And I Cannot Help But Wonder
It was a Superman lunchbox and the smell of my mother’s perfume when she left me on the steps of the tiny Kindergarten portable that fortified me on my first day of school. That was the beginning of it. Before first crushes, first cigarettes, first girlfriends, and first rum-and-cokes greedily consumed out of two liter bottles for most of my senior year of high school, there was that lunchbox and Chanel, fortifying me against my two worst fears at five years old: 1) that the teachers would be mean, and 2) that no one would like me, or want to play with me, or want to be my friend.
I cannot help but wonder if anyone will like me.
That is what I am thinking about when I’m sitting at Campo, a bar in Morningside Heights on a Saturday before the first day of school at Columbia University. That fear never left. It can be temporarily dismissed with a wave of the hand of logic — of course people will like you — but it can never entirely be exorcised. Unfortunately for me, I have neither my old lunchbox nor any trace of perfume — my mother’s or otherwise — to fortify me. Fortunately, I have learned that mimosas make a wonderful substitute.
This is not my first time in a new city: I am not a homesick teenager whose parents have just left him on the curb with exhortations to do well and a few pictures from home. My father is 75 years old; my mother, six years dead. I am twice the age of the average first-year: a 36-year-old man who was accepted into Columbia’s School of General Studies: a college for non-traditional students that is better Googled than explained. I have just walked away from a very comfortable apartment, my beloved leather sofa, and a social lunchbox full of friends so that I can chase down an Ivy League undergraduate degree, accrue a not-insignificant amount of debt, and receive weekly exhortations from people — my family, a few friends –who have placed their hopes and money on the dark horse to win the race, or at least finish.
The mimosas are helping. I’m up to fifteen.
Two girls walk in, both about 21. They sit next to me at the bar and order “Barnards” — some red concoction involving muddled fruit and vodka — and I suddenly feel like a total fraud. I should be in grad school by now. I should have a career. I should have an income and I should be loafing on my now-sold sofa, smoking a pipe and not having to return to a small, Columbia-owned studio surrounded by screaming drunks of the collegiate Greek variety. But I am not. I am, for better or worse, a homesick (and drunk) 36 year old man who, like his 18-year-old peers, has no choice to go but forward; has no choice but to try to please the people that I have long felt as though I have disappointed, no matter how great my successes without the magic of a college degree.
It is either liquid courage or solid loneliness that turns me toward the two young women who are sitting next to me and asks them if I might buy them a drink.
My exact words are, “So. Shots, ladies?”
We start with tequila, but by the time two hours have passed, we are finishing with 160-proof absinthe, served neat, no water, no chaser. The day has disappeared into our glasses, though somehow my legs do not fail me. I assume that, like most friendships that crystallize in tequila, I won’t be seeing them again unless it’s in rehab.
Much to my surprise, they adopt me. They introduce me to their friends, invite me out with them, tell me about their problems, tell me off, drink with me. The cynical will ask, so I will preemptively answer: no, I do not date any of them, nor do I hook up with any of them. When it comes to social credit, however, my cup runneth over: I have the great fortune of being surrounded by at least three or four intelligent and beautiful young women at a time. This is a much better situation than it was when I was five.
They are the first friends I make at Columbia.
They graduate and begin all the things that I have already done: look for jobs, get first apartments, break-up with lovers, have friends suddenly die. I know that advice on any of it is useless, but I help when I can.
Some days I want to quit. School is fucking hard: hundreds of pages of reading, scores of pages of writing, language classes that I feel like I’m failing, and a street-facing studio apartment in a city that tends to celebrate noise at all hours of the night. Still: I don’t quit. A friend commits suicide just before Thanksgiving in 2011. I grieve, I drink, I carry on. By day I am fueled by coffee and occasionally amphetamines and at night I sleep thanks to Columbia-prescribed Temazepam: a potent, short-acting benzodiazepine sometimes called “Hardball.” My anxiety is kept at bay by Klonopin, also graciously prescribed at Columbia. I will go through a very private Hell when I wean myself off both drugs a few months after graduating, no doctor or significant other at my side, no one to soothe the nightmares.
Two years go by and I am months away from graduating with a very expensive degree in English faced with the prospect of having to find a job in the same economy that spat me out of the workforce and back into school, having been rejected — to my shame — by all six of the Ph.D programs I have applied to.
No one in NYC will look at my resume or return my calls. I drink. Then I drink some more, while still somehow keeping my GPA high enough to graduate cum laude. A month before graduation, I see a news article in BWOG or Spec or the NY Daily News: Ashton Kutcher is on a worldwide search for a writer for some new start-up in Hollywood. I read the post:
Ashton Kutcher is looking for a writer to join a small team of designers and engineers who are cofounding a consumer-oriented technology company. This job will require relocating to LA, and will provide an opportunity to be a part of the tech company’s founding team. Your writing will be a centerpiece of the company?s [sic] product and will reach millions of people.
A successful candidate will be an excellent and versatile writer with strong project management skills. This individual should have experience in creative descriptive writing and be capable of conducting research/curating content.
Responsibilities
– Write daily creative pieces that will form a core part of the product
– Work closely with founders to curate content for application?s homepage
– Begin to screen and hire a larger editorial team
Requirements
– 3+ years experience writing in college (English major or equivalent)
– Ability to take the initiative and complete a project, regardless of scope or complexity
– Meticulous attention to detail
– Creativity and taste for aesthetic beauty
Fuck, no problem.
There’s an email address asking for writing samples and a resume.
I write a cover letter, attach a copy of Engaged, a couple other pieces of writing, and some photographs of some books that I rebound.
The cover letter reads:
Dear Mr. Dabaghi,
I’m a senior at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, due to graduate in May of this year with a B.A. in English with Latin honors. As an English honors student, I am also eligible for the granting of departmental honors, having finished my senior essay on the modernist poet Harry Crosby.
You’ll probably see — if you haven’t already — a large chunk of applicants with very similar dossiers and much more interesting cover letters.
Luckily you’re not hiring cover letter writers.
I returned to college in my 30s, having spent most of my 20s working as an armed guard. security manager, or sales professional for various luxury retailers. As a writer, I started off as a self-publishing ‘zine writer in the early 1990s, occasionally seeing my stuff published in places like Rollerderby (a long forgotten but once culturally-relevant publication run by Lisa Crystal Carver) and later, in various places online, including copy for adult websites (which, thankfully, is all uncredited).
After returning to school, I became more prolific. I studied novel writing with Marian Thurm at Yale. I won first place in creative non-fiction at the 2010 annual humanities symposium at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. I was published in Columbia University’s Surgam and U.C. Berkeley’s Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal. Most recently, I had a brief essay published by the visual artist Wayne Bertola via his Danaides Press.
I have written everything from long screeds on modernist poets to close readings on Milton and Shakespeare to pornographic copy to technical treatises on the impact of human intelligence sources on nuclear terrorism threats to incident reports to essays on summer flings to academic papers on obscure modernists. Suffice it to say, I have an eye for detail and I get things done.
In short, I can write. Moreover, I write very well. I’ll go further: I may be the best writer you’ll find.
My sense of aesthetics is best demonstrated by the fact that I taught myself bookbinding because I don’t like the way modern paperbacks are bound. I’ve attached a few examples of my work there.
I hope my writing will speak for itself and, moreover, I hope you’re interested in talking. I’m extremely interested in this opportunity and would love to hear more about it.
I am attaching my resume and samples of my writing that I think showcase my creative and technical abilities, but I also invite you to look over my blog:
If you have any interest or think I might be a good candidate for this position, please feel free to email me…
Thank you and all the best —
K.S. Anthony
I graduate, Latin honors intact, departmental honors… not so much.
Two weeks after graduation, I’m walking up to a house in a cul-de-sac in the Hollywood Hills. The house overlooks the Hollywood Reservoir and, I will soon learn, used to be where Justin Bieber lived. I’m wearing a suit: it is the last time I will wear a suit to work in California. Once again, I’ve left my friends, a city I loved, and refused the comfort of returning to someplace that would take me back, knowing that I’m not made for that kind of retreat.
It’s about to be the first day of school all over again and despite everything I have learned and the robust affections of my friends, I cannot help but wonder if anyone will like me.
But as I approach the gate of Ashton Kutcher’s house, I pause for a moment, and there, on the summer wind, I swear I can smell my mother’s perfume.
A much shorter version of this was rejected by The New York Times in January 2013.
