Walter Kirn

by Lost in the Meritocracy (v5)

  “I see you at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s where I went. A little intense but not obnoxious. Though I guess you could also try Princeton, where your dad went.”

  “No one knows that. How do you?”

  “I asked him in a parent-teacher conference. It surprised me. I thought he was lying. I wouldn’t have guessed.”

  “Fitzgerald studied at Princeton. I’ve read Fitzgerald.”

  “Except that he barely studied. And didn’t graduate. Eugene O’Neill, the same. They kicked him out. I’d be suspicious of a place like that. If you want to crawl drunk and naked through the snow after being raped by your best friend, there’s always Yale, of course.”

  I looked at my wrist as though I wore a watch but had forgotten to put it on that day. Our talk had grown dispiriting.

  “Another Miller?” said Mr. C. “I dug up a British Hendrix bootleg that’ll melt your temples through those headphones.”

  I rose from the couch without signaling or asking. Mr. C. looked resigned. He stood up, too. We’d had a few good times together, but I was absorbed in my plans now, and he knew it. He knew he’d been just a stop along the way.

  “Well, wherever you go,” he said, “skip the drinking games, don’t buy acid or uppers on the street, and always—I want you to promise—wear a rubber. Even if her daddy’s very rich.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “Funny.”

  “Now get out of here.”

  And that’s exactly what I did.

  The year before I left for Princeton, during my last semester at Macalester, something happened to remind me that I’d chosen correctly in leaving the Midwest. My high school invited me back for senior prom as a sort of returning celebrity and I was given a choice of two exchange students as dates for the upcoming dance. One, a French girl, Genevieve, was conventionally pretty, with the sort of brown skin that looks fine with a few moles on it and isn’t terribly marred by a dark hair or two. The second girl, Lena, my favorite, was a lithe, unblemished stunner whose skin seemed dusted in powdered gold. I don’t remember her country of origin. It was one of those small, frigid nations that at the time was partly subjugated by the Russians but would eventually break free and dominate the worldwide modeling scene.

  The reason I had the choice of the two girls was that they intimidated my male classmates, who sensed—correctly, I think—that the exchange students abhorred our monotonous rural culture and were counting the hours until they could jet home to the bastions of strong dark coffee and avant-garde theater where they’d been raised and educated. The girls, it seemed clear to us, had lost some lottery that had assigned their more fortunate peers to such hot spots as Florida and San Francisco. The idea was that we were to play ambassadors to this pair of lovely travelers, convincing them of the United States’ benevolent, easygoing character, but instead our high school found their presence embarrassing, perhaps because they spoke better English than most of us and seemed caught up in issues of global concern about which we had scant knowledge and few opinions.

  I was considered the exception. I liked the girls and was thought by my shy friends to have something in common with them because I was already enrolled in college and had learned there to talk politics, which allowed me to voice polite agreement with their uncharitable assessments of “America’s cultural imperialism.” The only problem, as the prom approached, was that I couldn’t imagine choosing Lena—my clear favorite between the girls—without offending Genevieve. When I let Lena in on my dilemma, she failed to see the trouble: we should attend as a group, she said, a trio. My face remained still as we talked this notion over, but behind my brow strange thoughts unfolded, dim scenarios of new behaviors, of unfamiliar sensations, exotic postures. I began to sense that my small-town high-school prom—my symbolic farewell to the Midwest—would also be my introduction to a welcome new life of cosmopolitan decadence.

  Accompanied by my two dates, the drive from the dance in the school gymnasium to the after party at a lake took about three hours—hours I can’t account for except as a drastic reconfiguration of my accumulated heartland notions about “going all the way.” I recall specifically a big, sweet slug of syrupy fruit wine that passed from mouth to mouth and then was allowed to stream down a bare chin onto a pair of dark breasts with perfect moles, which snagged the liquid in glinting droplets that I was invited to lightly tongue away while another tongue, and then another, shaped themselves into slim, wet, fleshy cones and drove themselves deep, deep into my ear canals. Skirts came up, pants slipped off, and legs made V’s that turned into X’s and shifted on complex axes that allowed for wonders of sidelong friction that brought forth fetching squeaks and grunty purrs that primordially bridged all language gaps. Some new bond was being stirred in that car, some fresh form of international understanding that the Rotary Club, or whichever organizations sponsored the exchange program, might not have planned on but shouldn’t have been displeased by, so intimately did it shrink our globe. I’d grown up a good son of rural Republican Minnesota, but now I was a citizen of the world. When we finally reached the party we smelled like sin, and not American sin but a deep-brewed funk of Romanized corruption that caused me to compulsively sniff my hands whenever I lifted my cup to sip my beer.

  My buddies swarmed in to share their prom-night war stories, and my girls slipped away past the bonfire into the trees, leaving me alone to contemplate—with the distaste and contempt that I assumed they suffered from every moment of their visits here—-just how stupid Minnesota was. How stupid we all were, here in crass America. Everywhere I looked I saw the evidence. The barbarous chest-pounding of our square-jawed prom king as he bellowed “Seniors rule!” across the lake. The way the homely girl we’d nicknamed “Critter,” and who pathetically answered to the name, sat alone and shoeless on a log, dipping her toes in the froggy, fetid water. And the music! The music was the worst. Ted Nugent blaring at teeth-rattling volume from the tape deck of someone’s flame-streaked red Camaro. How had I ever borne this gruesome exile?

  I went off to look for my tutors in exoticism. I stepped on Styrofoam beer cups that loudly crunched and would never, I knew from science class, decompose, but would junk up our sacred earth for a thousand years. A drunk girl whose breasts I’d crudely mashed and squeezed once during a nighttime bus trip from a speech event sloppily grabbed my crotch and slurped my cheeks with a tongue that smelled like menthol cigarettes. As I twisted away from her, she said, “Not good enough for you, am I, college boy?” I didn’t correct her. It wasn’t nice, I knew, but sometimes the truth is the truth and can’t be helped.

  MY FIRST SEMESTER AT PRINCETON I HAD FOUR ROOMMATES who resembled no one I’d ever known: Peter, a foppish piano prodigy with a mature, fine-bristled mustache, who dreamed of writing Broadway musical comedies and spent his leisure time in a robe and slippers, smoking Benson and Hedges Menthol 100s and hunching, vulturelike, over his black Steinway, plinking out show tunes about doe-eyed ingenues who’d been seduced and ruined by caddish tycoons. Jennifer, the composer’s plump heiress girlfriend, whose father owned a night club and often sent a limousine on weekends so that his daughter could party with celebrities, who—as I learned from a framed snapshot which sat on a dresser in her and Peter’s bedroom—included the two best-known members of the Bee Gees. Tim, the son of a New York journalist, who kept his cheeks fresh with Oil of Olay and treated the composer and the heiress as surrogate parents, addressing them in baby talk and asking them to tuck him in at night, which they did, complete with fairy tales. And Joshua, an earnest Long Island Quaker kid with a close-trimmed, pious-seeming red beard, who played guitar and protested apartheid, which I pretended to be concerned about, too, although I wasn’t certain what it was. The SATs hadn’t required such trivial knowledge.

  One night a report came over the radio that John Lennon, Joshua’s hero, had been assassinated. We were lying on our bunks in the small bedroom that we shared at the far
end of the suite, around the corner from a dank bathroom which smelled of wet feet and backed-up drains. My other three roommates slept closer to the common room, a bright south-facing sitting area neutrally furnished with nicked-up chairs and tables and a tough old institutional sofa whose denim-covered cushions hid a thick layer of pennies, ash, and paper clips. The suite was located in Wilson College, the ugliest cluster of buildings on the campus and the home to an inordinate number of glum-looking black and Jewish kids. That I, an unconnected transfer student, had ended up in Wilson was not surprising, but my Manhattan roommates seemed offended at having been assigned such modest quarters.

  “Lennon. Dead,” said the radio. “Imagine.”

  The first report, and the many that followed it, plunged Joshua into fits of heaving grief. “They finally did it,” he moaned. “They finally got him.” Lennon’s untimely demise meant little to me thanks to my heavy-metal upbringing (I hadn’t even known, before that night, that he’d gone on writing and recording after he left the Beatles), but I could tell from Joshua’s stricken eyes that something momentous had occurred, a catastrophe which, in the words of one announcer, would “devastate an entire generation,” and I wanted in on the cosmopolitan trauma. I saw the event as a chance to put behind me my provincial, mass-market sensibilities and join the ranks of the discerning elect.

  “Let’s sing something. ‘Working Class Hero,’” I said to Joshua, squeezing a few thin tears through my dry ducts. I hadn’t heard of the song before that night but the radio people were making fancy claims for it, calling it one of Lennon’s most “personal statements” and an “enduring critique of fame itself.”

  “I’d rather play another one. It’s for the young man, the poor killer,” said Quaker Joshua. He settled his shaky fingers on the guitar strings, strummed a chord, fell silent, sighed, then rallied.

  “All the lonely people,” he began.

  The choice was a magical piece of luck for me. Afterward, spent, having sung with my whole rib cage and fully emoted on every memorized word, I felt the urge to cry for real—from gratitude. Thanks to my gloomy second-grade music teacher, I’d managed to respond convincingly, in the company of a well-credentialed witness, to a historic cultural tragedy that would be revisited for decades. My genuine tears flowed along with my false tears, and as they did the distinction between them blurred. I wasn’t ashamed of this. My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me. It represented ambition, longing, need. It sprung from the deepest chambers of my soul.

  “Somehow it’s going to turn out okay,” said Joshua. “Somehow we’re going to come through this.”

  “Let’s hope,” I said.

  I needed a good cry that night for other reasons. I’d needed one for weeks.

  It had all started one Sunday afternoon when Jennifer, the heiress, returned from a weekend city trip accompanied by a uniformed driver who was lugging a case of champagne her father had given her. I watched from my bedroom doorway, thinking: I live with people who have servants. When Jennifer saw me loitering, unoccupied, she invited me into the common room where we popped the cork on a green bottle and drank the bubbly without glasses, licking the foam when it ran down the neck. This struck me as the height of decadence and reason enough for betraying my hometown buddies, with whom I’d promised to keep in touch but hadn’t. I’d heard from my mother that a couple of them were in the army now, stationed in Korea and Germany, and that one had hitchhiked to Alaska to labor in a salmon cannery. Another guy from Taylors Falls, a famously volatile delinquent who used to call in bomb threats to the school, had married and fathered a child by a farm girl who suffered from a form of dwarfism. Her doctors had warned them that giving birth might kill her but my friend had received a message from God, reportedly, assuring him that she’d survive. The delivery proved complicated and costly, and to cover the bills my friend had taken a job disposing of dangerous industrial wastes. The work had required him to wear a spacesuit, but the outfit hadn’t functioned well, apparently, and now he was ailing, unemployed, and, rumor had it, headed for divorce.

  “What are you?” Jennifer asked me as we drank. “This is an arts room. What’s your bag? Your talent?”

  “I’ve written a bit of experimental poetry.”

  “To me you look more like a … Let me think. A playwright.”

  I grinned from cheek to blushing cheek, flattered that I looked like anything to someone who consorted with the Bee Gees.

  “I think it’s the way your hair sticks up,” said Jennifer. “Playwrights are generally terribly unkempt. It’s all they can do to shave and not catch crabs.”

  “Really? I’ve never heard that,” I said. “Why?”

  “Why are most virtuoso violinists perverted sex fiends? Because they are,” she said. “Why are all newspaper people disgusting drunks?”

  “You’ve seen a lot,” I said.

  “I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen it from the front and from the back.”

  “What are the Bee Gees like?”

  “Normal. Nice. You’d like them.”

  Was this a promise? I could only hope. It didn’t seem like an outlandish hope, though. The friends of one’s friends very often became one’s own friends—time and proximity were all it took. I slugged back more wine to cool my burning brain. A diploma, I was starting to see, was the least of what Princeton had to offer; the major payoff was front-row seats. To everything. But what would they cost? I suspected they might be free. Something told me that people such as Jennifer didn’t obtain admission to things with tickets; they were ushered in through secret entrances, through fire exits and stage doors, and their guests were permitted to sweep on in behind them.

  To consolidate what I believed to be my progress toward someday unwinding backstage with global pop stars, I asked Jennifer about her family history, guessing that ownership of a top hotel wasn’t an overnight achievement. I was rewarded with a saga of American commercial striving which commenced at the end of the last century and took in the construction of famous bridges, the invention of basic industrial materials, the compounding of fortunes through advantageous marriages, and the advent of the modern theme park. Jennifer introduced the epic’s cast with a certain formality, by their full names, including their middle and maiden names, but after a while she relaxed and the demigods became “Harold,” “Old Bill,” “Great-Gran.” Her story had a strange effect on me. It made me feel trusted, included, but also belittled, particularly when Jennifer called her family “my people” or “the clan.” I had no clan, of course, and I knew there was little chance I ever would, since such lineages took ages to mature, as did the investments they were founded on. Yes, I could start on the project in a few years, and with luck it might still be advancing when I died, but I’d never know its ultimate fate. Jennifer obviously realized this, because she asked not one question about my background after she finished mythologizing hers.

  When we’d drained the champagne, she said, “You owe me twenty.”

  I stared at her, uncomprehending. “For what?” I said.

  “That was an excellent label. You owe me twenty. Though actually who you owe it to is Daddy.”

  I didn’t have the money, and I said so. My parents sent checks now and then, but not for much; they lacked any sense of the cost of living at Princeton. My phone bills alone consumed most of their remittances, freezing me out of any real social life and limiting my wardrobe to a pair of wrinkled Levi’s corduroys, a blue pocket T-shirt with a torn armpit, a white Oxford dress shirt I never wore, and one red, lumberjacky flannel number, which filled me with shame about my regional origins. My Adidas sneakers were fashionable enough, but they weren’t the scuffed-up leather Top-Siders favored by the breezy gentry.

  “Welsher,” said Jennifer, putting me in my place. In Minnesota, I hadn’t had a place, but here I did: several levels down from heiresses who charged their roommates to drink free wine. It seemed unfair that I had come so far in life only to find new wa
ys to fall short.

  “I’ll pay you next week,” I said.

  “We’ll just forget it.”

  “I don’t want to forget it.”

  “Tough,” said Jennifer. Then she gave me the bottle to throw away.

  Week by week, the humiliations mounted. While reading Tim his bedtime story one night, Jennifer was forced to take a phone call and she asked me to fill in. The book was The Little Prince, in French, and Tim wound up having to read it to himself, throwing his baby voice through a stuffed koala worn down practically furless from years of hugging. Soon afterward, a friend of Peter’s from Boston invited me to join him for a squash game. No racket, though. And no idea what one might look like.

  Then came the business of the furniture.

  Returning from classes one afternoon, past the fat gray squirrels all nervous with their nuts, the squads of leggy female runners with sweaty ponytails flopping against their necks, the imperturbable immigrant science profs attentive only to their inner reveries, the rumbling riding mowers of the grounds crew vacuuming up dry leaves through their attachments, I was feeling vaguely content about the fact that I’d survived another day without exposing my naked ignorance when I noticed a Bloomingdale’s delivery van parked on the sidewalk outside my dormitory. Its broad rear doors were open wide and its loading ramp was down, a pair of dollies with heavy canvas straps lying beside it on the chilly ground among a litter of empty cardboard cartons.

  Inside, in the common room, two burly workers were taking orders from Peter, who was in his robe on the piano bench, an ashtray balanced on one of his crossed knees. The workers had brought in new armchairs, plant stands, lamps, a coffee table, a large TV set, and a voluptuous chintz sofa, setting them all on a Persian rug so vast that its edges curled up against the walls, blocking the electrical outlets. There were also white lace curtains on the windows and the floral smell of scented candles. The old institutional decor had vanished, replaced with what looked like a set from an old movie about the lives of refined young socialites.