Life Time

The party's over: a post-graduation allegory

By Gabe Durán

hear all these stories from people complaining about how their parents pressured them into becoming doctors or lawyers and how unsatisfying it is to literally bathe in money. I laugh heartily at these stories to cover the sound of food leaving their plates and entering my pockets.

My parents never loved me enough to tell me what I should with my life. That’s how I ended up spending my afternoons in the bushes outside a Beverly Hills BMW dealership, jumping up to threateningly offer passing studio executives handies in return for unpaid internships taste-testing their coffee for assistant pee.

Some of my friends are lucky enough to have overbearing fathers who forced them to take over family businesses. This spacious apartment, this BMW, these diamonds I throw at pigeons in the park, they aren’t real happiness, they tell me. Perhaps not, spoiled assholes, I reply, but it sure beats street-fighting crack addicts for leftover food at the back entrance of a Chipotle come closing time.

Enjoying a newly liberated day-old Burrito Bowl, I drift back to my formative years.

In high school, blessed with endless possibilities and a knack for crashing my car, not changing my oil, and crying a lot, I turned to my family for guidance.

“Hey, Mom, should I become a therapist?” I asked.

“No, you’re very bad at listening,” she said.

“Hey, Dad, should I do whatever it is that you do?” I asked.

“No, it’s really boring,” he said.

“Dearest Sister,” I said to my sister, “should I become a teacher, and help the world, like you?”

“No,” she said, “you’re really selfish and kind of lazy.”

“Hmm…” I thought. Ninety hours of NHL 2002 later, I still didn’t have an answer.

“Mother, should I throw a giant party for my whole high school while you’re away for the weekend?” I asked, after I’d already been caught.

“No,” she said. “In fact, I’m very angry you did that.”

Gosh darn it, I was stumped. I advised her that this was just the sort of laissez-faire parenting that leads children to get social biology degrees from Brown and hang out in Seattle debating the merits of different cow manures for growing pot in their community garden plots.

“Don’t worry,” my mother replied cryptically. “You won’t be going to Brown.” I don’t know what that was supposed to mean.

“Hey, Dad, I’ve learned you’re an environmental engineer. Maybe I should be an environmental engineer.” He paused from rearranging his degrees from Harvard and Yale so as not to obscure his degree from MIT.

“You’re getting, what, a C+ in chemistry?” he asked. I paused to calculate the average of my grade wit the grades of those kids whose test answers I had surreptitiously copied, and, because I was equally adept at math, decided that this sounded about right.

It was a real conundrum, I explain to Sharise, a prostitute with whom I often fight for a great piece of cardboard in an alley off Sunset. Holding her at bay with a broken jar of jalapeno Tabasco sauce, I continue my tale.

Several months after graduating from college, I gave my loving father a call, eager to continue the philosophical discourse that was the foundation of our father-son relationship.

“Hey, Dad, can I have some money for food?” I asked.

“Haha, that’s funny,” he answered. “You should write jokes for a living.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I’ll mosey over to L.A., 3,000 miles away from everyone I know, to pursue a hopeless career for which I have yet to display any talent or achieve any success.”

That was fine with him, my father said. So I did it, just to show him.

Lulled into a false sense of comradeship, Sharise loses one of her eyes, but not her great sense of humor.