The Gilded Razor

by Sam Lansky

  While attempting to penetrate one of the boys on the balcony overlooking the park at about 5:00 a.m., so dizzy from all the blow that I could barely see, I lost my erection; I was mortified, although he was really nice about it. Nevertheless, every time I ran into him over the next two years I was unable to look him in the eye.

  Back for my last few weeks in Portland, I skipped class to sit outside a local coffee shop, smoking cigarettes and telling anyone who would listen that I was moving on to greener pastures.

  “Yeah, Paris Hilton went to school there,” I said smugly. “So, you know. It’s whatever.”

  I did not hesitate to leave, not knowing how I would later ache for Portland. In the car on the way to the airport, the trunk stuffed with suitcases, my mother sobbed as she maneuvered the steering wheel, fingering the pendant of Saint Bridget that hung around her neck. I gazed out the window at the white Oregon sky, loathing its emptiness, dreaming of cityscapes clotted with skyscrapers.

  My father found an apartment a short walk from Dwight. I did not feel displaced, only the curious sensation of returning home to a place I hadn’t been. I concluded that I had always been a New Yorker; I just hadn’t ever lived in New York.

  I didn’t come to New York to be the same person I had been in Portland. No, I had big dreams: of transformation, of glamour, of becoming the urbane prep school sophisticate I had always wanted to be. Later, when it was time to apply to colleges, I chose Princeton not because I wanted to go to Princeton but because I wanted to be the kind of person who could go to Princeton. It was the final, essential component of the persona I had created for myself.

  Dwight maintained its community prestige as an international school that was a popular destination for the children of ambassadors and members of the United Nations Secretariat, despite its reputation in the internal prep school circuit as a “school for rich fuck-ups,” as a rock-star alumnus once described it in an interview. (I sent that home to all my friends in Portland, as evidence of how cool I’d become, though mostly I was trying to prove it to myself.) Students were fond of saying that Dwight was an acronym for “Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together,” the redundancy of which, sadly, proved their point. I heard reports, whether true or not, that the year before I arrived, students would simply put their bags up on their desks and snort cocaine in the middle of class, an act of brazen rebellion that I found hypnotically compelling.

  What I hadn’t heard was that a crackdown on the trade of street narcotics in the school had shifted the focus to prescription drugs. It was harder to find cocaine than it had been before, I was told—at least, to the extent that it used to be easy to pick up in school. But when abused properly, I was learning, pharmaceuticals were just as effective. I began snorting prescription amphetamines for breakfast, which put me in a state of perpetual but frantic euphoria. It was like having my coke and eating it, too.

  Sahara, an Italian heiress with a lissome frame and a tangle of wild, dark hair, remained undeterred by the threat of random urinalysis. She single-handedly buoyed a thriving underground market for clean urine.

  “Do another line, baby,” Sahara said, scratching at her nostril. “Where’s the bag? Baby, I wanna do another line. Let’s do this shit.”

  My assimilation was rapid, even if it was mostly just an act. I went to fancy restaurants—private school kids went to dinner as a form of recreation, which I found very curious—and picked at Kobe tartare, trying to look bored. I kissed my female acquaintances on the cheek—twice, in the European style—and assumed the drifting vernacular of my new friends, who spoke in an odd sort of rarefied Ebonics, urban slang peppered with preternaturally savvy references that only those born rich would understand.

  “Yo, Daisy, that dress is mad dope,” my new friend Jesse said. “Is that shit Ralph Lauren Purple Label? He summers on Shelter Island with my parents, yo.” I knew how ridiculous he sounded, but I much preferred to imitate it than to challenge it.

  Jesse’s bedroom looked like a Mexican pharmacy. He didn’t sell any pills, but gave them to me freely in small plastic bags of twenty, appearing thrilled to find a peer who shared his geeky fascination with psychopharmacology. Jesse introduced me to modafinil, trade name Provigil, a narcolepsy medication that, he said, was being tested by the U.S. military as their new “go pill,” enabling the user to stay awake for up to six consecutive days without any deterioration of mental acuity. The paranoia and bloating were a small price to pay for hundred-hour days that were rapidly filling up with social commitments, drunken one-night stands, and detentions in the chancellor’s office. Someone told me once that in New York, trade-offs exist among academic excellence, social fluency, and sleep. You could really only have two out of the three. Jesse and I both chose to forgo the last, neither of us realizing that going without sleep wasn’t realistic.

  “I need to get in to see your doctor, yo,” I said one afternoon. The pockets of my cashmere topcoat were stuffed with sacks of assorted pills, but I was already counting them in my head, thinking about how fast they would go.

  “Yo, it’s just Chester,” Jesse said. “Dwight referred me to him.”

  The next day, I took a cab across the park to the office of Dr. Walter Chester, who, it turned out, treated many of my friends. They referred to him universally as “Chester”; you could hear his name, sotto in hallway asides. “Yo, Chester wrote me a script for thirty days of Tramadol, but I don’t even know what the fuck it does.” What did Tramadol do? I didn’t know, but I wanted some.

  The doctor saw patients in the funereal cloisters of a Park Avenue ground-floor co-op. In the waiting room, I idled through a tabloid. The door to an adjacent room opened and a boy I recognized from school—whose father, I knew, was the president of a massive media conglomerate—exited and crossed through the lobby. He shot me a knowing glance, and radials of pleasure, the stuck-throat feeling of a shared secret, coursed through me.

  Chester had owlish spectacles and a mustache that he stroked in a performance of erudition. I explained that I was having difficulty paying attention, that my sleep was troubled, that debilitating panic attacks tormented me through the night. I went on that it was tough adjusting to the “frenetic pace of the city,” a phrase that I used often in lieu of original thought. (“How do you like living in New York?” “Oh, you know, the pace is just so frenetic.” “What did you do this weekend, Sam?” “Just got carried away by the frenetic pace of the city, I guess.”) I was restless and unhappy, I said, and I knew that it wouldn’t be possible for me to realize my full potential in my current condition.

  Although I lied often, generally with the bristly indignation of the unfairly maligned (“Come on, Dad, do you really think I’d do something like that?”), I was a cautious, calculating liar. Preparing the alibis and excuses was half the fun. But these fabrications to Chester came automatically and without premeditation, as charged with authenticity as if they were true. I could almost convince myself that I really did have generalized-anxiety-major-depressive-attention-deficit-disorder. (It would not have occurred to me then that formulating such diagnoses should be the responsibility of a doctor.)

  As I exited Chester’s office, the autumn wind whipping my cheeks redder than they already were from three days of running only on cigarettes and amphetamines, I fingered those delicate slips of paper in my pocket, acknowledging their power. At any moment I could turn them into little orange bottles that would jangle in the pocket of my blue blazer, rhythmic as the shaking of maracas. They weren’t prescriptions; they were keys, they were lovers, they were shoes, they were new friends I had known forever. They were magic.

  “I’m living in Manhattan now,” I wrote to a friend in Portland, “surrounded by Upper East Side sophisto-puppies who spend the majority of their lives getting in and out of taxis. If you saw my life you would immediately vomit up your bean sprouts and acai onto your mandals . . . I’m incredibly busy, constantly overcaffeinated and exhausted, always broke, utterly cantankerous, lungs filled with tar
and blood filled with chemicals, and happier than I’ve ever been—just thriving, thriving, thriving on the excess and intensity of this city.”

  I had been so rapidly subsumed by the mundane glamour of life in Manhattan, a breathless circus of coke lines at Bungalow, white-gloved doormen in funny hats, tiny dogs in quilted coats. But stepping onto Park outside of Chester’s office, raising my arm to hail a cab, I saw a pair of girls standing on the adjacent corner—two, and then three, clustered together. Plumes of cigarette smoke circled around their bellies, charcoal and chalky white, and the sunlight percolating in auburn beams through the spaces between buildings made the smoke look almost opaque. The girls were thin as the leafless trees along Riverside Drive, their legs bony in black leggings, iridescent as coal. One of the girls was crying, and shouting into her mobile phone. “Mom,” she was saying. “Mom.”

  For an instant, it occurred to me that there was something sort of strange and sad about my life in New York. I had a niggling fear that I wasn’t really happy in it. But the thought that I hated most of all was that despite outward appearances, I still found it hard to assimilate to the city. I would never be anything but a tourist. I was an outsider, a spectator, a dilettante. That terrified me.

  That night, I went up to the roof of my apartment building and called Kat.

  “Kat,” I said, “I miss you.”

  Looking at the sky, I couldn’t see the stars in the city, everything so clouded by smog and pollution. I stepped up onto the squared railing and felt the autumn wind against my body as I looked out over Broadway. I remembered the sky in Portland, the silence of the cool night. I thought about how it had felt to climb, how I’d been so sure that I would fly, the way that ladder had soared majestically toward the sky. Here, there was only the endless whirring of taxicabs below, all of them spinning their wheels, just like me.

  “I’m lonely,” I said.

  It was the first true thing I’d said in a long time.

  The week after I visited Princeton, I met with my college adviser, Ms. Sharma, a stout Indian woman who spoke in hushed conspiratorial tones. Meeting with her usually gave me a tension headache, which, fortunately, could be remedied with the Vicodin that Jesse was giving me.

  She leafed through my paperwork, sending a stack of white paper sailing across her desk. “What did you think of Princeton?”

  “It’s my top choice,” I said.

  “Early decision, then?”

  I nodded. She leaned forward.

  “Sam,” she whispered, “Princeton is the most competitive school in the country. Their acceptance rate dropped to eight percent last year. Your class rank and your SATs are good but not exceptional. Your extracurriculars are lacking. Your personal essay is strong and I’ll write you a glowing recommendation—I know your instructors will as well—and I trust that you can deliver during the interview, but that’s not secure. You look like a dabbler, Sam. Are you a dabbler?”

  I shook my head.

  “No. You need a passion. You like to write, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “You need to strengthen that element of your identity. Princeton rejects well-rounded students; that’s not what they want. They want a well-rounded student body consisting entirely of students who excel spectacularly in one specific area. So you need to become . . .”

  She paused for dramatic effect. The wait was excruciating. I hung on her ellipsis.

  “The writer.”

  I set my hands on the table. Both of us had bitten our fingernails raw. Ms. Sharma saw me looking at her hands and folded them in her lap. She was an outsider, too, I thought, dealing with the petty problems of lazy rich kids all day. It must have been miserable for her.

  “What else can I do?” I asked.

  “Keep those grades up. Strengthen your extracurriculars. And find someone to advocate for you during the admissions process. Do you know anyone who went to Princeton?”

  A familiar sharp pressing began to form behind my eyes. In a moment I would cry. I didn’t know how to explain to Ms. Sharma that I didn’t come from this rarefied Upper East Side milieu, that here was where my middle-class Pacific Northwest trappings would betray me—here, because my father couldn’t put in a phone call or donate a building. He went to Berkeley, for God’s sake.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, see what you can find, Sam.”

  Outside her office, I slumped against the wall, feeling sorry for myself. Becoming “the writer” was easy—I had already begun that process by moving to New York. The city (also, I suspect, the amphetamines, but that seemed irrelevant at the time) had sharpened my identity as a writer; I knew that I was not the first young writer to draw inspiration from the gritty song of the city, a song that I thought I could hear if I listened closely enough. The streets slippery with cab filth and rainwater outside the scuff-toed chaos of Lower East Side dive bars; daytime drunks on Upper East Side terraces; the cloying richness of grilled ostrich and polenta at Butter, where bony actresses clustered against a mural of painted birches. It was the realest forest in the city, and I loved it.

  I was always writing this narcissistic little book in my head. Each moment was a potential vignette, every conversation mined for a savory snippet. Friends formed composite characters in my mind. At first, I had written to lend reason and meaning to a life that had grown chaotic, but the balance had reversed; I began living chaotically simply so that I would have something to write about. But my quest for drama had its own price: I had become so self-absorbed that even my most beautiful paragraphs were repellent. Even in English class, after returning a personal essay, a teacher told me, “This is very well written, but your protagonist is unlikable.”

  “It’s about me,” I said, genuinely dismayed.

  I convinced myself that he was jealous of my youth and my talent. Only if I stayed in crisis, I thought, would my life retain its narrative viability. Still, I knew on some level that the damage had begun to exceed what was necessary for compelling storytelling. This was one difference between writing and drugs: with cocaine, after the first line, other lines followed whether I wanted them or not. When I wrote, I could control exactly how many lines there were, and when it all stopped.

  I smoked a joint with Sahara in the garden of her parents’ apartment off Fifth Avenue.

  “What do I wear to my Princeton interview?” I asked. “I need something that says, ‘I was up all night teaching quantum physics to Somalian orphans with cleft palates.’ ”

  Sahara extinguished the roach with the toe of her metallic pump and considered this for a moment. She flipped her hair to one side. “Helmut Lang?” she said.

  “You’re no fucking help,” I said.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s just Princeton.”

  It’s just Princeton, I repeated to myself as we groped down the darkened stairwell, back to the ordered earth tones of the living room. Stoned, my feet felt heavy and club-like, my palms sweat-slick against the banister, an indistinct buzzing in the back of my head. We paused in the vestibule outside the door to her apartment, a tasteful bouquet of dried flowers in a vase on the end table, a paisley umbrella hooked on the coatrack in the corner, and I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. I looked rosy-cheeked and glamorously exhausted. To my eyes, then, I looked like someone who really might belong there.

  It’s just Princeton, I said to my reflection. It’s just Princeton.

  My Princeton interviewer asked to meet me at a coffee shop on Eighth Avenue, near his office in midtown west. I wasn’t nervous, I told myself. Not one bit.

  I went home from school early and took an hour to dress myself with fastidious attention to detail: pressed khakis, a black Helmut Lang sweater I’d taken from Sahara’s dad’s closet. (“He’ll never miss it,” she’d said.) Did it look effortlessly chic or just contrived? Probably contrived. Was it possible to decontrive something that I’d already spent so much time contriving? I spent a lot of time asking myself questions like this
instead of actually doing anything productive. I snorted two lines of Adderall off my dresser. I talked myself up in the mirror.

  You’re hot shit. He will find you irresistible.

  In the bathroom, I applied tinted moisturizer and studied my face in the vanity, working different muscles, practicing a casual-yet-cool smile.

  I wet a hand towel and wiped off the moisturizer. Suddenly I was blotchy. I opened the cabinet to expose the neat rows of orange prescription bottles. I took a Dexedrine, then a Xanax. I put another Xanax in the breast pocket of my shirt for good measure. It seemed likely that I’d need it later.

  I closed the medicine cabinet and took the elevator downstairs. I waved to the doorman. I got in a cab. There were traffic lights. My cabdriver murmured incomprehensibly into his hands-free phone. I removed the second Xanax from my breast pocket and held it in my hand until it was almost beginning to melt. I popped it into my mouth and rotated it around until it found a neat space underneath my tongue. (Dr. Chester had advised me that taking pills sublingually made them hit faster—“great if you need an extra Ritalin during, say, your SATs,” he’d said, and I had nodded thoughtfully; it sounded like great advice.) As it began to dissolve, I imagined that my inhibitions were being swept away by the gunmetal tides of the Hudson River. There was no traffic on the West Side Highway. I was young and free. Anxiety bubbled somewhere in my belly, then popped like a balloon, yielding to serenity.

  Who cares, anyway? It’s just Princeton.

  “It’s just Princeton!” I yelled to the cabdriver.