President’s limousine. If anyone had taken a shot at Harvey, I’m pretty sure our police officer would have taken the bullet.

I like Oprah. I need to get that out of the way immediately because there will be times as you read this blog that it will sound like I don’t like Oprah. But keep this in your mind throughout: Adam does like Oprah, and any criticism of the woman or the show will be

A. I really do like Oprah, and
B. she could have me killed any time, anywhere, in whatever fashion she desires.

But Oprah has a big head. It’s true. A lot of this head is actually curly black fusilli hair, but I was afraid to gaze directly at it for fear that the corkscrews would have Medusa-like freezing capability. She wears 8” heals that allow her to tower over most guests and she exudes invisible clouds of power that can be felt even in the furthest corners of the Oprah Winfrey Show set. I know all this because we went to a taping yesterday.

Wigs’ friend is an associate producer on the show and she generously hooked us up with tickets. The first thing we noticed upon arriving at Harpo Studios, where the show is taped, is that the majority of the audience looks nothing like us. The average Oprah fan is fifty years old, a woman, and gray colored (the audience is split 50/50 between black people and white people, which is pretty cool actually). We caused quite a stir because we weren’t 50-year-old gray women. If the rest of the audience were zebras, we would have been zebras too, but the colorful kind that you see on Fruit Stripes gum wrappers.

Outside the show we met two women, one from Kentucky and one from Oklahoma, who had paid 5,000 dollars for their two tickets at a charitable auction. They were true Oprah diehards and TiVoed every show. Their devotion made me feel like I should take the whole experience more seriously, like when you go to someone else’s church.

Inside the Harpo Studios door, Lydia, a 4’ Latino woman, took my book. I wasn’t happy about this because I had no other way to stave off the boredom that would surely hit while we were waiting for the show to start. She also took Ben’s hat and our poster that said TYAP (heart)’s OPRAH. We were all angry at Lydia and I told her that someday the world would know of her cruelty.

Then we met Delores, a 3’ white women, very sweet and old, with white hair and glasses. She was at the X-ray machine collecting cell phones. Sometimes Oprah gives away cars, so we asked Delores if we would be handed a set of keys after the show. Yeah, Delores deadpanned, You’re all getting hummers. We couldn’t help ourselves and started laughing so hard that I almost fell onto the conveyor belt with all the purses and cell phones and went for a ride through the X-ray machine. Delores looked at me and said that my Hummer would be pink, and I don’t even know what that means, but we laughed some more and then Delores said the word Hummer like ten more times before we were finally out of earshot.

While we were waiting to be admitted into the studio, they asked us to fill out a card with our name and address. Then they asked us to write the one question we would want to ask Oprah. This is a hard thing to do, so I drew a picture of an armored car instead. It had a satellite dish, a hot tub, retractable helicopter blades, and a tranquilizer missile for shooting rhinos, among other features. Oprah never provided a response during the show, so I guess she’ll call me or something. She has my number now.

Finally we were let into the studio. Because we were relative latecomers, they relegated us to the back corner way behind Oprah’s couch. This confused us because we were all good-looking guys and we deserved to be in the front row, but maybe we weren’t wearing bright enough colors.

A woman came out to the set with a microphone and asked us to be happy, then sad, then shocked, then happy again, then in agreement. What we were supposed to be in agreement with, we weren’t sure, but it was good practice for the show. The cameras scan the audience for colorful reactions, so if you’re an easy crier, a wild gesticulator, or a big-time nodder (you nod to say Yes, I agree with that!), then you’ve got a good chance at being on television. I cried, gesticulated, and nodded the entire time, so I’m pretty sure they’ll show me when the episode airs.

Toward the end of the warm-up lady’s spiel, Ben clapped at the wrong time, when no one else was making a sound, and all of a sudden everyone was looking at us, including warm-up lady. This was embarrassing, but warm-up lady said, “Oh, look: four cute young guys. We never get men like you here” and I wanted to kill Ben for clapping. “Why don’t you stand up?” she said, so we stood up, and I could feel my face become bright, BRIGHT red. It was true though. There weren’t any other groups of young men there. Most of the other males in attendance had clearly been dragged there by their wives and they were looking extremely uncomfortable. Although I should say that there were several other young men who didn’t seem to be affiliated with a significant other. I was confused by this until Oprah asked if anyone in the audience was gay and they all raised their hands.

Before Oprah came on stage, her first guest, Tyson Beckford, walked out to the couch. He is a completely unremarkable person except for the fact that many people think he’s beautiful. That’s why he’s a male model, I guess. I thought he was okay-looking, but nothing spectacular. They said, “You know him as the face of Ralph Lauren” but Tyson is black and I always thought that Ralph Lauren was white, so they were wrong about me knowing him as Ralph Lauren’s face.

Finally Oprah. She was coming. Everyone stood and shrieked. Ben started the O-PRAH, O-PRAH chant and this swept through the audience as if she were Rudy Rudiger waiting to go in at the end of the Georgia Tech game. As she emerged from the tunnel, everyone went crazy, and she sucked up the audience’s energy and turned it into even more POWER. She’s only 7 kilowatts away from being her own nuclear power plant. If she stays at her current pace, she’ll be able to make her own natural disasters. This is why everyone in Chicago is so scared of her.

I was expecting her voice to be a roar, like Sigourney Weaver at the end of Ghostbusters when she turns into a ghoulish beast, but Oprah sounded pretty normal. They actually keep her voice and the guest’s voice very quiet in the studio so that nobody in the audience talks during the show. We wouldn’t have talked anyway. We’re too devoted to Oprah.

As any regular watcher of The Oprah Winfrey Show knows, their programming is all about twisting your emotions. Every guest was there with the sole purpose of making us cry, then making us laugh, then making us really cry, and then making us go Awwwww because we learned a life lesson. During the show, we were introduced to:

- Tyson, the male model who was in a horrific car accident.
- The father and his severely disabled son who ran marathons and competed in triathlons together.
- A woman whose husband lost his memory shortly after their marriage
- A straight guy, Bryan, who lived with a gay guy, Ed, in San Francisco for thirty days as part of an FX reality series

The lesson, always, is to live every day for what it’s worth because you never know when you’ll:

It’s pretty much impossible not to get emotional about Oprah’s guests. All of them, with the exception of the “Gay for Thirty Days” guys, had a story that was both sad and heartwarming. A good percentage of the audience was crying, but fortunately the Oprah Winfrey Show is prepared for such displays of emotion, and free Kleenex boxes come with the tickets.

It was during the “Aftershow” segment that Oprah revealed some surprising opinions about gay people. Before I talk about what she said, I should say that it was very clear that both the guys from “Gay for Thirty Days” had the same message: once you get to actually know gay people, even if you’re a religious, Republican military man from Michigan, you see that they’re not all that bad. In fact, in the words of the straight guy, “There are no differences between them and us, except who we sleep with.” So Oprah wasn’t doing the gay community any favors when she began yakking away about how good gay people are at doing hair and makeup.

I think she meant it as a compliment. “Don’t let a straight person touch your hair,” she advised her audience. Apparently, she can spot hair done by a straight man. Gay guys, according to her, are much better at making women look beautiful.

Maybe this is true – what the hell do I know? – but it seems like the gay community is trying to get away from the stereotype of the gay hair salon employee. Oprah continued to demolish gay relations, calling some of her childhood friends little fairies, then bringing out her extremely flamboyant hair stylist.

She did finally let Ed, the gay man from the FX show, discuss how important it was to break down the stereotypical image of a gay person. She nodded in agreement while he spoke and when he was finished, she said, “Okay, we’re talking about why gay people are more creative.” She then turned to her hair stylist and asked for his opinion. I could see Ed thinking, No, Oprah, YOU’RE talking about why gay people are more creative.

Like I said before, I don’t think she was intending her comments to be pejorative, but it seems like a backhanded compliment to applaud the gay community for being good at hair and makeup. It’s pretty much the same thing as arguing that the black community should have equal rights because they’re good at sports and entertainment. I don’t think Oprah would tolerate a statement like that. She’d probably form her own volcano and melt the city of Chicago.

And that was the end of the Oprah show. We filed out with the other audience members, said goodbye to Delores (she said that our Hummers were waiting for us outside and we started laughing all over again), and walked to the coat check, where Lydia had our book, hat, and sign. When she saw us, she said, “Oh, no,” but she gave us an Oprah bag to keep our stuff in, and I started feeling more kindly toward her.

I like Chicago. It’s clean, it’s got lots of young people, and very interesting architecture.

Lots of homeless people though. Here’s my rule – I don’t give money to homeless people who are just sitting there, asking for money. I feel awful walking past them, but if I’m giving my dollar to someone, it’s going to the guy who’s tap-dancing and playing the harmonica. One guy walked four blocks with Ben and I, talking about the differences between gentlemen and men before asking us for money. Ben told him that he would give him a dollar if the homeless man answered one question: “You seem like an intelligent man, why – ” But the man cut Ben off. He knew what was coming and he didn’t want to answer the question. Talking about why he was homeless was apparently a subject that he wasn’t willing to go into.

Lots of friends to see in Chicago. They’ve made the visit to the Windy City that much more enjoyable. And Matt’s grandparents have taken excellent care of us. They’re in their nineties, they’ve been married for seventy years, but they’re two of the coolest young people we’ve met. They get a lot of their news online and watch their movies courtesy of NetFlix.

I could keep talking about Chicago for another 3,000 words but is anyone even reading this anymore?

We woke up in the RV around ten on Saturday morning. Our parking lot adjoined a Michigan State University campus road, so SUVs, sedans, and campers were driving by bedecked in their favorite colors, green and white for MSU Spartans fans, blue and maize for Michigan Wolverines fans. Wiggins put on a gold Under Armour shirt and I asked him if he was sure he wanted to wear it because everyone would think he was a Wolverine supporter. He looked down, decided he should change, and donned a blue shirt, the Wolverines’ primary color.

We were on campus for the big football game and all around us families were getting ready to tailgate. Closer to the stadium, near the tennis courts, were the lots where the students set up their drinking stations. Many of these kids didn’t even care about the score of the football game; they just wanted an excuse to drink in the morning.

Some people apparently pack up their entire living rooms before heading to East Lansing. They find a patch of grass, park the family truck, and unload all their belongings – furniture, enormous television, stereo… One group gave us hot dogs. Their makeup was typical of the other tailgaters: four men (three Spartans, one Wolverine), four wives, and several daughters who attended MSU.

Matt and I split from the other two and circulated through the rows of student groups. We had to wade through empty beer boxes, paper plates, and plastic cups. A bald guy named Zach, who graduated last spring with a degree in engineering, told me that the school had passed new tailgating rules last year, but that nobody was following them. The students weren’t supposed to be drinking hard alcohol, playing drinking games, or doing anything conducive to binge drinking. Having a beer funnel would presumably count as “conducive to binge drinking,” but there were plenty of funnels around and none of the police officers seemed to mind.

I asked Zach why the rules had been passed and he said it was because a girl had supposedly been raped behind those trees over there. But then a couple months later she said that they had only touched her elbow. I’m not sure if Zach had all his facts straight though.

Meanwhile, Ben was making new friends. He found himself playing flip-cup and then he was on top of a bus hanging out with Spartan fans. Ben thinks life should be more like a tailgate, where everyone is friendly and shares their hot dogs, but I’m not so sure life would be tolerable as a tailgate. There was a lot of indulgence near the tennis courts, with strewn trash everywhere. It would all get cleaned up – I saw one black kid with several trash bags picking his way through the cars – but it seems wrong to let someone else clean up your empty Natty Light cans.

I split from the rest of the gang and walked to the Student Union to watch the second half of the game on television. The Union had attracted the students who weren’t interested in tailgating and a large contingent of locals. I found a seat and promptly fell asleep, waking up whenever the crowd rose to their feet to encourage a Spartan who was breaking toward the end zone. I did catch the end of the game and all of overtime – it was enough to see Michigan win on a field goal. The other three guys had managed to work their way into the stadium to see the very end of the game, so they saw it live.

We were going to stay in East Lansing for the night, but no, we were way too tired, so it was off to a campground.

This essay is in response to a Vanity Fair contest. The essay question was, "What's on the minds of America's youth?"

Halfway through my giant pitcher of Liquid Dope at a bar called Four Kegs on High and 15th in Columbus, OH, I realize that I’m not like any of these people. I graduated college last spring, so these kids are mostly younger than I am, but that’s not it. I’m not like that guy by the bar talking on his cell phone – probably not even a caller on the other end – who has store-distressed jeans, black shiny hair gelled to messy perfection, and a tight pink shirt that challenges someone to DEFINE “GIRLFRIEND.” I’m not like those two guys who just started shoving each other, now they’re really throwing down, launching fists at skulls, attracting a posse of wide STAFF backs, and almost busting through the second floor banister. And I’m definitely not like the girl that has just arrived at my left ear, asking if I’d think she were hotter if I knew she was a freshman.

We’re here, in Columbus, to talk to young Americans about their lives, their futures, their generation, and their country. Tomorrow we’ll be in Cleveland, then Detroit, and then on to the rest of the United States. We are members of The Young Americans Project, which is a grand title for four guys in an RV traveling the country to meet our generation. Thus far the RV has only covered the Northeast corner of the country, but we’ve yet to meet a young person that reminds us of someone else. On the Ohio State campus alone, we’ve encountered more diversity than could ever be depicted by an Admissions brochure (you’ve seen the cover photos, where an impossibly colorful circle of friends sits smiling in front of the library).

Earlier in the day, while two of us were meeting with three students who founded a progressive paper called The Pragmatist, the other two introduced themselves to a group that was practicing medieval martial arts in the middle of the campus green. Kevin, an Ohio State freshman and one of the Medieval experts, told me exactly how he would kill me if he had to (he would shove the base of his hand into my nose, trip me over his leg, and bash my head off my bicycle). Neither The Pragmatist staff nor the modern knights would be hanging out at Four Kegs that night.

Ohio State is 85% white. Most of its students are from Ohio. Seemingly homogenous from the outside, the campus, when scratched, becomes impossible to consolidate under a statement of generalization. A fondness for Buckeye gear unites most of the school, but a girl in a blue Michigan t-shirt, spotted near the Student Union, tarnishes this maxim: all Ohio State students wear red.

If The Ohio State University represents such a wide range of personalities, how can we attempt to assemble all the nation’s young faces into a discernible mosaic? With each turn of the zoom lens, we get closer to the subjects, but further from an understanding of the generation as a whole.

Perhaps part of the problem is that we, the disparate members of America’s youngest adult generation, have matured without a unifying factor to bind us. There’s no World War II to fight for, there’s no Vietnam War to fight against. The events that have shaped our lives have been disorienting and sometimes stratifying. We were the kids that watched two of our peers go on a killing spree in a Littleton, CO high school. We had to listen to the question, “What’s wrong with America’s youth?” when most of us wanted to let everyone know that those kids weren’t us. We knew who they were, but they weren’t us. Of course, there were those of us who silently understood the anger that had turned the halls of Columbine into a first person shooting game.

Then there was September 11th and all the adults told us that we were inheriting a changed world, but we hadn’t even had a chance to figure out the old world yet. We’ve seen the six o’clock news pieces about waiting a little longer to catch a flight at JFK, but is this even an issue for the girl in Nebraska or the homeless kid in Las Vegas? Should we feel scared and terrorized, or should we go about our lives as usual? It’s confusing, you see: to be perennially on Orange Alert, but to not let the terrorists win, and all the while there’s nobody in our neighborhood who seems capable of terrorizing. Please don’t blame us when, from time to time, we let September 11th slip our minds.

We do have a war, but are we supposed to be for it or against it? Does Support Our Troops mean that we can’t conscientiously object? Some of us are fighting the War on Terror and some of us think that a War on a word like Terror poses a mission that will never be accomplished.

Maybe we should vote, but who or what would we vote for? Those guys that look alike? Go ahead, describe the last two Presidential candidates as they stand behind their podiums. How many adjectives does it take until you hit a fork in the road? They were both men, white, in suits, gray-haired… These are the people behind whom we’re supposed to assemble? Rocking the vote (thanks for making it sound cool!) would be putting one of these men in office, and that would somehow say something about our generation’s needs, wants, and desires? Maybe we’ll try again in four years.

So we’ve devoted ourselves to being individuals. With no great cause to be a part of, we’ve turned inward to be the best we can be, even if that isn’t the best ever. In my college fraternity we talked about “doing your own thing.” Those who chose to do their own thing were a bit of a chink in the fraternity’s solid armor, but we “backed” them all the same. I suspect all of us on some level believed that we were one of the brothers who did his own thing.

Young people are joining the Army, they’re enlisting in Teach for America, they’re going to Africa to bring medical services to those in need, and they’re hard at work finding a cure for cancer. These endeavors aren’t selfish. They’re part of giving back, something our generation seems to want to do, but we give back in so many more ways than were available to our parents or grandparents.

We’re a generation with more doors than members, and new doors open everyday. We can be entertained by hundreds of satellite television channels, we can get our news from thousands of Internet venues, and our soda pop is available in everything from Classic to Diet Cherry Vanilla. With so many options available, doing our own thing has never been easier.

Which brings me back to the bar in Columbus, with the freshman girl to my left, the STAFF backs hauling the sweaty bloody boys down stairs, and amidst the storm, the kid in the DEFINE “GIRLFRIEND” t-shirt still listening intently to his cell phone and staring at everything. But it’s all out of focus to him; the whole mob blurs into one pulsing, shouting audience. He realizes that he’s not like any of these people. No one else is wearing those jeans and no one else has their hair spiked so carelessly and no one, for sure no one, has that shirt. He is, as we all are, doing his own thing.

How to Hack on to Hack.com, Making New Friends in Strange Places, and A Review of I Am Charlotte Simmons

I’m probably the wrong person to talk about Tuesday, September 27th because I spent most of the day in the West Virginia University library pretending to be a Mountaineer student and now Matt just turned up the Metallica song on the radio and I can no longer think because my head is automatically banging itself. Okay, I’m concentrating on writing again, but no, now I’m not because Wigs just stepped on my neck while climbing into the bunk that’s above Harvey’s steering cabin. This is what it’s like to write a blog on the road.

But back to Tuesday. So all four of us went to the – Matt just turned the volume up again – center of campus and Matt, Ben, and I camped out in the library. All through the afternoon, with the exception of a short foray to the science center for lunch, we were nerds. Then, when Ben and I began to upload content onto the website, we were really nerds.

This is where we start laughing because we know that no matter how encrypted the password to hack.com is, we’ll still be able to hack on to the site because we’re hackers now. We’re also losers.

As Ben and I were uploading and hacking, Matt and Wigs took their cameras and went to talk to people around campus. They met a bongo player named Bill who had blond hair with a blue streak. It turned out to be his twentieth birthday and he was celebrating by taking his drum to a bridge by himself. A Ford Bronco passed while they were filming and the frat guys within encouraged Bill to “Just jump, dude.” I wasn’t there for any of this and it all sounds unbearably depressing, but apparently it wasn’t.

As we left Morgantown, the scarlet sun said its final goodbye and dipped below the city-lit horizon. I felt like crying because I was so glad. Big whatup to my dog, Calloway! Joss.

We really did leave Morgantown as the sun was setting and from there we went back to Pennsylvania, then through the middle finger of West Virginia, and into Ohio. Ben has given me the finger about forty-seven times in the past twenty-four hours, ever since his third cousins taught him that West Virginia looked like a hand with middle finger upraised. This is how locals tell out-of-towners where they live. They flip the clueless passer-by the bird and then point to some location on the palm or one of the fingers. The longer you can prolong this act of direction-giving, the funnier, because the out-of-towners still think you’re giving them directions when really you’re clearly showing them that you’d be perfectly happy if they went and fucked themselves.

Somewhere in Pennsylvania “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen came on the radio and Matt and I turned up the volume and belted out the words (we knew almost all of them). It was the kind of sing-along that carries no shame because the radio is so loud that you can’t really hear your own voice and you assume you’re singing exactly in tune with Freddie Mercury. Then your passenger, Matt, turns down the volume for a line, stops singing, and you find out that your voice is cracking like an egg thrown against a brick wall.

Challenge: Come up with a better metaphor for a cracking voice than “like an egg thrown against a brick wall.” It’s tough. I just spent like a minute trying.

Just over the border of Ohio we stopped in a Cracker Barrel (Ben’s favorite restaurant). The dinner was…
uneventful…
uneventful…
uneventful...
and then we left and Matt tripped over a low wire that was locking the rocking chairs to the porch. He was walking with his hands in his pockets, so had I not warned him a split-second before foot hit wire, he probably would have performed an emergency landing with his face and I would still be laughing and laughing and laughing and pausing to breathe and then laughing again.

Another risk of writing a blog on the road: we just turned off the freeway and now we’re on a twisty back road and I’m about to vomit Cracker Barrel pork chops all over the keyboard of my laptop. I’ll have to stop writing until we get to the RV park…

We pulled into the dark Shady Acres Campground and sat idling while we decided what to do. The office was just as dark as the campers behind it and a sign said that we couldn’t drive past the office without registering. We were about to give up and drive back to the highway when a truck came down from a house on a hill above the office. A woman hopped out of the cab and I followed her to the office, apologized for coming in so late, but the lady said it was okay. She was nice like everyone’s supposed to be in the Midwest and it was a good chance for me to practice being folksy. I don’t mean to change my vernacular when I hit America’s heartland but all of a sudden the G’s are disappearing from –ing words and every one of my sentences starts with y’all.

We parked the RV in an empty slot. I walked the campground late at night, after the others had gone to bed, and heard a wild call-and-response song between at least a dozen howling coyotes and porch-dwelling watchdogs. That is, of course, if Ohio has coyotes.

It’s way easier when you’re in a quiet bar on a Sunday and you’re watching a Patriots game in a state outside of New England and there’s a guy wearing a #90 Dan Klecko jersey and you’re both cheering for the Pats. Pretty soon he’ll be buying you a shot of blackberry something and then you’ll be walking around the bar to high five him after touchdowns, and then, after the game-winning field goal, comes the awkward ten second embrace, initiated by the man in the Klecko jersey, that will leave you wishing your relationship had plateaued with the high fives.

In Defense of Charlotte Simmons

I’m not sure if “controversial” is the right word for Tom Wolfe’s latest book, I Am Charlotte Simmons. The controversy seems to stem from the fact that some people think the book sucks, and some people, like me, think it does the opposite of suck.

Question: Doesn’t the opposite of sucking = blowing?
Answer: Yes, but shut up because you knew what I meant.

I've heard the book called “a disgusting waste of time.” Well, I think I can identify the problem: some people think that college is a disgusting waste of time. It makes sense that those people wouldn’t want to read Charlotte Simmons. I, a recent college graduate, do not think that college is a disgusting waste of time, so I liked it.

Why is Charlotte Simmons worth talking about at all, especially here in my allotted corner of The Young Americans Project website? Well, it’s about young people in college, and what those young people do, and it’s pretty damn accurate. Some people have criticized Wolfe, saying he’s a sixty-something-year-old pretending to be a twenty-year-old. I have two problems with this criticism:

1. He pulls it off.
2. He must be over sixty-something years old. He looks four hundred in his picture.

Charlotte Simmons is an eighteen-year-old girl from Sparta, North Carolina, a town up in the mountains where people rarely go to college and when someone like Charlotte goes to Dupont, Wolfe’s fictional überversity, it’s big news. Charlotte comes from a family that uses a picnic table as its dining room focal point and gives her a homemade computer for Christmas. Dupont College, with its heavy drinking, coed bathrooms, and frat guys, serves as an enormous culture shock to Charlotte. She might as well be a deaf Ukranian shepherd at a Slipknot concert.

Charlotte is the type of girl who doesn’t have enough money to spend on nice clothes, but even if she did, she wouldn’t know what nice clothes were. Her go-to outfit consists of tapered jeans and Keds, or, if she’s being adventurous, a Kmart print dress. She’s pretty and she ran cross-country in high school so she’s got a great body, but it’s all buried under layers of obliviousness. She doesn’t know how to make herself up like the other college girls do, doesn’t know how to flirt, doesn’t even know how to drink. This would all be somewhat refreshing and endearing if she wasn’t so depressed about it.

Wolfe interweaves Charlotte’s story with those of three guys, all of whom want Charlotte to a) hook up with them, b) fall in love with them, or c) do their French homework:

Guy #1: Jojo Johanssen He’s a power forward on the basketball team. Your typical meathead athlete. He walks around in muscle T’s to make sure people can check out his biceps, which are huge because he’s a 6’10” monster. The basketball team won a National Championship last year and Jojo was a big part of it. Maybe that’s why, after a preseason practice, Jojo reaches into his pocket to find the keys of a brand new SUV. This happened to me once, but the keys belonged to a ’95 Volkswagen Jetta and it wasn’t a surprise to find them in my pocket because I had already bought the car with my own money.

Guy #2: Hoyt Thorpe Your token Big Man On Campus Too Cool for School Frat Dude. He’s the sweetest brother at St. Ray, the sweetest fraternity at Dupont. Tom Wolfe calls his attitude “insouciant,” which is a fancy French word for what we used to call “apathy.” He’s a typical frat guy in that his favorite television show is SportsCenter, but he knows that only losers actually go to Dupont games and care if they win or not.

Guy #3: Adam Gellin The nerd. He writes for the school paper, has aspirations of becoming a Rhodes Scholar, and is part of a nerd herd that has actually named itself: The Millenial Mutants. I hated Adam Gellin.

Maybe I liked this book because I have something in common with each character (self-call). In college, I was an athlete, a frat guy, and a columnist for the school paper (self-call, self-call, self-call). Actually, I don’t really know why Tom Wolfe didn’t just write the book about me (biggest self-call ever).

I can’t say that everyone should like Charlotte Simmons, I can only say that it’s an accurate representation of some aspects of college life. I know people similar to every one of the characters, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Wolfe covered the entire spectrum of undergraduate students. To be fair, he should have included some well-rounded girls. The ladies other than Charlotte are all bitchy back-stabbers, and those girls definitely exist, but I’ve met several college girls who are only bitchy back-stabbers part of the time. And Wolfe’s nerd didn’t have to be so despicable. Adam Gellin was just way too bitter about being a nerd. Nobody likes a bitter nerd. Either get used to your status as a serf amongst the lords of the university, or go to the weight room and do something about it.

And I think I’m unintentionally revealing why I sided with the athletes and the frat guys over the nerds…

Before I dig myself deeper than I am tall, I’ll finish this book review. Look, you’ll either like Charlotte Simmons or you’ll find it a disgusting waste of time. But if it’s a disgusting waste of time, so is college.

For the first time in my life, I woke up in a CVS parking lot on Friday. I definitely recommend this to anyone passing through the Boston area. Go to the Cleveland Circle area, find the CVS next to Mary Ann's bar, ask if David Romulus is working, and then tell him you'd like to spend the night nestled between the dumpster and
the chain link fence, right next to the T station that rattles into motion around 5:30 in the morning.

This is the life of the RV vagabond, but subway noises aside, it has its advantages. For example, one needs only roll out of bed and step on the gas paddle to be at the next destination. Or if you're hungry, you can walk across the train tracks to Eagle's deli, the #2 place in the world to pig out, according to Wiggins. I recommend the sausage sunrise breakfast sandwich, a delectable combination of grease and grease.

After Eagle's we went to Harvard University, which, from what I've gathered, is a glorified community college in Cambridge, MA. We parked the RV at the business school and got our first surprise of the day - no other RVs in the lot. Apparently Harvard Business students get around in sedans and SUVs. They're missing out if you ask me.

Matt H. and Matt W. walked to Harvard Yard to interview Matt Dalio, the founder of ChinaCare.org, an orphan adoption agency. He's been featured in Teen People (I know because I subscribe) as one of the Top Twenty Teens Most Likely to Change the World. From what Matt and Matt have said about interviewing Matt, it was an enlightening experience. I'll let Wigs talk about it in more detail in tomorrow's blog.

While Matt and Matt and Matt were hanging out in the Yard, Ben and I set up shop in the Harvard Business School library, took out our cell phones, and loudly pretended to buy one million stocks a piece. Everyone in the library looked impressed.

In the afternoon Ben and I realized that there was a B School party happening on the lawn behind the library. A couple hundred grad students were hanging out, drinking free beer, networking, eating free chicken fingers, and loudly pretending to trade one million stocks a piece. You might think that a HBS party would be a drowsy affair, but this lawn was hopping, and two big stereo speakers pumped out the latest rap hits. The future earnings present on that lawn were somewhere in the billions, but there they were drinking Bud Heavy and listening to Lil’ John. The DJ didn't even bother to cut out the N-words or F-bombs. Ben and I took pictures of each other drinking out of Harvard Business School plastic cups, an act that might have blown our covers as high-powered grad students.

1. Chicken fingers? Come on. This is the Harvard Business School. We would have liked at least some sushi or hummus.

2. Only business school students were invited. Sure, they let us hang out, drink their beer, eat their food, and make fun of anyone wearing both a suit and a backpack, but they never said, "Hey, thanks for coming, guys. Help yourselves." It just would have been a nice gesture, we think.

3. It ended too soon. Ben and I left for a couple hours, came back, and the chicken fingers were gone, which wasn't cool.

This is me eating chicken fingers. That's a Nantucket Nectars hat I'm wearing.

From Boston, we drove to Providence accompanied by Sally Magellan, our talking GPS machine. She has a light yet husky voice and reminds us that we have to “go straight at the intersection, followed by a… LEFT turn.” We keep thinking she’s going to ask for casual sex, followed by a… CIGarette.

We pulled Harvey to a stop outside of Thalia and Jamie’s house just off the Brown campus. Thalia is Matt’s cousin and she, her husband, and their son, Benjamin, graciously allowed their street as a temporary parking lot for Harvey the RV. Harvey’s a little sensitive about his width, so I won’t mention how much of the street he was blocking.

At night we met up with our friends, Rob Cotter and Pal Herman, who didn’t know each other even though they were in the same class at the same school and they lived next door to each other. We followed Rob to a house party, where Rob decided that he and Ben should wrestle. Ben threw Rob into a couch repeatedly before Rob stood up, shook Ben’s hand, waited for Ben to start walking away, and then drove his shoulder into his back. Rob claims he won the fight.

We then met Rob’s friend, Billy, who was wearing a white polo shirt with an upturned collar and brown streaks all over it. Billy was very drunk, having just arrived at Rob’s house via cop car. Apparently he had gotten lost and called the Providence police for a ride back to Rob’s. He was boasting about how quickly the ProPo got him to his destination and we were all impressed until we realized that he had been less than two blocks away when he got lost. Billy shrugged, tried to look us in the eye, and told us that birth control pills were what girls take so that they don’t get pregnant.

That was pretty much the end of the night for us. It was back to Harvey the RV, where the futon awaited me and my North Face sleeping bag.

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So far the trip has been exhilarating and exhausting and everything in between. None of us are operating on enough sleep - that's what you get when you start your road trip at 3:00 am in order to see a sunrise. So far we've only been to places that are familiar to me. Day one was in Maine, my home state. Day two was in New Hampshire, where I went to school. Day three was in Boston, where I was born. We've had friends to see everywhere, which is excellent, but I think we're all looking forward to heading into the unknown. For me at
least, the unknown = the Midwest.

It's been hard to keep track of days. I can't remember if we left Maine a week ago or five minutes ago. At times, this is how our trip will be. But we haven't hit our rhythm yet, and I'm looking forward to putting the whole trip in cruise control. I've gone through the emotions of leaving home and leaving my alma mater. I had to say goodbye to my girlfriend, Renee, which was even more painful than having Ben spike my toe into the turf at Boston College's football stadium where we were playing one on one tackle football. I had already beaten him and was running through the end zone, by the way.

So now we're in Boston and I'm able to sit down, take a breath, drink a Harvard Business School beer, and get to writing. It feels good and the road ahead of us is an inviting canvass of trees, mountains, tundra, buffalo, buffalo burgers, men's rooms, and bad fast food that will undoubtedly lead to more men’s rooms.

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One thing I've learned so far is that four people living in the same RV together will occasionally have differences of opinion. To be democratic, we all have to adopt each others likes and dislikes. For example, Ben doesn't like the color yellow. So we all have to dislike the color yellow. This is a good thing and a bad thing. I like the policy because I've instituted an RV-wide ban on tuna fish. The other guys don't know about the ban, but they will when I throw out their tuna fish sandwiches and say, "No tuna fish! It's banned!"

Sometimes the arguments get pretty heated though. The naming of the RV has been an arduous and ongoing process, which has left the RV without an official name. Unofficially, we're calling it the U.S.S. Harvey the RV. My dad actually suggested this name, proving his uncanny ability to couple any inanimate object with someone's name. I'm pretty good at it too. I once owned a Pooper-Scooper named Storm Trooper. So anyway, three of us, Ben, Wigs, and I, like the name Harvey for obvious reasons. First, it rhymes. Second, um, well, it
definitely rhymes.

But Matt doesn't like the name Harvey. I think he wants the name to come from within our own group, not from an outsider like my dad. Hopefully he'll come around, but until then Harvey will have to be known as The RV Hopefully Soon Known as Harvey.

Of course, we're not even sure what pronoun to replace Harvey with. Ben thinks Harvey's a girl, which I think is pretty messed up because what kind of girl is named Harvey? My grandfather is named Harvey, and my dad and I made him wear a long black wig once, and he was NOT hot. So in my thinking, Harvey the RV should definitely be a dude.

Ben thinks we need more of a feminine presence on our trip though. I suppose he's right. There are four of us and we're all guys. Actually five of us if you include our mascot, Captain Hank. Hank's a cardboard cutout, about five feet tall, and he always wears a backpack and carries two large textbooks. He’s named after a Starbucks commercial. I've never seen him not smiling, which is good when you need a pick-me-up, but bad when you wake up in the bed that's above the driver's seat and Hank is staring you in the face from about a foot away. It's a little creepy to see his grinning face right there in the morning. He never blinks and it's as though he's been waiting there all night for you to open your eyes. I still don’t know if Hank is a genuinely happy guy or if he's one bad day away from spraying the cabin of the RV with machine gun fire. I guess it's a good thing that he's made out of cardboard and can't operate a weapon without assistance.

The only other thing I don't like about Hank is that he never offers his opinions on anything. When we get into one of our arguments, there's frequently two guys vs. two other guys. Captain Hank has the deciding
vote in these situations, but instead of saying anything, he just thinks and thinks and thinks... We're still waiting to hear from him about what to name the RV.

I'll let you know when he makes up his mind.

Be back in four days.

-Adam