He's a reporter! He's an actor/director/writer! They're cops!

Joel Achenbach catches up with his college pal David Duchovny:

I lived in a dorm room next to a kid from New York named David Duchovny. He was smart, athletic, talented and confident. Over the next few years, we didn't hang out a lot, but we did play a fair bit of a pinball game named Xenon. I took the left flipper, he took the right. When we dropped in a quarter, the machine would say, in an alluring female voice, "Enter Xenon," which represented pretty much my entire college sex life.

I sensed that women found Duchovny attractive, because when they saw him they would instantly start weeping, writhing on the ground and speaking in tongues. (Standing there, ignored, I'd announce, "But I'm better at pinball.") Occasionally a beauty would disappear into his room, and seconds later the stereo would be cranked to deafening volume. I never understood how they could talk with the music so loud.

There's more about Duchovny's foray into grad school and his writerly yearnings. While I went to college with a number of folks who have gone one to some level of fame, I wasn't actually friends with any of them, and am unlikely to be writing about them in twenty years or so.