The place was Rhode Island.  The season was summer.  The year was 1984. The night was inviting. My friends were eager. The pleas were endless.

“You gotta go. You'll be in the States for only two more weeks." "Brown Summer Academy is ending, you wild man. Think of what you can tell your friends back in Pakistan." "Did you like Animal House? Well, you'll love this!"   “Come on, all the other kids are doing it!”

I cringed. What my friends were entreating me to participate in was akin to Hawthorne's "Unpardonable Sin" - you know, the stuff about violating the human soul and having hell to pay for it. The deed symbolized the antithesis of every principle I had been taught to swear by - truth, justice, and the Pakistani way.  Superman could tell you about truth and justice, but not the Pakistani way.  Oh, the Pakistani way, the way of segregation from women; of people assuming that I'm either a cab driver or a newstand owner; of refraining from alcohol consumption, at least in public; of savoring a delectable spicy cuisine only to have it called a generic "curry" in the lands of my royal Anglo-Saxon conquerors.  There I was, a quasi-religious, no let us say quasi-fanato-religious homeboy, away for the first time from his fantastically fanatically fundamentalist family, a boy who, even in his most extreme moods of revelry, would refuse to parade around in shorts which did not reach below the knee or talk to any woman besides his mother, and that, too, only when he needed her to go with him to the dentist.  And now, there stood before me the choice to partake in depravity, decadence, and debauchery, or to return to Pakistan the inexperienced high school senior, verily unaware of the vile ways of the Wild West. Never before in the one-year history of the Brown Summer Academy had four letters meant so much to so few people, namely me. The letters were T-O-G-A.

Louie Louie was resounding across Wriston Quad. In sight were women with bedsheets covering only the barest essentials. The statue of Caesar never looked prouder. The tugging of my friends was opposed by the moral tugging inside me. Seemingly interminable allegories of Good vs. Evil began playing in my head, the struggles of the pantheon of heroes whose very existences seemed to be defined by the forceful foes they faced: the debate of Hamlet with his conscience, the struggle of Brutus pitting citizenship against friendship, the combat of Odysseus with Schylla and Charibdis, the battle of Beowulf with Grendel, the endless tussles of Road Runner and Wylie Coyote, Elmer Fudd's predatory pursuit of  Bugs Bunny, and Tom’s almost Sysiphian cat-and-mouse game with Jerry.   I snapped back.  “To-Ga or not To-Ga”, that was the question. After much agonizing, I reached a decision.  I thought I had won, for I knew I was strong. Tenacity and perseverance were my first and last names, and cliche was my middle one. I had learned my lesson, and I, of course, practice what I preach: Just Say No To Toga. And I did.

But what I did not expect was a rebuttal of momentous magnitude. John Matejzyck, a tall man from Chicago, had an incisive insight into the human psyche. His advice did for me what Imelda Marcos did for shoes, what Dan Quayle did for potatoes, what George Bush did for lip-reading, what Al Gore has done for the color gray, what Bill Clinton has done for cigar sales,  what the British have done for manufacturers of separate hot and cold water taps. His words were revolutionary, enlightening, ennobling, sublime.

He spoke, "Mo, sometimes you just gotta say, 'What the fuck...'"

I repeated, "What the fuck."

God bless America.
 
 

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