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Pinterest is so helpful. Yes, “create post” is the action I was looking for. Zoom in closer on the quad of dorms cornered by Merrill Hall, the stoner dorm. See a typical Tuesday night, study hall from 7 – 9 pm. Dwight and John are at it. John is in bed reading a book, Hawthorne, if I remember correctly. Dwight is doing some mathy shit at his desk. Alice Cooper’s “It’s Hot Tonight” is playing softly on the turntable. Dwight is wearing his signature Mott the Hoople hat with his blonde locks exploding all over the place. We are studying. Searching for clues to this life.
My life, my misery, was different from Dwight’s, to be sure. I wouldn’t really learn much about it until his older brother became famous overnight with his first novel, made into a movie, revealed the shitshow of NJ wealth that he grew up in. I don’t know how much of the narrative is biographical, but you get the idea. Wealth and ennui. Key parties. Cocaine. Drinking, always with the drinking.
The movie was disturbing and true. Later, I would learn it was my roommate’s brother. Stunning cast. Kevin Klein, Sigourney Weaver, that geeky Batman, and little miss sunshine herself, Christina Ricci. Even the future hobbit is in this movie. Everyone became someone.
Going back and reading the book, twenty years later, I can see how it became a bestseller. The writing is unafraid, unapologetic, and vigorous. The unfiltered look of a collapsing country surrounding the Nixon fallout. The days, the weather, the uncertainty, all captured in the misadventures of our young protagonist.
He didn’t get a tenured position for that novel. In fact, he never received a tenured position. I guess that would’ve required another bestseller, not just the one. And his fiction does tend to ruffle feathers. It’s a little dense. Requires some focused reading. “Academic.” The death sentence for literary ambitions.
Sex. Drug use. Cheating. Accidental death. Intentional genius. Perhaps not seen again in his writing. Powerful. I suggest you read it first, then watch the movie.
Rick Moody, best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973
Okay, NJ or Connecticut. Easy mistake.
I keep dipping back in for another touch of Exeter. A formative break in my string of successes. A snapping of the proverbial camel’s back. A detour I am still recovering from in many ways. I did not go to Harvard or MIT. I returned to Westlake High in Austin, Texas. The affluent neighborhood high school with an inferiority complex.
I had attempted escape velocity. Away from my father’s death spiral into the bottle, away from the popularity contest of local wealth and dysfunction. Attempted and succeeded, to a certain extent. I tasted the glory. Tasted genius. Tasted deep and lasting friendship. Tasted the seconds of actually being a rockstar, so high I believed I was giving a concert to my two new “cool” friends, Peter and XX.
Time warp time travel back to Austin, back to Westlake, back to hyper-makeup and drill team girls and my utter and complete lack of motivation beyond fucking it up even more. I tried. Drank. Smoked more weed. Dated without joy. Fantasized about picking up the guitar and learning how to play. I liked faking it. Being on stage. Having an adoring crowd. Today, many years later, I’m still craving that high. You can’t buy it. You have to earn that one.
But I’m not good a practicing. I want to do it on bravado and charisma. That doesn’t really work on stage. Either you have it, remember the lyrics and chords, or you don’t. And when you don’t have it together, the world comes up fast to slap you in the gut with anxiety, and the head with blackout fear. Still, you carry on. Play the gig. Reach for the brass ring.
Years later, the same alcoholic would facilitate my band’s performance in Liverpool at the Cavern Club. Where the Beatles started. I played that stage in a full-panic “what the fuck am I doing here” string of days. My girlfriend was wonderful. We walked all over the port of Liverpool. Got lost a few times. Used our phone maps to reorient us and find interesting places to eat.
Despite her affliction, my drinking girlfriend was quite wonderful. She tolerated me. She even supported me when I was falling completely apart. And she yelled from the crowd as I played the Cavern Tavern the night before, and the Cavern Club the next night. It was not a great show. When you’re (I am) panicking, you can’t remember lyrics, so you just make them up. We stuck the endings. That’s all I recall. That and the Japanese band that played right before us, Bigtime Fun Band, they were called.
It was like I was trying to hammer myself back into present moment existence. My girlfriend was helping in the best way she could. Enabling the visit back to New England and Maine. She was along for the ride. A fan of my creative bursts. Looking for an eventual payout.
The escape plan to prep school and on to an Ivy League school didn’t take. It didn’t work out that way. If only… Would I be as fabulous as I am now, without all the shit that’s about to unfold before you, in this story? Does my trauma inform and elevate my creative drive? Or, is that a bunch of shit I tell myself to relieve the burden of the failed attempts, thus far?
In some odd random events, I reconnected with Peter about ten years later, via Facebook and then email, if I recall. He mentioned a recording that had circulated for years after we got booted. There was a phone recording of the moment I opened the door to the tennis coach’s wife. The moment we were busted. All caught in a moment of lucidity, “Oh fuck.”
Except there were no mobile phones at the time we got busted. There would’ve been no way for us to record the audio of the moment. It stumped me for a bit. I never did hear the file. Funny to be part of a myth, the dreaded Merrill Hall, the stoner dorm. “Here’s something funny you can listen to.”
I can’t recall the other fellow’s name. He was a senior when he got the boot. Derailed his plans somewhat more dramatically than mine. His acceptance to college was reversed. He returned to his hometown and worked for a year before reapplying. He attended the local community college. He’s an actuary living in Connecticut. A good life, Peter said. They have stayed in touch. Peter didn’t have the recording to play for me. “It was pretty realistic.”
Save Idea. That’s what I had left when I got back to Austin. Save the idea that I could become a writer, musician, success. Well, I’ve gotten two of the three. The third, financial success allowing me to focus on my writing, is still elusive. I feel the burn with this one. Still embers worth fanning. See what an excavation of my greatest triumph entwined with my greatest failure. Let’s dive in and hunt for buried treasure maps, psychological motivations, and poetic prose, when allowed.
Optimism still fuels my creative dreams. If I write a book and publish it by leaving 100 copies in Little Libraries across America, have I failed or succeeded?
One thing is certain, even after all this time, I am a writer. And the high school English teacher who encouraged me, is probably to blame. The hope and optimism, however, that’s mine. Even as I collapsed into nihilism and punk rock in Austin, my light continues to shine as I head toward these dark tunnels beneath the greatest prep school in the nation.
