I had once had an unstoppable drive to be the best at everything I ever did. Now, after my experience with Graham, I still wanted to succeed, but I also wanted to fail and show the world the true me, the fraud that I knew I truly was. I was escaping my abuser, but I was about to find out that he had left me with something worse.
I was now my own abuser, dedicated to bringing myself down.
FIVE
ESCAPE TO PRINCETON
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY is a glorious combination of physical beauty and limitless opportunity for learning and self-growth. Set in the midst of lush, gently rolling New Jersey countryside halfway between New York and Philadelphia, it is more Hogwarts than Hogwarts itself. One of the world’s great learning institutions and often ranked as the United States’ best undergraduate university, it is Ivy League in every sense. Its Collegiate Gothic buildings are blanketed with dark green ivy, though to be fair, the campus also features buildings of innovative modernist design along with others that can only be described as brutalist in spirit, if not technically a member of that school of architectural design. Yet even the most seemingly out of place structures are all somewhat softened by the ivy that permeates the campus in an almost calming, spiritual way.
Princeton is somewhat isolated. The university is located in its namesake, a small town that grew up outside its campus gates. The town’s hub, Nassau Street, with its old brick-and-awning shops and restaurants, fronts onto the university’s Nassau Hall, which served as the base for the U.S. capital in 1783. Nassau Street is the dividing line between town to the north and gown to the south, while the campus itself rolls gently down a hill to the south, unbounded, dissolving into vast open fields, treed countryside, and Carnegie Lake.
Though Princeton had been a dream of mine, I had actually known very little about it until late in high school. My parents hadn’t gone to university and I had just assumed that it would be something like the only university I had ever seen, the University of Manitoba. My only real knowledge about Princeton growing up had come from the “Flintstone of Prinstone” episode of The Flintstones.
The student body is far smaller than many might think. When I attended, there were approximately 4,400 undergraduate students (about 1,100) in each class, meaning that it accepts only a tiny fraction of the countless thousands of applications it receives every year. Virtually all students live on a campus where cars are essentially absent except for campus police and service vehicles. The few students who bring cars to school park them far away from the dormitories and other buildings, and use them only for infrequent off-campus excursions. That was also true in my time there.
It is a magical place, an intellectual nirvana where you can walk, stroll, play, and fully immerse yourself in a world unlike the one you came from, or at least in my case, a world unlike the one I came from. It is, as former student F. Scott Fitzgerald described in This Side of Paradise, a collection of spires and gargoyles, a paradise indeed where time seems to slip away among the quadrangles and arches and fields, marked only by the ringing of the bell atop Nassau Hall. But make no mistake about it, as Fitzgerald’s contemporary and nemesis would have said, that bell, well, it tolls for thee.
My mom was pretty sure I was never going to make it there. Not that I wouldn’t be accepted, but that I wouldn’t physically make it there. I had packed and was ready to go, my life now consisting only of whatever I could fit into a single duffle bag, a suitcase, and my hockey bag. But my mom firmly believed that at some point along my journey (a flight from Winnipeg to Toronto, a transfer through customs with my student visa, a second flight to New York’s La Guardia airport, a connecting transfer via van to the Newark International Airport, and a wait of several hours in the airport until being picked up there by the hockey coach for the drive down to campus) I would be abducted by the Moonies. Seriously. She thought that there was more than a good chance that I would be taken in by the followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who were, like the Hare Krishna, known to seek donations and recruit lost souls at airports (I use “known” somewhat loosely). She worried I would be lost forever, never to be heard from again. She warned me again and again, and again one final time as I said goodbye at the airport, to be careful and not get swept up by some cult.
I understand the angst that a mother must feel when her child goes away to university. My parents had little money, and they couldn’t afford to take me to Princeton and set me up on campus. In fact, my parents never came out to see me until I graduated. While it’s easy to look back and laugh at my mom’s fears, she was actually on to something but didn’t know it. I already was a lost soul, taken in not by the Moonies but by a far more dangerous monster.
Like most people, my mom feared the monsters she saw in the news, the faraway threats and bogeymen thrust upon us by those exploiting our weaknesses and greatest fears. But also like most people, she couldn’t see the monster that had been lurking among the children in her own community, the one who had ensnared her own child.
I MADE IT to Princeton, somehow miraculously avoiding the Moonies, though sweating profusely because of the amount of clothing I was wearing given the limited baggage I could travel with without incurring extra fees.
Once at Princeton, I knew immediately that I was home. It was perfect. It was everything I had dreamed it would be. It was the ideal place for me because of who I still was deep down. I still get very emotional whenever I think of this moment, because I only wish I had been able to experience my time there as the true me, not the me of the aftermath of him.
Holder Hall, which was to be my home for the next two years, is one of the classic dorms at Princeton—a three-story, gray stone Collegiate Gothic quadrangle, with arches on each of three sides to allow access to the inner quad and the doors into the dorms. There’s a tower in one corner with spires reaching to the sky, and a dining hall and library along the fourth side. At that time there weren’t hallways in the dorms but entryways, with about fourteen doors, each opening up into the quad. The entryways were like vertical hallways—open a door, take a few steps up to a landing—and there were doors into rooms on each side, one room to a side. Up the stairway was the next level and landing and two more doors to two more rooms. On the third level there was a landing and one door for a double wide room sitting on top of the rooms below on either side of the stairs. A group of sophomores lived on the third floor in the ultimate luxury of a spacious room. My group was lucky, and in our second year we too lived in such comfort.
Although this was a dorm, these were not utilitarian stairways, landings, or rooms. The wood was dark and stained, with wainscoting everywhere. Each room had a main living area with a fireplace—nonworking but providing ambience—and two bedrooms. In the past, one bedroom had been for the student and the other one for his servant (I use “his” on purpose, as Princeton did not admit women until the late ’60s, and it was still only 35 percent women and 65 percent men when I attended). The rooms were now configured as quads, each bedroom outfitted with bunk beds and desks.
I’ll never forget the somehow exotically musty smell of the dorm on that hot and humid September afternoon in 1982, a smell that persists to this day. It was a magnificent smell, and the room itself was more than I could ever have hoped for. I was a student who went away to university, lived on campus, and actually saw my standard of living rise.
My roommates had all arrived earlier that day: one from Detroit, one from just outside of New York City, and one from the Washington, DC, area. I met their parents. I met their siblings. I met their other relatives. Coming from Canada and being the first in my family to go to university, I had no appreciation for how far I had come and how big a deal going away to a university like this was. To me, I was going away to an excellent university. To the American kids, it was as if they had won the lottery, and they couldn’t believe their good fortune at having been accepted.
Our closets and storage areas were small, but I had no problem fitting in all of my stuff with room to spare. My ro
ommates, on the other hand, had more difficulty, though they were very creative and made it work. By the time I arrived, everyone else in our room had already been there for a few hours. It was almost a fight to see who could help me the most to unload, and they couldn’t have been more welcoming and supportive. Unlike them, I had no car or station wagon or van to unload. Everything I had was in my arms.
We sorted out rooms, beds, and desks, and just like that we were in the next phase of our lives. I saw their painful goodbyes with their families, I saw the love present everywhere as similar scenes played out elsewhere in the quad, and for a fleeting moment it made me feel very calm, knowing that even though I was all alone, even though I was seeing what I wished I myself could have been a part of, I could live vicariously through the others and imagine a similar love and support. And sure enough, to this day, my freshman-year roommates—Ken Cook, James Fischer, and Brian Crane—remain three of the best people I have ever been lucky enough to know.
There is a picture of the four of us, taken on our first day at Princeton. My roommates all look so excited, but I have a distant look, the eyes of somebody who at a young age has already seen too much, who already knows how this next chapter of his life is going to play out.
THAT FIRST NIGHT it started to set in just how far away from home I was. Fortunately, the school set up small parties to help get us to know each other. We mingled, we were introduced to upperclassmen, and there were games to further integrate us. One of the tasks we were assigned was to interview a fellow freshman at the party and report back to the group. My roommates prodded, actually pushed, me toward a tall, beautiful woman named Melissa Marks to interview her. I was already so taken aback, almost in shock at everything new around me, that apparently I had just stood in place, trying to figure out who to talk to until my roommates intervened. Melissa was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was also a professional model who had already been on the covers of major fashion magazines. She would go on to marry a friend of mine and become Melissa Marks Sparrow, now a leading doctor at Johns Hopkins. But that night, the only thing that mattered was that, though she was far more worldly than I was at the time, she was the nicest person imaginable and she made me feel at home, broke me out of my trance, and in the process let me know that I was among good people. She won’t remember a thing about our interview that night but it kept me from going home. I will remember it always.
As a recipient of substantial financial aid, I was required to take a job on campus to support myself during the school year. It was my good fortune to get a job working in the dining hall for my residential college. I could work the breakfast, lunch, or dinner shift, or all three if I wanted to. This job came with an added benefit: it was a fantastic way to meet other students who like me needed to make money. While the reputation of the school may suggest otherwise, the reality is that there are a great number of students at Princeton who come from very little money.
That’s the interesting thing about Princeton. Notionally a bastion of conservatism and elitism within American society, like many elite U.S. universities, it’s actually in many ways one of the more socialistic and progressive institutions you may ever come across. Don’t get me wrong, it is a very expensive place to go to university when you actually have to pay. If, however, you come from a family with little or no money, you don’t have to pay. Admissions to the university are made on a need-blind basis and financial aid is allocated once the students have already been admitted. I was also the recipient of the Canadian Alumni Association of Princeton scholarship, which paid for a portion of my tuition, room, and board. Princeton, a school without athletic scholarships, was still virtually free for me.
As it turned out, Graham had no contacts at Princeton, and my scholarship from the Canadian Alumni Association of Princeton was something I had earned on my own and with no help from him—something I learned only later.
DESPITE BEING FAR removed geographically from Graham, despite making new friends, having new roommates, and meeting the guys on the hockey team, I still could not get Graham out of my mind. He was with me every step of the way. Never, ever did I believe that I belonged at Princeton. Worse, I believed that the only reason I was there was because of what Graham had done for me. Although I was on the cusp of living out my dream, in my head that dream was still, even in his absence, controlled by Graham. Everything I had in front of me was to me something I had because of him. My new roommates were because of him. My ability to study at Princeton was because of him. My place in the hockey program was because of him. And that belief that everything good in my life, that everything there in front of me, was because of him, made me not want to be there at all.
Princeton was supposed to be a new beginning. Yet I was in shock, stressed beyond belief by the jolt of simply going to the airport, getting on a plane, and instantly starting my new life, the one I was always supposed to be living, a life more in touch with who I really was, one removed from Graham and the abuse. I was free of him. Except I wasn’t. The change was so sudden, the confusion so unsettling, the stress so intense.
Who am I? I’m a fraud. If they only knew who I really was, how weak I am, how pathetic, how I actually got in here through his help, they’d know I don’t belong, they’d laugh at me. What am I doing here?
My body started to shut down. The very day I arrived my left thigh went completely numb and I didn’t regain feeling in it for about a week. It scared me. I scared me. He still scared me. And I couldn’t tell anybody about it, and I couldn’t go to the infirmary and seek treatment, physical or otherwise.
How can you tell anybody? What are you going to say? “I’m here to report that my left leg is going numb. Nothing happened, I just, um, well, see, it just started after I kind of freaked out a bit after realizing that even though I had made it here, nothing was ever going to change the way I think about myself even after I’ve left my sexual abuser behind”? That’s how to make friends and influence people. They’ll commit you.
I went back and forth between absolutely loving Princeton and all that it had to offer and detesting everything about it because I associated it all with Graham. Princeton, my magical place, was at the same time a living hell because to me it represented the very worst in me, the truth about who I really was. I had sold my soul to him to get there. What should have been a shining achievement I saw as further evidence of the fraud I was. I had not earned my place at Princeton. It had been delivered to me by my abuser. I was only here because I had let myself be with him.
I had the bottom bunk in our bedroom. At night I would roll into bed and pretend to fall asleep quickly, attempting to avoid small talk about who I was, where I came from, what the details of my life were.
It’s not important, you don’t need to know about me, you wouldn’t want to know about me.
I would stare up at the bottom of the mattress above me and trace its soft blue stripes pushing through in diamond shapes formed by the intertwined metal mesh that ran from end to end of the upper bunk holding up its mattress. I would do this from each bottom bunk bed I slept in over the next four years. So many hours of staring mindlessly while not being able to sleep, not being able to think of anything but him, not being able to do anything but wonder why. My diamonds in the sky, made by the weight of another pressing down upon me from above.
Don’t think about him. Don’t think about it. He’s not here. He can’t hurt you anymore.
Except he was still with me and he was still hurting me.
I threw myself into everything in front of me in an attempt to hide from my reality. I took as many shifts at the dining hall as I could get. My days usually began around 6:30, when I would get up to work the morning shift. Classes would follow, then it would be off to dryland training in anticipation of the hockey season, then dinner, and then off to the library. I did my best to ensure that there was little or no time that wasn’t filled with scheduled obligations in an attempt to force myself to keep my mind as far away from Graham as I c
ould. I tracked my money, logging every expenditure, and I recorded our team workouts, anything to divert my mind. I was disciplined. I was very hard-working. I was successful. But I wasn’t sleeping well, and still he was always with me.
ONCE I’D REALIZED I was actually going to go away to Princeton, there had been only a few months to prepare. I wanted to take control of my body in hopes of a new start and becoming the athlete I really was. Having gorged myself to make myself as unattractive to him as possible, I now desperately needed to get in shape.
During that summer before university, I started to eat better, I ran, and I worked out again. I started losing weight. Yet I still saw myself as fat and unworthy, so I lost more weight. But the more weight I lost, the more I thought I was still hideous, fat, ugly. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without thinking that I was deformed, that he had ruined me, that I had ruined myself with him. I kept thinking that I had to change who I was, that I had to cut him out of me. So I kept running, stopped lifting, and pretty much stopped eating.
I showed up for university lean and mobile, but I had little muscle and no real strength, my body running on fumes. I could no longer see what was real. I had completely lost any connection with my body. I could no longer properly build my body because I could no longer properly see it and thus could no longer truly be an athlete.
Still, when you’re working hard to make your dreams come true, good things can happen. My midterm grades in my first semester were all A’s, with an A-plus in a physics lab course. Being the complete geek-fest that it was, I won a wall chart of the periodic table for the highest score in a multidisciplinary assignment, and I loved it. That was me at Princeton—all A’s and an A-plus. As always, school was easy.
I was slowly making friends and having fun both in class and while working. I was popular at work and in my classes. I was fun. I was hard-working. I was everything I was supposed to be. That job I had at Commons, our college cafeteria? I worked countless mornings as a short-order cook and was awarded “Best Trash” at the end-of-the-year party for the ease with which I emptied garbage cans into dumpsters and threw around heavy bags of waste. That turned out to be the highlight of my college career—“Best Trash.”
I Am Nobody Page 9
