We stayed at these apartments on the weekends, when my friends’ parents were out at their country houses, and spent our days trolling the West Village. The Village dazzled with its array of head shops, art house cinemas, and the most coveted suppliers of bohemian wear in Manhattan—Canal Jean and Reminiscence. Indian print T-shirts soon replaced my Alligators; dangly silver filigree earrings replaced my tiny gold studs.
We shopped with the cash dispensed by Taft’s accounting office, our expenses later billed to our parents. Despite my mother’s pessimism, the Stroh Brewery had expanded nationally by acquiring the much larger Schlitz Brewing Company—described by the Wall Street Journal as a “minnow swallowing a whale”—and money came my way more easily now; I could see our beer brands in all the liquor stores in New York, the empties in Central Park and even on the Taft campus. Still, handing over those crisp ten-and twenty-dollar bills in West Village shops, I got a rapid-fire charge of adrenaline guilt, as if spending money were as risky as shoplifting or smoking pot. I’d witnessed my father’s freedom with money, of course, but never without my mother’s sportscaster’s commentary. I’d internalized both somehow, so that spending became just one more naughty thing I could do.
Fifteen-year-olds with pockets full of cash, we felt as if we owned the damn city. We dressed up and went out to Upper East Side bars, practicing our classroom French on the bartenders, ordering martinis. We took cabs downtown, had dinner at John’s Pizza in the Village, and danced at Studio 54 or Danceteria, flashing the bouncers our fake college IDs, procured at Playland on Forty-Second Street. We bought pot in Washington Square Park to take back to whichever apartment we happened to be crashing in, and if no one was selling the good stuff, we called Choo-Choo.
Choo-Choo brought the drugs to your building, uptown or downtown, like a train carrying precious cargo. A scrawny old punk rocker, he’d show up wearing peg-legged black jeans, a wifebeater, and a spiky dog collar–style belt down low on his waist.
One Sunday after a particularly late night, a group of us sat around Liv’s penthouse on Riverside Drive waiting for Choo-Choo’s delivery. When the doorman telephoned up to announce, “Miss Goodman, Mr. Choo-Choo is here,” Liv and I went down in the wood-paneled elevator with our wad of collected bills.
Choo-Choo was waiting next to the leather sofa in the lobby, I remember, sweating behind his sunglasses. The doorman politely looked away when we pulled out the cash.
Upstairs, we sat in the living room drinking really strong gin and tonics and smoking Marlboros, the baggie of green buds on the coffee table in a nice crystal ashtray, right next to the Times—with its front-page article on Choate Rosemary Hall. Two Choate students had been arrested at Kennedy Airport for trafficking cocaine up from Colombia, and fourteen others had pleaded guilty for financing the trip. The article seemed to encapsulate a multitude of truths about our kind of crowd; we took risks—big ones—as a diversion from our boredom. It wasn’t about running away “Summer of Love” style; we worked from within the system, using our own privilege as a launching pad. The trick was recognizing where the lines were and then letting someone else cross them. One of the traffickers, see, had been the son of a truck driver, hell-bent on fitting in with the privileged set at Choate, and . . . he’d been used. Just as Charlie had been used. They were the line crossers.
“Can you imagine?” said Feren. “You’d have to be, like, so fuckin’ ballsy to go for that.”
I sipped my drink and studied the faces of the kids involved—kids just like us. I couldn’t believe they’d done it. “I almost went to Choate,” I said. “I wonder if they’ll go to prison.”
“That so easily could have been you, Franny,” said Jen, absently dropping her ash on the rug. “You know? I could totally see you doing it.”
I thought of Charlie—now stationed in Okinawa—and I felt an inviolable boundary within myself. “Nope, I’d never have gone for that.” I already understood, at age sixteen, the elusiveness of the line between a life of privilege and a life in prison. Soon after Charlie’s trial, Michigan had raised the penalty for dealing cocaine to life without parole.
“Would you?” asked Sasha, looking over at Feren.
“Me?” asked Feren jestingly, laughing her semi-insane laugh. “Not a chance.”
But I wasn’t convinced. Feren was the wildest of us all. Over spring break she’d apparently been cavorting with some French sailors who’d docked in Nevis, the West Indian island where her mother lived.
“I wonder what will happen to them,” I said, glancing down at the photo. “They’re so screwed; they’ll never get into college.”
“They’ll end up in reform school,” said Liv in that endearing deadpan monotone of hers. “As far away from drugs as you can get.”