by Rob Spillman
51
“If You Want To Rebel Against Society, Don’t Dull The Blade.”
—Ian MacKaye
Soundtrack: Minor Threat, Minor Threat, 1981
THE FLASH OF SILVER was going to hit us. I had to turn the wheel. Too late.
My head cut through the windshield as easily as if I were diving through cool, clear water. I flew free from the car. Airborne, I noticed blue, clear sky, and that I was flying toward a beautiful, flowering willow.
I shouldn’t have been in college. I was seventeen and a half at the end of my first year. I wasn’t yet sixteen when I’d applied to colleges. I was so focused on my Baltimore exit strategy that I hadn’t thought about what I would do once out. College? I guessed that was what I was supposed to do. Everyone did it, right? Or at least all of my classmates did. Both of my parents had been of limited help in counseling me about college, about where I could go or even how to apply. Their choices had been Eastman School of Music, Eastman School of Music, or Eastman School of Music. For me, there was no such clear-cut choice, nor any clarity about why I was even going. My mother’s contribution to the cause was to take me to a college fair, where hundreds of schools had booths with pamphlets about how wonderful their campuses were. “They all look good,” I told my mother as I gathered up dozens of pamphlets.
UCLA and USC were perfect in that they were palm-tree-decorated havens 3,000 miles away from Baltimore. The University of Puget Sound, on the very edge of Washington State, and the country, was slightly more perfect in that it was 3,200 miles away. Puget Sound looked like a decent liberal arts college, but this was of secondary importance.
“You’ll only be sixteen,” my mother said when I told her my first choice.
“I’ll turn seventeen in December,” I protested.
“You need to be a little closer to home,” my mother insisted.
Instead of Puget Sound, I applied to another nice little liberal college—Drew University, in central New Jersey. At Boys’ Latin, my senior adviser was the same English teacher who had given me the Melville novellas. “Drew?” he asked. “That’s a perfectly good school, but why aren’t you looking at Yale and Princeton? You’d do well at Princeton. Or Brown.”
“Me?” I said with a laugh. “No way could I get in there.”
“Why not?” he asked. “You’re what—third in your class and have skipped a grade, managed the after-school theater club, run cross-country, started the Ultimate Frisbee team . . . why not?”
Because I am nothing. My classes at Boys’ Latin had been jokes. The Yales and Princetons only took the squeaky-clean rich kids who had gone to schools like Gilman and St. Paul’s. Art schools only took kids who had taken some art classes. And even if I did manage to get into a Yale or Brown, how could we afford it? By “we” I meant my father. He paid for all of my school bills, but wasn’t exactly great at saving money. Before Christmas during my last year of high school, my father asked me what my favorite city was. What the hell does a fifteen-year-old know? I said London, which was my father’s favorite city. So we spent Christmas in London, going to the theater every day—seeing Diana Rigg briefly naked in Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day, Macbeth with no intermissions at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the original Broadway cast of A Chorus Line.
London at the time was cheap, hit hard by recession and spillover from “The Troubles” which kept tourists away. An IRA bomb had injured a handful of people in Hammersmith in early December and afterwards airlines chopped their Christmas airfares. Cheap as it was, I was still worried. On the flight over I said, “This is a really cool way to spend my sixteenth birthday. Are you sure you can swing this?”
My dad looked out the window and said, “Don’t sweat it, kiddo.”
Even though I knew my mother had some money, I assumed that she wouldn’t pay for a nonpractical, liberal-arts education. I didn’t even ask her, afraid of the probable negative answer. I got into Drew, but my father said that he couldn’t afford it and that I would have to go to the University of Rochester; it was affiliated with the Eastman School of Music, so I could go for next to nothing. Student loans? I didn’t even know they existed. No one told me, and I didn’t ask.
At Rochester, students had to declare an intended major upon entering. You weren’t locked down, but even a provisional decision was ridiculous. Astronaut studies? D.C. hardcore music? Drinking? Bomb throwing? Over the summer I had read an interview with the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder where he said, “I don’t throw bombs, I make movies.” I was angry enough to want to throw bombs, but I was a coward, not to mention a pacifist. I had never been in a fight.
But Fassbinder’s quote was a clue; maybe there was a way to harness my undifferentiated rage into art. I knew there was a way past self-defeat, a way around the self that was afraid to be seen or heard. Hunter Thompson had started his writing career as an editor on the air-force newspaper. What would he do at the perfectly square University of Rochester, a campus known for its engineering and premed programs?
So I entered the U of R unsure but determined to make something out of the experience, though I felt like I needed to take care of core curriculum before I even thought about looking for anything creative. I started by declaring economics as my major. It sounded better than premed or engineering. My mother had advised me that I could study whatever I wanted, as long as I got a “useful” degree and had a “set of job skills” to support myself. What the hell does this mean to a scattered sixteen-year-old?
I was too young for the cross-country team, which was a serious Division III team, and which might have preserved my liver and brain cells. The drinking age in New York was still eighteen, and a college ID was usually good enough at any bar. And alcohol flowed in the dorms. Since I wasn’t running competitively, I “trained” haphazardly. And acted upon impulses like Why not try acid?
The Grateful Dead tour acid called “Space Invaders” lived up to its name. I dropped with my geeky friend Albert, a fellow freshman who likewise had never taken it before. While we were in the Commons game room watching kids playing Centipede, mesmerized by the flowing green orbs, Albert vanished. But this was fine, because I ran into another friend, a jazz pianist who took me into the concert hall and sat me down in the middle of the orchestra section. There was a piano onstage. I wish I could tell you what he played, but the notes weren’t notes, but rather a kind of chocolaty ooze, and his head was on fire, huge flames shooting up into the rafters. I want to have flames shooting out of my head and make someone as happy as he is making me.
I slipped outside, and I knew it was very cold by the sound of the snow crunching underfoot. The Science Building melted into an ice field. I brushed my teeth for an hour. I was so blissfully gone that I knew I had a clear choice: permanently stay in this state of grace and become an acidhead, or never dare come back.
My increasingly binary outlook to all aspects of life allowed for no middle ground.
Monday morning I was counting ceiling tiles in the lecture room of the narcoleptic calculus teacher’s class. Then listening as the Indian macroeconomics teaching assistant’s thick accent and uninterested monotone combined into the incomprehensible. What am I doing here?
I teamed up with Albert and a few other engineering geeks who had mapped the steam tunnels running under the campus and out to the university hospital on the other side of Mount Hope Cemetery. Their master map was intricate and mesmerizing. It was art. Subversive art. A Situationist-style intervention. This I could do. At ten below zero, we would sneak into the tunnels and explore the subterranean universe, popping into buildings and surprising bundled-up students as we emerged in our sweat-soaked shorts and T-shirts.
When I received my first-semester grades, I called my parents with the dismal news. I was surprised when my mother said, “I know it is hard at your age. But you can rise to the challenge, like you did at Boys’ Latin.” I felt sick that she was rooti
ng for me and couldn’t figure out how to tell her that her cheering was futile, as I was in the wrong game.
My father, on the other hand, wanted to talk in person, so he came out to campus on a brutally cold day. As soon as he walked into the all-glass Student Union, I felt the sickening churn of disappointment.
“So what happened?” my father asked, calmly, concerned, which made me feel even more wretched about myself.
“I guess I’m just having trouble making the transition,” I said, not having the guts to tell him that I was in the wrong place, that I was wasting away while trying to pass deadening subjects like calculus and economics. “I’ll do better next semester.”
“I know you can do it,” my father said.
Second semester, I took an English class—The Postwar American Novel. A book a week, and so many great books by such strong men—for they were all men, the course taught by a rumpled professor much like the Donald Sutherland character in Animal House, a ruined writer, who throughout each class tapped a sad, unlit cigarette on the face of his gold wristwatch. The Deer Park, Portnoy’s Complaint, Ragtime, Catch-22, Gravity’s Rainbow, one after the other. How I ate them up, even though the meals were too rich for my limited palate.
My enthusiasm was far greater than my intellect, but what I did understand, more than anything, was that these writers had sensibilities that were in tune with my own. This feeling was a much stronger and more complicated reaction than when I had first heard Talking Heads alone in my room late at night. These writers saw the American Dream as a mirage in a spiritual desert littered with empty entertainments, material and marital acquisitions, a vast nothingness burying the poor, old, uneducated, blacks, Indians, and anyone else who didn’t buy into the dream or who were ignored by its salesmen.
These writers were working Thompson’s territory, but in fictional form, and I liked it. I loved it. I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to create, as Robert Frost put it, “a momentary stay against confusion.” But to me the gulf between me and these writers was infinite. They weren’t humans, but strange gods who had delivered fire to us mortals.
The Postwar American Novel class was the one class I passed that semester.
In other words, I flunked out. And after flunking out, I didn’t think that I would ever be a writer. I assumed that the literary world was like the classical music world where most successful musicians went to highly competitive music schools and had mentors. My assumption was that successful writers went to elite schools like Harvard where they worked on the Crimson and then got internships in New York City publishing houses where their Ivy brethren looked out for them and gave them a leg up toward literary success. What was I? A literal failure.
Late May, I left town in my father’s orange Pacer. My friend Albert was in the passenger seat. My plan was that, after a few days in Baltimore, I would drive to Aspen, where I would search for a summer job before any of the other seasonal slackers blew into town. I didn’t know what the hell I would do after the summer. Maybe community college, maybe stay in Aspen and work the ski season. Maybe join a cult.
Twenty miles south of Rochester, on Route 15, I had The Who cranked up. “People try to put us down,” I sang out, mashing the gas pedal with my bare foot. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a silver Chevette streaking toward us nearly head-on. I tried to swerve, but had only enough time to turn the wheel an inch to the left. In the split second before the Chevette smashed into the Pacer, I wondered what the impact would feel like. I knew it was going to be harder than anything I had ever felt before. I wondered if it would be the last thing I ever felt.
I wasn’t wearing my seat belt. My skull splashed through the windshield, which disintegrated as I soared over the hood and sailed away from the car.
Past the willow tree, I landed on someone’s front yard and went into a forward roll. Sitting in the cool grass, I scanned my arms and legs, then felt my face and the top of my head where it had hit the windshield. Not a scratch. I looked up to see a beautiful, flowering willow tree, its long limbs reaching down to almost brush my lips. I turned around to see flames shooting out from the hoods of both cars.
I sprinted to the passenger side of the Pacer, where Albert was holding his head, dazed, blood streaming between his fingers from a gash on his forehead. I dragged him away from the car to the grass, then ran to the Chevette, where the driver, a slight Asian woman, was bloody and unconscious. I unbuckled her seat belt and carried her to where Albert was, his head still in his hands, then came back for her husband, who was moaning and covered in blood. I unbuckled him and he stood up, but collapsed, one or both of his legs broken. I carried him away from the burning cars, then laid him down next to his wife. A truck driver appeared with an extinguisher and put out the fires.
In the ambulance, my heart rate was 60 beats per minute—close to my out-of-shape resting pulse. The EMT said it looked like some safety glass was embedded in my right ear and a cut at the top of the same ear would require a handful of stitches. I had a slight headache. I had failed to die. Again.
52
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E. L. Doctorow
Soundtrack: Buzzcocks, “Hollow Inside,” 1979
FIVE DAYS AFTER my second near-fatal crash, I was behind the wheel of another car, thanks to New York’s “no fault” insurance; fines were pending for the other driver, who had, according to witnesses, blown through a “YIELD” sign. (I would find pieces of the Pacer’s smashed safety glass in my clothes for months afterward, and one tiny pebble of safety glass stayed embedded in my right earlobe for years.) With the insurance settlement, my father bought a used silver Chevette. Sore and achy, I drove the rattling little joke of a car out to Aspen to find summer work while my father finished up at Eastman. May in Aspen was a grim time, cold and rainy, the depths of off-season. I couldn’t stay in my father’s music-festival apartment until he arrived a month later, so I rented a cheap room in a ski lodge down the street. As the storekeepers returned to their boarded-up businesses, I would ask for work.
When I wasn’t on the job hunt, I holed up and read. That class had unlocked a torrent of clichés—these books were “only the tip of the iceberg”; they had “opened up the floodgates”; and now I was ready to dive down into “the heart of the matter.” I lost myself in a novel or two novels a day, suffering the torment of Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratchet, hitchhiking across the West with Tom Robbins’s Bonanza Jellybean, being terrified by Stephen King’s spooky off-season Colorado lodge, doubly so since I was reading about it while living in a spooky off-season Colorado lodge.
I read randomly, hungrily, my father having loaded up the Chevette with a bag of paperbacks, including biographies and histories of great artistic epochs. As I read these, I wondered why I had been cursed to be born at the wrong time and place. Every other era and place seemed so much more alive—New York in the fifties, when the Beat giants stomped the earth alongside the drunken New York School painters, with a soundtrack of Bird and Miles and Monk; or Berlin in the twenties, with their decadent drag balls, vicious theater, and brutal visual art. I tried to psychically bore into these books to find the answers to my life. Nothing was more important. Well, maybe girls, and maybe running. But there were few girls around in May, so I read and I ran.
I applied for what I thought would be a shitty job—working at a self-serve gas station—but it turned out to be a godsend. I sat in a lawn chair with bills—singles, fives, tens, twenties—wrapped around the fingers of my left hand, a paperback in my right. I was basically paid to read all day. Traffic was light. There were the rich tourists in rental cars, but the locals gassed up down-valley, where it was much cheaper. Some of the rich locals did stop in, like Jack Nicholson, who rode a beat-up Harley and paid for his buck or two of gas with an Amex. We had a routine: I always asked him for his au
tograph on the credit card bill and he would give me a sneer and say “Wiseass” before signing.
Seventeen, a college washout, and working in a gas station. And ridiculously entertained. The previous summer I had finally had sex. I wish that it were a good story, but it was drunken, rushed, awkward, in the apartment of a music-festival singer while her roommate was on a beer run. It was so clumsy that we avoided each other afterward. I forgot her name and I hoped that she forgot mine. I thought other girls would be able to tell that I was still mostly clueless, but apparently that first sex attracted other possible mates. Suddenly sex wasn’t hard to find, and I quickly became better at it. In one month I went from being a sixteen-year-old virgin to hooking up with college-age girls. My father had only one, unwritten rule—don’t date his students. I mostly respected this.
Once the season officially started up and I was able to move into my father’s music-festival condo on Durant, summer settled into a halcyon state of running, reading, drinking, and sex. I could live like this forever, I thought one late July morning as I went to open the gas station, which was only a block and a half from our condo. There was hardly a soul out at quarter to seven—a few dog walkers, a lone jogger. No cars, which boded well for my reading day. I unlocked the office, pulled out my green-and-red lawn chair, and breathed in my hangover-curing straight black coffee, still too hot to sip in my Yellowstone travel mug. My father had seen me reading “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and A Moveable Feast, so he recommended the biography Misia, about the Parisian arts patron Misia Sert, who was integral to almost every artistic moment of the early nineteenth century, a book I inhaled.
When I told my father how much I liked one of his favorite books, he responded by pressing another of his desert-island books, historian Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years, on me. I blazed through Hemingway’s Paris, went to Gertrude Stein’s salon, marveled at the bizarre, wonderful genius of the pianist and composer Satie, imagined sipping absinthe and coffee at the cafés, and wondered where this artistic life could now be found and if a flunk-out like me could ever be in this new Paris or New York.
