Who was I stealing from? Myself? My past with my father? Ha, that was the thinking someone straight would use. This was the best choice I could make, and not at all motivated by darkness and rage. How could I ever think this was rage at work?
Carefully and wisely, I thought, I comparison shopped. I spent $186 on old comic books.
My first investment.
560 BROADWAY
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
94133
NOVEMBER 1974. I was ten years old, lying on my stomach and reading comic books. The phone rang, Peter Charming calling, him telling my mother to stop packing, come to a party, and then a few hours later my mother and I were on the PSA flight from Orange County to San Francisco. We caught a cab at the airport curb and my mother gave the address, 1974 Broadway.
On the ride into town, it was dark outside, so all I could see were lights from other cars and houses on hillsides, not a clue what San Francisco was like yet. My face to the window. It’s not a pretty drive from the airport at first, but then the sight of downtown is impressive and strange, a distinctive pyramid surrounded by more obvious skyscrapers, and suggestions of hills and bridges in the distance.
We were on an ugly multideck freeway that spilled abruptly into North Beach, a sleazy fiesta of neon and flashing lights. Topless clubs advertising “He-She Love Acts.” Sailors. The deep bass of amplified music trying to convince the people packed onto the sidewalks that anything sticky and awful must also be sexy.
The cab idled at the stoplight. My mother looked at the address Peter had given us. He lived on Broadway. This was Broadway. She looked disturbed.
A thud of a body, the cab jumping on its shocks. There was a blur I couldn’t quite resolve. A pimp and his hooker had gotten into it, and for a second there was a snarling face pressed up close enough to mine to leave a film of breath on the cab’s window that remained vivid after we peeled off.
I was blank. Nothing. No reaction, not even a racing heart. My mom asked if I was all right. The cab went through the Broadway tunnel, and on the other side of it was Pacific Heights. Fussy Victorian flats, Edwardian town houses. In other words, the bulk of Russian Hill filtered out the tit bars and Broadway became respectable. We were saved.
But the moment that face hit the cab, something happened to me. At the party that night, among the biofeedback and the pinball and the adults smoking weed, I tried to say something like this: You know how, right before you speak, there’s a moment where the words in your brain start lining up? Just as there’s a tunnel from North Beach to Pacific Heights, I became aware of a kind of tunnel that the impulse to speak travels, from someplace primal and prelingual into the place that civilization understands. There’s a distance between when I perceive something and when I form the words to describe it, and my perception only becomes real when those words finally hit me, and I am anxious. What happens when I perceive something before there are words for it? Is there something in that darkness, before words?
I realized that I was telling myself about what had happened fractions of a second after it happened. After that collision with the cab, that sense never left me.
There was a comic book hero named Captain Marvel, who, in issue 29, gains “Cosmic Awareness.” It’s not exactly specific what that means except that it’s a superpower. I felt like that jolt in the cab woke me up to what being in tune with the universe must be—following the chain of perception back into that tunnel so there’s no longer a space between what you see and how you react. I could never explain it to adults in San Francisco because they, to a person, wanted to tell me about their acid trips. This was different. I didn’t know why.
5025 THACHER ROAD
OJAI, CALIFORNIA
93023
A WEEK OR SO after coming to Thacher, I stood outside the pay phones that lined the side of the dining hall. I was waiting to call my father, but I was also eavesdropping. Another kid who was new was trying to explain a word to his parents. “No, ‘face.’ ” He said. “Face. Like, you’re—uh—faced. You know?” A brief pause—obviously the person on the other end of the phone didn’t know what he was talking about. Just saying “face” repeatedly hadn’t helped.
He tried again: “When something goes wrong, like when you think something and it turns out not to be true, only you had a lot riding on it—we’d say face. Only, it would be like, faaaaaace, because you’d be faced.” Pause. “No, it does make sense. But I guess you kind of have to be here. It makes sense when you’re here.”
I sympathized. When I talked to my father or my mother, I couldn’t explain this place. Plus, I was having trouble talking to my father anyway. I could not sleep most nights. I had stolen $186.
The problem was, even though I’d moved from San Francisco, I’d brought myself with me. I felt guilt. At night, instead of sleeping, I looked at the ceiling and I plotted the pathway from my room to the pay phones. I’d have to wait until after eight in the morning or so, to be polite. It would need to be a collect call. I would tell my father everything.
But every morning when I woke up I realized I was being ridiculous. I’d made an investment using my own money, right? Those comics were going to be more valuable than those bills ever would be, and years from now my father would applaud my foresight. Except that I had broken the covenant that held us together. Except he had broken it first. Except I was using that as an excuse to try to not feel bad.
These thoughts didn’t last very long in the daytime. There was too much to do. At a school assembly one morning, Dr. Chase, who had been the headmaster in the 1950s, got up to tell a story. It was an urgent one. He needed us to know that everything he thought he’d known while he was at Thacher was wrong.
Dr. Chase had been retired for a while. He’d been brought out that day to be a charming fossil, but fossils from Thacher didn’t behave the way normal fossils did.
“I was in a bar in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago,” he said, which was shocking enough to hear, then he backed up. When he was headmaster, before coeducation, Thacher bused girls from Emma Willard in for dances. It had been Dr. Chase’s job to stand on the dance floor with a ruler, making sure Thacher boys stood twelve inches away from Emma Willard girls. Many years later, he was in a bar in Manhattan and he ran into a former student who had been his nemesis. There was one nemesis in every good class, he explained, “like in Milton.” This one was kind enough in adulthood to buy Chase a drink.
“Did you know,” the former student asked, “when you were on the dance floor with your stupid ruler? Do you know where I was? In your office. On your desk. With my girlfriend.”
This caused our assembly to riot, which Dr. Chase took in quietly. It looked to me like he was curious what we were learning. How simple your laughter is, he was silently saying. Mine had a subtext: you never knew what was actually going on. There was always a way around the system. I liked this lesson.
Dr. Chase’s story made me suspect abstract thinking might be rewarded here. Every day, among all the duties and homework assignments, Thacher presented you with a pile of unfinished material, threads of daily life, and it was up to you to decide what to make of it. As a freshman, there was little chance to do much—just trying to do my homework on time was hard enough—but as you cleared hurdles, slowly, you were given more free time to use, maybe wisely.
I saw seniors smoking cigarettes and arguing on the Putting Green after dinner. They talked to girls. They knew how to arrange weekend dances. They dressed in tweed vests and frayed Brooks Brothers shirts that they’d stolen from their brothers’ laundry hampers. They lived life of sprezzatura, elegance without effort, an art history term I learned my first semester.
I wanted to know the same ease they did. Seniors understood music in a way that made me feel queasy and small. The first time I was in Ken Everett’s room—a senior—I could not take my eyes off his satin-gloss Technics amplifier or his speakers, which wer
e tall enough to be end tables. I still had the Panasonic all-in-one I’d had since I was ten, and the receiver was built into the base of the turntable, and the speakers were as crushable as Coke cans.
The music I heard coming from seniors’ rooms was incomprehensible. It was Roxy Music and Traffic, Stanley Clarke and the Grateful Dead, jazz I’d never heard of, and Frank Zappa sometimes. The only thing the songs had in common was a sense of jaded exhaustion that the seniors had managed to embrace by the age of seventeen.
I longed to be jaded, but the problem was that someone preferred me dead.
The freshmen boys lived in Middle School, a handsome Arts and Crafts shingled dorm in the center of campus. From memory, from north to south, six rooms housed the following boys: Cliff, Heitz, Flohr, Herron, Sparrow, Robbins. It turned out that Mr. Shagam, a faculty member fond of wordplay, had done the room assignments. So upstairs, again in a row, Pinkham, Brown, Brown, and Dunne. Of course, I was in that row, but more to the point, I had a roommate. I cannot imagine the cry of joy Mr. Shagam must have let loose when he realized they had incoming freshmen named Glen Gold and Francis Fish.
There weren’t supposed to be roommates, but the class of ’81 had overbooked, so some of us had to double up. I was the youngest in the class, Frank the oldest. I was from San Francisco; he was from antipodal Newport News, Virginia. I was perhaps the least experienced horseman, Frank had his own saddle. I was Jewish; Frank hated Jews. Rather, he was under orders from his mother to get a single room at any cost (I was actually standing next to him during this conversation, as at least one of them thought I was too stupid to understand what she was saying), and so a quick course of anti-Semitism seemed to him to be the best way to accomplish that.
One time, I was struggling to stand up while Frank was grabbing my wrists and trying to force me to my knees. He was saying, “Go on, tell me that Israelis are passive pussies. Say it. Say, ‘Israelis are passive pussies.’ ”
I did collapse to the floor but I didn’t say it. He got bored and went on to doing something else. More than anything, I was shocked by his choice of insults—the Israeli commandos had just rescued a planeful of hostages; clearly there had to be more stinging ways of making fun of being Jewish. It was clear even he didn’t really believe it—it was just the first tool at hand.
If I seem more exasperated than threatened, that’s about right. Frank was mediocre at being a bully—I could tell that his heart wasn’t in it.
I had a terrible, stinging crush on Debbie Taylor, who was from Montana, who knew everything about horses, and who was a better student than I was. I used to write and tear up letters to her, and on rainy days I sat in the window and imagined what it would be like to listen to ELO’s New World Record with her. One afternoon, Frank came into our room and shook the rain off his hat and told me I might want to put on some sad music instead—he recommended the Best of Bread or anything by David Gates—because Debbie had just started going out with an expert horseman with whom I could never compete.
I thought Frank was taking the opportunity to tease me, but it turned out he was a romantic. He shared his Doritos with me. He told me dirty jokes and then he became serious. “You and me, we’re not like other guys,” he said. “We respect girls—everything about them. I hate it when my heart gets broken.” I was amazed but it was also nice to have him on my side.
He was also helpful a couple of weeks later. I had a crush on Kirsten, who before realizing her mistake had held hands with me on a school trip to a production of Arsenic and Old Lace. “No, you shouldn’t write her a letter telling her how you feel,” Frank said. I also had crushes on Rachel, who was an artist, and Jean, who was one of eleven children and who lived to argue about things. If you were a girl and you talked to me when I was a freshman, I was interested in being your boyfriend.
Six weeks into the first semester, I came back from dinner to find a strange person in the room. I recognized him instantly: John Spencer, a senior. He was sitting on the radiator, window open, smoking, one of those privileges reserved for seniors. Finding a senior in my room was like finding a yeti. My first thought was that I was about to be killed.
Spencer was strange, donnish like an Oxford scholar. He kept his own hours, tending to cook late meals in the student kitchen by himself. A Prince Valiant haircut, a slack body that didn’t walk so much as stumble forward, floppy hands that always held a Player’s Navy Cut, which had the most nicotine in any commercially processed cigarette.
Whenever rules were explained to me, Spencer was cited as someone who had found an asterisk. He didn’t play lacrosse or have a horse—he took fencing lessons. All of his classes were AP or independent studies. He’d computerized the seating arrangements for formal dinners. Somehow Spencer kept getting seated, week after week, next to the prettiest girls in school.
“Gold, right?” That cigarette was certainly not allowed in a freshman’s room. He was watching me and taking in how I was taking him in. Finally he took out some sheets of paper. It was dot matrix, two hundred rows of names and numbers.
“The administration asked me if I could computerize the grading system, so I did,” he explained. “They don’t know what a back door is. These are everyone’s grades.”
It was like being handed plutonium. Nothing he had done so far suggested I wasn’t going to be killed.
He continued. Here was the freshman class, by rank. I had the fourth-highest GPA. “Eric Heitz has the highest grades, but he’s a fac brat—he knows how the system works. The second highest is Debbie Taylor, and I think she does it by studying hard. She’s the one you have a crush on, right?”
“How—”
“Don’t be dull. I have a crush on Heather Findlay, and she has the third-highest GPA. I have no idea why you have the fourth highest but it might be you’re a genius. Are you?”
“I am,” I admitted.
Ludicrous as that was, he still nodded. “Good. Who have you read?”
“Read?”
“What books have you read? You have atrocious musical taste—ELO? Come ON. Haven’t you even heard of Rick Wakeman?”
I hadn’t. And if I had, knowing what I know now, I would have shown him the door. Spencer was a fan of prog rock, music that didn’t count unless it told a story about the Book of Lindisfarne, and used an eighteen-minute organ solo to do so. But he was passionate. He had a lot of books to recommend, too. Roger Zelazny, Walter M. Miller, Clifford Simak.
At some point, probably about now, the door slammed open and my prefect, Ken Everett, was standing there ready to shout. Smoking? Busted! Then he saw Spencer, and he was as confused as I had been. Seniors didn’t fraternize with freshmen. But—recovering—Ken still shook his head. Spencer wasn’t supposed to smoke in freshmen’s rooms.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Ken said. After all, only one of them was a prefect—Spencer technically had no responsibilities here.
Spencer tapped ashes out the window. He had a smile that it’s hard to call anything other than smarmy, the kind of thing a super-villain withheld until the moment he was assaulting the hero’s girlfriend.
Ken left. Spencer said he’d be keeping an eye on me, and then he helped himself to some of my Doritos. He left, too.
I was baffled, still. I’d half-thought I was about to be offered the keys to a secret society, and that hadn’t happened. I heard the word “provisional” a lot because the first year of Thacher was a winnowing process. You were in the school but you weren’t quite accepted as part of the landscape until an odorless, tasteless change had occurred. The school was so small there were no groups of jocks or snobs—you had to keep recombining with the same people throughout the day, first at breakfast tables, then in classes, then riding horses, then in study hall, then in the dorm, like reshuffling a deck of cards. You might be good at track but you probably also were trying out for The Madwoman of Chaillot.
&nb
sp; This increased your chances of making friends. Alex Calhoun, who lived near me in San Francisco and who had the same glasses as I did, was a decent sort. Butch Cliff, a motocross champion at home, seemed to find my jokes funny enough to not dismiss me entirely. But no one was sure if he was meant to be here or if years from now he would struggle to explain to people how, for one semester, he’d gone to a place called Thacher, and it hadn’t worked out. People might point at the one blurry photo of me in the yearbook and wonder what had happened to me, and no one would know the answer.
My guilt about the $186 was crushing me and on one particular night in my bunk bed, I focused on the ceiling and tried to explain myself silently to a stone-faced invisible judge: I was a kid. How could I be trusted with that responsibility? That interrogation was endless, full of fretting and tossing and turning.
The next day, Frank told the other freshmen boys that he’d heard me jerking off all night long. Suddenly, my problems with my father weren’t important. Frank had hit on an almost perfect way of getting me ostracized. There was no argument I could make to get out of it. You’re accusing me of doing the thing that everyone does, you know the surveys, 97 percent of men say they masturbate and the other 3 percent lie. I didn’t say this aloud, as it would put me in the strange position of seeming to admit to doing the thing I’d actually stopped doing because I had a roommate, in order to never be accused of doing it. I was angry there were no points awarded for having had such restraint.
For a couple of weeks, my reputation was on a seesaw. I was sitting on a lawn with Kirsten, who blushed easily, who was forthright and had managed to befriend me in spite of my crush on her. I thought it would be a good idea, maybe a great cleansing, to tell her what Frank was saying about me. I was specific. I even used my own defense. I remember finishing up, “and the other 3 percent lie,” and realizing with a flush that I had just made the type of mistake someone who’d been in a boys school for two years would make. I’d been talking to girls regularly for only a few weeks. Anyone could have told me you just didn’t talk to girls about stuff like this.
I Will Be Complete Page 16