by Guy Branum
Finally, at long last, I was an Associated Students of the University of California senator. I spent the following year bickering. It was nothing but self-righteousness, adolescent antagonism, and parliamentary procedure, and I liked only one of those things. I had gotten the thing I’d wanted, had spent far too much time and energy pursuing, and realized it was pretty lame.
This is what I hate about the musical Wicked: At the moment when Elphaba is offered everything she ever desired by the Wizard, but also discovers he’s the person who’s been persecuting the animals in Oz, she refuses. She says, “But I don’t want it, I can’t want it anymore.” That’s just so political: “I can’t want it.” It’s a gay person who really loves Chick-fil-A not going to Chick-fil-A because Chick-fil-A doesn’t like gay people. Isn’t it infinitely more interesting to get the thing you want, then just realize you don’t want it anymore? What if you fought your whole life to get a Chick-fil-A sandwich, and when you finally bit into one, it wasn’t satisfying? That is not a good analogy, because their homophobic chicken is delicious,12 but I think you get my point. Making a political choice isn’t interesting, but to discover that your frustrated, unrealized desire was actually more satisfying than the absence of desire: That’s chilling.
All that didn’t happen to me, but I did start to realize a life of capital-A Achievement might not be as satisfying as I’d imagined it would be. At Berkeley, I wasn’t the Smart One or the Important One or the Ambitious One. I was just me, and I wasn’t sure what that meant. It never crossed my mind that I just got to decide. The purpose of my life had been to get out of Yuba City and go be a real person in the real world. Now I’d done it, and I had no idea what my life could or should look like.
A Pygmalion movie is no simple makeover movie. Look, I love a makeover movie. Any movie in which “she gets bangs” is a plot point is a movie I’m going to enjoy, but those movies are dishonest. Yes, when Mia Thermopolis from The Princess Diaries learns to flat-iron her hair, everything does turn around for her, but those makeovers are fatuous. She was always pretty and skinny underneath, and I always knew a new hoodie wouldn’t fix my life. Makeover movies are fun, but they aren’t real.
Look at The Devil Wears Prada, another Anne Hathaway movie in which a woman’s liberation is just an eyelash curler away. The thing is, the makeover doesn’t transform her so much as make her aware of her potential. It challenges her to engage a part of herself she’s left fallow. But the movie is really about a bigger transformation: Does she want to learn? Does she want to study at the knee of Miranda Priestly and learn to be a dragon lady?
As I have previously stated, I am still mad at Andy Sachs for not taking the red pill and learning how to be a dragon lady. Dragon ladies are great, but you never get to see where one comes from, and movies invariably make it seem like being a dragon lady comes at incalculable personal cost. Men get to be generals or super-spies, and no one asks, “But are they there for their children?” One lady decides to make her magazine the very best, and we have to have a protagonist who scoffs and says, “I don’t want to be like her.”13
The Devil Wears Prada is at least a mature enough movie to cloud that decision with ambiguity. We understand that Miranda Priestly is great but not good, and Andy Sachs feels the loss that goes with rejecting her mentorship. The films and books in which people let themselves be truly transformed by education always end poorly: Our protagonist has been transformed, but not enough. Eliza Doolittle can no longer be happy selling flowers on the street, but she isn’t a proper lady. Illya from Never on Sunday can no longer be happy with her simple seaside prostitution after Homer Thrace teaches her that she’s an affront to the history of Greece, but it’s not like she can become a loan officer at a bank or anything. The process creates a creature incapable of living comfortably in either world.
What’s great about Educating Rita is that Rita is a hairstylist. She gives women actual makeovers and rants about how twenty minutes under a blow dryer cannot change who you are. She’s gunning for more than cosmetic transformation, and the climax of the film comes when she’s educated and sophisticated enough to read and appreciate Frank’s poetry. She loves it, it’s “full of style . . . it has in it a direct line through to the nineteenth-century traditions of wit and classical allusion.” Frank then explains to her that it’s pretentious crap, full of allusions that assure the cognoscente readers that they’re responsibly educated, but the poems lack legitimate passion. Frank points out the basic truth of Pygmalion tales—that they are not so different from Frankenstein stories. He thought he could fuel the intellectual ambitions of a common hairdresser, but instead he just created another upper-middlebrow, pretentious undergrad monster.
As an autodidact, I was my own Professor Higgins. Through single-minded purpose, I’d been able to transform myself into the semblance of a nice, educated person, and I’d solidly established that I wouldn’t have to make my living installing HVAC equipment. But like Rita, I’d learned just enough to know that the semblance of sophistication or achievement wasn’t enough. I was making choices to prove who I wasn’t, and I was wholly unprepared to think about who I wanted to be.
Then something really lovely happened. The student journalist who covered the ASUC senate while I was a senator, Ryan Tate, got selected as editor in chief of the campus paper—the real campus paper, not the funny one. A week or so into my senior year, he emailed me and said that one of the weekly humor columnists for the paper had resigned, so he needed a quick replacement. He’d always found me funny and full of opinions when I was a senator, and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in submitting to be the columnist’s replacement. I, of course, said yes, and a week later, my first column was running in the paper.
I don’t know what I wrote about, I’m sure it was terrible, but people read it, and some of them found it funny, and some of them told me, and I loved it. Instead of trying to be like other, important people, I was just saying things I found amusing and hoping people liked it, and it was working. It was a charming drug; but, like any vaguely irresponsible person, I soon found the obligation to crank out a weekly thousand words to be a chore. Half the time I forgot I had to do it until the night of my deadline.
Which brings us to a certain Tuesday in November of 1997. I had been out at my friend Alice’s house drinking, and I was wending my way home in the gentle haze of a boy who doesn’t really know how to be drunk yet. I remembered it was Tuesday, and that meant I had to submit a column. Further, it was eleven p.m., and my deadline was two a.m. This was not good. This was not good at all.
I rushed home and scanned my mind for a topic. There was an obvious one: It was the week before the Big Game between Berkeley and Stanford. Look, Berkeley and Stanford do have an official sports rivalry, but how little we care about it should be evidenced by the lack of creativity in naming. We just call it the “Big Game,” like the big football game in a teen movie that can’t be bothered to provide any texture to the narrative. At Berkeley in the 1990s, the only sports anyone really cared about were unionizing sweatshop laborers and competitive indoor marijuana horticulture. But there was this official campus thing that was happening, so I figured if I could come up with a decent angle on it, it would satisfy my overlords at the paper and earn me my sweet, sweet twenty dollars for the column.
The angle was obvious. There’d been a lot of news that fall about the fact that Chelsea Clinton had started as a student at Stanford, and everyone was doing their best to make sure she was treated like just another student. The pressure went so far that when a campus humor columnist at Stanford referenced Ms. Clinton’s presence, he was summarily fired. It was clear that I had to be writing about Stanford, and if I was going to be writing about Stanford, I was going to be writing about Chelsea.
What I wrote was an unmeasured, excessive diatribe against Stanford’s elitism. I was still pissed that I hadn’t gotten to go there, and I was still pissed at rich kids having advantages they don’t have to think about. I essentia
lly argued that Stanford’s power and reputation were based on their exclusivity, and that Berkeley’s greatness lay in its inclusion. I also talked about how our campus was gross and smelled like urine because it was inclusive, and theirs was pristine and beautiful. Thus, I encouraged Berkeley students going to Stanford to riot, destroy, and attack everything around them.
We live in a world with power disparities. Money, race, gender, class: People have different opportunities. I always thought that the glory of the First Amendment was that it allowed unfettered (not equal) access to discourse. If other people are leading better lives than you, at least you’re allowed to talk shit about them. To me, that’s what Joan Rivers at the Oscars always was, a person who’d never be admitted to the ranks of the blessed and beautiful sniping at whether they were blessed and beautiful enough. I know it can seem shallow and negative, but at the time, I really felt like the sharpness of my tongue was the only power I had for confronting people on course to a life much better than my own. I was super-fun at parties.
The column was fine. Not particularly inspired or funny but fine. However, we were not the only publication needing to fill their pages, so the San Francisco Chronicle, while putting together a special section about the Big Game rivalry, included an article about my column. It was that vague late-1990s time when we’d learned about twenty-four-hour news cycles and national obsessions, and the “Chelsea Is Off-Limits” stories were simply too good to be ignored. It was neat, someone wrote an article about my article.
Then the Associated Press picked it up, really centering on the idea that I’d threatened the life of young Ms. Clinton. In the column, I’d written the line “Chelsea Clinton represents the Stanford ethos of establishment worship which must be subverted and destroyed.” The AP quoted it as “Chelsea Clinton [ . . . ] must be destroyed.” So, you know, it didn’t look great.
The following day, I was making a mad dash to finish a draft of my undergraduate history thesis14 to show my adviser. I got a call from the campus registrar’s office. Let me be clear: Berkeley doesn’t call you. Berkeley may email you or send you a letter. You may call someone at Berkeley and leave a message, but the enormous bureaucracy of Sproul Hall does not deign to contact you in person over the telephone, so that seemed odd. The person said that I could be expecting a visit from the Secret Service later that day.
Fuck.
Two men, white, bland, regular. Exactly what you’d imagine of Secret Service agents showed up at my door. I was scared shitless. I wasn’t a kid who broke rules or got arrested. I only challenged the order conceptually. Well, finally, my knife-footed chickens were coming home to roost.
At the time my apartment was truly, truly nasty. I am a fundamentally disorganized, untidy person, and my apartments in college and law school would descend into states of chaos that would frighten many, so you must understand my terror when two representatives of the Treasury Department showed up at my home and said they needed to search it. Who but a criminally insane person would let a cantaloupe get that moldy in their own home?
If I were a smarter person, I might have said no. I might have pressed my constitutional rights against illegal search and asserted that my silly little column was no reason to believe I’d do anything actually violent, and that this search was, in fact, an illegal attempt to chill and restrain free speech.15 I could have done that, but all I could think was “I’m supposed to meet with my thesis adviser at three thirty.” So I let them search.
They looked through my dirty clothes, my wilting salad greens, my innumerable piles of Entertainment Weekly. They found nothing of real concern and ended the session by taking my photo and requesting I give them access to all of my medical and psychiatric files. All this so I could have a Secret Service file of my very own opened up.
I assented, but as the Secret Service agents sped off and I carried my still-warm printout of my thesis to my meeting, the absurdity of the situation bothered me. I’d made a stupid, lame joke and politicians who didn’t want to have their privilege questioned had sent some goons to scare me. I am now older, and I can imagine how Hillary felt about the danger and pain that was brought on Chelsea by dragging her into the public eye. I get why a person would have the Secret Service go check to make sure there was no potential of any real danger. I can understand it, but I don’t buy it. Hillary didn’t think I was going to do anything to her daughter. She thought I was shit-talking at someone who was “off-limits” and wanted to scare me and others from talking about her daughter.16
I decided to do something. See, one part of the story I didn’t tell you about that interrogation is that one small part of me was thinking before I opened the door to those Secret Service agents. Even though I hadn’t yet been to law school and didn’t yet know my rights, I grabbed a mini–tape recorder I always intended to use to record lectures but never did, and I pressed “record” as I opened the door. I had it in my hand as the Secret Service agents told me that Hillary had seen the AP article in the San Jose Mercury News and said, “Find out what the fuck is going on here.” I had a record of all the times they told me what I did wasn’t nice, and of them saying they were searching my home for “pictures of Chelsea with a big red X over them.” Well, when I say “them,” I mean the guy who was playing good cop. There was a very clear good cop/bad cop thing going on. The bad cop spoke only the two times I started to say no to something. Both times he told me if I refused, they’d just go get a warrant and arrest me. I didn’t say “Go get a warrant,” but six hours later, I was up in the offices of the Daily Californian with my editors, turning the tape recording into a story.
This time, the story blew up even bigger. There were stories in the New York Times and Time, and for twenty-four hours, I was part of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. The Moscow Times called me a “bad-boy invectivator,” and the Washington Post called me “unfunny.” A hastily written, poorly thought-out column had earned me global exposure and an odd first taste of fame.
I’d proved to myself that I had it in me to make a mark outside the confines of an almond orchard. It was messy, it was problematic, but it was mine. My time away from my family and my time spent in the loving care of old PhD’s had opened me up to start expressing myself. Trying to be important hadn’t worked out that well, but trial and error had shown pretty clearly that when I expressed myself creatively, people didn’t always love it, but they had a reaction. I could see that doing things I loved paid off more than things I did because they seemed respectable. But I could see it only dimly.
So then I wasted three years in law school.
* * *
1. There was this boy, Bobby Cooper, who had one of those truly transformative puberties. One that’s essentially as effective as being bitten by a radioactive spider or having the rays of Earth’s yellow sun penetrate your Kryptonian cells. He started high school as a Cabbage Patch doll, and by graduation he looked like he could break a car in half. Anyway, one time in football we were doing a drill where we had to stay in our tackle pile until the coach told us to get up, and I got to gently rub my hand along Bobby’s abs. This moment is the happiest I have ever been in my life.
2. No one was looking, and she’s only Rita when someone’s looking.
3. Or you learned it once, then forgot it, and are now googling it on your phone.
4. In the film she eventually defines assonance as “a bad rhyme.”
5. Shibboleths like using the word “shibboleth.”
6. This is rhyme, not assonance.
7. And on concrete, no less!
8. In the early 1990s, pop culture references were an unexplored science. This trite activation of a 1970s TV star’s name seemed witty and dynamic. Believe me, it was much funnier back then.
9. Hi Chris, Matt, and Charlie! I am sorry I am throwing you under the bus right now, but the unavoidable prospect of class warfare in America meant it was only a matter of time.
10. I am using the Eggplant as a generic representative of ca
mpus humor papers you’ve never heard of. I can assume no one reading this book went to Florida State to pursue comedy. There are only two reasons to go to Florida State:
1. Football, or
2. If you’re a Jewish, Latina, or biracial girl and want to spend four years in intense humidity having to confront the most basic truths about your hair texture before moving to more temperate climates, buying a flat iron, and getting a job in publishing.
The University of Florida, however, has produced lots of great comedy writers, like my friend Christy Stratton Mann. Go Gators!
11. Crown Prince Haakon of Norway was also at Berkeley then, but Scandinavian royalty have lost much of the village-burning, virgin-despoiling glamour of their Viking ancestors. I did serve him popcorn at a movie theater once, though.
12. The only thing worse than their hatred for my sexuality is the fact that they’re closed on Sundays, giving me one less day to guiltily enjoy their succulent, Christ-fearing chicken.
13. Yes, I am equating the importance of our national security with a fictitious fashion magazine. Deal with it.
14. “Video Killed the Radio Star: The British Monarchy and Media Relations 1952–1997.”
15. You owe it to yourself to learn more about the months of harassment Kathy Griffin was subjected to after she took a photo with a bloodied replica of our president’s head in the style of Judith beheading Holofernes.
16. I think Hillary would have been a great president, and I gave five hundred dollars to her campaign in 2016. I also think she has a nasty habit of playing by the most old-school and underhanded of political strategies.
