I attended a moderately small college run by Jesuit priests in Buffalo NY. It was only a few blocks’ walk from the family home on Summit Ave., which was nice, as was the tuition, which, me being a son of a faculty member, was free. Anyways, even though it was located on Main Street in the middle of the city, it was still a somewhat cloistered environment. It was a largely middle class black community and the student body was largely white, suburban, or white, countryside. So there wasn’t a lot of mixing going on with the neighborhood folks. Since quite a few students were from downstate, I guess the term is, and lived on campus, and because it was kind of a catholicky place, the overall atmosphere was, well, kind of conservative.
So, I had this small fish in a small pond experience that came to mind recently after a long time. A guy named David Eliot e-mailed me about my blog, which he happened across during a “vanity search” on Google, and mentioned that he has already, at the age of 34, published two independent newspapers. Publishing my own rag is a sort of a dream of mine, though I’m not locked in on it, I would have a ball. I even recently drew up plans for an indie entertainment newsmag, but I gave up because I figured (A) it likely wouldn’t make any money and (B) that I had no seed money to get it going.
So, I was lamenting my launch pad status, when a friend reminded me that I did put out two issues of a really small independent newspaper when I was still in school. Crazy that I forgot that. It was called The Tunnel Rat, named for the system of tunnels that connected much of the Canisius College campus while I was a student. The tunnels are still there; only the campus has really grown, so “much” probably doesn’t apply any longer. Most of the student activity clubs were in those tunnels, beneath the student center, and I spent a good portion of my 5 college years living the life of a tunnel rat.
I’ve always identified with rats, inasmuch as I think they’re really cool animals, albeit frightening to find taking the lid off one’s garbage can (happened to my mother once). My father’s nickname for me as a child was Bumbalardee. This came from a Sesame Street cartoon where a really poor kid who has no friends instead invites the tenement’s rats to his birthday party. I scarcely remember it, but my folks claim that I loved it as a kid. So, naming my “underground” newspaper The Tunnel Rat had extra meaning for me.
I only put out two very short (a few pages each) issues, mainly because I couldn’t afford the printing costs. It caused a bit of a stir, this being a small, conservative pond school. How conservative, you ask? During my first senior year, I had a goatee going, not because I liked beards (I didn’t then), but because I had been too lazy to shave. A whole plethora of people and school administrators strongly suggested to me that growing a beard was wrong and that I’d better shave it. I’m serious! Try living in a small town sometime (or perhaps, Greensboro) and you’ll likely run into that same kind of attitude.
I promised them all I would shave it off, as soon as I could go a week without getting nagged about it. It took until Christmas break.
So anyways, to make a short story far too long to read to the end, I decided to publish my own paper not because I felt some kind of need to stir up trouble, but because I had just finished reading this cool book my sister Nicki had given to me (upon the promise that I not mention she did so to mom and dad) and I wanted to quote it in an op/ed piece for the Griffin, the college paper I was an editor at. But they wouldn’t let me use all the swearwords, which I thought were essential to the quote, as it knocked the press itself, so I created an entire publication so I could put the quote there.
It’s the scene in the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which, high on acid and other stuff, Raoul and his attorney pal are checking into a hotel when in Raoul’s eyes, everybody starts turning into reptiles and chewing each other to bits. Raoul exclaims to his attorney:
‘”But what about our room? And the golf shoes? We're right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo! And somebody's giving booze to the goddamn things! It won't be long before they tear us to shreds. Jesus, look at the floor! Have you ever seen so much blood? How many have they killed already?’
“That’s the press table,’ he said.”
So I threw the essay with that quote, a one sentence entertainment review by my childhood friend Jeff Burnett, a nostalgic look back at record players by another friend, and a short story done up Mike Hammer-style about a campus police detective wannabe titled “Diary of a Dick.”
I played on an ongoing controversy with the English Department by doctoring up a group photo of them for the 2nd issue; I penciled-in satanic symbols and Led Zeppelin onto their shirts and books and ran it on the front to show how bad they were. I understand they got quite a kick out of it. (I’d show an image from the issues, except that I found out what is wrong with my scanner -- it’s busted. So, no scanned-in images from me until I get a new one. You know, when we have money again.)
A year later, my buddy Eric published a final issue of The Tunnel Rat on his own, causing much more strife, in part because he and I stood out on the corner and handed the issues to kids coming in, and in part because it was a lot racier and more fun and addressed ongoing controversies better than I ever did. If any student remembers The Tunnel Rat, it’s Eric’s issue that he remembers, I’m sure. For example, he played on the health ministry’s decision to excise contraception information from a campus magazine by including a dotted-line condom that students could cut-out and glue together before engaging in sex.
That one perturbed no small number of people -- self-important students and administrators alike -- who actually believed that if no mention was ever made of sexual activity, then by God the students wouldn’t engage in it! I’ve seen these kinds of attitudes persist during school board meetings, church socials, and of course, at the federal level, in just about everything Moral Majority types go on about.
So just today I was wondering if I might be able to find a reference to The Tunnel Rat, -- it being one of the few a vanity searches I’ve never conducted -- perhaps in some guy’s web page reflecting on his school days.
Nope. The only mention I found is so small as to make it a sort of a found poem. It’s mentioned, for some obscure reason, in the root directory of the campus computer mainframe. This is the whole of it:
Tunnel Rat - Lampoon
Publication – totally anonymous (Bootlegged)
File: 21/0
I guess if I want people to remember me for something unique and wonderful, I’m going to have to try something new.
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