The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  “You were gone a while,” he said. There was no judgment—it was just an observation. He closed his eyes and inhaled through his nose. “You smell like smoke.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, although I didn’t quite know for what.

  After he fell asleep, I stayed up staring at the ceiling, listening to the wheeze of his breath. I ran my fingers over the grooved pendant lettering on the shorts, picking at it with a fingernail, then realized what I was doing. I pulled back the covers and looked at the damage—I’d scratched off half the letters. They were ruined now.

  It all felt ruined.

  I rose. Stealing through the moon-shot room, I changed into boxers, then stuffed the shorts into a drawer, where nobody would find them until I was long gone. It felt like I was hiding the evidence, hiding a piece of myself.

  Maybe tomorrow I wouldn’t take so many pills. Maybe I wouldn’t sleep with any strangers. It wasn’t too late to change, right? I made myself a solemn promise: When morning comes, I’ll be someone else. Someone different.

  Someone better.

  Two

  The day after I got back from my college tour, Daphne and I skipped French class to sit outside at a French restaurant on the Upper West Side—which could almost, I thought, be considered a field trip. I ordered a bottle of wine. Daphne ordered a Caesar salad with dressing on the side and a black iced coffee. She was a platinum blonde with a droll wit; I liked performing for her, but I could be honest with her, too. Like me, she was a recent transplant, having moved from London with her family one year earlier. Since her father was an advertising executive and her mother was a psychoanalyst, she was clever and inquisitive—a perfect foil for all my glib posturing.

  “Can you take this bread away, please?” Daphne said to the waitress. She took a drag from a Parliament Light and looked at me skeptically.

  “Here’s the thing, Daphne,” I said, lighting my own cigarette. I was jittery. I had been up for the first half of the night studying; then I’d gone to the apartment of a guy on Riverside Drive just past midnight and stayed there until four, sniffing poppers and fooling around; then I’d had a 7:00 a.m. detention in the dean’s office, which I had nearly every morning; the upper-school dean doled them out to students a week at a time if he caught them smoking, which happened to me virtually every week. I was so hungry that morning that I’d gnashed two tablets of Adderall with my teeth just to have something to chew on.

  “I just feel like—okay, so, ever since I was a little boy, I have known that deep inside me there is a door, and that door leads to a room, and inside that room, there is a table, and on that table is a locked box that contains the meaning of life—like, all of the happiness that I could ever wish for or want or dream of having, you know?—and I’ve always wondered what the key is to open that box because it’s always been locked to me, impenetrable. And this week, when I went to Princeton, it just felt like—I don’t know, like I finally realized what that key is, Daphne, because that key is Princeton. It’s Princeton. It’s Princeton, and their grand, grand architecture, and their Nobel Prize–winning faculty, and these expanses of green lawn that go on forever, and benches, like, wrapped in tendrils of ivy—fucking tendrils, I swear to God. And you know how, like—remember walking around Columbia before our SATs, and how, like, there just really wasn’t anyone cute around? It was a lot of stocky girls in hoodies and basketball shorts and UGGs—I don’t even know how that happens—but Princeton was, like, the opposite of that. And I know that, like, if I went to Columbia, I’d still be in the city so at least I could still have a social life—I mean, I could go down to NYU to party since that’s basically a trade school for attractive people with family money, right?—and if I went to Princeton I’d be in New Jersey, which is so ugh, but like—would I even want to come back to the city when everyone there is so fucking beautiful? And I don’t mean normal beautiful, I mean Hamptons beautiful, Saint-Tropez beautiful, beautiful in that rich way—you know what I mean—and this privilege that’s so thick in the air you can taste it. And I want to be one of those people, those privileged few. So I guess, then, the question is, like, could I be one of them, Daphne? I could just—I could feel it as soon as I set foot on campus, that it was the only place I could ever really be happy, that I belonged there. I mean, I have to get in, right? I’ll do anything to get in. Like, literally anything. Except, you know, studying and extracurriculars.”

  Daphne impaled a ribbon of lettuce with her fork, as unimpressed with me as she was with the salad. “You’d better apply, then,” she said. She chewed for a bit. “Do you really think you can get into Princeton, Sam? I mean, you know I love you, but—fucking hell—you’re a mess.”

  I ground my teeth anxiously.

  “I could do it if I really set my mind to it, don’t you think? I just have to quit doing all the bullshit that I’ve been doing. No more cutting class to blaze on the Great Lawn. No more sneaking out at midnight to go sit at Marquee, which sucks now, anyway—how many hours have we clocked, like, watching Lindsay Lohan text and scowl?—just waiting for some probably-married dickbag to buy me a Red Bull–vodka and take me back to his hotel room for completely unfulfilling sex. Honestly, Daphne, I’m so sick of that, aren’t you? No more showing up for morning detention still drunk from the night before—and this is going to be hard, I mean, I’m really going to need your support if we’re going to pull this off, but I mean, like, if I can curb all those bad habits, I could probably do it, right?”

  I sipped my wine.

  “I could get into Princeton, couldn’t I?”

  I didn’t want to say good-bye to those nights—catching a cab uptown with girlfriends as they changed out of slinky cocktail dresses into dress shirts and ties, replacing their stilettos with suede boots, emptying out of the taxi in a cloud of smoke, fragrance, and tousled hair, popping pills and blinking Visine tears and sucking on breath mints. Huddling outside the Gothic wooden doors of our school, waiting for Willie, the hobbled old security guard, to let us inside.

  More than the buzz and stomp of Meatpacking District nightclubs with my friends, though, I lived for the nights I spent with strangers. By midnight, with the rush of the evening’s amphetamines surging through me, I could go online, find an older guy with a nice apartment and some blow, and lose myself in that euphoric lust daze for a few hours. I would tell him my name was Brock or Cory and that I was a junior at Indiana State just visiting New York City; or I would tell him that I had a girlfriend and that I’d “never done this before.” And then there would be quickening pulses, some itch that I couldn’t quite name being scratched—and for a few hours, I would be wholly present in my body and also somehow able to exit it entirely. And then it would be over, a bleary comedown, two strangers, naked in a cold apartment somewhere on Central Park West. I would say I needed money for a taxi home; he would fish out some cash—often, and to which I did not object, several twenties or hundreds—and then I would walk home through that desolate predawn hour, use the money to buy painkillers or cocaine for myself or just to go out with my friends the next night. Yet I rarely spoke about it with my friends. There was socially acceptable wildness—the typical antics of bored, indolent, private school kids—and then there was what I did.

  Surely, I reasoned, there had to be some way I could keep doing that while also becoming a more serious, motivated student. Someone purposeful and civic-minded, with a commitment to service. It seemed in that moment unjust that they should be mutually exclusive.

  “Well, it’s ambitious,” Daphne said. “You know. A leap. And, like, you’re sort of the worst.” She shook out her hair, as though trying to rid herself of some stress, real or imagined. “Not to mention that Princeton doesn’t even matter—it’s just a tangible embodiment of this unattainable version of yourself. It’s practically Jungian, really. Symbols or whatever.”

  I was caught off guard. “No,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it’s about going to Princeton.”

  She shrugged. “Thank God I’m g
oing back home for university. The ways they torture you Americans. It’s shit, really.” She looked at me with pity and sighed. “Aren’t you supposed to have safety schools?”

  “I mean,” I said slowly, knowing she was right and disliking it, “there are Wesleyan and Hampshire—but I’m not that liberal or lazy. And Harvard and Yale. They’re both, like . . . kind of overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time, you know?”

  I kept talking but avoided her eyes. “Like, as an undergraduate at those places, you don’t have a lot of options to take, you know, like, small, intimate classes with professors, because it’s mostly lectures, and you have to cycle through, like, nineteen TAs before you can get a word in with the professor, if ever, and, like, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to bust my ass and spend fifty thousand dollars a year—well, it’s my parents’ money, but whatever—to go to a school where I can’t even develop a relationship with my instructor. I’ll buy a fucking book on tape, thank you very much. You know what I mean? It’s just, like, whatever. And my adviser says I should apply to Connecticut College, but, like, what is that even? I mean, okay, there’s Sarah Lawrence, and the academics there are great, but it’s kind of a dump, you know? It just looks run-down. And it’s so close to the city that I’d probably come down all the time and just, like, end up living here, which defeats the whole purpose of this holy residential college experience everyone keeps talking about. Also, I mean, not that this is a reason not to go, but you know I’ve been really trying not to do coke and, like, when I went up there and I saw that girl Eleanor, do you remember her? Like, I was staying overnight at her place and she wanted to get a gram and so I just went for it, which, like, was stupid because it had been so long since I’d done it but it just seemed so harmless and, like, do I really want to be around a bunch of cokeheads all the time? If I wanted that, I could just go to Vassar, right? I mean, Amherst and Swarthmore are both gorgeous—at least they look like Ivies, even if they’re not, but I just kind of feel like, I dunno, like, there’s only so much foliage that a person can take in before their head explodes. I mean, am I being elitist here? I don’t think I am. That’s why it’s Princeton. It has to be Princeton.”

  I chewed on my fingernails. I ran my fingers through my hair. I lit another cigarette.

  “You take too much Adderall,” Daphne said.

  If someone had asked me why I was like this, I would have snapped back, “Like what?”—yet, if pressed, I could point to a dozen little threads of dysfunction that I’d teased out over the course of years in therapy. The monstrousness in me had crystallized in New York, but it had its roots in Oregon, where, by the time I was fifteen, I had already begun to disappear down the rabbit hole of addiction. I blamed it on my parents because that was convenient, but it was a tougher knot than just that.

  Still, as I told myself often to excuse my bad behavior, my parents probably hadn’t helped. As their marriage had slowly disintegrated, my mother unraveled. We fought constantly. After she figured out that I was using drugs, she began administering drug tests. I worked around them: Nothing could keep me from my beloved pills. I could sense a drug test coming a mile away, and neither of my parents was around often enough for it to be consistent, anyway. They were too distracted to effectively parent a child as precocious and strong-willed as I was, and I had grown skilled at manipulating them into looking past what should have been obvious red flags.

  A few days before my sixteenth birthday, my mother surprised me with a urinalysis test, and I came up positive for cocaine; after consulting with my father, they grounded me for a few days.

  Neither of them brought up rehab—at least not to me.

  My mother pursued her spirituality, trying to unlock the secrets of her happiness. She returned to the house at odd hours with red eyes, reeking of burnt sage. (“I’m going out on a dream quest,” she’d say, her eyes daring me to laugh. “I’ll be back in three days.”) Shortly before my parents separated, my mother described my father as “the most emotionally and sexually repressed individual I’ve ever met.” I loved how cinematic this was—how withering.

  Several weeks later, my father and mother sat me down in the kitchen.

  “We’re separating,” my mother said.

  “I’ve taken a job in New York,” my father said.

  “You can stay here with me,” my mother said. “Or you can go to New York with your father. It’s up to you.”

  I told them that I thought it was for the best, and I did.

  “Maybe now we can all be happy,” I said, although it didn’t seem like that was in the cards. But I thought I would gladly trade my mother’s more watchful eye for my unerringly unavailable father—and a fabulous new life in New York.

  Later that night, the house blanketed in silence, I slipped out the front door and jogged along the gravel that paved our cul-de-sac, down to the DEAD END sign where my best friend Kat’s SUV was parked. All summer, Kat and I had been doing blow—too much blow, if there was such a thing—but Kat was two years older than I was and much more experienced, and I trusted her judgment implicitly. Even on the nights when she drove seventy mph along the perilous curves of Skyline Boulevard, her lipsticked mouth working animatedly, my teeth chattering, charring my fingertips trying to kill the roach of a joint—even then, I always felt safe with her. We had become friends not long after we had both been unceremoniously dumped by our first loves—me by my boyfriend, Jerick, a charismatic theater kid, and her by Rob, an aspiring rapper from a bad neighborhood. At first, we medicated our loneliness with fast food and bad movies, but it didn’t take long for us to graduate to harder vices.

  Kat was behind the wheel, looking fidgety, ambient pop bleating on the stereo. She was a bombshell, blond and curvy, but—perpetually self-conscious—she hid in formless sweatshirts zipped up to her throat, hood pulled up moodily to hide her long, wavy hair. I sat in the passenger seat and began chopping up a gram bag of nacreous blue-white cocaine on my pocket mirror.

  “Well, it’s not like you didn’t see it coming, right?” Kat said.

  “I really think it’s the first thing they’ve ever done, like, for themselves,” I said.

  Kat shrugged. “I hope you’re right.”

  I snorted a line.

  She turned up the music and drove down Vista Drive, her car hugging the curves, filling up with smoke from my cigarette, my spine tingling. At an underdeveloped industrial neighborhood by the train tracks, a corporate park was dead by night, save for the scratching of Kat’s razor blade against a jewel case. She stopped the car and we got out, circling the perimeter of the parking garage in search of the stairs. The summer had been a blur of nights like this: although I’d dabbled in drugs the year before, that had mostly been taking a hit from a joint on the way to a party; only over the last few months had things started to feel dangerous. Parties where I blacked out and found out the next day that I’d made out with some straight boy from school. Mixing barbiturates I’d bought off an upperclassman with alcohol and feeling my breathing slow to a frightening sluggishness, picking up the phone to call 911 and thinking better of it.

  I will be fine, I would think, and in the morning I always was. And then there were the nights I stayed out with Kat until the sun rose, driving across Portland, doing blow and taking long walks along the river. Early in the morning, searching for an empty public bathroom or abandoned parking garage, we promised each other that we would “kill this bag and not do this anymore.” But then, a day or two later, we would be back at it.

  We climbed several flights up the stairs, then crossed the roof and hopped over onto the next building, emboldened by the drugs and adrenaline. We were high enough to see the whole city, a panoramic view of the valley, all those glimmering lights. I followed her up to the base of a water tower, which cast its looming shadow over the roof. A slender ladder mounted to its side looked rickety and treacherous, but we climbed up that, too, stopping at ledges along the way to survey the view, to feel the fear, to congratulate each oth
er on how brave we were being. How far can we get? Can we make it to the top tonight? We scaled those heights, dizzy, queasy. My sweaty palms slipped on the rungs. Gravity tugged at me. My limbs felt featherweight, then heavy as lead with each step.

  “Don’t look down,” Kat whispered. “Don’t look down.”

  Up there, at whatever peak to which we’d ascended, cold and high with the summer air prickling at the nape of my neck, I looked up at the sky. It was shot through with stars, in the way Oregon nights always were, bright lights so eerily lucent. I hung from the ladder with one arm and reached one out toward the sky.

  I felt my grip starting to loosen. In a moment, I would fall. Or maybe, I thought, I would just fly.

  The next week, I went to New York with my father to interview at prep schools. I vetoed a Jesuit academy on the Upper East Side—too staid, too Christian—and a day school in quaint Park Slope—too unpretentious, too dressed-down.

  Finally, we reached the Dwight School. In the art classroom, panoramic windows framed a view of Central Park. The boys were doe-eyed and rumple-headed, in wrinkled chinos and blue blazers, their ties sloppy. The girls were inscrutable behind opaque Jackie O sunglasses, wearing oversize men’s dress shirts and leggings. Their nimble feet were silent in ballet flats. I yearned to belong. Could this be my life now? I wondered. Please. It felt like a dream.

  That evening, the last of our visit, I arranged to see my friend Aria. We’d met several years earlier at an academic camp I attended each summer and kept up with each other via email. Aria lived just outside of the city in New Jersey; she took the train in, and we met two of her friends, scrubby-bearded prep school trustafarians who went to St. Ann’s and kept talking about some book called Finnegans Wake. I had never heard of it, and it didn’t sound very good, but I pretended to be interested. One of them, I was told, lived in a town house in the East Eighties that had previously housed a Latin American embassy, and the other had just bought a penthouse on Central Park West from a famous singer. We bought an eight ball of cocaine, splayed it out in thick lines on the grand silver music stand in the closet, and casually, as if it were a perfectly normal thing for fifteen-year-olds to do, had a foursome.