by Dave Itzkoff
College called out to me like a carnival barker, coming on to me with its well-honed and irresistible sales pitch, declaring that it was everything I hoped for. Anything I wanted it would find for me, and anything I wanted it to be it would become. Once I walked through its gates, it promised I could shed my previous identity and construct a new one according to my wishes. It guaranteed me that the arena I was about to enter, and each one following, would be a perfect meritocracy, where I would be judged solely on my ability to perform a task and my will to see it done. Here was a world where whatever I had been before didn’t matter—all that was important was what I wanted to be. Put aside all previous shames and abandon all embarrassments, it whispered. College assured me that it was the path between me and my ideal self, and it swore to me that the desire to travel this route was all I needed to complete the journey.
College was a liar.
I arrived on the campus of Princeton University at the end of the summer of 1994, delivered there one August morning by my uncharacteristically and antiseptically quiet parents. Of all the schools I had applied to and been accepted into, from Dartmouth to the University of Southern California, Princeton turned out by accident to be the closest to us geographically: it was only a two-hour drive of undifferentiated New York and New Jersey highways, a straight southward shot past outlet malls and shopping centers until one hard right turn took you past the soccer, lacrosse, and rugby fields, the mansions of the upper-class eating clubs and the Center for Jewish Life, and then you were there, on its chockablock campus of Gothic quadrangles, Ionic-style Greek temples, one Frank Gehry–designed library, and a rusty Henry Moore sculpture. The change in scenery was abrupt, and the minimal road trip afforded no time to adjust.
Aside from a family visit we had made to Princeton almost a year earlier, back when I had no idea what I wanted in a college other than for it to be different from high school and far, far away from it, my parents had largely kept themselves out of my college application process, never asking to review essays or standing over me to make sure my submission materials were mailed out on time. My father, in particular, had committed himself to a superstitious vow of silence, refusing to put his thumb on the scale even by encouraging me to consider certain schools or by offering his opinions of the ones I had applied to; he was afraid his slightest attempt to influence my opinion could have traumatic and unintended consequences down the line. What if he made it clear he favored one school over another and I didn’t get in? What if I chose to attend a university based on his preference and I later discovered I disliked it? What if he told me not to go somewhere and I went there anyway to spite him? What if his actions in any way led to his disappointing his son? Wouldn’t it be better, then, not to act at all?
On this day of all days, I expected my father to be teeming with paternal advice, eager to guide my transition and take advantage of this last opportunity—for the next four years, at least, and possibly forever—when he would be the sagest, most seasoned adult male in my sphere of influence. If nothing else, I thought I would hear the final iterations of one or perhaps two stories he had lately been recounting to me from his personal experience, stories that were his personal favorites because they were germane to my situation and because I was old enough to hear them; because they seemed to offer general life lessons without suggesting specific courses of action that could later be contradicted or proved fallacious; and because no story in our family gets told only once.
The first story told of my father’s own attempt at attending college—the first time he dropped out of school, not to be confused with the second time he bailed on his bachelor’s degree. In 1956, at the advanced age of sixteen, he enrolled at Tulane University in New Orleans, where one of his very first lectures was in a calculus class taught by an instructor named Dr. Goto. As my father and his fellow students took their seats, Dr. Goto, a small Japanese man with a three-piece suit and a briefcase, was working his way from one end of the classroom to the other, filling every square inch of chalkboard space with inscrutable formulae made even more cryptic by his cramped handwriting. Any hope that the lack of clarity in the professor’s printed expression would be compensated for by a lucid and mellifluous oratorical style were quickly dispelled when Dr. Goto, who, in the years following World War II and the Korean War, had come to teach calculus to American students in the Deep South, began speaking at ninety miles an hour about “Ze fukshun!” and “Ze dewivative!” In especially animated tellings of this story, my father might exclaim “Ze fukshun! Ze fukshun!” a few more times and add, “Nobody knew what the fuck he was talking about.”
At that moment, my father said, “You shoulda seen all the kids that picked up their textbooks and made a beeline for the door.” He, however, was not one of the students savvy enough to exit the class. He stuck out the semester, and for his efforts, he was rewarded with a failing grade, the first of several unsubtle nudges that would eventually prod him out of school before his freshman year was completed.
That was one tale he had been telling me a lot lately. This was the other: as a teenager growing up in the Bronx, my father once traveled from his home turf in Pelham Parkway to neighboring Parkchester, where he and a friend climbed to the roof of the friend’s apartment building to eat fried chicken and to smoke pot. After getting high, the boys began to get silly, and their loud antics and the chicken bones they were hurling to the streets below aroused the suspicion of the building’s tenants, who called the police and had the boys arrested.
The story did not end with the punitive ear-twisting that my father received from his mother when she bailed him out of jail.
When my father was summoned before the draft board some years later, all that the army knew of him was his name, his age, and his arrest record, which showed he had been busted for marijuana possession, so they naturally assumed the worst about him. “We employ some of the best doctors in the nation,” the army told him. “We could help you kick your drug habit for good.”
“I’m sorry,” he answered, probably stifling a grin, “but I’m a hopeless addict.”
For as much as I knew of my father’s drug history then, this was easily my favorite story about it, and the more I have learned about him since, the more enamored of it I have become. No one in the story gets hurt, and it’s kind of funny, though the joke is funnier if you know its true punch line, that my father really did grow up to become addicted to a far more harmful substance. Also, it seemed to offer an embryonic display of the verbal craftiness that would serve him well in later life. For all I knew, the incident may have been the only thing that kept my father from being conscripted and killed in one of our nation’s earlier ill-considered wars of choice—which would mean that I owe my existence to my father’s drug use.
The moral of his first story was clear: If this was the best I could do, my father seemed to be saying, just think how low the bar has been set for you, my son. Look at how little you need to accomplish in order to surpass me. If I simply showed up for my first lecture, I was already my father’s equal. If I completed a single course with a passing grade, I was his hero. And if, after four years, I returned to that man—the onetime genius who had graduated from high school two years early only to flunk out of college in under one year—with my own bachelor’s degree from an Ivy League institution, I was his king.
The point of my father’s second story was more ambiguous. He wasn’t strictly saying that he gave me his permission to take drugs; oh, no, the part of his life that overlapped with the entirety of mine had been one long argument against that. And though he loved to spend his summers in a cabin upstate in Monticello, New York, fishing in the morning and watching FOX News in the evenings, I don’t think he was advocating a libertarian worldview that one should always seek to undermine authority and misrepresent oneself to government agencies.
No, I think the lesson he hoped this legend would teach me was a more general one: that it was okay to try new things and important not to be afraid of
them; that it was permissible, even necessary, to make mistakes, get silly, throw chicken bones off rooftops; that it was only through the acquisition of experience—no matter how awkward or self-thwarting it might be—that a boy becomes a man. Experience cranked the engine of time, and on occasion time transformed our humiliating defeats into minor victories.
This was what he had been telling me repeatedly, incessantly, until the day he and my mother conveyed me to the location where my trajectory departed from theirs, depositing me at the mysterious machine whose inner mechanisms would be known only to me but from which their vantage point appeared like a great black box working its unknown effects on their son to alter him into something different and unfamiliar, and they suddenly went mute. Unlike the other sets of parents we saw that day, who chaperoned their children with grace and appropriate distance, my mother and father did not take their cues to depart as soon as they saw I had been delivered safely with all of my belongings; they continued to hover and rotate around me like satellites until I told them they could leave. I unlocked the door to my ancient dormitory, saw its brick walls decorated with green oxidized stars to memorialize the occupants who had died in world wars, and felt a stuffy, humid draft begin to creep in through the stone flue.
I was idealistic enough those first few weeks to believe that any other freshman would be as unfamiliar as I was with the school and its structure and that any new person I encountered could be converted into a friend through conversation. But there is a way that two people look at each other when they meet, even passing strangers whose glances align for an instant. In that moment, their eyes can convey warmth and kindness, indifference or revulsion, calculated and communicated in a fraction of a second. When I looked at my new classmates, I thought I was putting out a message of curiosity and openness, but I must have been communicating desperation and vulnerability, because what I saw directed back at me was ambition, aggression, and antipathy. My college tenure would be spent vying to maintain my averageness against an infinite number of competitors with an infinite range of skills developed from an infinite number of backgrounds, and it would be a losing battle. They came from their country clubs and cotillions, conservatories and community-service projects, preparatory schools and magnet programs, with preexisting connections and private instructors, old friends who came with them to school and more than sufficient charisma to make new ones. I showed up with four Beatles CDs and the same Janis Joplin poster that had hung on my wall in high school.
So for a time I fell in with my three roommates, who all wanted the same thing I did and, who like me, had been led to believe by urban legend and John Hughes movies that by simply being in a place where lots of women also happened to be and behaving as we normally would, gravitational forces would naturally draw them to us. But over the months and semesters, after many Saturday nights spent scanning the dog-eared freshman facebooks we had dutifully purchased on our move-in day, poring over the female faces and wondering what the bodies attached to them might look like, and renting every movie from every library on campus and watching it in the solitude of our cold and drafty den, we had not made much progress. We began to go our separate ways: one roommate found his peers in an a cappella singing group, and a second was absorbed by his friends in the school orchestra; the third never quite got his act together and trolled the dormitory halls telling our female neighbors things like “You know, I’ve never watched a woman put on her makeup before.”
That left only me, and it meant that down the mean streets would have to go a young man who was not himself mean. I knew where the women would be, and to get to them I would have to get myself to the parties, fraternity and sorority houses, keggers, mixers, dimly lit dormitories, and back-alley taprooms that sat just outside the jurisdiction of campus police. There, I felt, I was certain to find women—women who wanted to be with actual men who looked like they strode right out of baseball cards and deodorant ads, instead of hairless, prepubescent cherubs from Raphael paintings with tiny corkscrew penises. There, I believed, this same youthful innocent who had not yet consumed an entire can of beer would be corrupted into ingesting much more illicit substances. It was paralyzing to think about, and it was all I thought about. I was trapped inside my mind, and my mind was the only place I allowed myself to live.
They were extraordinary, the false realities that I could invent, the elaborate fantasies that I could concoct from the thinnest of circumstances, and they became more delirious and desperate when some actual women came into my social circle. There was the little Jewish girl with the short chestnut hair and almond eyes whom I met on an off-campus hiking trip, whom I circled and circled but could never bring myself to dive in on. There was the coed, only heard on the phone and never seen, who was set up with me at random for a campus-wide computer-dating dance, for whom I bought an unasked-for bouquet and made an unsolicited dinner reservation, and whose distaste and bewilderment I completely understood when she called to back out of the whole arrangement at the eleventh hour. There was the tall and flaxen-haired roommate of a friend of a friend whom I was too scared to make a move on when I walked her home from a party one night, but whose cafeteria meals I was perfectly at ease crashing and whose dorm-room door I was completely comfortable standing outside at any time of day or night, whether she was home or not. The little Jewish girl with the short chestnut hair and almond eyes even came back to me a second time, ready to let me take another shot at whatever she had to offer, but all I had learned in that time was how to sit actionless in intimidated awe of her, and she drifted away again.
That was just my freshman year.
As a sophomore, I continued to fantasize about the graduate students for whom I checked out books at the art-library desk where I worked, and phoning up girls who said they already had boyfriends at other schools, until I befriended a young woman who lived on my hallway. After a few weeks of hanging out, doing homework in my dormitory living room, and sitting at the back of a chartered bus, swapping swigs from a hidden bottle of Goldschläger on the way to an R.E.M. concert, I had concluded in my messed-up, desperate noggin that we were in the midst of a relationship that was on the verge of getting physical at any moment. That lasted until she started telling me about the dreamy junior she had her eye on, at which point I viciously and abruptly broke up with her in my mind. I wrote savage eviscerations of her in my journal, fixated on rueful Bob Dylan songs, copying out the lyrics to “Idiot Wind” over and over on my binder in silent dedication to the latest unrequited crush to spurn my unarticulated advances, certain this music by a twice-divorced journeyman who’d known everyone from Woody Guthrie to Federico Fellini had been created to address the personal and specific needs of a nineteen-year-old virgin who’d lived his whole life between New York and Princeton.
I vowed to call her out on her perceived callousness, and when I never made good on this threat, I swore never to speak to her again or even explain how it was that she had offended me. I wondered then, as I do now, if she had the slightest sense of the turmoil she was wreaking in my life. Did some fraction of my agony ever get through to her, and did any part of it remain after I cut myself off from her? Or was she one more woman who wandered blissfully through the world, another unknowing assassin who killed men like me from afar without ever having to see the crime scenes?
It was the midpoint of my sophomore year, and I had found a means of distracting myself from solitude, a medium that offered me access to the part of my brain that didn’t know how big the world was and how tiny and inadequate I had become, something I could turn to at any time of day when I wasn’t feeling the way I wanted to feel or when I didn’t want to feel anything at all, and that was drugs.
I started growing my hair long, traded my glasses for contact lenses, and ditched the remnants of my high school wardrobe for CBGB T-shirts, in tribute to my Manhattan homestead, and a silver chain I wore around my neck with a padlock I had attached, in honor of the first-wave British punks I had recently discovered. These sup
erficial changes eventually drew me into a whole new group of friends who worked at the college radio station and had memberships at the alternative eating clubs and dining co-ops; who turned me on to all the indie rock and classic rock I had missed in my time spent playing my four Beatles records over and over again; who looked and dressed like Willie Nelson in the 1970s, disheveled and intimidating from afar but utterly harmless up close.
From the fateful night when I was handed a bong for the first time and, not knowing how to approach the apparatus, tried to fit it inside my mouth and asked if they made them any smaller, I became a different person. In those moments when everyone else at a party started shooting stealthy glances at one another and then disappeared to parts unknown, I was no longer the guy left behind to wonder where all his buddies had gone. I was a part of that group, who got to visit the shabby, half-lit rooms where all the action went down, always littered with unwashed clothes and half-eaten sandwiches and smelling vaguely of cats even when no cats were present. I got to watch the rituals, in which an acolyte would retreat to a corner and turn on a stereo softly playing American Beauty or Pretzel Logic, and a high priest would sit at the edge of a bed or stand over a dresser drawer arranging his relics and manipulating his paraphernalia, packing a bowl of marijuana so compactly and precisely that it looked like a newly mowed field in miniature. Then he would offer up the first hit to whoever looked like he was most in need of relaxation, and eventually, we’d all take a hit, and another and another and another and another, and we were happy and content to share the same air and smoke and saliva. If you overdid it one night and couldn’t make your way back to your bedroom, you fell asleep right where you were on the floor, woke up the next morning, and wandered home in a delighted daze.
Having concluded my prepared statement, I’m ready to take your questions.
Did I, as a direct result of my new drug-consuming identity, meet any women who, in their blissed-out state, found me more attractive or were willing to sacrifice a small bit of their dignity in exchange for access to, among other things, my stash? No.