I left Colorado College after my second year, looking for a fresh start and an excuse to get back to the east coast that spawned me. I ended up transferring to SUNY-Binghamton, where John Gardner had taught fiction, but he ran his motorcycle into a tree and died by the time I got there. Instead––in one of fate's kind moments––I ended up falling into the orbit of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, the first great artist I was exposed to and a huge formative influence on me. 

But instead of making a fresh start in Binghamton, I fell deeper into the marijuana pit and ended up dropping out of school. One of my many rotating roommates, a gay Frenchman named Phillippe, had friends at Cornell who grew their own pot, so I never had to buy any. There was always a bag at the house, and we housemates smoked it in the kitchen, philosophizing our days and nights away. Among those housemates was a guy named J_____, who had dad issues of his own and claimed to envy me for my father being dead. We had some big talks. 

I got to Binghamton in August 1983 and left (I think) in February of 1985, hanging on for a few months after I dropped out of school in order to work as the bric-a-brac manager at a Salvation Army store (still one of my best jobs ever). Looking back, I have to say it was the most debasing and depressing phase of my adult life. Totally adrift, unable to figure out the love thing and the sex thing. Smoking too much pot to pass my classes consistently or even figure out what I might become in the world. Losing myself in a cloud of pot smoke and wannabe-proletarian might-have-been-ness....

It reminds me, as I write this, of my time in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where I hung on too long after dropping out of school because I didn't know what the hell else to do. Eventually I got my ass to Boston and got away from people who had constant supplies of pot, and things straightened out for me eventually. I settled into becoming an occasional opportunistic smoker who didn't know where to get weed unless it was offered to me, and strangely enough I got my shit together. Go figure.