by John Darnton
Over time my enthusiasm for Andover was mitigated by some hard-edged realities. There existed, I was soon to learn, a strict social hierarchy. Boys who were deemed cool were at the top of the heap, especially if they were athletic. The guiding principle was to achieve an ineffable quality of worldliness, a pose of having seen everything and being surprised by nothing. It was epitomized by a singular bodily stance, slouched against a wall, hands in pants pockets in such a way that the jacket tails hung over them in front, like a bloodhound’s ears. The dress was conforming: wrinkled jacket, tie askew, chinos, and dirty white bucks. The best compliment was to be called a “cynic.” The most devastating insult was to be called a “weenie.” In the atmosphere of social categorizing and ostracizing found only at an all-boys school, we deified the strong and handsome and we vilified the weak and homely. We assiduously avoided all risk. Intellectual prowess didn’t enter into the equation—except at grade times. Three times a year, classmates were rank-ordered on a bulletin board, the highest at the top, the lowest at the bottom, occasions that constituted revenge for the weenies.
Halfway through my freshman year, I noticed something else. A speaker came to our Wednesday assembly from a union hall in New York City. He delivered a rabble-rousing stem-winder about workers’ rights, and in response students in the hall rose up out of their seats, shouting him down, waving dollar bills in the air, attempting to heap ridicule upon him. I was flabbergasted. What was this? People I knew, friends, had suddenly gone berserk. Their faces were red and they were screaming. They were displaying their colors, defending their class. A realization struck me like a lightning bolt: I was different. I was a scholarship kid and I was in the minority. Class divisions that I had never been aware of, that I had certainly not encountered in the public schools of Washington, D.C., materialized, as suddenly vivid as wrist stamps under the ultraviolet that determined who could enter a country club dance. I had unknowingly crossed a no-man’s-land and had infiltrated the camp of money and privilege. The scales fell from my eyes. How could I have been so blind to the way society was ordered? This cocoon was for rich white people. There was one black boy in my class and one in my brother’s class, too. We had a number of Jews, but not too many.
Once clued in, I cultivated my newfound knowledge and began to notice things—how some of my friends had dresser drawers full of fine starched shirts, how others skipped meals and paid for cheeseburgers at a diner on campus, how on Saturdays they walked into town to casually buy new blazers or madras jackets at the Andover Shop. I began to see how the world was organized to fill their needs and prerogatives. Toward the end of senior year, recruiters from Harvard and Yale and other Ivy League schools arrived on campus to make their pitches. They came to us—we didn’t have to go to them.
On vacations I returned to our rent-controlled apartment in New York. During the winter break, I undertook a bizarre venture with some friends from Westport. We got hold of tuxedos and wore them to crash society balls in the city. We’d learned the fire staircases and hidden corridors of the Plaza and the Pierre and other fancy hotels and simply walked in through the back door. We’d take to the dance floor and flirt with the girls, usually after smuggling in a bottle. There was, of course, the attraction of the opposite sex, but the thrill of it, the exaltation, came from penetrating the closed world of the upper class. I reveled in being a barbarian at the gates. And sooner or later in the course of the evening, I’d pick a sympathetic young girl and try to impress her by admitting I didn’t belong there. Almost always, the girls went along with the game, and some were even intrigued by it. But once, my ploy landed on a less than sympathetic ear and my name was taken and I was summarily ejected from the ball. The following day my mother received a phone call from a woman with a cultivated accent who was on the organizing committee. Was it true that I was a student at Andover? Yes, my mother replied. Well, in that case would I be interested in attending the next dance legitimately? I wasn’t. I told my mother to hang up. And from that time on, I never crashed another ball.
During the Easter break, I spent some time with the family of an Andover friend named Nate, who lived in Wilton, Connecticut. His father was a journalist, a writer for Life magazine, and his mother was a poet, and he had a younger brother and sister. Sitting at their dinner table, before a feast of baked ham and steaming vegetables served on fine china and drinking water from crystal glasses, I felt I had stepped inside a Norman Rockwell painting. The father, a handsome man with a wayward shock of hair, stood up when he carved at the head of the table. He questioned his children with a store of paternal wisdom. The mother gently chided him when he seemed to be exerting too much control. I was witness to the power and wholesomeness of the American dream. This, I told myself, was the way my life would have been had my father lived.
In my second year at Andover, after Bob had graduated and moved on to Harvard, I was pleased to note that I could survive very well on my own. Somewhat to my surprise, I found that my grades were strong, especially in science and English, that I had many friends, and that I was moving ahead in the sort of extracurricular activities that were useful for getting into a top-notch college. I liked writing stories and I entered an essay contest. I needed to write about something personal, something moving, so I chose to write about attending an AA meeting. I pulled out all the stops. I poured on the rhetoric and scooped out the metaphors and applied a heavy helping of the pathetic fallacy. I described the thunder and lightning before the meeting, how it rent the skies and a downpour drenched the streets. Then I wrote about how the congregants, slipping quietly through the side door of a church, convened to tell their stories and bare their souls in a redemptive communion. I described how open they were, how appealing, how they accepted me into the group and how uplifting it all was. Afterward, when we emerged, the city’s streets were washed clean and the cigarette butts had disappeared down the storm drains and the sun came out and the air was fresh—and so on. Barely a single syllable was honest—what I described was the antithesis of what I had actually felt. I won the contest.
During summer vacation of my sophomore year, I drove with two of Bob’s friends from Harvard to Boulder, Colorado, and from there took a Greyhound bus to Yakima, Washington, where I had arranged to take a job in an apple orchard. I was given a room in a tiny makeshift cabin on a hillside overlooking the trees. The work was brutal. I arose at 6:30 in the morning, fixed breakfast, put a sandwich in a paper bag, and joined a work crew. Ten hours later, after backbreaking labor on the top of a ladder, thinning apples from heavy boughs by squeezing them off at the stem, with only two five-minute breaks and half an hour off for lunch, I would return to my cabin, so exhausted that I could barely stand. But then, after frying a hot dog for dinner and washing it down with lemonade, my limbs began to ache pleasantly. I would sit outside as the sun went down over the brown lava hills in the distance, watching the long arcs of the sprinklers over the treetops below and listening to the buzz of the cicadas. On those evenings, alone, with my thoughts vitiated by fatigue, I felt entirely at peace.
The work crew was made up of the descendants of “Okies” and “Arkies” who had migrated west during the dust storms of the 1930s. They lived in squalid quarters in the single-road town of Wiley City in the valley below. They were a hard lot, straight out of The Grapes of Wrath—wrinkled before their time and tanned a permanent brown, with crooked and missing teeth, and outfitted in bib overalls. They turned their weekly paychecks over to a local store that provided groceries and, on Saturday nights, enough hard liquor to send them into oblivion. The children had no formal education—nor had the adults, for that matter. During breaks, the conversation would range widely over issues that aroused their curiosity. I was astounded at the level of ignorance. Debates would break out, sometimes running for days on end: Was Chicago nearer to California than New York? Which was closer to the Earth, the Sun or the Moon? I was allowed to toss in my view, but it carried no more weight that anyone else’s. They were astounded to l
earn, after questioning me in a group conversation that turned awkwardly personal, that I was still a virgin at the age of fifteen. “Hell,” said one. “I lost my cherry in a haystack at eight.”
I went on a weeklong church retreat up in the mountains. We camped and lived on fish plucked from a cold lake. The twenty or so young people divided themselves into two groups, the good kids and the less good. I straddled the two, but by the week’s end I had gravitated toward the misfits. I was an object of fascination to their leader, a young man with slicked-back hair, tight black pants, and motorcycle boots, who went by the nickname of Paladin, after the character in the TV series Have Gun—Will Travel. Paladin, like others in his circle, was of Swedish extraction, and I was surprised to discover that other locals looked down on them, considering them shiftless and dirty, especially those who still occupied “Swede Hill.” After the retreat ended and I returned to work, my quiet evenings at the cabin came to an end. My new friends would drop by, a scruffy gang in rusty cars and broken-down pickups, and take me for a night out. They had little to do. The prime activity was hanging out on a strip of odd lots and hot rods in downtown Yakima. Once Paladin invited me to his home on Swede Hill. It turned out to be a tumbledown shack. Banging around inside, his father raged in a drunken stupor. We beat a hasty retreat, and leaving I saw Paladin’s face had turned scarlet. We didn’t talk about the incident and never returned to his home.
By the summer’s end, I had accumulated enough cash from my paychecks, fifty dollars a week, to buy a small secondhand Harley-Davidson. Learning to ride it, I ended up in ditches a number of times, but eventually I got the hang of it. I resolved to ride it across the country, heading home to New York. I set out in late August with a bedroll and bag of clothes strapped to the back. I barely clocked twenty miles before it broke down. I wheeled it to the nearest motorcycle shop, and had it freighted and shipped to Boston, which gobbled up all of my remaining money. I was forced to hitchhike, but I found the going easy. I went south to San Francisco and then east across the mountains, following Route 30 straight through the fields of Nebraska to Chicago and then on to the turnpikes and New York City. It took me five days. Waiting for rides, with no one in sight, I sang songs on the roadside. I bought postcards in every state and sent them to my mother (“Welcome to Iowa”). I memorized every ride I got and the gist of every conversation with every driver. I had discovered a glorious way to travel. I could go anywhere in the country—for free. I thought of myself as a rambling man, stepping in and out of lives, listening to the dreams and confessions of strangers while speeding along the roads on long afternoons and lonely nights, the original rolling stone.
In my junior year at Andover things began to turn sour. My affection for the place had worn off and I began to strain at the many restrictions. I kept a dog-eared copy of Kerouac’s On the Road on my bedside table. I took to wearing a black turtleneck sweater—faculty members would occasionally pluck the neck down with a forefinger to see if I was wearing the mandatory tie underneath—and also to smoking, which was allowed twice a day, during fifteen-minute breaks after breakfast and dinner. In the second semester I became embroiled in a controversy involving the student literary magazine, The Mirror, of which I was the deputy editor. I wrote a short story about a junior faculty member trying to win the affection of unruly students in a dormitory; his efforts at enforcing discipline were ham-fisted, and the students rebelled. I recounted the story from the students’ point of view and at the end I abruptly shifted the perspective to that of the teacher, seen alone in his room, weeping. My thought was that this sudden shift would jolt the reader and force him to see everything that had gone before in a new light. I doubt that it worked. But in any case, the story bought me a great deal of grief. I based it loosely on an apprentice teacher who had been there a year before and was now gone. The editor of the magazine, a senior, inserted the teacher’s initials into the story’s title, thereby undermining his anonymity. The magazine was printed and then suppressed by a faculty adviser before it was distributed, and the student newspaper broke the story. I was called in and reprimanded, and I didn’t defend myself. I didn’t mention the fact that it was not I who had come up with the title—to do that, I thought, would be to implicate the editor. The issue was raised at a faculty meeting, where I was loudly condemned, and the decision was made to take away my scholarship.
At the start of summer vacation, a teacher spotted me on the side of the road—hitchhiking to New York—and reported me to the dean. I was informed by mail that this was a serious offense. I wrote back indignantly, declaring that I had had no alternative because I had had no money for the fare home and that, given the same situation again, I would be forced to do the same thing. My ploy—the indignant pose of an impoverished but proud student—worked. I was told that I would start my senior year on a somewhat lenient form of disciplinary probation. By the time the letter reached me, I was well into a summer of wild adventure and unbridled freedom. I was going off the deep end.
That critical summer began, not by accident, on the road—more specifically, at a gas station cutoff on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge, a good spot for getting rides west. I had managed to indoctrinate three Andover friends into the glories of hitchhiking, and we decided to set out for San Francisco. We would travel in pairs and meet up in Chicago in three days, precisely at 6:00 p.m., on the steps of the Art Institute. From there, we would make our way to the freight yards and hop a train west. I was in the second pair, delayed by twenty-four hours as I awaited the arrival of my partner. We had poor luck in getting rides (I hadn’t calculated how much longer it would take for two people) and we finally made it to the rendezvous with only twenty minutes to spare. The reunion was joyous—the four of us danced on the sidewalk of Michigan Avenue. Our friends had assessed the situation and had purchased a carton of food for our time in the boxcar. We took a bus to the vicinity of the freight yards.
Then things began to go wrong. We stopped off in a bar to buy bottles of water. Next door was a junkyard of demolished cars, and as we were crossing it, two police cars drove up. We split up, hid, and waited until they left. We reassembled out on the street, but one of us was missing. From inside the yard we heard shouting. A companion and I returned and saw a large black man stomping on top of a car and waving a gun. Gently, taking care not to surprise him, we calmed him down—he turned out to be the night watchman—and we rescued the fourth member of our group, who was still shaking with fear. By now it was getting dark. We circled the junkyard, following a chain-link fence that trailed off above a ravine. We plunged down it, into swamp water up to our waists. By the time we found the yards, we were exhausted, soaked, and filthy. But at least we were there!
Now the problem, in the bewildering jungle of tracks and signals and switching engines, was to find the right train. We had been told that railroad detectives searched the cars before they left, so to elude them, you had to catch the train as it was leaving and gathering speed. We talked to a signalman in a tower; he said a train was due to leave for Los Angeles at five in the morning and he would alert us. We spent the next few hours practicing our technique on trains still being assembled. The first person was the spotter. He would choose the car, toss in the food, and hoist himself up, then ten yards away the second would join him, and those two would help the third, and they’d pick up the fourth as the train accelerated down the line. We got to be pretty good at it. Finally, the moment arrived. Our signalman yelled down: The next train was it! We took our positions and waited anxiously. The engine came on strong, then the boxcars. They flew by, rattling loudly. The doors were closed. Our spotter was on the wrong side of a curve in the tracks, so he couldn’t get a good look at the cars to come. Before we knew it, the entire train had thundered past. We were downcast, ashamed in front of one another and the signalman. We stayed there, hoping for another chance. At dawn two railroad detectives spotted us. After a brief interrogation, they drove us to a highway heading west and told us to get
out of town.
We split up again. My partner and I, after five days scrambling for rides, were in Tucson when we found ourselves next to a freight train idling at a crossing. We asked the engineer where it was bound and he said it was going to Los Angeles. We jumped on board and lay down on a flatbed car right behind the engine. Four feet above us was the belly of a truck riding piggyback. We were ecstatic—here we were at last, riding the rails. We imagined how jealous our two hitchhiking partners would be. The train took off slowly, with the cars banging against one another. It plodded through the desert all night, pulling off frequently to stop at sidings for hours on end. Each time, the cars smashed against one another, like giant dominoes, jolting us awake. By morning we were hungry and caked in dirt, but still enjoying the adventure—until an encounter that took away the romance. As I looked back along the train, I saw two men way behind us, jumping from car to car, approaching us. We could see them only when the train rounded a bend. Their going was slow and they were invisible much of the time, but each time a bend came, they had moved closer than we’d expected. After about half an hour, they reached us, two wiry men poorly dressed. One of them had lips chapped so badly they were cracked open and the sores inside were bright red. He mumbled something and the other man told him to speak up. He did, suddenly almost shouting. He asked us if we had ChapStick. When we said no, he looked disbelieving. He climbed up into the cab of the backward-facing engine to look, he said, for a first-aid kit. While he was gone, the other man, thin as a rail, with matted hair, complained about him. Ever since they had left prison together some months back, he said, the guy had been following him around like a whipped dog. The first man returned, his mission unaccomplished. He looked at our two small suitcases and then at us and then at the other man. He touched a bulge in his pocket. The other man looked away, as if in thought, then turned back and looked at us and then at the first man. Slowly, he shook his head. A couple of minutes passed in silence. Then they got up and left as they had come, jumping from car to car, away from us. I breathed deeply. They could easily have robbed us and rolled our bodies off the train.