College 1

4.

It is harder than you think to give up privilege. Being a screw-up at Exeter meant that you didn’t get into Harvard, where a good third of the graduates did go. Peter got his act together and got in. I didn’t even apply. I applied to Columbia, UC Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina. I got into Berkeley and North Carolina, but I was waitlisted for Columbia.

When I was completing the applications, I read an article in Time magazine that said students needed to distinguish themselves in some way in their essays. So I wrote an essay about how I liked to ride the subway and look at the people. I’ll never know whether my essay helped or hindered me. But I was called in for a consultation, as we all were, with the college admissions person at Exeter, and on the spot he called the admissions director at Columbia and noted how my grades had improved and my SATs were pretty good. My hunch is that call is what did the trick. A few weeks later, I got an acceptance letter.

New York City, like the Old Howard, was another antithesis to Exeter, especially in its offerings of sleaze. I lost my virginity during orientation week. Two Exeter classmates, Bailey Wilkinson and Myron Magnet, and I began cruising for prostitutes in Times Square. Bailey was a good old boy from Nashville, but with a sweet streak. Myron was a dandy, a poet whose mentor might have been Edgar Allan Poe.

A wiry black man approached us. “You want some girls?”

We said yeah. I was suspicious, because in Boston a year before, I’d taken a guy up on a similar offer and he took me to this sleazy tenement. In the hallway, he took my $20 and had me wait. And wait. And wait. Of course he never returned. But this was New York. We started following him, when a policeman came up to us.
“He doesn’t have any girls,” the cop said. “If you want girls, you got to go to the bars.”

We thanked him, grinning at each other, such a New York moment. I went up to the black man and said, “That cop said you don’t have any women. If that’s true, I will kill you.” Where I got this kind of nerve, I don’t know. We’d been drinking, of course, we were 18, it was even legal. The guy slinked off into the night.

We ended up in a Puerto Rican bar on W. 72nd Street that one of us had heard had girls. And there they were.

Three of them approached us, and we made our deals. Being a nice guy, none too competitive, I went with the ugliest of the women. We did it and that was that.

Bailey died in his thirties of some kind of cancer. Myron became famous. Here’s his Wikipedia entry:

[Myron] Magnet is the author of several books, and is probably most well-known for writing The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass, which President George W. Bush has cited as a book that had a profound influence on his approach to public policy. The central premise of the book is that the dramatic cultural transformation that the United States experienced during the 1960s unintentionally created a vast underclass whose societal maladies we are still being forced to address.

The orgies of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll that swept through middle class white America were the cause of urban poverty – not white flight, not the collapse of the industrial base, not racism. We seemed to draw opposite lessons from our joint foray into the underclass that September night. I suspect it was his first time as well. I wrote him at the Manhattan Institute a year or so ago to remind him of our history, but I’ve yet to hear back.

That same first week, I also met Mark and Steve, who lived down the hall from me in the dorm and who became close friends. I had a single room. I cringe as I remember my first encounter with Steve. He was hanging out in my room, looking in the mirror over my sink. “You’re not Jewish, are you?” I asked out of the blue, hoping to bond with him by ragging on all the Jews at Columbia.

“Yes, I am.” Oops. “The trouble is there’s too many Jews here,” he said. How we recovered from this initial meeting, I’ll never know, but it wouldn’t have happened without Steve’s generosity of spirit. Steve was tall and dark, athletic looking without being athletic.

Mark was small and compact, with an unruly mop of curls, and a nose big enough to prevent me from making the same mistake I made with Steve. Mark and I had many adventures in Manhattan. I learned at least as much from him as from the Great Books curriculum at Columbia. We went the Cloisters, and he admired the medieval tapestries there with an appreciation way more mature than mine. At the same time, with considerably less maturity, we both enjoyed dining in one of the many mediocre restaurants on Broadway or Amsterdam Ave. above 110th, and then bolting out the door in giddy laughter before paying the check.

Mark was the first person I’d met who had the slightest degree of political consciousness. I mean there were ban-the-bombers at Exeter, but they had low status and I kept my distance. By the time I reached Columbia, I was no longer interested in status. Again in that fun filled first week, I had rushed the elite fraternity of prep school boys, but I didn’t get in. My feelings were hurt, but I wouldn’t have joined if I had gotten in. I had no idea what I wanted, but I knew status was something I didn’t want. One time Mark came in my room with a can of black spray paint.

“You know those fallout shelter signs they have all over campus?”

Starting in our own dorm, we sprayed peace signs on all the fall out shelter signs we could find. I hadn’t felt such a thrill since going through the Brumder gate.

Mark’s parents had been Communists, a word that made the hair on my arms stand up. At Exeter, I had written my major history term paper on Joseph McCarthy because he was from Wisconsin and so was I. I interviewed his personal physician. I had a hard time coming up with a thesis. It finally came out something like: “It really doesn’t matter.” McCarthy was a jerk, but so were the Communists.

But now at Columbia, it was 1963. There was an energy coming from the south that was calling into question all previous assumptions.

On the roof of the student union one night drinking tequila, Mark and I wrote a rock ‘n roll song, to the tune of “Earth Angel.”

Shall I compare you to a summer’s day-hey-hey-
Thou art more lovely and more tempora-a-a-te…

I contributed the background vocals:

Eli eli lema sabachthani
Eli eli lema sabachthani

One night we went into Harlem together, to a bar I’d been to before with Bailey, the Morningside, right on Morningside Park, 110th and Lenox Ave. Yes, they had girls. I hooked up with a woman named Jasmine, black of course, but with long hair down her back, possibly a wig. I fell in love with her. We made love in a dingy flophouse of a hotel next to the bar. Mark went with a woman too, but when we met up again at the bar, he told me nothing happened, he couldn’t go through with it.

At 2 in the morning, we waked back through Morningside Park, reputed to be among the most dangerous in the city. I yelled as we walked through, “Hey, anyone here? Anyone want a fight?” Fortunately, no one responded to my challenge.

Toward spring, another friend from Exeter, Huck, as tall and aristocratic as his namesake wasn’t, fixed me up with a Barnard girl from Argentina, Christina Ochegavera. I was grateful that Huck and his girl had predetermined that this girl wanted sex. So we went out, to the West End, one of my favorite hang outs. We didn’t have much to say to each other. I wasn’t attracted to her. She had an okay body, but a face like a dried up apple doll. I took her to the nearby Hotel Earle, $10 a night, or an hour. We fucked. That was about what it was like. Afterward, she said, “You don’t know much about life, do you?”

We went together for about a month. We did enjoy making out. And I learned a few things about life.

In April, she dropped out of school and was returning to Argentina by freighter. I took her to the dock and got on the boat with her. We made out lustily among the rigging and those trumpet-like vents. The boat cast off from the dock.

At considerable trouble and expense, the tug accompanying the ship had to twist around and make itself available for me to disembark the ship and return to land.

At the school itself, I was having trouble paying attention. My nascent social conscience was giving me an excuse to outright reject this phony attempt to provide an Ivy League education in the heart of Harlem. I went to class and eeked out a C average, but my spirit was in the subways, just as I promised in my essay.

The school song was over the top: “Oh, who owns New York, oh who owns New York, C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A…” Mark and I discovered that it was not only a disgusting claim, it was disgustingly true. Columbia University owned the land under Times Square and about half of the slums of Harlem.

Mark and I both decided at about the same time that spring to drop out of college for good.