Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) by Walter Kirn Page A
Authors: Walter Kirn
Tags: United States, Literary, General, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Criticism, 20th Century, Authors, American, Biography, Education, 21st Century, Higher, Walter - Childhood and youth, American - 20th century, Students, Students - United States, Students & Student Life, Kirn, American - 21st century
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because I understood their premises. I liked them because they disliked the others, as I did.
By the time Nina left to fetch us two fresh drinks, I sensed that she found my outcast status intriguing and fancied herself a sort of exile, too, as wasn’t uncommon, I’d find out, with kids who’d been raised at the center of everything. An hour later I was lying on top of her in a cold off-campus communal house which reeked of hashish, crème de menthe, and brown bananas. On the cracked stucco walls were unframed student paintings whose abstract muddiness irked me for some reason. My love-making was brisk, ungenerous. This suited Nina just fine. “You’re good,” she said. “You know how to take, to be selfish. I guessed right.”
“How?” I said.
“The beautiful wild fury behind your eyes.”
That Nina had seen my anger surprised me. Ever since being booted from the common room, I’d labored to hide my wrath under a smirk so as not to gratify my enemies. With Nina’s wet breath roaring warmly in my ear canals, I decided to change this policy. Raw disgruntlement was rare at Princeton, and some people found it beguiling, it seemed. “Play your best card,” my father had always said. Mine would be an ace of spades. A black ace.
Dating Nina raised my profile in serious campus drama circles and brought support for the staging of my play: Late Modern, an Apocalyptic Comedy . My roommates were unmoved by my step up and didn’t admit me to their get-togethers—their “salons,” as they’d begun to call them. Nina was no longer welcome at them, either. The wonder was that she ever had been. Her spare, dimly lit productions of Beckett’s Endgame and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros were, according to Peter, “utter masturbatory anarchy.” I didn’t entirely disagree with him. Nina’s theatrical hero, I’d discovered, was a mad Frenchman, Antonin Artaud, whose writings suggested that the ideal play ought to resemble a sort of torchlit orgy climaxing in a crackdown by the police.
My piece was staged in an airless black-box theater tucked beneath a campus rec room stuffed with clacking foosball tables and beeping Space Invaders consoles. The director was Adam, whom I’d met through Nina, who’d begun taking credit for my ascent while privately telling me, “You’ll choke. You’ll blow this.” She had good reason to be concerned. On rehearsal nights, before the cast arrived, Adam and I would push thin coffee straws through the drilled-out rubber stopper of an ampoule of pure liquid cocaine which he’d pilfered from a New York hospital where he’d worked as an orderly that summer. The drugs, we thought, sharpened our vision of the production, but they also prevented us from clearly conveying it to our two main actors, who rolled their eyes at our psychedelic suggestions to “lead with your auras,” “float above the lines,” “gesture negatively through stillness,” and “turn every pause into a small inferno.”
One night my lead, my President, a sorrowful tall Southerner named Reynolds who seemed to be at Princeton on the strength of having carried the antique gene for tubercular romantic wispiness into modern times, mounted a polite aesthetic mutiny.
“The script has weaknesses. It’s thin. A tissue. It’s part an homage to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove —”
“A movie,” I said, “which of course I’ve never seen.”
“You must have. Believe me. You’ve just forgotten. My obsession with purity, my hypochondria, that’s one hundred percent out of the film.”
“Maybe some of it, twenty minutes, on TV once.”
“And part a stereotypical revue sketch on erotically blocked religious maniacs.”
“I was a Mormon, Reynolds. These aren’t stereotypes. I had a bishop in my early teens whose remedy for my dirty thoughts—no lie—was buying a Playboy , tearing out the centerfold, and drawing wounds on it, gaping bloody wounds, with a red Magic Marker.”
“I’m sorry you went through that.
By the time Nina left to fetch us two fresh drinks, I sensed that she found my outcast status intriguing and fancied herself a sort of exile, too, as wasn’t uncommon, I’d find out, with kids who’d been raised at the center of everything. An hour later I was lying on top of her in a cold off-campus communal house which reeked of hashish, crème de menthe, and brown bananas. On the cracked stucco walls were unframed student paintings whose abstract muddiness irked me for some reason. My love-making was brisk, ungenerous. This suited Nina just fine. “You’re good,” she said. “You know how to take, to be selfish. I guessed right.”
“How?” I said.
“The beautiful wild fury behind your eyes.”
That Nina had seen my anger surprised me. Ever since being booted from the common room, I’d labored to hide my wrath under a smirk so as not to gratify my enemies. With Nina’s wet breath roaring warmly in my ear canals, I decided to change this policy. Raw disgruntlement was rare at Princeton, and some people found it beguiling, it seemed. “Play your best card,” my father had always said. Mine would be an ace of spades. A black ace.
Dating Nina raised my profile in serious campus drama circles and brought support for the staging of my play: Late Modern, an Apocalyptic Comedy . My roommates were unmoved by my step up and didn’t admit me to their get-togethers—their “salons,” as they’d begun to call them. Nina was no longer welcome at them, either. The wonder was that she ever had been. Her spare, dimly lit productions of Beckett’s Endgame and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros were, according to Peter, “utter masturbatory anarchy.” I didn’t entirely disagree with him. Nina’s theatrical hero, I’d discovered, was a mad Frenchman, Antonin Artaud, whose writings suggested that the ideal play ought to resemble a sort of torchlit orgy climaxing in a crackdown by the police.
My piece was staged in an airless black-box theater tucked beneath a campus rec room stuffed with clacking foosball tables and beeping Space Invaders consoles. The director was Adam, whom I’d met through Nina, who’d begun taking credit for my ascent while privately telling me, “You’ll choke. You’ll blow this.” She had good reason to be concerned. On rehearsal nights, before the cast arrived, Adam and I would push thin coffee straws through the drilled-out rubber stopper of an ampoule of pure liquid cocaine which he’d pilfered from a New York hospital where he’d worked as an orderly that summer. The drugs, we thought, sharpened our vision of the production, but they also prevented us from clearly conveying it to our two main actors, who rolled their eyes at our psychedelic suggestions to “lead with your auras,” “float above the lines,” “gesture negatively through stillness,” and “turn every pause into a small inferno.”
One night my lead, my President, a sorrowful tall Southerner named Reynolds who seemed to be at Princeton on the strength of having carried the antique gene for tubercular romantic wispiness into modern times, mounted a polite aesthetic mutiny.
“The script has weaknesses. It’s thin. A tissue. It’s part an homage to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove —”
“A movie,” I said, “which of course I’ve never seen.”
“You must have. Believe me. You’ve just forgotten. My obsession with purity, my hypochondria, that’s one hundred percent out of the film.”
“Maybe some of it, twenty minutes, on TV once.”
“And part a stereotypical revue sketch on erotically blocked religious maniacs.”
“I was a Mormon, Reynolds. These aren’t stereotypes. I had a bishop in my early teens whose remedy for my dirty thoughts—no lie—was buying a Playboy , tearing out the centerfold, and drawing wounds on it, gaping bloody wounds, with a red Magic Marker.”
“I’m sorry you went through that.
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