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In This Issue

• The Many Temptations of Jesus Christ, CC 20 AD
• Slackers Take a Stand on Work
• Letters to the FEDitor
• From the Archives: Volume 14, Number 1 - February 1999
• David Foster Wallace, 46, Found Dead in Apartment
• Found: Lost Diary of a Sensitive Frat Boy
• ‘Roo 08: The Fed Reports
• Last Nightʼs Study Break on Hartley 5
• Confessions from a Member of God’s Flock
• The McCain/Obama Liveblog From Hell
• The Rime of a SEAS student
• Bra Burning is sooo passé
• Stephan Vincenzo: The Man, The Legend
• Orientation Activities: The Horror, The Horror
• Straight from the White Board of my NSOP Hookup
• The start of a new year...
• And now, two freshmen getting it on.
• Columbia Court
• Secret Oval Office Tapes Exposed! George W. Bush: “Fuck the Economy. And Fuck You.”
• THE FED Presents: A Political Cartoon
• A Public Service Announcement
• THE FED has this to say
• The Staff of 24.1
• THEY Watch

Sarah Levin

For a moment, I think I can see pain in the eyes of Stephan Vincenzo. Yet as he leans his powerful frame back in his chair, I realize I am wrong. And when he says, with a profundity only rivaled by Socrates and perhaps Sir Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, "People think they know me, but they don't, ya digg," I realize that I am in the presence of a powerful man.

Unable to deal with the passion my question has unleashed, I attempt to change the subject. "I'm still amazed President Bollinger let us use his office for this meeting," I say.

"Lee and I go way back," Stephan says, a story begging to be told behind those words. But we cannot dally on inconsequential diversions. The tale of a great man needs to be told.

Born Jose Stephan Perez, our hero spent his first five years in Ensenada, Mexico, where he gained his current moniker. "Vincenzo was a Jesuit monk who lived in the village," he says. "Everyone loved him. One day these bandits showed up and demanded that we give them all our crops, or they'd sell our women into slavery. Vincenzo saved us. With just a broom and force of will, he chased them out of town. But a bandit, galloping away, blindly fired back. He hit Vincenzo. When I close my eyes, I can still see his lifeless body. I began to use his name as a tribute to the most courageous person I had ever met."

Scarred by the murder, Stephan's family moved to Atlanta. Reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer for pleasure, he propelled himself through elementary school. Here begins that Vincenzian pattern: an unquenchable desire to make everyone happy, thwarted by a jealous, cruel world. "Every year I did so well on the standardized tests," he says, "that the school board thought some teacher was faking the results. Every year they'd send someone to investigate, and every year they'd find no evidence of anything. But they were bitter and just couldn't believe. They'd shut down, every year, my school to retrain the teachers. I cried when my mom said I couldn't go to school. I was too young to understand. Too young."

Without school, Stephan turned to another passion, rapping. He is dismissive about this stage of his life: "I had a lot of fun. I learned a lot. But I just felt used by my label. After the stadium tour with Jay-Z fell through, I knew it was time to wash my hands of all the bullshit." Stephan, however, the man of many ways, seized the opportunity the end of his rap career presented. "I could finally take school seriously," he tells me, "and write that essay about symbolism in The Scarlet Letter I had put off to deal with the three simultaneous lawsuits caused by some joker who claimed I sampled illegally his album of Moog covers of commercial jingles."

Succeeding academically, Stephan found an outlet for his boundless desire to please in organizing and promoting his own parties, which soon became renowned in the tri-State area for their Bacchanalian excess. After each night the floor of the club was left covered in condom wrappers, the bones of roasted condors-his unique take on chicken wings-and the blood of a hundred sacrificed lambs. But Georgia was not large enough for his designs. "I had just gotten my Early Decision acceptance into Columbia," he says, an enormous grin spreading across his gorgeous Latin cheeks, "so I started to plan a party."

He made preparations over the next eight months for what historians have begun to call "Sexxx in the City." Requiring a way to build hype for such a massive party, he made a difficult decision-sending an event invitation, before a location had been found, to all of the Columbia Class of 2012 Facebook group. Reaction was universal. While a few Internet-borne sourpusses mocked Stephan's laid back use of grammatical rules, they could not erode the will of the majority and man's inalienable right to party.

When Stephan arrived on campus his celebrity was untested. Would he be the hero of a generation or was he destined to enter history as a dismal failure, his name only preserved in the argot of future dystopian youth gangs as a synonym for "utterly marked by craptacularity"? The question was answered on the night of August 28th. So much conjecture and rumor has filled the accounts of what happened that it is difficult to sort fact from reality. Wanting to keep his modus operandi secret for his next party, I could only glean two pieces of information from Stephan-that at one point the entire southern half of Manhattan was united in one single electric slide and that he made enough money from the event to cover all his expenses for the year, including the solid gold laptop that he "desperately needed."

As the weeks have passed, Stephan has slowly come to accept his celebrity. "It's funny that everyone wants to know what I'm doing," he says. "But it comes with a price-I can't drink, I can't holla at a girl without everyone knowing what I did." Despite the shame I feel deep in my heart for invading such a noble man's privacy, I couldn't resist asking him if a few rumors were true.

"I've heard some girls have started calling themselves ‘Vincenz-hos"...?" I ask.

Stephan begins a laugh-a long, infectious, delicate thing. I cannot help but join him. "I haven't heard that before," he says.

"I also heard the RAs held a special meeting about how to deal with you," I say. "Wouldn't be surprised," he smirks.

Finally, I come to the last question, the answer to which every resident of Carman was dying to know. "I heard you fucked a bitch so hard that she had to get stitches, but the next night she was at your room, asking for more, which you couldn't give her due to the fact that you'll never let another person be hurt because of your sexcapades after the September 11th attacks."

Stephan looks around quickly, and mutters "no comment." He checks his pocket watch, and I know what he knows: our time together is over. And as he leaves, I take one last glance at him, his long, luxurious hair flowing like a modern day Achilles, one whom I hope is not fated to die in a single blaze of glory, but destined to live long into old age, touching every person who see the rugged handsomeness of his face, and the boundless beauty of his brown eyes.