Steve Martin - The Pleasure of My Company

The top of the hill held an unholy sight. It turns out that Freedom College is a little village, pristine and fresh, with its classrooms set back on fertile lawns surrounded by low wrought-iron gates. In front of each of these bungalows, hung from natural wood supports, were white signs with the name of each department in calligraphic script, and each compound was set on its own block, with a street in front of it, with sidewalks. And curbs. Curbs I had not counted on. In all my preparations for this day, the problem of curbs never occurred to me. Yes, there was the occasional access driveway for supply trucks, but they were never opposed by another driveway or were in some way askew. And worse, students of both sexes, sporting matching blazers, lined most of the sidewalks to hail our arrival, creating an audience for my terror. Our troop had gathered a small head of steam and was not about to regroup or swerve for my unexplainable impulses. The pathway fed onto a sidewalk and I saw that I was on a direct path to curb confrontation.

False hopes arose in me. Perhaps, I thought, the other contestants too could not cross curbs. But I knew the odds of finding anyone else whose neuroses had jelled into curb fear were slim. Perhaps my behavior would be canceled out by someone else’s even more extravagant compulsion. Perhaps we’d find out that Danny Pepelow needed to sit in a trash can and bark. Maybe Sue Dowd couldn’t go a full hour without putting a silver Jiffy Pop bag over her head. But no rescue was materializing and the curb was nigh. I could turn back. I did not have to speak at Freedom Hall, I said to myself. I could stop and cower in front of the curb, collapsed in a pool of stinking sweat, weeping and moaning, “No, no, I can’t cross it,” or I could simply move backward while everyone looked at me and my ashen face and my moon-walking feet. These cowardly solutions were complicated by another powerful force, the fear of public humiliation. The students had started to applaud thinly, probably because they had been instructed to. My fear of the curb and my fear of embarrassment clashed, and my extremities turned cold. My hands trembled with the chill. I felt greatly out of balance and widened my stance to keep from reeling. I breathed deeply to calm myself, but instead, my pulse raced into the danger zone.

If I’d allowed my body to do what it wanted to do, it would have fallen on its knees and its head on the ground, its arms stretched out on the sidewalk. Its mind would have roiled and its throat would have cried, and nothing but exhaustion would have made it all stop, and nothing but home could have set the scale back in balance. But instead, I marched on, spurred by inertia and the infinitesimal recollection that I had recently crossed a curb and had not died.

My feet were like anvils, and it seemed as if the curb were nearing me rather than I nearing it. My fear represented the failure of the human system. It is a sad truth of our creation: Something is amiss in our design, there are loose ends of our psychology that are simply not wrapped up. My fears were the dirty secrets of evolution. They were not provided for, and I was forced to construct elaborate temples to house them.

As I neared the curb, my gait slowed. Most of the party had passed me and was happily, thoughtlessly mid-street. Even Brian, who at first had hung back, was now even with me, and as we approached the curb we were stride for stride, our arms swinging in time like a metronome. Just before Brian stepped off the curb, I slipped my index finger into the cuff of his jacket and clipped my thumb against it. I was hanging on to him for my life. I don’t think Brian could feel my minuscule clamp on his coat sleeve. As I raised my foot into the air above the road, I relived Brian as leader, how his leap across my curb weeks ago had shot me over it, too, how his he-man engine had somehow revved up mine. My foot landed on the street and it was like diving into icy water. The sound of the clapping students became more and more distant as I submerged, and I kept my fingers secretly clasped to my lifeline.

When the next curb appeared I came up for air and stepped up onto the sidewalk. Muffled sounds began to clear and sharpen. By now, Brian had felt the to-and-fro tug at his sleeve and he turned to me. My blood pressure had soared and had pushed streams of red into my eyeballs and he saw them wide with fear. But Brian seemed to think it was okay that I hung on to him for safety. And I felt safe, too, even though the contact point was only the size of a small fingerprint.

There were four curbs in all and each step down was like the dunking of a Salem witch. I would be submerged into the fires of hell and lifted into the sky for breath. My persecutors were Tepperton’s Pies, and my redeemers were my thumb and forefinger pinching a square half inch of wool. When I finally saw Freedom Hall a few yards in front of me, its name now held a double meaning. My pulse lowered to acceptable; my tongue became unstuck from the roof of my mouth. But my God, was I drenched. I attempted to walk so my body would not touch my clothing, trying to center my legs in my trousers so my skin would not contaminate my pants with sweat. I held my arms bowed out so my underarms could aerate and dry, and I could feel that the hair at the nape of my neck was moist and starting to curl.

Finally we were backstage in an air-conditioned office. The chill matched my own body temperature, which had plunged to freezing, and my evaporating perspiration cooled me into the shakes. My nervousness was increasing and I was afraid that if anyone spooked me I would spring in the air and hiss like a Halloween cat.

Soon we were escorted to the wings, where we stood waiting to be brought onstage. We could hear our introduction through the curtain but the words echoed vacantly and were hardly intelligible. Several students lingered around us and I overheard one of them whisper “How’d he get away from his gardening job?” and then with a snicker nod his head toward Kevin Chen.

We were told that we would give our speeches in order, “worst first,” which was quickly changed to “least votes” first. This meant I would be going last. A stage manager paged the curtain and waved us onstage with a propeller elbow. We entered almost single file, and I realized it was the first moment since I’d left Santa Monica when Brian was not nearby. I looked back. The stage manager had barred him from the wings with a hand gesture.

Out on the stage, the four of us sat on folding chairs while the college dean introduced us one by one. I don’t think any of us could make out a word he said. We were behind the speakers and all we could hear was the din of reverberating sound. Occasionally, however, the dean would throw his arm back and gesture toward one of us, at which point we would individually stand and receive enthusiastic applause. From where, I wondered, did this enthusiastic applause generate? Certainly not from the hearts of the audience members, who had no clue who we were or the extent of our accomplishments. I figured it was an artificially instilled fervor, inspired by a version of reform school discipline.

Sue Dowd spoke first, and though I couldn’t understand a word she said, I wept anyway. For some reason, her body movements and gestures captivated me. She punctuated sentences with an emphatic fist or a slowly arcing open palm. Her oval body swayed with each sentence like a galleon at sea, and she concluded her speech with her head humbly bowed. There was a hesitation before the applause began, indicating that the audience was either so moved they couldn’t quite compose themselves, or didn’t realize her speech was over.

Danny Pepelow was next and inordinately dull. When I think of the trouble I went to to dress nicely, I wondered who’d suggested to Danny that a lumberjack shirt, jeans, and leather jacket would be fine. I was able to catch a few words of his essay because he spoke so slowly that the sound waves couldn’t overlap themselves. I wondered how he could have possibly gotten more votes than Sue Dowd. At least she gesticulated. Danny stood there like a boulder. His voice was so monotone that I welcomed the few seconds of audio feedback that peppered his speech. He sat down to half the applause Sue Dowd had coaxed, but still grinned as if he had spoken like Lincoln at Gettysburg.