Those first few months of college are a treacherous time, especially if you’re a kid who’s always been the smartest person he knows. Suddenly, you’re not even the smartest person in your set of bunk beds. Believe it or not, that eats people up. People commit suicide over it.
I didn’t have that problem. Any suggestion that I was any kind of übermensch, academical or otherwise, had been definitively settled years earlier.
What got me was chemical equations, Sophomore year of high school. I just couldn’t balance them. Those little f*ckers combined the impenetrability of math with the soporific insolence of a completely useless secret code.
I still remember the pained look on my Chemistry teacher’s face; it was the only real emotion I ever saw him display.
“I don’t understand it,” he droned sadly, pushing up his glasses. “Ed Triner [my Biology teacher the previous year] told me you were the brightest student he ever taught. Now you can’t remember Cesium has seven electrons.”
(Was it Cesium? Was it electrons? See, I still can’t do it.)
“Sorry,” I said, genuinely sorry. “I’ll…think harder?”
But I know when I’m licked, and I was licked. I scraped by with a C, frosted with that teacher’s cold distain.
So I walked into Yale with a, shall we say, lively sense of my own limitations. To these known failings, Mrs. Y added many more. Seeing how much raw intellect could be packed into a human skull, I realized that I was merely smart; the same went for wealth, times many millions. Some people furnished their room as I did—with a dumpster-worthy chair cadged from a couple of disreputable Seniors, and one of those cheap torchiere lamps from the Co-op—and some people most definitely did not. Yale’s not quite Oxbridge-level—I knew the heir to the Seagram’s fortune, and she couldn’t have been nicer helping me struggle through Italian—but back at Yale in ‘87 one’s social status came up every day, in lots of different ways.
There are lots of Yales going on simultaneously, and which one you attend is based on your bank account, family name, and what you’re willing to do to get where you want to go. Through charm and social cunning, over the course of a four-year career you can leap one level, maybe two. One was usual—I did it, myself—and two I saw happen once or twice (sex was often involved, or conservative politics). But what strikes me now, as opposed to what struck me then, isn’t Yale’s ability to make careers and lives, but how mediated the whole experience was by the life you brought with you.
This is the exact opposite of what you see in the brochure; and it’s also a reality that Yale takes great pains to conceal from its students. Since the 1960s, the idea is that Yale and every place like it, levels you up, and that’s why you should bust ass to get in, and give money after you do. But I know hundreds of Yale alums, and what strikes me is how most of them have pretty much the same standard of living as their parents, give or take.
There’s a great calm in jettisoning the jittery American lust to rise, and just accepting what a place like that has to offer…to someone like you. It’s not that you’d get snubbed, though that did happen to me occasionally; it’s more that you wouldn’t even know about the parties at all. Or the clubs, or bars, or whatever. Even though you attended the same classes, slept in the same beds, dodged the same stray bullets (this was, after all, New Haven in 1987), you really were going to a different school.
Which was fine; I went to the Yale I expected and understood, and enjoyed it from the first day, even though my Yale was full of homework and acne, heartbreak, cheap pizza and even cheaper beer. The particular Monday in question I was feeling a little rough; a non-drinker in high school, I’d happily picked up the habit, and being flagrantly underage, my choices as watering holes were restricted. Like many Freshmen, I’d spent the previous evening at Naples Pizzeria, a local Mob-inflected dive that accepted clumsily altered Lifeguard IDs and the like. I think I had something from Hostels USA.
It didn’t really matter; the fix was in, and that was an important part of my Yale education. New Haven can be a sneaky little town, and I liked that about it then, and like that about it now. It’s a Mayflower Madam kind of place, with emphasis on both halves.
In addition to pretty good pizza, a terrible jukebox (“Faith,” “Red Red Wine,” and INXS’ “I Need You Tonight” were on endless repeat), Naples served beer so calamitous the campus wise-heads said it was laced with formaldehyde. Of course it wasn’t, but your kidneys did hurt in a very peculiar, throbbing, angry way, when you were using the one men’s toilet. That toilet was its own sobriety test; you’d walk down a steep narrow stairway, down into the dark, piss-smelling half-floor basement, where at the back you’d go into one of two cubbyholes made out of rec-room wood paneling. Did you have to squeeze through a door, or did I hallucinate that? Anyway, it was a torturous path, and many people per night didn’t make it, filling red Solo cups along the way, which stood as mute signposts of human frailty…until some drunk knocked them over. It was a scene straight out of Dante’s Inferno; maybe the sin of pride? We were all full of ourselves, for sure. Or full of something.
But drunken gamboling did have its benefits; that night I’d found a perfectly good necktie tied to a tree on the way back to Bingham Hall, and claimed it as my own. Blue, with little red florets, Brooks Brothers, I wore it for years.
That was 1987 Yale in a nutshell—a nice necktie left in a dying tree; a skaggy pizza joint on a beautiful street; future Supreme Court justices passed out, surrounded by cups of strangers’ urine, arrayed around a rusted, perpetually running basement toilet. You cherish the memories you have, not the ones you want.
Freshman Commons, where as the name implies all the Freshmen ate, was perhaps the pinnacle of this dichotomy—it served truly terrible slop in truly beautiful surroundings. I remember my breath actually catching the first time I walked through the doors and saw Commons in all its gloomy beer-hall-on-steroids grandeur…then gagged a little at whatever entree was offgassing nearby.
You learned what to avoid—I’m convinced dining hall scrod did me more lasting damage than those endless pitchers of Naples beer—and truthfully any solids they did serve were just to give all those endless cups of coffee something to fight with. Commons is still a remarkable room, brick and timber topped by a 66-foot ceiling…which is just large enough to accommodate all the hopes and dreams of the diners.
The night of October 19, 1987, I recall was windy, chilly, fall was coming. From the cold dark into the warm light, I remember rushing through the doors into Commons, bursting into the sounds of eating. To attend a school like Yale—or maybe any college—is to be in a perpetual hurry, which I liked. Then and now, I prefer to take life at a trot.
The hubbub seemed lesser than usual, subdued. But I didn’t think any more of it, implanting myself into the snake of students wending out from the kitchen. As I moved, person by person, towards whatever punishment awaited me at the steam tables, the custom was in that pre-phone era to scan the hundred or so four-tops to see if any friends were there. I spied one, sitting in a corner, alone.
I fairly cackled; this man, a smooth and sharp-tongued Southerner, was great company. Plus, I wanted his opinion on the necktie, which was still crammed in my pocket. I loaded up my tray with salad—avoiding the “Green Goddess” dressing that was notorious for causing cramps—and weirdly sour baked ziti, which is Italian for “loose stools.” Then I walked over to my pal.
From ten feet away, I could tell something was wrong; Tom had his face buried in the YDN as usual, but this time he wasn’t making acid jokes about the quality of the writing.
“Hey, Old Salt,” he said, but there was no snap in it. (This was the least-embarrassing of several nicknames Tom gave me; they persist until this day.)
”You look shitty,” I said. “What’s up?” I picked up a table tent, the folded photocopy samizdat every Yale student group used to communicate. “Why does DUH insist on telling me about anal warts? They’re obsessed. What is the Department of University Health getting up to?”
Tom grunted.
“Are you going to Pierson Inferno?” This Halloween-themed party was a highlight of Yale’s social season, if such a thing existed. I don’t know if it was the costumes or the pre-gaming, but people really let loose at Inferno; It was one of the few big campus parties after which you could plausibly imagine people getting laid. (Predictably, they shut it down a few years later.)
Tom grunted again.
“Okay, you’re forcing me to get out the big guns.” I reached into the pocket of my windbreaker, and pulled out the tie. “What do you think of this, Mr. Southern Prep?”
Tom just looked down at his coffee. “I guess you didn’t hear,” he said, “about the stock market. It dropped 23% today.” I can’t be sure whether he wiped away a tear, but in my memory he definitely did. “I have to go.”
As I watched Tom slump off to bus his tray, his untucked pink shirt waving a sad goodbye, I thought, “Wow. I have never once, not ever, cared about the stock market. Maybe I should start?”
Because I became a writer, this has not been a problem.
My friend Rodger the cartoonist sauntered up in his Dining Hall gear. “Hi Micul,” he said brightly. “Anyone sitting here?”
“You are.” Knowing that Rodger didn’t come from money either, I didn’t bother telling him about the Dow. Instead, I tossed him the table tent. “Rodg, ‘Anal warts are no joke.’”
“We’ll see about that,” Rodger said, uncapping his felt tip pen, and beginning to draw a cartoon. He drew me hundreds between then and graduation. I wish I’d kept any of them.
That would make me feel very rich. ◊
MICHAEL GERBER is Editor & Publisher of The American Bystander humor magazine. Did you know he went to college at Yale? Sorry, “in Connecticut.” We just uploaded this t-shirt in Bystander’s Etsy store. It is funny and you should buy it.
