My new novel, Bright College Years, has now launched! Smart, funny, and fun (say various reviewers), Bright College Years is a look at the college experience and its relation to our subsequent trajectory through life. (It’s also quite timely, given the worrisome headlines we are seeing about the state of campuses today.)
The blurb for the novel gives you the basic idea:
“When a former close friend and rival is murdered, world-weary but still aspiring optimist Jeffrey goes back to the beginning, to those fraught college years at Yale University during the 1980s and to her, to make sense of what happened—only to discover that what needs most making sense of is himself. By turns smart, funny, and heart-wrenching, Bright College Years tracks Jeff and an ensemble cast as they navigate the shortest, gladdest, most complex years of life—and then the rest of it.”
Throw in the tag line—“Coming of age doesn’t only happen to the young”—and you’ve got a story not just about those treasured days of old but also about time, memory, regret, acceptance, rivalry, friendship, and more. All this in an entertaining story about the gang of friends that, if you attended a residential college, are pretty much your gang.
Full information and loads of endorsements are available at the link.
Meanwhile here’s the opening of the novel … Feel free to share with anyone who might appreciate it!
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bright
college
years
(or, if that’s not life)
by andrew pessin
preamble
After Jude’s murder, after the federal agents had finished clearing out The Advance, after the shock of the violence had begun to dissipate, your mind wandered back to the early days, to the beginning, trying to make sense of it all. Sorting through the decades, the morass of memories, going back to the source, to the Maggie affair and the rest, going over everything. He was fascinated by Anne Sexton but what was that worm poem about? He was maybe a little intense but, what, crazy? We live life forward but can only understand it backwards, they say, yet you also don’t want to project something onto the past that wasn’t really there. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, after all, except when it isn’t. Something Swill might have said, puffing on one. Not a bad guy, but what a repulsive habit.
And so you endeavor to find a clue, to follow the trail, like taking a stroll through a wood and coming across a solitary butterfly, watching it flit randomly to and fro and realizing that the back and forth is actually going somewhere. So you follow and it flits and it leads you deeper into the wood. You are in unfamiliar territory now but you feel you are supposed to be here, so you carry on. One more turn, one more bend, and then perhaps you come into the clearing …
The dart came from behind him, whizzed right by his left ear.
Startled, he turned, looked. The place was dark, crowded, loud. No possibility of identifying its source, even as another dart now whizzed by his right ear.
“What the f—” he muttered, ducking, pushing off Black as he moved down the row. Black gave him the finger as he pushed through the crowded row, stumbling. His heart pounding he made it to the aisle, turned around again, looked.
The hall was packed. Nobody clearly aiming for him, at him.
Yet somebody clearly was.
Maybe it wasn’t meant for him. It was so crowded, it could have been meant for someone else. He was feeling paranoid, that’s it, all this talk of assassination.
Right. He felt his own weapon, in the holster he had bought, as another dart whizzed over his shoulder. He felt it, just maybe, touching his hair as it went by. Maybe he should get a haircut, present a smaller target. Think about that later, he thought, instinctively ducking, turning on his heel, crouching as he headed down the aisle toward the stage with the massive organ. For a moment he thought the organ looked like an enormous tree with all its branches pointed straight upward, its many arms raised, praising the heavens maybe.
He would not meet his end tonight.
He got to the bottom, to the front row. The English Beat had finished their short set, Jeff had had to admit to Black that they were not terrible, and now The Pretenders were on, opening with their hit song, “Precious.” Chrissie Hynde was just now singing the lyric the gang had argued about over dinner, in which (Jeff was sure) she was going to use her, her, her vagination, and hearing a hot woman in her tight black tights singing about using her vagination was possibly the hottest thing he had ever heard.
But he would have to get aroused about that later.
He first had to preserve his life now.
He slinked along the front row, to the side. Another quick look around and at first all he saw was everybody singing along and dancing.
Then he saw his assassin.
Striding down the aisle toward him, calmly, confidently. Sure of his mission, not a care in the world. Openly bearing his weapon, reloading casually, his burning eyes, his killer’s eyes, locked on Jeff through those little round glasses.
Was that a gentle cruel smile on his murderous face?
His heart in his throat Jeff turned, started running.
He got to the end of the row, saw the door to the side of the stage. So different from a regular concert, no security here, no bouncers, like those beefy guys who’d almost thrown him out of Toad’s Place the other night just because of the little “puking incident” in the bathroom there. He had made it to the bathroom at least, for crying out loud. Jeff was proud he’d matched Eli to the fifth Alabama Slammer, appreciated that Eli even helped hold his hair back as he vomited in the stall just as Steppenwolf was launching into “Born to be Wild” upstairs. True, would have been nice if he’d managed to vomit into the toilet rather than next to it, but you can’t have everything. How Eli held all that liquor, skinny as he was, was a marvel. Many generations of whisky drinkers for his forebears, he said. Also marvelous was his ability, with just a few words to the beefy bouncers, to let them stay in the club.
Jeff went through the door, closed it behind him, noting with dismay that he couldn’t lock it. It was dark back here, a narrow corridor with some closed doors off it. Storage rooms maybe, offices, running through, feeling his way through, trying all the door handles, all locked. He could hear the music from the stage but surprisingly muted, good soundproofing here.
No one would hear him scream.
He heard the door at the end of the hall behind him open.
He’d paid ten bucks for this concert. The two tickets. He would not die here tonight.
Not during the opening song at any rate.
He could hear the footsteps approaching him, that steady, confident, homicidal pace, as he started running along the corridor, which seemed to stretch around behind the stage. He was behind the organ now, he could see the massive pipes stretching up to the ceiling. A funny contrast, the President, Bart as they affectionally called him, had spoken to the entire new freshman class in this hall just a few weeks before, the convocation including a brief organ concert where these pipes had belted out some Baroque masterpiece. He’d sat then with Ren who was a fan of interminably long 19th century novels and could tell you everything you really didn’t want to know about Victor Hugo, including about the silent film version of Hunchback of Notre Dame that was shown in this hall too along with a live organ score. Ren who had declined to come tonight because he was already underway writing his own interminably long novel which he said was going to be about everything, hence the length. That sunny convocation afternoon seemed long ago, as it was now dark and late and oh so hot Chrissie Hynde was singing about her vagination on the other side of the organ, and his assassin was approaching.
“Oh Jeff-Jeff,” the murderer was sing-songing. “Where are you? …”
Jeff picked up his step, continued around the semi-circle corridor, trying to unsnap his damn holster as he ran. He’d gotten one that had a strap because he’d seen too many stupid old Western films where the cowboys dramatically unsnapped their weapons and he thought it looked cooler. He was obviously thinking of himself more as an assassinator than an assassinee, hadn’t thought that he might need to withdraw his weapon quickly in self-defense. And whoever designed this strap, it actually required two hands to unlatch it, which he tried to do as he stumbled along the dark corridor toward the lighted opening at the end.
“Oh Jeff-Jeff,” his murderer cooed immediately behind him. “I have something for you …”
Was that the click of the weapon cocking?
Jeff jumped through the opening, finally releasing his weapon, gripping it, glad he’d loaded it at least before holstering it. As he came through he tripped on something, some wiring on the floor, and stumbled onto the stage. The music was so loud, the lights were so bright, he felt blinded, the stumble felt almost slow motion, cartoonish, like that scene in Modern Times where Charlie Chaplin teeters and totters on roller skates along the edge of the second-floor overhang, but finally the stumble ended and Jeff hit the ground, the floor of the stage. He found himself on his back, looking up, almost directly up, into the vagination of oh so hot Chrissie Hynde who as the consummate professional kept on singing as members of the stage crew—pretty beefy themselves—crept out to deal with the intrusion. His weapon, where was it, he had dropped it during the stumble. Frantically he reached around, was just feeling it when he managed to pull his eyes off Chrissie Hynde’s private area and looked up, directly, into the murderous eyes of his murderer.
“Oh Jeff-Jeff,” his murderer cooed, pointing the weapon at him, smiling that cruel smile of the slayer upon the about to be slain.
Jeff saw the finger pull, heard the click, could swear he heard the whiz of the dart as it fired through the air and landed directly on his heart.
“You dead,” Jude whistled as the beefy crewman tackled him.
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For more information and loads of endorsements, and to order, please visit this link.