And it was over all too soon.
The headmaster clapped me on the back and retook the podium.
“Now that is how you do it!” he said to the entire upper school. “Nice job, young man.”
The effect was immediate and overwhelming. I was the buzz of the campus.
Did you hear that Adam read a Top Ten List at the assembly?
That kid who stands in the hallway counting lockers all the time?
The very same! And it was hilarious!
Everyone wanted to be my friend that day, funny by association. I soaked the attention up greedily. I knew that it would vanish all too soon, but I didn’t care. This was my moment and I was going to bask in it. I sat at a completely different table in the cafeteria that day, apart from the early-acne adopters with whom I usually dined. Fuck ’em. They didn’t exist that day. Girls who had never spoken to me in the many years we’d been in school together fawned. One stopped me and asked if I was Adam Cayton-Holland.
I was.
She immediately dropped to her knees and sucked my dick right there in the hallway. Okay, not really. But the high I felt was as if she had! I was someone different that day. Someone of note. I had done something that none of them could do. I had been funny. Gotten up in front of a room and gotten laughs. And it had opened doors, instantaneously blown them right off their hinges!
It all went away the next day. Of course.
Baby boy, you only funky as your last cut
You focus on the past, your ass’ll be a ‘has-what’
—André 3000
My Top Ten was forgotten like a dream by the entire class. No one said a word about it. Things went back to normal. I was an outsider again, completely ignored. Back to the loser table. Back to obscurity. That’s just how things were for me at Graland. But though the school remained the same, I was different. Something changed in me that day. Something irrevocable. There was before that day, and then there was after. Now began the after. A fire had been lit somewhere deep inside me. This whole humor thing might just be the ticket.
A career in the arts was born.
AMBASSADOR OF HOPE
One Sunday afternoon my freshman year of college I awoke from a three-day booze- and pot- and coke-filled bender, desperately needing to piss. I started down the hallway toward the coed bathrooms, then hit the floor. I opened my eyes moments later to my hysterical RA telling someone to call an ambulance.
“No, no, no,” I stammered, knowing the trouble I would get into if someone were to run any sort of diagnostic on me in the moment.
“Your face is green!” she shouted.
“I’m fine! I’m fine!”
She was meek, a sweet Canadian in need of the financial assistance she got for being an RA. She was not equipped to handle this shit. I pushed her out of the way and hurled myself into the bathroom, where I promptly passed out again in front of the sinks, green face on cold tile. More hysteria, more screaming, more false assurances on my part. I headed back down the hallway to my room and slammed the door behind me. I slept it off for another six hours and emerged relatively intact. But everyone looked at me differently on the hall after that. People saw a darkness in me.
I had followed Anna to Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, and while she looked after me the best she could, brought me extra slices from her shifts at Giuseppe’s Pizza like a good older sis, she was also busy with her junior year. I didn’t want to bother her. And truthfully, I was ashamed of how badly I was doing. Within two weeks of getting to college I had been cut from the soccer team and rejected by the newspaper. My identity and confidence vanished. I did not rise to the occasion. I sunk. My face exploded with acne. I grew remote and insecure. I made friends with the kids that partied way too hard and I drank and did more drugs than I ever had in my life up to that point. I needed help but I didn’t want to let on—to Anna, to Lydia, to my parents, to anyone. I felt like they expected better of me and I didn’t want to disappoint them. I couldn’t shake the feeling like I wasn’t doing college right.
Weren’t these supposed to be the best years of my life?
My mom used to tell a story about her days as the co-editor of her college paper. Roe v. Wade had recently made abortion legal, but because of a legislative oversight it was still illegal to advertise for abortion clinics. The Virginia commonwealth attorney let it be known that if any liberal student newspapers decided to test him on the matter, there would be hell to pay. So a coalition of student editors agreed to all run ads for clinics in their respective papers on the same day. They figured he couldn’t prosecute them all. Then the fateful day came around and only my mom and her co-editor followed through. They were summoned to the commonwealth attorney’s office. They sent a car for them and everything.
“We’ll need you to pull the ad immediately and print an apology,” he told my mother.
“Or what?” she said, all firebrand redhead.
“Or I’ll have you arrested,” he responded, certain that would settle the matter.
They told him to go right ahead.
The good-ole-boy attorney clucked, flustered. He was stuck between an abortion and a hard place.
“Well, I would never have young ladies arrested,” he stammered. “Just don’t do it again.”
They left his office and continued to run ads every week, completely undeterred. My mom said she never heard another word from the commonwealth attorney again.
That was how my mom tackled Mary Washington University. My seminal collegiate moment thus far had been discovering how good Red Bull tastes in a forty.
I was not living up to my potential.
In high school, I was my mother’s rightful heir apparent. As editor in chief of the school newspaper I spearheaded a humor edition that got the entire staff into all kinds of shit—then won awards. I was the funny guy, the provocative writer. I graduated number three in the class, I was a star soccer player. I was someone.
That Adam Cayton-Holland, keep your eye on that one.
I felt loved and supported and respected there, and now, at Wesleyan, I was no one. There were a thousand kids like me. And two thousand far more impressive. These were East Coast elites, from fancy boarding schools up and down New England and progressive preparatory schools in Manhattan. They had saddlebags and wore peacoats. They were driven and sophisticated and blossoming while I withered. Lin-Manuel Miranda was in my class. Nobody looked in my direction and saw a Hamilton. Nobody looked in my direction at all.
I felt small and insignificant and far away from home. And it was all-consuming. I fought the darkness off as best I could but I just sank deeper and deeper.
People used to say that the dorm I lived in my sophomore year of college was haunted, that there was a ghost in Hewitt Hall. The details were unclear, but the general consensus was that sometime, awhile back, a student had taken his life there and now that same unfortunate soul haunted the dormitory. People claimed they saw things: the figure of a young man behind you as you brushed your teeth in the mirror, an apparition that always vanished when you turned around to investigate. Some reported hearing loud crashes at the end of the hall, garbage cans being hurled about. One student swore that every time she went into the coed bathrooms a faucet would inexplicably turn off and on by itself. They were popular ghost stories people told one another as fall turned to winter and New England turned gray and claustrophobic. But I never saw or heard anything. And I haunted that dorm far more than any ghost.
I couldn’t sleep for days on end. I’d spend grueling hours lying on my extra-long twin mattress, tracing the arc of the moon across the sky, unable to turn my brain off. Eventually I’d grow so frustrated that I would get up from my bed, dress, and leave my room. I’d walk around the dorm, daring the ghost to show himself, lingering for long spells at his purported haunts, traipsing silently through the hallways. But he never appeared.
Sometimes I’d sit at the top of Foss Hill in the middle of campus and think about being back home, some two thou
sand miles away. Sometimes I’d go for long jogs through the wooded area that surrounds the school. Mostly I’d go to the nearby Indian Hills cemetery and wander among the old mausoleums and crumbling headstones.
I’d think about killing myself.
I had a number of ways that I wanted to do it. Most of them involved overdosing. Might as well have one great final trip on the way out. The violent stuff I couldn’t go in for. Slitting your wrists. Shooting yourself. What if it went wrong? How painful. Though hanging myself also appealed to me for some reason. Something so poetic, no blood, no gore, just a swinging silhouette of a man who couldn’t take it anymore. Of someone who had enough. There’d be no doubt who haunted Hewitt then.
I’d think about who would come to my funeral, who would remember me, who would forget. I’d wonder what they would say about me, what my legacy would be. All the sad, shitty stories and poems I was writing—they’d certainly have more meaning once I killed myself. Maybe someone would publish them.
They’d notice me then.
But I was too big of a coward to ever pull it off. I just thought about it all the time, about becoming the ghost I spent so many nights chasing.
Except for when I was vandalizing. The darkness I was fighting off, the depression, all of that drifted away when a long night of binge-drinking was allowed to culminate in its inevitable conclusion of me breaking shit. I felt free in those moments. I felt a reprieve. Never mind the fact that I was some asshole nineteen-year-old nihilist howling at the moon, some self-obsessed liberal arts school prick ruining it for everybody else. None of that mattered then. I didn’t care what anyone else thought. That was the point. I was able to shut my brain off and mute all the dark thoughts that plagued me every other second of the day.
Call it Zen.
I liked everything about vandalism. The sound of the glass breaking, the risk of getting caught, the endorphin release, all of it. I felt alive. It got me high. I was always the last one to run off. We’d destroy something or hurl a fire extinguisher five stories down the center of a stairwell and my friends would yell after me to get out of there, that we were going to get caught. But I lingered as long as I could, soaking it all in, laughing. I was listening to too much Pink Floyd at the time; I felt like it spoke specifically to me.
Hey you, out there beyond the wall breaking bottles in the hall, can you help me?
I couldn’t. I couldn’t even help myself.
Walking home drunk from a party one night, a buddy and I kicked over a trash can. A passing group of girls noticed our idiocy.
“Ooh, some real bad boys,” they teased. “You won’t knock over that other trash can.”
Trash can down.
“What a bunch of badasses,” one of them said. “You guys are too cool for us.”
They walked off, totally oblivious to what they had started. I had tasted blood. No mere trash can would pacify me. We wandered past College Row, a tier of iconic, stone buildings in the dead center of campus. They were renovating the old ’92 Theater. It was an active construction site zoned off with yellow tape. I ducked under the tape and found a metal rod lying on the ground. I jumped into the chair of a parked bulldozer and began smashing the control panel to pieces, a wild animal. My friend yelled at me to stop but I was too far gone. I was possessed by a darkness. I was spinning out of control. This was my cry for help, I was going to see it through.
I leapt off the bulldozer and, wielding my new weapon with two hands over my head, I hurled the metal rod through the enormous window of one of the neighboring brick buildings. Direct hit. Glass poured down from above, a purifying shower that cut my face, hands, and legs. Sweet release.
I was instantly seized by the strong arms of a mammoth Public Safety officer. He had heard the breaking of the glass of the bulldozer and snuck up on me. Within seconds five Public Safety cars were there, lights flashing, all of them full of screaming officers.
“What’s your problem with the president of the university?” they demanded.
“I don’t have any problem with him,” I responded, confused as to why they were asking me that. “The food here sucks.”
“Then why did you break his office window?” they yelled.
“That was the president’s window?”
Much later, I would play up the fact that it was the president of the university’s office window. It seemed cooler that way, like I was a rebel making some sort of statement. That sad truth was that I had no idea whose window I was breaking. I just aimed for a patch of glass and threw.
The next morning, the head of Public Safety knocked on my door with an incident report.
“Fill this out by this afternoon,” he said, disgusted. “We’ll initiate the proceedings after you do.”
I consulted with an older vandal I knew, a senior with some disciplinary experience under his belt.
“The trick is to make them laugh,” he told me from his perch on a futon festooned with dirty laundry.
“Make them laugh?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “You’re going to have to go in front of the student advisory board. They see all kinds of dumb bullshit every week. They get bored. If you can get a laugh from them just off your incident report, they’ll be on your side already. Then they’ll go much easier on you.”
His logic seemed sound. Throughout my life, humor was the glimmer of hope, the place I felt most at home. The most powerful. I could do this. So I filled out my report.
To whom it may concern: last night while trying to emulate a move from the movie “Braveheart” I attempted to hurl a metal rod with two hands over my head against a wall. Unfortunately, my aim was not as good as Mel Gibson’s (hey, whose amongst us is?) and my shot went dreadfully awry, shattering the president’s window in the process. I apologize for any inconvenience and hope they will be able to fix the window soon.
They skipped the student advisory board all together. I was placed on immediate “interim suspension,” meaning I was barred from campus, despite the fact that there were two more weeks in the semester. I was forced to move into the off-campus house of several sympathetic hockey goons and had to send friends to the campus center to retrieve my meals. Were I to be caught on school grounds at any time, I would be immediately expelled. So I stayed out of sight; there but not there. Like a ghost.
Fortunately, I had Anna on my side. Unlike myself, Anna was well liked at Wesleyan, involved in numerous school organizations and on several administrative committees. She was on a first-name basis with many of the deans we would be dealing with. She took up my case like the powerhouse attorney she was born to be. We sat through a half-dozen meetings, and every time Anna calmly and patiently painted my actions as a cry for help, help that I would be taking proactive measures toward getting. She argued that the university was overreacting in the wake of a yearlong wave of vandalism, none of which they could prove was my doing outside of the night in question. She reminded the deans that in these moments they had the opportunity to showcase what a school like Wesleyan was all about. Was it a place that turned its back on its students when they were most in need, or was it, as she liked to believe, a place that helped the most vulnerable members of its community when they were in trouble?
Somewhere in the middle of a deposition a shiver must have shot up my father’s spine.
Anna’s measured approach sprung me. Over the course of her stalwart representation, talk of immediate expulsion dwindled to nullifying the semester, which shrunk to suspension, which finally gave way to two years of probation, paying for all of the damage, one hundred hours of community service, and mandatory psychological counseling for “rage.” It didn’t hurt that I would be studying abroad in Spain the next semester, and would not physically be on campus for eight months. I was, for all intents and purposes, a free man.
Somewhere toward the end of that fucked-up semester, toward the end of what had been up to that point the worst year of my life, Lydia came to visit. And everything slowed down. The world stopped mo
ving so fast and played out in real time, at a pace I could understand. Things recalibrated and made sense again. Oh yeah. Lydia. My other sister, the little one, a lifeline from a previous existence, one where I felt grounded and safe. She came like a messenger from a past that was far more me than whatever it was I was becoming. She was fifteen, a curious high schooler on her first visit to a college campus. Anna and I took turns hosting Lydia for a couple of days, showing her our school, and all the other bullshit went away. There was no depression then, no thoughts of suicide. It was just the three Cayton-Holland children on the far side of the country, away from our parents, together.
Two years earlier I had been in the exact same boat, off to Connecticut to see my big sis. I was filled with excitement and anticipation. The whole world was out there in front of me. The formative years were fading into the past, it was all right now, and everything beyond. Life felt like it was finally beginning. I knew Lydia was feeling that way too and I didn’t want to burst her bubble. I didn’t want her to see what I had become since I left home. I didn’t want to be so lost. Not in front of her.
She had dyed a thick, blue streak in her hair at the time. That was a total surprise to me in an era before social media. My little sister, the punk rocker. I asked her if she smoked weed and when she told me that she did, I proceeded to take her to a party and get her higher than she’d ever been in her life, an elder sibling’s responsibility. When we left that party Lydia told me that she could see the people moving their lips but she couldn’t hear a single word anyone was saying. We smoked some more and laughed and laughed and laughed.
She had an early morning flight the day she left. I’d prepared a little pallet on the floor of my dorm room for her; a nest of blankets and comforters and pillows. Neither one of us could sleep, so eventually we just gave up. I climbed down into the floor fort with her and we watched movies all night together. We giggled, ran new bits. It felt like old times. Then the sun was rising and it was time for my little sister to go. I had an early class, so Anna drove her to the airport. Lydia waved at me as they drove off, looking back at me through the rear windshield, like we had at that tornado all those years ago. I can still see them driving away together, my sisters. I wasn’t a ghost in their eyes; I was one of them. It wasn’t okay to just disappear.
Tragedy Plus Time Page 4
