What is it to become a man? Is it having 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, and a dog or two? Maybe it’s going through a life-threatening trial, putting your life on the line in some ancient ritual passed down from generation to generation? Or, is it just turning 18 and graduating from High School? Three years ago I told myself I had become a man. I had just transferred to a new college, one where months beforehand people were telling stories about me, setting the stage of my coming like I was a messianic figure. A mythology of who I was, the land in which I came, and what I was about to bring were spread like legends of old, passed not from campfire to campfire but rather dorm room to dorm room. I had just turned 20 and when I arrived on the campus of Michigan State University that late summer of 2005 people knew me as Vandermolen, founder of Lombardo Barnyard, creator of the tongue-in-ear sexual maneuver known simple as “The Vandermolen,” and the kid who pooped into his own pants and cared to tell about it. When I arrived, I was already a legend.
I had been planning for this moment all summer long, sewing together bits of cloth to become what I would call fashion, and penning a book with friend and co-owner of Lombardo Barnyard, Nick Jarmo. I had been planning for it, but I never could have imagined my arrival would be more like a homecoming than a first day. I was greeted with hugs, invites, and within the first week I was a grand prize in a raffle – people could win a date with me, Nick Vandermolen.
With little effort on my part I was MSU’s greatest student, bringer of sweetness, harold of Alpena, the seventh charka. With in the first month I gave them the Transformation Fashion Show. By that time, I felt as if I had them all in my hands. Some were models, others I tricked into getting me snacks, some were reporters, and all were witnesses, an audience to cheer my name, to clap, to sing, to praise me. There were over 70 people in attendance; sitting upon freshly mowed blades of grass, flowers bloomed and the sun beamed down on all of our faces, the sky beamed a blue hue that has yet to be reproduced. They honored me with each transforming fashion I presented to them. When my clothes were ripped off revealing sackcloth and my beard and hair were cut off, for the finale of the show, they gasped just like I knew they would. Finally, when I turned to symbolically drown in a fountain that was peering over my shoulder the whole show, they ran for me, only to see me beat death and arise from the dyed waters of the fountain. In the end they all danced in the fountain as if so happy that I had arrived, that I had become a man.
And that was the day I had been working for my entire life – that was the day I became a man. As least, that’s what I thought at the time. Over the next few years adorning fans, which in my mind I numbered in the thousands, dwindled to only a handful of childhood friends. The idyllic childhood dreams I was promised were never achieved, and the confidence, aura, and fortitude I saw in so many men, didn’t develop. Instead, a negative condescending attitude, a realized naive lack of understanding, a cynical look on life, and a propensity to complain began to develop. Over the course of three years the fervor that had pushed me so far had fizzled and in its places were the ashes of a childhood I burned alive to become a man. Now in Chicago, having left the few friends I still had, a church I loved, and what was left of my family, I find myself alone in an empty apartment, where I sleep in a closet using a towel as a blanket and a sweatshirt as a pillow; jobless, friendless, and slowly losing weight, I sit here on the carpet trying to once again become the man I thought I had become years earlier...
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