Despite the many hours I’d spent admiring college catalogs from Tucson, Seattle, and Boulder, I experienced a failure of nerve in the end. I’d made a visit to a fancy Catholic college in St. Paul, where the Mercedes and BMWs of rich suburban kids gleamed in the dormitory parking lots, and was instantly transfixed by the limestone buildings honey-colored in the afternoon light, the ivied walls of the football stadium, coeds strolling with books in their arms across the fastidious lawns. I’d never seen so many girls in one place. The whole scene was like the previously missing, wide-angle prelude shot to the porno film I’d been writing, directing, and starring in every time I thought of what my college years would be. Even deeper in my reptilian brain I sensed a chance to learn how to be rich by living in proximity to rich kids, the old dream not yet dead. Here I could finally begin the process of reinventing myself as a man of debonair tastes and urbane manners, a prairie sophisticate with a fancy car. I learned that through a University of St. Thomas scholarship fund I stood to earn $3,500 per year for my high school GPA, class rank, and ACT score. This seemed a phenomenal sum, the equivalent of nearly six months of work at the mom-and-pop bakery where I was then making $3.80 an hour. If the sight of pretty girls and shiny cars had been the initial seduction, the promise of free cash clinched the deal. I didn’t for a moment acknowledge the fact that I was merely getting a discount on a very expensive product. Nor did I bother to imagine, given that my parents were in no position to help, where I’d come up with the remainder of the $15,000 per year I’d be charged for tuition, room, and board.

Needless to say, I was not the prototypical Tommy. I drove a 1970 Ford pickup of a pale green hue that earned it the nickname Phlegm. I arrived with $2,000 in savings from my job at the bakery, which bought me six heady weeks of Coors Light party balls and Mexican ditch weed. Over the next few years I borrowed exorbitantly while working all sorts of stupid jobs: painting houses, unloading package trailers at a UPS hub, frying donuts for a little shop in the suburbs. It was the same work I’d performed since I was 15, and I came to loathe the stupefying repetition of it, eight at night till three in the morning, five days a week, the clicking handle of the donut dropper, the pox-like burns on my hands from the splash of fryer oil. The way I smelled like a jelly-filled bismarck even after I’d showered.