Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Vermont was my antidote. I’d only been there once since my thirteen-year-old Fresh Air Fund voyage, and that just seven months earlier, in late January, for my entrance interview at Camden. Still, though the green hills of the Vermont landscape were fresh-quilted with snow, whiter than any I’d seen, and the wind on the vacant campus bit through my fake down coat, I felt stirrings everywhere of Heather Windle-ghosts, of my dragonfly-and-swimsuit summer. I bought a single cardboard-and-cellophane-boxed leaf of maple-sugar candy in the bus depot in Camden Town and when I melted it on my tongue as Heather had once taught me to do I got the most innocent and yearning erection I’d had in four years.

Camden College wasn’t Heather Windle’s Vermont, though. At Camden Heather would have been a townie, a girl glimpsed at the Brass Cat or Peanut’s, one of those small-town bars Camden students sometimes dared themselves to frequent on their sorties from the idyllic walled preserve, the bucolic acres of the campus itself. Inside that trimmed-green sanctuary was a sort of collective solipsistic laboratory, where high-strung urban children were allowed to play however they liked. Dressed in leather and fur and batik they and I-for I was briefly one of them-roamed an environment one part New England farmland, complete with white clapboard dorms, twisted apple trees bearing inedible fruit, low lichen-covered Frostian stone walls wending nowhere through the woods, and tattered cemetery plots with burial dates in the 1700s: one part experimental arts college, founded in the 1920s by passionate Red-leaning patrons, and legendary for its modern dancers and faculty-student marriages; and one part lunatic preserve for wayward children of privilege, those too familiar with psych counseling and rehab to follow older siblings to Harvard or Yale, and which recapitulated in junior form the tribal rituals of Mediterranean resorts and East Hampton summers and the VIP room of Studio 54.

I understood none of this. I was class-dumb, protected from any understanding of money by my father’s artisan-elitism and, paradoxically, by Rachel’s radical populist pride: I’d been raised by a monk and a hippie, each of whom stood willfully outside any hierarchy of class. The desires our little family couldn’t afford to indulge had never seemed important, only snobbish and silly and somehow misplaced, like Thurston Howell’s priorities on Gilligan’s Island . Besides, I’d had as much or more money than most kids I’d known in Brooklyn, if somewhat less than the majority of my Manhattan schoolmates at Stuyvesant, so figured I was somewhere in the middle. Yeah, sure, that was it: I was middle class.

The truth was, few Camden students had ever set foot inside a public school, much less attended one. And I’d never set a foot inside Brooklyn Friends or Packer Collegiate or Saint Ann ’s. A handful of students formerly from those schools, Brooklyn Heights kids mostly, were introduced to me by others, in those first weeks, as being “from Brooklyn too,” yet they were strangers, and when I admitted that I’d gone to P.S. 38 and I.S. 293 they knew, better than anyone else at Camden, what a freak I was to be in their midst here. Across this gulf of experience my new acquaintances and I stared, as though at denizens of a looking-glass world.

In a gesture which could be taken for either a muddled kindness or a cruel segregation, I’d been given a roommate who was also on financial aid. Matthew Schrafft was from Keene, New Hampshire, a town much like Camden, only lacking a glamorous college. He’d attended Manhattan prep schools until sixth grade, but his family’s fortunes had tumbled, his father abandoning a career as a junior producer at CBS News in order to live in a small town and write a novel. For this reason I suspect Matthew felt dangerously near to being a townie. We became friends, and it was a solace that my roommate and friend was, like myself, sometimes to be found on the wrong side of the dining hall’s counters, wearing a white apron, spooning hot waffles and sausages and eggs from steel vats onto our fellow students’ trays. Food server was one of the less hidden or euphemistic work-study jobs-those other charity cases who were tucked away quietly research-assisting or working in the alumnus office could afford to pity Matthew and me as they lined up for their meals.

Matthew and I had also been awarded an unusual housing arrangement, for a pair of freshman: Oswald House Apartment. Oswald was famously the rowdiest and druggiest of the dormitories which surrounded the Commons. Each of these eight clapboard buildings included one central “apartment”: a suite of connected rooms with a fireplace and a private bathroom. These upscale digs were ordinarily reserved for a graduate student or visiting professor, only no one expecting a moment’s peace would have accepted placement in Oswald. The floors in the living room there reeked continuously of cleanser-scrubbed beer spills, the carpet was riddled with burns, the doors decked with thumbtacked porn and spiky, punk-style graffiti. Oswald House was like a pirate ship sailing the apple-strewn lawn, one which blared Grateful Dead more or less around the clock in late summer, when speakers could be mounted facing outward in first-story windows and students sprawled on the grass. The Oswald Apartment had been the domain of a legendary pair of bearded, Belushi-esque partyers, and I think the Housing Office had a notion that by replacing these ringleaders with two fresh-faced, short-haired scholarship students they’d effected a kind of heart transplant on Oswald-that Matthew and I would temper the place from the inside out. That wasn’t exactly how it worked out, but I’m sure the established Oswaldites were every bit as dispirited to see us moving into the Apartment that September as the administration might have wished.

Matthew and I ironized our discomfort by sublimating it in culture. Devo, a band I’d never cared for in high school, became an emblem of our difference, not only from the Camden hippies, but also from the chic, Bowie-loving punk types who had subscriptions to Interview and vacationed in Paris. Devo expanded the nerd-brainiac ethos of a band like Talking Heads in a usefully hostile direction. Loving Devo, it was possible to indulge our class resentment by masking it as anticapitalist satire. They became an adjective: Certain things were awfully Devo around this school, weren’t they?

One balmy afternoon that first week in Vermont, still stunned at catapulting out of our high-school lives and knowing no one, Matthew and I attended an out-of-doors afternoon talk by Richard Brodeur, the new president of Camden. Brodeur seemed as terrified of the place as we were. Like Matthew’s father, he’d thrown over a corporate career for something more real , and his descriptions of why he’d wanted to preside at Camden sounded a tad defensive. In fact, Brodeur was an efficiency expert brought in to repair damage done by a charismatic and tolerant seventies type. Nobody but us gullible freshmen had bothered to attend his talk.

“There’s a story I like to tell,” said Brodeur. “When I was a boy I used to love pizza, and whenever my father took me to the pizzeria I’d order two slices. And I’d sit and he’d watch me wolfing down the first slice with my eyes on the second. I wasn’t even tasting that first slice. And one day my father said to me, ‘Son, you need to learn that while you’re eating the first slice of pizza, eat the first slice. Because right now you’re eating the second slice before you’ve finished the first.’ And a year ago I realized that I needed that lesson again. I took a look at my life and realized I had my eye on the second slice of pizza.”