Light and Shade
by Casey Flynn

Chapter 3

It was the all night cram, the 'all nighter' – the modus operandi of the student-about-town. Due to the confining dimensions of my bedroom, I had to go into the kitchen to write my paper. After commandeering a corner of the table, I plugged in my Mac computer with an extension cord and went to work.

After taking a sip of my mocha, espresso, crushed chocolate-covered coffee bean beverage, I quickly read through Professor Wren's paper, which dealt with sources of International Law: custom, conventions that codified custom, treaty, etc.. Sipping away, I went through and made the corrections. Finally, I looked over each footnote, quickly checking that I had sourced it correctly. Save to hard drive, saved to disc.

I thought about taking a break before starting the next paper, but I knew that if I went to that easy chair to watch television for a time period that felt like say fifteen minutes, that was fifteen minutes in college time, which would translate roughly into two hours in real world time. I didn't know why that was, but it was.

Tossing the stack of materials for Professor Wren's paper in the corner, I brought in the stack for my Russian history paper, and embarked into Russia of the early 19th-century, of Napoleon, Alexander I, then czar of Russia … After cranking out a rough outline, I went to work. With numerous opened and tabbed books, overlapping each other, strewn about me on the table and floor, I began typing at a frenetic pace.

In between sips of cappuccino, I hummed along and clicked the keyboard to the rhythms of the local alternative rock radio station 99.1. And after I typed in each paragraph, I jotted down the citation in my notebook for the endnotes that I would put in later.

I thought it was amazing how much my ability and fluency to write had improved in these last two years. Of course in large part, I attributed this fact to the period of time in my first year when I was essentially bedridden, and there was no television in my room, and I passed the time by reading large quantities of books, mostly fiction, unrelated to school. I also felt my ability and enjoyment of writing greatly improved because I worked on one of the school papers, The Voice, the more left leaning (as the name would indicate) of the two main school publications, my sophomore year.

I had been a late-night security guard near the offices of the school papers and had gotten to know many of the staff members for The Voice. I initially wanted to write hard news. I came into The Voice office in my typically unassuming fashion, 'I'm Woodward, who wants to be my Bernstein.' It was decided that I should try Sports as a way to test my journalistic metal before considering me for more important assignments. It started out pretty rough; my editor was one of those sensitive types who believed that all humor and jokes was simply a manifestation of one group subjugating another group, notably women and minorities. As a result, she was constantly reading into my neutral fact based sports pieces, some slight against her gender. She essentially stopped talking to me when she had to edit out of my piece covering a Georgetown women's tennis match, the phrase, describing the team's new uniforms, 'hemlines are shorter this season.'

Then there was the incident with the woman's field hockey team. I reported that the star field hockey player was taken out of the game, suffering an injury that turned out to be an orbital blowout of the knee. Now I'm still a little vague on what I did wrong;

I think she actually suffered an orbital blowout of the eye or whatever part of the body has orbitals; they claimed that the knee did not.

Then there was the fiasco with the women's volleyball team. I asked for and in some cases received certain players phone numbers because I thought, attempting to be a professional member of the Fourth Estate, that august body that is entrusted to write that first draft of history, I would need to call them and fact check my stories, especially after the orbital blow out incident, maybe over dinner at a nice, cosy Italian restaurant with a bottle of Chianti. Somehow my earnestness in doing my job professionally and what not was twisted, and a complaint was lodged against me.

So I was quickly transferred to the lifestyle section to be a movie reviewer, and that is where I did a large bulk of my writing. I handled a lot of movie, book, and other Arts and Entertainment review. I had one real big screw up. I wrote a fairly devastating artistic review, called 'He's no Ross' (Ross, the landscape PBS artist, who took the painting of fluffy clouds to that next level) for some fairly famous New York artist who had graduated from Georgetown. The artist called up not so much to complain about my trenchant review, but to point out that I had gone into the wrong gallery, and his paintings were in the gallery on the floor above.

I was quickly relegated to assuming the responsibilities for the humor column Student-about-Town and that is where I really flourished. I had absolutely no background or interest in writing humor pieces, and approached it much as I had done my other work on the paper, but for whatever reason, it worked and people seemed to really enjoy my pieces. In fact, I even took some of my snappier jokes and began to frequent the open mic. nights at D.C. stand up comedy clubs, though too much less acclaim.

But as a result of both of these reading and writing experiences, I had become more proficient in the process of threshing out 20-page school papers in less than six hours. (I once told a professor, 'I know it's not a good paper, but I did it in under six hours, and that bozo spent three weeks on his paper. Sure it's better, but not that much better. Head-to-head, let's see if he can write a better paper than mine in under six hours.)

By midnight, I had done my speed-reading and had spat out the bare bones of my outline for the second half of the paper. For the next few hours, I frenetically typed out my paper until my thesis seemed - to me at least - less cryptic, and the two halves of the paper began to gel somewhat better.

As the sky outside the window achieved a darker shade of blackness, I went back and forth from drinking my cappuccino with my left hand and Mountain Dew with my right hand; my fingers dancing on the keyboard; my left foot tapping to the music, and little by little, the body of my paper took on a definite form. It wasn't just good; it felt like real scholarship; indeed, the insights were just exploding one by one into my head and out onto the paper, and everything was so perfectly interconnected; the random ideas snapped together like pieces of a puzzle, and I took a drink of the cappuccino and cleared the bitterness with a gulp of the Mountain Dew, and I was typing like crazy to keep up with the ideas, and I was singing out loud, just rocking out to the music; the 'all nighter' was in full gallop . . .

By three-in-the-morning, the light above seemed even more yellow and dim from the dust-caked, dead bug-strewn covering; darkness was lurking closer to induce my eyes into sleep. The drowsy silence of the rest of the house muffled the spark of the music. My squinting eyes read and re-read the new revisions of my thesis that would hopefully more correspond to what I had actually written. My shoulders slouched some more; the silence lapped massagingly against me - ebbing and flowing; I yawned, drowning out the music. For the umpteenth time, I changed have to had to have to had to have to had to have and had not, and I read the sentences back and forth so many times until the sound of the two words were entirely indistinguishable.

I stood up groggily and stretched my arms to the air, giving amnesty to another yawn. Wake-up god-damnit, I chanted repeatedly, pivoting back and forth on my toes. I walked over to the stove, stepping on crushed Mountain Dew cans, and put on some water in the coffee pot. While I waited for it to boil, I fell to the crud-ridden wooden floor and interchanged between sets of modified push-ups and sit-ups to get my blood sugar going. After jumping back up, I shadow boxed around the darkness of the living room, stumbling over someone's tennis shoes. I went to the CD player and put on a Midnight Oil CD, and after remembering that my housemates were still at the bars, I jacked up the volume and proceeded to pound away against the back of a closet door as if boxing.

When the steam whistled out of the kettle, I rushed over and filled up my cup with some black coffee, a hint of vodka, and a generous portion of Hershey's syrup. As I slowly sipped the burning chocolate bilge, I went through my housemates' leftovers in the refrigerator, and with my fingers, selectively gleaned the meat from the vegetables.

'Garlic chicken! They should really call it garlic water chestnuts.'
Licking my fingers, I neatly put everything back in its place, so my housemates wouldn't detect anything.

I turned a light on over a reclining chair and re-checked my written-out footnotes with my research books. While turning a page of some heavy tome to reconcile a discrepancy between my written notes and my footnotes, I caught sight of three of my tattered, joke notebooks, sitting on the edge of the coffee table, not far from a thick recently-cracked LSAT preparation book. I yawned and fell into a long stare, focusing on the point at which the LSAT book rested on a joke notebook and thought this was the fork in the road of my life representing two divergent paths.

For whatever reason, I had envisaged a road to law school, and in fact had planned to sign up to take the LSAT the summer after this junior year. I had a vague idea of why I had this definite notion to be a lawyer. In fifth-grade, my grade school class went to Springfield to see Lincoln's home. We visited the place where Lincoln worked with his law partner. While on the tour, I observed his picture carefully. He appeared to be a tall and gangly man, not unlike myself. Nevertheless, he became a lawyer in this place, filled with these rustic log cabins, and well did all right for himself. Perhaps there's something to this law thing.

Later, in eighth grade, our teacher showed us the movie, 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' and I was completely enthralled with the movie, and the idea of becoming Atticus Finch - the thoughtful, distinguished attorney, the moral pillar of the community. I believe that Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch, and Atticus Finch is Gregory Peck. I even rushed to the library and read Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' and whenever the character of Atticus Finch spoke, I distinctly heard the distinguished, thoughtful low-toned voice of Gregory Peck. Now I was tall and Gregory Peck was tall, and though my voice was less deliberate and thoughtful, and more babbling and spastic, I thought there was a rough similarity and felt a certain kinship, and began to think that maybe I could be that.

In my sophomore year of high school, I was on our mock trial team, and I was the public defender who was defending the drug dealer who was allegedly trafficking in narcotics. I showed up with a brown corduroy suit, unkempt hair, dandruff flecked over my taped-up glasses, and I gave this opening statement where I liberally plagiarized from the character played by Al Pacino in: '… and Justice for All' ('I'm out of order? You're out of order. You're out of order. This whole trial is out of order.') Though my client got the death penalty on really some pretty circumstantial evidence, I was ecstatic because I got an 'A' in the class, and the idea of becoming a lawyer began to excite me.

At Georgetown, in the School of Foreign Service, I chose the major of International Law and Politics, mostly because of this early inclination. I was also greatly influenced by two classes I had taken from the dynamic Professor Wren, dealing with International Law, and I found them utterly fascinating. I was particularly interested in how a system of rules developed over time between nations until they were eventually crystallized into a system of International Law, and typically the roots of these rules were sprung from both practical and idealistic considerations.

I also took classes that dealt with the elements of political theory, dealing with the likes of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes – 1588-1679) from Professor Mould, and this started an interest in the more abstract questions of how societies are formed and organized. I read at some guard post the Hobbes' view of the state of nature for human beings, which I believe he regarded as a constant state of war and of course his famous line: 'No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' The Leviathan Part i. John Locke's social contract was intended to make life less brutish, protect the natural rights of man, the weak from the strong etc., but I think he was also on board that humans in the state of nature didn't really play well together and weren't exactly that nice. These abstract considerations made me consider our own social contract and our laws which is its fabric, and I was very interested by this subject. I assumed in law school that I would study Constitutional law and other related matters.

But more than any of this, there were the practical considerations of life. With my four-year degree in Russian, political science and theory, and International Law, I would have made a great guest at a D.C. dinner party, conversant in that anecdotal way on a variety of subjects, or even a contestant on Jeopardy. Neither was much of a career path, I was pretty sure. I concluded that lawyers make money, and money could serve as a protection from the brutish side of life.

And soon enough, the idea of going to law school had become 'fixed', and as my friends prepared to take the LSAT as they once prepared to take the SAT, I fell in step and as well began to finger my way through the LSAT preparation books.

Of course, then there was the crew injury, and I thought about the first part of the line: 'No arts, no letters, no society . . .' I had spent a good deal of my first-year mostly bedridden. Initially, I was able to get around on crutches, but then I pulled and strained the muscles in my arms and smashed the nerve of my shoulder blade, and as a result was unable to use crutches. I also pulled and strained muscles in my right leg, which by mid-November, created a situation where I needed to ask friends to bring the food from the cafeteria.

Recovering from all this inexplicable nonsense, I read, by necessity, voraciously, though previous to my crew injury, I might have read only a handful books outside of assigned class reading. And then I began writing the humor pieces and hanging out at the comedy clubs. And from these experiences, a second road was formed, the product of which was in those tattered notebooks on the table in the shadow of the thick LSAT book.

And because of the second road lately I've been thinking that I should drop out of school, take my oeuvre - joke notebooks, my half-written novels, plays, poems, urban haikus, aphorisms-in-progress, and just go to New York or Los Angeles and find some musty basement apartment in a tenement building, dimly-lit only by a swinging forty watt light bulb and work late into the night, typing out my recondite masterpiece; my silhouette hunched over a Remington typewriter (or laptop), and just existing in utter obscurity and with a very little money, alone with my art . . .

I finally fell out of that stare and returned begrudgingly to my books.

Sometime later, after checking my last endnote and finishing my drink, I sat up - with a slightly queasy stomach and marched over to my keyboard where I sat determinedly and prepared to type in the 52-endnotes of this twenty-paged paper. It was around 2:30 in the morning, and the heaviness on my eyelids was more and more blurring the world around me.

At that moment when I felt my head and shoulders fall forward, like that of a rag doll, as I succumbed to sleep, the door of the house flew open and the raucous sounds of students returning from the bars could be heard. I looked over and noticed Irwin, three of my housemates, Sean O'Brien, Matt the Mailman (so named because he worked in the dorm's mailroom are freshman year), the third housemate whose name I could never recall except to think of him as 'the guy whose towels I borrow in the bathroom,' and Rob Cook, who was a mutual friend of Irwin's and mine from security. They were followed by a group of three rather pretty girls, two of whom were holding a grocery bag.

The group descended suddenly on my table. As they clumsily took seats at the table, I noticed - in a sudden breathless moment - the extension cord of my computer pull dangerously taut until I cautioned someone to watch where they rested their feet. I quickly saved my document. As everyone settled about me, Irwin and one of the girls began to take out of the grocery bags various bottles of alcohol or six-packs of beer. Some were placed on the table, most were stacked for now in the fridge.

The three pretty girls sat at my end of the oblong table, and their effervescence further awakened me until it was almost as if I were never tired. Irwin introduced them to me: Tracy – the shorter of the three with bluish gray Irish eyes; Kiersten, blond hair with toned features, and Noelle a brunette with lovely doe-like eyes.

I looked back at the sofa television area and noticed that a group had gathered there, and more stragglers were coming up the stairs into the house.

Those at the table began to play some drinking game that involved cards. Tracy, who principally explained the rules, was presently dealing. The loser of each hand had to drink a rather imposing glass filled with vodka. Noelle, suddenly red-faced, chugged down the glass, while the others cheered her on with encouragements and rapped the table with their knuckles.

While the drinking game and the party around me gained momentum, I continued to work. I paused here and there to save my document whenever their hands rapped on the table. Far from being a distraction, I felt thoroughly revived and proceeded to efficiently type in the rest of my endnotes. Using the party about me as a further stimulus, I proceeded to edit on the computer my paper.

Soon the drinking game reached that point where all drinking games end: when the players had consumed enough of the alcohol that following the rules of the game was just too taxing, so the cards were just left disheveled in a pile. Nevertheless, everyone remained at the table, talking in two or three separate, though sometimes overlapping, conversations and continuing to drink.

Irwin and the girl named Tracy, who were sitting on opposite sides of me, had, as their discussion revealed, a shared interest in the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche. They were arguing some point about Nietzsche for sometime. Irwin had just read, Nietzsche' 'The Birth of Tragedy', and was explaining with somewhat flagging coherency his 'Dionysian' concept and that it was not negative, but a positive creative force, and then explained what the Apollonian forces were, which he described as 'stale logical order.'

'Speaking of which, why are you studying?' Irwin asked, genuinely concerned.
'I've got a paper due tomorrow.'
'You can't study on a weekend night!' Tracy insisted.
It was of course Thursday night, as that term is used in college, refers to Wednesday night until Sunday afternoon. Studying on a putative weekend night at a university was a little bit like having an animal right's rally outside of the Roman Coliseum to protest – over the blood-curdling screams of the Christians who are getting their innards gorged out – the cruel treatment of the lions (cages are not properly ventilated).

Irwin became verbose, slurring certain words here and there as he explained, if I was going to insist on writing my term paper, in the proven tradition of Hemingway and Faulkner, I needed a drink. A glass of vodka was poured for me. When Tracy held up her glass and said the word, 'Social,' the whole table drank.

After I had finished another vodka and was opening a beer, Irwin was explaining to Tracy about the time our freshman year when I was laid up in my dorm room after my crew injury.

'I had no idea what was wrong with him, but he had a bad leg, and he was stuck in his dorm room. And I guess he got bored, and he kept bothering me about letting him borrow books to read, so I let him borrow some of my books. When he borrowed everything that I had, he would have me bring down books from my parents when I went up there to do my laundry. I think he was knocking off a book a day. And so one day I'm walking into his dorm room, and he just finished some book, I dunno what, and guess what he says to me?' Irwin raised an eyebrow in my direction. Tracy regarded both of us waiting for a response.

Irwin continued in a heavily slurred cadence, 'He says, 'I've been reading a lot of books lately, and you know what, I think I can write the 'Great American Novel.''
'I never said that,' I corrected.
'It's already been done,' Rob Cook - who evidently had been listening to our discussion - interposed, 'It's Melville's 'Moby Dick'.'
'No it's not,' Noelle said, 'I hated that book. It's Fitzgeralds' 'The Great Gatsby''
'Are you out of your mind!' Rob shot back, 'Moby Dick is epic poetry, Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod hunt for the legendary 'Great White Whale, the themes of that book are the themes of America.'
'He's right Noelle,' Irwin seconded. 'Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod, they were like the Captain Kirk and Starship Enterprise of their day!'
'You haven't even read Moby Dick!'
'Yeah, but I love the Star Trek, now throw me a fucken beer, you fucks!'
'Listen Rob,' Noelle said 'if you show any American the rather slim copy of The Great Gatsby next to a hefty version of Moby Dick with minuscule print, then further say that one's about rich good-looking people on the Hamptons with a gangster subplot and the others about 100,000 words longer in obscure 19th-century dialogue with main characters with the names like Queequeg, my bet is that they read The Great Gatsby.'
'And rent Jaws,' Kiersten added.
Rob considered this and as if to convey, 'Let's agree to disagree', he raised his glass of beer and said, 'Social.'

When the conversation between the three of us resumed, I corrected Irwin, ' I never said that?'
'What?'
'I never said that exactly, I said I think it would be fun to try to write the Great American Novel or the worst American novel ever published.'
'That's right, and I said,' Irwin recalled, 'I think you're capable of either. Let's drink to that.'
And we all clicked plastic cups and slammed down our drinks.
As the discussion shifted to the other end of the table, I proceeded to edit my term paper sentence by sentence. I got a pretty good cadence going as I cleaned up the sentences. As my toes tapped to the music, and I alternated between taking drinks from the vodka, the Mountain Dew, the beer, Yoo-hoo!, some mystery beverage in a plastic cup, as well as munching away at the Ding Dongs, I efficiently typed in the changes.

I had set out the various factors that led to Napoleon's decision to invade Russia, and then compared that to what Russia had done to contribute to that decision. Whenever I felt the overpowering sleepiness gather heavy on my eyelids, I would look over to the sofa area, and steal a breathless glance of this short skirted, long slender-legged girl, who was dancing with a group of her friends.

Gathering energy from this, I would continue hacking away at the paper. I looked up at the book, check the citation, made the necessary changes, then consumed more alcohol, more soda, more mystery beverage, then a chocolate treat, but I was just finding discarded wrappers in the box, 'It can't already be empty?', so I groped my hand in the box until I discovered that it was empty, cursed a bit and then resumed reading and correcting. After reading the final paragraph, I saved the document to a hard drive and a disk. A surge of satisfaction coursed through me as I thought this might be the greatest term paper ever written on: 'Napoleon and the Russian Campaign of 1812: The contingencies leading to Napoleon's invasion of Russia.'

I stacked my various textbooks as well as the computer in the corner. I knew that I needed to proofread it one more time, but essentially it was done. Perhaps I thought I could wake up early and do it then, no I should do it now, h'm? But then that song came on the stereo, it was that song that everyone on campus had been rocking out to lately, I didn't know its name, but it was so contagious -- it was the song of right now. And when the recognizable beats of the song burst rhythmically through the room, everyone excitedly headed to the sofa area where everyone was dancing. Already teeming with satisfaction from finishing my work, the driving beat caused a further exhilaration in me so much so I could feel my hair stand on end in a tingle (though perhaps this was some adverse reaction caused by the combination of toxins in my body), and so with this impetus, I hurried to the dance floor thinking how perfect it was that they were playing this song right when I finished my paper.

The sofa area was filled with people, moving to the music, and as the song built up to a crescendo, everyone poised for that moment to belt out the song's chorus line, and the next thing I know, I was throwing my arms in the air, kicking out my legs to the driving beat, crying out a sequence of words that bore some relation to the chorus, feeling that surge of energy that pulled me into the dance floor, explode through my body. As the rhythm built back down, I found myself dancing with a pretty girl, green eyes, long brown hair that I vaguely knew from one of my classes. She said loudly into my ear, over the rapidly increasing drumbeat, 'this has turned out to be like a good party!' And then again, I was throwing up my arms, moving about my legs, she made eye contact with me, her brows slightly arched as she playfully smiled, the fresh flowery sent of her perfume, small splashes of beer were tossed up from the plastic cups in the various extended hands, a good-faith stab at mumbling out the chorus, she moved closer to tell me something in my ear, and I couldn't help but thinking this has not just turned out to be a good party, but the greatest party ever.

After the song had ended, we left the dance floor/sofa area together. We went outside to cool off as the house inside had become unbearably warm. I couldn't fully hear what she was telling me until we got outside, and I was hoping it was something like, we should go out on a date sometime, but it was, 'Do you have a light?' Which was fine because I have been known in the presence of a pretty girl to be able to give a fairly interesting eleven-minute standard response to, 'Do you have a light?' Unfortunately, I got nudged out by a guy who did not have a light; rather he said he had 'fire' and proceeded to light her cigarette. Rolling my eye, I bit my teeth, thinking, 'I hate those philosophy majors.'

So I took a seat on our steps leading into our house and I found myself sitting next to a girl named Meredith, who was tall, had curly brown hair, with clear blue eyes. It turned out that she was in my American Foreign Policy class, and she began to tell me about her term paper on the American-sanctioned genocide in East Timor.

Fortunately, I was very interested in the subject as I tend to be very interested in just about everything, and as she made her points about the genocide, I periodically caught myself nodding not so much to what she said, but to the music playing in the house, presently the AC/DC rock anthem 'She shook me all night long.'

I was also grateful that she was sustaining the discussion, as I was feeling essentially spent, and as I listened to her voice, that paused only to light and then smoke her cigarettes, I leaned back on the red brick steps and listened to the wind rustling up the fallen leaves about me; the perspiration that had formed around my body was drying in the crisp fall air …

Then that other song came on the stereo, it was that other song that everyone on campus had been playing recently, I didn't know its name, but it was so contagious. We both headed into the house.

About halfway to the sofa area, I felt that I might collapse from this sudden sense of exhaustion that had finally overtook the various stimulants in my body. I went past the dancing and sweaty throng and grabbed my disk. As I ascended the stairs, I looked down and either a fight had broken out or there was some type of mosh-pit going on. I went into my housemate's room and printed out my paper on his computer. After completing this task, I walked up to my room, leaned over and found my alarm, and attempted to muster the mental energy to set the alarm: it was 4:07 am. I set it for 7:15; that would give me enough time to get in one paper by nine and the other one by twelve. Like an axed tree, I fell into my bed…