by John Darnton
The train pulled into Los Angeles in the evening. We got off and called an Andover buddy, who said he’d be happy to offer us a place to stay. The problem was, he couldn’t pick us up right away. I read the nearest street sign to him. He had never heard of it. We were in some kind of manufacturing area. He said he would come shortly after midnight. We killed time. Nearby, we found a pie factory, and so we spent the last of our money to buy a lemon meringue pie for his mother. Then we sat down to wait—hitchhiking does nothing if not teach patience. We waited—and waited. He didn’t show. At 3:00 a.m., we ate the pie. We found a fleabag rooming house and slept on the floor of the second-floor corridor. At 6:30, I awoke. My friend was yelling—a man who had opened his door and found him curled up there was kicking him in the stomach. We bolted away and left quickly, then hitchhiked north to San Francisco. There, another Andover friend took us in.
In San Francisco, my friend Steve, from our quartet of hitchhikers, introduced me to friends, who he said were wild. The first night, one of them, a football player at UCLA, took us out for a ride. He leapt out of Steve’s car, ran over to a garage, lifted the door, and emerged at the wheel of a shiny black car. It belonged, he said, to a police detective. Anyone else want to take a ride? I hopped into the passenger seat. On the dash was a police radio and on my side a searchlight. We drove into the Presidio. I tried to yank down the rearview mirror, but it wouldn’t budge. When he gave the word, we both jumped out, sending the car careening down a hill, where it smashed into a tree.
The summer continued in that vein. I bummed around, picking fruit in Northern California and getting odd jobs at shape-ups on the grittier sides of towns. I ended up working on a construction crew that was building a school in Santa Barbara, where I joined up again with my buddy Steve. We got to know some locals who liked making trouble. A handsome young man named Keith knew how to hot-wire cars and seemed to steal them as a matter of convenience to get around town. Once or twice we joined him, until one evening we crashed a car into a concrete gateway pillar. Neighbors rushed out, worried looks on their faces. We ran off. Separated, we made our way back to town, hiding in the bushes as every car passed. I resolved to give up car theft. At one point, Keith invited us to move into a house whose owner was away; he had been hired to look after it. He broke a windowpane to simulate forced entry; that way, he could explain the damage. We stayed only a couple of days. I learned that the owner was in rehab, and I didn’t like messing up his house.
In August, we hitchhiked to San Diego and crossed the border into Tijuana. The town was filthy and disgusting. Every two steps, it seemed, we were accosted by pimps and dealers. There, going up a back staircase to the second floor of a whorehouse, in a room with toilet paper tossed in a corner, bullied by a pimp into buying a rubber for five dollars, I lost my virginity.
At the end of the month, I hitchhiked home. I had spent the night before my departure at a fancy party with a girlfriend named Denise; I had borrowed a tuxedo from her friend and gotten so drunk that I’d vomited all over it. The next morning, Steve drove me to my starting point, the beginning of the Golden Gate Bridge. We shook hands and he left. As I stood there, hungover, the taste of vomit still in my throat, depressed at the prospect of all the miles ahead and filled with self-loathing, I wondered what in God’s name I was doing.
Somewhere along the line, I had evolved the philosophical notion that experience was all. The importance of adventures was in the living of them. Added up, they would build character and endow understanding. Each bizarre encounter, each brush with danger, each passage through yet another crazy set of circumstances was another tale to tell, a notch in my belt. In lost moments, waiting by a deserted roadside, with my gut rumbling from hunger, I’d remember all the rides I’d had up to that point, as if they made a significant pattern. I’d reconfigure my life on the road, summarizing it like the biographical bullets I used to read on the back cover of paperbacks: The author went to sea as a merchant marine, worked as a short-order cook in Hong Kong, taught English in Peru. Somewhere in this jumbled journey through the underbelly of America, I thought, would come wisdom and meaning.
After such a summer it was difficult to turn back into an upstanding prep school boy. I managed to make it through most of my senior year. I was breaking rules about smoking and drinking but avoided getting caught. At one point I was called in by Dean Benedict and chastised for having a “negative attitude.” I protested—the soul of innocence—but he had me dead to rights. I spent a good deal of time in the infirmary with fake illnesses, made convincing by high fevers, induced by holding thermometers up to lightbulbs. My grades were suffering badly—I was in advanced courses, like calculus, and skipping so many classes that I was hopelessly behind. By now, I detested Andover—everything about it. Looking at the boys seated around me in chapel or in the dining hall, boys who were my friends, I saw hypocrites and conformists. It was the school that had done that to them, I told myself, the school—with its dictum: “Our goal is not to build boys but to mold men.” Andover had methodically misshaped them into soulless achievers ready to assume positions of privilege they had not earned.
Despite my attitude, my prospects for college were looking good. In the last semester, I was given an “A rating” by Harvard, meaning that I was a shoo-in as a candidate for admission, provided I remained a student in good standing. I did not. With only months left to graduation, one Saturday night I left campus in a car after signing into my dormitory; I went to a bar in the nearby town of Lowell and had half a glass of beer. My absence was discovered when my mother tried to phone me and the housemaster couldn’t locate me. The horrible part was who was driving the car: my brother. He had come up from Harvard to visit me, along with his girlfriend, and she and I had convinced him on the steps of my dormitory to keep the evening alive. “Let’s go somewhere,” I said. He was reluctant to get me in trouble, but neither did he want to look like a spineless killjoy. In the bar, we had a grand time. There was an open mike, and he and I sang a hillbilly song, “As Fer as I’m Concerned,” until we were practically booed off the stage by the barflies.
In my dorm my housemaster waited in ambush. He had been alerted to my absence when my mother had phoned. He interrogated me, and I tried to lie my way out of it. I said I had been in the infirmary. He knew I had not been; he had called there. He said he smelled alcohol on my breath. I did a quick calculation. Could I save the situation by making a clean breast of it? Of course. I admitted what I had done and apologized for placing him in the position of having to make such a difficult decision: He could report me, and end my time at Andover, or he could ignore this unfortunate incident, knowing that I had learned my lesson and that I would never do such a thing again. I stopped, my heart racing, waiting for his response. He looked me in the eye. “I’m not in a difficult position,” he said quickly. “I have no choice. I must report you.” Within two hours, Dean Benedict and another faculty member convened a meeting of two and expelled me. When Benedict told me, he seemed to display the superior air of a man whose verdict had been vindicated. The next morning, I was to be on a train to New York City.
I didn’t feel shook up by leaving. I felt quite the opposite—almost a kind of exhilaration. I took a moment from packing to slip outside my dormitory and carve my name deep into a wooden bench along a pathway. I was leaving my mark. My housemaster called me in for a last-minute talk. He wondered what had gone wrong, why my trajectory at Andover had been so promising and then had gone into a tailspin. I was touched by his curiosity, if not his concern, and I tried to gather my thoughts. I didn’t tell him about my growing disillusionment—my distress at losing my scholarship, my anger at the social conformity, my jealousy of my classmates’ money and privilege. None of this was clear to me at the time. Nor was I able to dig into a deeper truth: that Andover had become a symbol to me. The school often spoke of acting in loco parentis, and I had come to accept this literally. For me, Andover had become an authority figure. It had taken the place of my mo
ther and the entire adult world. I wanted to fight against it and overthrow it. How much better to turn my back on the treadmill competition for top grades and credentials and instead assume the role of the one who refuses to go along, who works to bring down the whole system. I would go out with a bang. My expulsion would complete my résumé—I was now typecast in the role I coveted: the rebel, the troublemaker, the outsider. I didn’t tell my housemaster this because I didn’t know it. I just felt this strange new sense of exhilaration. I looked him in the eye and croaked, “Something’s wrong with this place. You ought to let in girls.”
One agony of my expulsion was my brother’s involvement in it. He had been reluctant to take me off campus, knowing that I, not he, would be running the risk, and he knew how big the consequences were. The iron dictate of our family was that he, in his role as father substitute, would protect me. Now he had thrown that obligation to the winds. Moments before I was to leave Andover, the phone rang. He was on the line and he began by saying that he hadn’t been able to sleep that night, that he wanted reassurance that I had returned to my dorm without getting caught. I took a deep breath and told him I had been expelled. He responded with a long, low moan, a groan of pain.
He met my train in Boston. We would ride down on the train to New York and confront Mom together. On the way, our conversation uncharacteristically turned to our childhood. For the first time, we began exchanging confidences about it, about what we remembered and how hard it had been. He said he wanted to tell me something that he had vowed he never would. It was something that he had seen as a young boy. What was it? I asked. He paused, as if he were reconsidering. Then he began. Did I remember that time Uncle Ben came to visit years ago? The time he brought along with him a buddy, the soccer player, the man who had lifted up his pants leg to show us all the scars on his shin? I remembered perfectly. The next morning, Bob said, he had gone into our mother’s bedroom. She was asleep, and sleeping next to her was the man. The sheets were in disarray and he was naked and lying on his side; his penis was hanging down. “I sometimes wondered,” Bob said, “years afterward, if she had asked Ben to bring someone along, you know, a kind of stud to sleep with her.” I was shocked at his revelation, but even in the midst of it, I wondered how he had been able to stash it away inside himself all these years, like a small bullet imbedded in the flesh.
It’s odd how the past is never really past, how it can rise up to club you when you least expect it. I didn’t feel upset by his revelation, not as much as I later thought I should have been. Something had insulated me from it, maybe all the years that had passed in ignorance. I wondered how the episode had affected my brother, husbanding through childhood that shocking primal image of a stranger in bed with our mother. And why had he chosen this particular moment to reveal it? Was it a means of reducing our mother in our eyes, so that we could face up to her? Or was it proof, at a time when he was open to the accusation that he had abrogated his most important responsibility, that he really was capable of protecting me, that he had been doing it all that time by keeping that bullet wound secret?
When we made it to New York and saw Mom, there was no recrimination. She saved all of her umbrage for Andover, insisting it was too puritanical for boys of creativity and spirit. Typically, she was on our side, no questions asked.
Over the years, I’ve told the story of my expulsion from Andover with a kind of perverse pride. In the telling, I sometimes try to minimize the role my brother played, shading the narrative a bit, emphasizing how his girlfriend and I had to persuade him to act against his better judgment, protecting him as he should have protected me. But there’s no getting around the repercussions the expulsion had. There I was—one minute on the threshold of getting into Harvard, the next scrambling to find a high school to graduate from.
Recently, reading letters between Andover and my mother—letters in which the school demanded payment of back tuition amounting to $675.63 and refused to release my transcript until it was made, and in which my mother attacked the school for expelling me—I came across a stark assessment of Bob’s role in the affair. The letter was from Benedict, explaining that the disciplinary committee sought “extenuation in the fact that John’s absence from bounds was in the company of his brother.” Sadly, he said, the committee could not. He went on: “I am myself in doubt as to just what happened between the two boys. John insists that the initiative was his, that he worked hard to persuade Bob to take him along and finally succeeded. Be that as it may, I should expect that the business would be one which would lie heavily on Bob’s conscience.” His letter struck a truth deeper than he knew.
But as I dug into the correspondence more, I realized that for years I had been omitting some important details in telling the tale. I was astounded to rediscover what I had once known: that I had been properly chastised for a “negative attitude,” that I was failing two courses—chemistry and calculus—and that, in fact, I had already lost my “A rating” to get into Harvard. Who knows? Perhaps I wouldn’t have been admitted there in any case. I abruptly recalled that I had already been breaking serious rules at Andover, taking swigs from a bottle of rum hidden in a bench and smoking cigarettes in prohibited areas. I was itching for trouble, in full-fledged rebellion.
These were facts that had dropped by the wayside in my narrative, as I’d honed it over the years, confident that no matter how I tried to downplay Bob’s guilt, it would shine through, a kind of irredeemable sin, and that my attempts to minimize it were likely to come across as rather noble and even touchingly loyal, as befitting a brother.
Every good story demands a coda. Twenty-five years after my expulsion, a new dean invited me to a reunion. He said there had been a “grassroots” movement to have me return and added that if I did, Andover would give me a diploma. My first response was to fire back a refusal, saying, “Sadly, your capacity for forgiveness outstrips my own.” But then I relented. My old Andover friend Nate, who turned out to constitute the entire grassroots movement, persuaded me by insisting: “If you fall off a fence, you must go back and touch it.”
The twenty-fifth reunion was a bust. It was held in a cabin in the woods, a place I had rarely visited as a student, and not many classmates showed up. The dean put in an appearance and made a speech. At one point, turning to me, he allowed as how an “injustice” had been done to a member of the class but added that the record was vague as to what offense I had actually committed. “They don’t even know,” I thought to myself. He ended by saying he could not confer a diploma—that would require approval from the board of trustees—but had been empowered to offer instead “a certificate of attendance.” He gave it to me, already framed.
I stepped onto a tabletop and made a short speech. Looking my former classmates in the eyes, I said I had come back not to honor Andover but to see them, since what counted in the long run was not loyalty to an impersonal institution but the friendships formed there. I explained I had gone off campus and consumed half a beer, and, holding a glass with half a beer remaining, I offered a toast—to them, not the school—and downed it.
When I sat down, a man I recognized as something of a campus cut-up all those years before sidled over for a chat. His name was Tom. He said that he, too, had been expelled.
“Really?” I remarked. “What did you do?”
He said that his roommate, Ned Evans, known to come from a wealthy family, had found a condom in a drawer. Ned blew it up. They played with it, batting it back and forth like a balloon and brought it outside. When the housemaster’s toddler came by, they gave it to her, and the child ran off with it, skipping around a corner. Within minutes, they heard her mother scream.
“That must have been horrible,” I said. “So you had to leave right away?”
He smiled.
“Not at all,” he said. “I stayed.”
I was mystified and asked him to explain. “My roommate’s father called the headmaster of the school and asked him, ‘What building do you most need?’ The an
swer was a new science hall. He said, ‘The day my son graduates, you’ll get it.’ ”
I was aghast.
“You don’t believe me?” Tom said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a map, and pointed to a darkened silhouette of a building that was labeled EVANS HALL.
I did not keep my certificate of attendance.
CHAPTER 14
I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison by a roundabout path. After I was expelled from Andover, no private school of any repute would take me on to finish out the year. I enrolled in a place called the Searing School, a small tutoring outfit of tiny cubicles in a walk-up off Lexington Avenue. I needed only four credits to graduate. My teacher was a soft-spoken young man from Mississippi, who sported a fine mustache in the style of William Faulkner, his hero, whose works he assigned, along with Hawthorne and Henry James. He had moved to New York in hopes of making it as a writer and lived with his wife in a tiny apartment on Horatio Street in the Village. They invited me there to talk about writers and writing. We drank cheap Chianti. The relationship felt like something I must have read about once, life in the Village in gentler times. I celebrated my “graduation” with a night of drinking at the Subway Inn, a smoky dive on Lexington and Sixtieth Street. My diploma was supposed to come by mail, but I don’t remember ever seeing it.