You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!
How one moment in time, can change your life.
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES 1981
I’m a wide eyed 18 year old kid. It’s late August and L.A. is thick with smog and oppressive heat. Downtown is a hornets nests of sirens and homelessness and congestion.
I’ve recently left the pristine Monterey Peninsula, famous for sea otters and cypress trees and now I live in the ghetto.
What the hell am I doing here? I routinely ask myself.
I guess I was homesick and maybe a little scared. Who wouldn’t be? I left the end of the rainbow for police choppers. I left the crashing Pacific for an asphalt jungle. I left Big Sur for East L.A. I left Fisherman’s Warf for Felix the Cat. I left Ocean Avenue for illegal aliens trying to sell me $1 dollar bags of oranges at every freaking off ramp.
I quickly learned that L.A. is a huge city and it isn’t exactly friendly in a multitude of languages.
On this life changing night, I was at a campus bar known as the 501 Club. It was a dungeon of concrete, picnic tables and ripped bar stools. USC photos and Neon signs are the decorating theme of choice. The 501 Club always stank of stale beer and ripe vomit. In one month of school, I had seen more knife fights inside a beer joint than I had seen in my entire 18 years of life.
It goes without saying that USC is in a rough part of L.A. The 501 Club mirrored that roughness in its architectural design, but its clientele was ecclectic, like a Benetton add. It was a haven for South Central locals, Beach City surfer chicks and a variety of downtown workers who often came in for a beer while waiting for 3 hours of LA traffic to diminish.
I had been at school for about a month, and I was home sick. I hated my roommate. I hated my dorm. I sort of hated L.A.
There were beautiful women everywhere on campus, but I quickly came to realize that the best looking girls were all in sorority’s and they only dated other Greeks.
The Greek System was a universe by itself at USC, with its own rules, regulations and social status.
Open up a map of L.A. and look at 28th street and it looks like any other street. But drive down 28th street, known as the ROW, and you will know that you have entered another world.
Gigantic homes line the street that runs between Hoover and Figueroa. Huge Greek letters hang above each doorway. Sorority’s are next to Fraternities and fraternities are next to sororities. Economically the neighborhoods surrounding USC are very low income. But the mean income of Greeks on 28th street was six figures easy. BMW’s and tricked out VW Scirroco’s and Mercedes were common modes of transportation. The juxta-position of haves and have nots couldn’t be more demonstrable on this street that mainlined old school money and flaunted disposable income like Pamela Anderson flaunts breasts.
Not only were the people who lived on 28th street richer than the people who lived 2 blocks away, the street itself just looked different. Most L.A. thorofares are dull and ugly. Streets like Western and Adams and Figueroa go on forever like a monotonous run on sentence of concrete and dirt. The Row was like a colorized burst of pop rocks dumped in coca-cola.
28th Street was like some magical Alice in Wonderland street where teenagers had no rules and no credit card limits. They drank to excess, screwed everything not nailed down and in their spare time painted anything they wanted anywhere they wanted. That’s right, the ROW was a collage of color that changed from door to door. Delta Chi pledges painted a big Yellow and Red Triangle and X in front of their house, symbolizing their crest. Across the Street, the Tri-Delts did the same thing, with Three gigantic triangles, much like the asses of the sorority girls who lived there. Stop signs were signed in spray paint and decorated with cartoon characters and surf stickers. Compared to the rest of the dinge that is L.A., 28th street looked like a rainbow that had over dosed on neon.
Many in-coming freshman knew all about the power and influence of the USC Greek system. They grew up in Orange County and understood the immediate social acceptance and instantaneous access to parties and sex that Greeks enjoyed.
Many freshman figured this out on day one. Other freshman, like me, had no clue what the Greek system was prior to getting on campus. Big mistake, because by the time we knew it was an option, Rush was closed.
We liked to call ourselves GDI (G** Damn Independents) but what that really meant was a bunch of Freshman guys drinking beer in their dorm and wishing they could meet some freshman girls.
So there I am inside the 501 club. I’m unhappy and thinking that maybe I should have stayed in Northern California. Maybe I should quit USC and enroll at U.C. Santa Cruz, closer to home. At least I understand Northern California beach girls having grown up around them. Somehow they are less pretentious.
Then my luck takes a turn for the better. Through the haze of Cardinal and Gold neon, a beautiful girls sits beside me. She is stunning. She is blonde and blue eyed and tanned. She looks like she stepped off the page of Surfer magazine.
Suddenly I’m talking to this young lady and we’re connecting. We have a lot in common. She’s a freshman, I’m a freshman. She lived in a beach city, so did I. She likes blondes and so do I.
We talk for a while and down a few beers. Suddenly USC is starting to look like the brochure that the admissions office sent to my house.
Back in the day, when I went to college there was no internet. There was no 3-G network. Back then the world wide web was only a wet dream in Al Gore’s brain.
I didn’t even visit the college before going there. I looked at the USC brochure over and over and over again. I remember the Palm trees on page one and Trojan Football on page 2. The hot looking song girls on the front of the glossy marketing material closed the deal..
Sunshine and a Southern California lifestyle was a siren’s call. In my mind, I would be going to a fantasy school where SC song girls escorted freshmen to class while Traveler the USC mascot pulled us on our shiny golden beach cruisers.
When I arrived, there were no song girls waiting for me, but there were hobos and plenty of guys pushing shopping carts full of aluminum cans.
So a month into my freshman year I’m in this dive bar seriously considering withdrawing from school. I’m lonely and home sick and feeling like I couldn’t breathe.
Then, like a sunrise warming up a new day, this gorgeous young woman is before me. Her body language says yes. Her eyes clear as a breaking wave are inviting. Finally my luck has changed.
Then, she asks the question I feared most.
“What house are you in?”
My chest grew tight and my breathing pensive. My mind raced.
“What house are you in?“
What do I tell her? Do I tell her I’m a GDI? Do I lie and tell her I’m an SAE?
Her smile is overwhelming. Her eyes peering into mine. She looks so friendly.
She won’t care, I think to myself. Tell her the truth. Why would it matter? After all, USC is a big university with a lot of different groups. People are people right? She‘s digging me and I‘m digging her.
“I’m not in a house,“ I say confidently. “Who needs the Greek system, right?“
I chuckle waiting for a response.
Like a light house going dark, her smile extinguishes. Her eyes turn black and dispassionate. Her golden tan becomes a cool grey.
Like a skeleton withering before my very eyes, she transforms from Goddess to ghost.
Without so much as a word, she gets up from her bar stool and walks into the neon haze.
She never said a word. She never batted an eye lash. She didn’t say good bye or I have to pee. She didn’t even try and lie to me. She simply vanished into the vomit stained ether.
I may have cried in my beer, I’m not sure.
All I know is that I was going home to pack my bags. If you have to be a Delta or a FIJI of Kappa Sig to talk to women, then this was not the school for me.
I was pissed, bordering on crazed as I returned to my buddy’s off campus apartment at Kerkoff Hall.
The guys were seated around the table playing poker and drinking beers. Spit bottles and cigar ash littered the place.
That’s when I first met Michael Schultz. He was tall and lanky with a crazy distant stare in his eye. He was wearing an Oliver Swift type hat on backward and his lower lip was filled with Copenhagen.
I came in and angrily grabbed for a beer. I’m sure that I broke something, because everyone asked what my problem was.
“I’m quitting school,” I said matter of factly. “This place sucks. The girls suck. The row sucks. I quit.”
That’s when I heard the distorted, altered voice of a man who would shape the next four years of my life.
Schultz looked me in the face for the first time, his eyes darting away from his cards.
He spoke. His words were profound and the sentence he uttered seared into my brain like a stamp on a steer’s flank.
“If I eat this glass will you stay in school?”
BAM THERE IT WAS!
If I eat this glass will you stay in school?
The words were like a cannon blast out of nowhere. The words cut through Pink Floyd’s comfortably numb like nails down a blackboard.
Others at the table chuckled. Nobody knew what the hell the new roommate was talking about.
I looked into the glassy eyes of Schultz. His brown pupils were hard and serious. He held the whiskey glass in his hand toward me. The bottom of the tumbler was at least an inch thick.
There was still a layer of ice and whiskey in the glass.
I stared at Schultzy and he at me. His eyes didn’t blink. His face never twitched. Pink Floyd filled the moment.
“Sure,” I said, caught off guard by the challenge. “You eat that glass, I’ll stay in school.”
Schultz never said a word. He tipped the glass back and gulped down the remaining inch of whiskey.
With that done, he turned the glass sideways, and extended his upper jaw over the rim of the glass and bit down with a ferocious torking twist.
CRUNCH.
The glass broke off in a fifty cent piece sized chunk.
Without blinking, Schultzy started chewing the jagged glass. Blood oozed from the corner of his mouth. The sound was horrible. His molars grinding the glass and the glass grinding his molars into dental saw dust.
The table of inebriated card players was amazed and horrified at the same time. Nobody knew a thing about our new roommate except he was intense and refused to come and go through the front door.
CRUNCH.
The next hour was surreal. Blood and shards of glass mixing in his mouth creating a viscous stew that looked like ketchup and gravel. Whiskey and cards littered the table and while the game raged on, there was Schultz, quietly, deliberately keeping his pledge to a distraught freshman he hadn’t know more than 30 seconds.
Schultz’s face never changed. It was hard and serious and dedicated to a singular purpose, a challenge that he himself created.
I was shocked at what I was watching. Schultz never said a word. He played cards and bled. He chewed and chewed and chewed until the glass was ground down into a palatable mulch. Then he swallowed the ground glass with hardly a wince. With blood streaming down his face, he would turn the tumbler and again bite off a chunk of thick razor sharp glass. Then the process would begin again.
CRUNCH. GNASH. GNARL.
It was brutal, but also incredible to watch. It was mind over matter. Schultz had little mind and it didn’t seem to matter.
An hour later, with a blood smeared face, Schultz turned to me. He looked frightening, like Heath Ledger in Batman The Dark Knight.
The glass tumbler had been chewed down to the 2 inch thick nub.
“OK,” he said matter of fatly. “That good enough for you? You going to stay in school now?”
I burst out laughing. What else could I do.
“Yeah, I’ll stay in school,” I replied.
Suddenly the bloody faced Schultz smiled. His lips bleeding, his face smeared with blood. He laughed a maniacal laugh.
“OK, then. Now get me a beer.”
I got Schultz that beer, the first of a thousand I would get him over the course of our lives together.
I might have stayed in school anyway, but it was the sheer power of the way he handled this issue that struck me.
Nobody else in the room cared whether I was upset. Nobody else in the room gave a damn whether I was threatening to leave school. Schultz didn’t even know me. He didn’t know anyone at that table. That was just Schultz being Schultz. Crazy out of the blue statements and then the temerity to back it up.
In Schultz’s mind; stay in school equals eat glass. It was that simple.
Everyone in that room has a Schultz story.
Whether or not they have a moment in the fabric of time that changed their life, that is debatable.
All I can say is Thanks Schultzy. Even if I can only say it long distance.
And that is crazy!