SFO was aflutter with student volunteers in red T-shirts, their signs held aloft announcing the name and the place and the fact that this would be the first day of our four years together at Stanford. The volunteers were all very…upbeat. Almost impossibly upbeat to my just-off-the-plane-from-New-York eyes and ears.
Speaking of ears. My left one was angled 90 degrees from my head like a wing, crusted with dried blood. Not more than 48 hours earlier, three men, and a dog, had tried to murder me. They’d only succeeded in bashing the side of my head with a broken bottle.
Now that it was stitched up, poorly, it hurt too much to wash, so I’d left it as is.
A blond, blue-eyed volunteer skipped up to me. “Are you GENE?”
“I’m EUGENE.”
“Great,” she chirped, figuratively and almost literally. “Welcome to Stanford!”
Let me back up. In 1980, I was headed to Stanford from New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, where most of my classmates went on to East Coast Ivy League universities. Despite my best efforts, though, following a midnight showing of the Clash flick , I got
