At Princeton I was struck by how everyone around me seemed to get on so easily so quickly. I’d left Bayonne, driven an hour or so on Route 1, and arrived at another world, one that I didn’t quite trust. My only prior visit hadn’t prepared me at all. It’d been a cold, rainy day in April. I’d taken an abbreviated campus tour, returned home soaking wet, and come down the next day with a head cold. But now, under a rich blue sky, kids loafed on the quad in laughing clusters while others threw Frisbees and footballs and still others sprawled on blankets as if they’d spent their whole lives among centuries-old Gothic buildings and flagstone walkways cutting through acres and acres of sweet-smelling grass.
Some of them had. In my incoming class there was a Purdue and a Chrysler and the children of national politicians. And while not everyone was from a rich or famous family (plenty of others, like myself, worked food services to help pay for their education), it was hard to ignore the fact that the guy down the hall had the same last name as one of the new buildings on campus, and that in the dormitory adjacent to mine lived an actual Middle Eastern princess.
In those first baffling days of my freshman year, everyone seemed to be forming fast friendships. They seemed to know instinctively which organizations to join, which to avoid, which of the “eating clubs” had the best parties on tap for the weekend, and how to get passes to those parties.
Even my roommate had slid easily into Princeton life. The day he moved in, he taped inspiring quotations to the wall over his desk. “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.—Ralph Waldo Emerson.” And: “Anything in life worth having is worth working for.—Andrew Carnegie.” Lying in our extralong cots late that night, we gave each other our brief histories, and then I asked him if he’d like me to set my alarm.
“I already have mine set for four thirty,” he said.
I asked if he was serious. Classes were still a week away.
“If I wanted to sleep,” he said, “I would have stayed in Missouri.”
He had worked hard and traveled far to arrive, finally, someplace worthy of his ambitions. And he was going to make the most of it. During our weeklong orientation, he bought a new computer and began to read ahead for his classes. Once the semester began, he awoke for crew practice at dawn, and was showered and off to the library before I was out of bed. Within two weeks, he’d already decided to major in political science, joined the debating society, and begun to spend time with a pretty sophomore, the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Chile.
Had he prepared for this life at some exclusive high school, an Exeter or Andover? No. He’d come straight off a midwestern farm, where he got up before dawn each morning for several hours of chores before school, which, from the sound of it—leaky ceiling, shared textbooks—was barely a school at all. Yet here he was, succeeding.
That seemed to be the common trait among the people here. They succeeded. They had succeeded in order to be invited here. And now that they’d arrived, they would prove themselves all over again.
Impressive? Damn right—but I didn’t care for any of it. Everything about the place intimidated me, and I longed for those simple afternoons of music, marijuana, and local girls who didn’t care if I was ambitious or lazy, a Rockefeller or a Buttafuoco. I would have taken solace in my coursework, but that was another problem. I’d always sailed through school without much effort. But now, my calculus class was quickly losing me. My natural ear for music took me only so far in a music theory class where half the students had studied classical piano since the age of three. And what I’d assumed would be the gut course—the required freshman writing class—ended up being an intensive study of modern European authors: Malraux and Mann and Pirandello and Beckett and Sartre and Camus.
Two weeks into the semester and I was swamped. I hadn’t even done a load of laundry yet.
Sunday afternoon, I returned to my dormitory from brunch to hear, coming from a nearby window, the whiny jangle of a badly played electric guitar. I followed the sounds of the guitar down the hallway and knocked on the door.
The guy opened the door wearing pajama bottoms and no shirt. He was pale and stick skinny with longish hair and an unsuccessful blond beard. Smoke curled in front of his face from a cigarette, which he plucked from his mouth.
“Gotcha,” he said. “I’ll turn it down.”
“Oh, I don’t care about that,” I said. “Do you mind if I bum a cigarette?”
In the time it took to smoke one of his cigarettes, I learned that Jeffrey Hocks, from Los Angeles, California, was having as hard a time adjusting to Princeton as I was.