Fear & Loathing & Cal Grants

We were somewhere around the high school on the edge of my neighborhood when the drugs began to take hold.

My NyQuil^® connection had handed me the green pills just before our son reminded us it was college financial aid night. I sat down for a minute, anticipating a slow flood of utter relaxation through my limbs, then stood up, put on a jacket and handed my son the car keys.

“You drive,” I said, and stumbled mumbling to the garage.

We drove away from the high school to drop his friend off at his mother’s apartment, then headed back. By the time we pulled into the school parking lot my mind and body were enveloped in a warm fog. I put on a hood against the drizzle and giggled.

At the library we were met by a walking corpse with the eyes of a dead caterpillar.

It wanted to shake my hand. I backed off and said, “No, man, no! Ah. I have a terrible disease. I have a cold.”

Its eyes were red and the bags under them sagging to reveal raw red flesh. Animated as though by a small creature hidden deep inside, they turned away from me with disinterest and bore down on the next man in line. The room listed and I followed an ever so slightly wobbling path to a table and fell into a chair. My son took the chair on the opposite edge of the table, furthest away.

“I’ve met him before,” I said. “Shook his hand.”

“What?”

“He’s our state senator. I met him at a parade we were both in, or something.”

“Oh.”

It was clear my explanations were wasted so I wiped off my lower lip and squinted at the papers that had appeared in my hand. Application forms. Information on Pell Grants and Cal Grants and various random scholarships. A huge black man with a lisp stood before us and explained many things. He was bald and fat and energetic and mildly confused, always flicking his glasses on to check the forms he was reading verbatim, as if we couldn’t read them ourselves. He suggested there were ways to game the system, but he couldn’t tell us publicly. We would have to take him aside. Get the skinny one on one.

The state senator spoke clearly and meaninglessly. His face was liver-spotted and his gait, shambling. He walked like one of those unfortunate old men who never exercise and are doomed to rocking back and forth on stiff knees and a fused spine. I imagined his black suit was one of a dozen identical black suits in his closet and the closets of his entourage, young men with self-consciously vacant faces. One of them I’d seen before, too. He’d been with the senator on a visit to my employer a couple of years ago: a serious young man with a perpetual deep frown and eyebrows raised as in constant surprise, hovering about the senator’s hulking shoulders, whispering secret instructions. Now he stood at the back with a digital camera, a black suit, blue shirt, yellow tie, taking random pictures with high school girls in them.

I scribbled on some of the forms and wondered how much money I make. My son had secret silent conversations with a girl halfway across the room. Speakers droned and droners spoke. I grinned idiotically at other parents I knew. Time was lost in a blue-green haze. I blew my nose as quietly as I could. And then we broke for cookies and a sliding walk to the parking lot, all our answers questioned. College? Already? WTF?