Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(16)
We unrolled the rug across the gray cement floor, instantly brightening the room.
“Cool rug,” said a narrow-faced girl wearing a man’s felt hat. She’d come in and sat down on my trunk unannounced. “I’m Jen.”
“Jennifer Victoria Fairchild?” I said, shaking her hand. I’d gotten the school letter with my roommate’s name the week before.
“That’s me,” she giggled. She went over to the bottom bunk and unrolled a poster: Bob Marley smoking a cigar-size joint. “Where should we hang this?” she asked.
My mother shook her head with resignation, pushed my trunk into a corner, and gathered her purse.
I laughed, feeling a spike of excitement. That poster represented a whole uncharted world. I had smoked pot only once, in eighth grade, but I’d never actually been high. I was determined to change that this year, in spite of my parents’ warnings that pot led to “harder stuff.” Now, of course, they could point to Charlie as an example, but I wasn’t like Charlie; I was smarter than he was—I was sure of it—I could break the rules and still come out on top.
Soon my mother would get into the car and drive away and everything would become possible. My heart quivered at the thought of her leaving. She would worry, I knew, but only for an hour or two. I would miss her; I would miss a lot of things, and yet my whole life, I realized, had been preparing me for this moment. I saw my childhood spinning away from me like so many lackluster previews before the feature itself. I looked around at the blank walls of our cell. “Anywhere,” I said.
“There are other cool posters we can buy in the Village,” Jen said. “Taft charters a bus to New York for long weekends.”
The campus of the Taft School, founded in 1890, was made up of old neo-Gothic buildings arranged on hundreds of acres of greenery. The school had only begun accepting girls in 1971, ten years before my arrival, around the time it eliminated coats and ties. The most flamboyant students now were throwbacks to the sixties, with their long hair, hippie beads, and Mexican ponchos, while the faculty seemed permanently frozen in the conservatism of the 1940s or ’50s, the era they’d begun teaching there, in most cases. They seemed to have unfurled like ivy from the school’s stone walls and spires, these tweedy, pipe-smoking teachers, and appeared entirely unprepared for the hopelessly stoned, guffawing students that passed them in the halls. The less passive among them cast their disapproving gaze on these bohemian kids whose politics were so vastly different from their own. Like flies in amber, the warring forces of straight America and the hippie movement appeared perfectly preserved at the Taft School.
There were only thirty-five boarders in the freshman class, and ten of us banded together in a tight-knit group whose closeness surpassed our own sibling bonds. Among the girls, we shared our clothes, our cigarettes, our boyfriends, our houses and apartments, and, soon enough, our alcohol and drugs. Almost overnight, in the absence of parents, we became one another’s family.
Music was our religion. The Grateful Dead, the Doors, and Neil Young—they were gods. And the Talking Heads, the Police, and the Clash, demigods. We all went out for sports, pulled all-nighters to study for exams, and never missed a class. But in our free time, we asserted our newfound independence by violating each of the school’s rules, one by one.
The doors to the dorm rooms were kept unlocked, except when parties were under way. The junior and senior boys regularly supplied us with pot and shrooms. Day students provided alcohol from their parents’ liquor cabinets or purchased on trips to Waterbury.
Taft had a two-offense policy: two drinking and/or drug offenses and you were out. The fact so many “Tafties” were the progeny of prominent Wall Street financiers, famous authors, and brand-name families hardly mattered. Among us kids, the individual was judged by how much he could party—how well he played the game of risk—and still do well in the games of school and sports. Straight As, varsity teams, good taste in music, and a robust drug habit, that was what landed you on top, socially. Surviving a “bust” made you legendary.
The academics at Taft mattered as much as anything else, though. I spent my first exam week snorting crushed NoDoz while studying until dawn, my friends and I taking cigarette breaks every hour down in the butt room—a room-size ashtray in the basement of Mac House. My favorite course was third-year Latin with the preternaturally acute Mr. Cobb, whose famous line—“Whenever you have a fifty-fifty chance, ninety-five percent of the time you’ll get it wrong”—seemed to apply to everything.
In the dorm we’d stay up late discussing Camus while drinking home-fermented cider (produced by adding yeast and three successive rounds of heating next to the radiators and cooling in the snow), or collaborate on algebra problems, the Ramones beating a manic rhythm in the background, while packing for our next weekend getaway. Because, with Taft’s chartered buses and lenient travel policies, New York quickly became our off-site playground.
Nearly all my friends had either grown up in New York or had a parent with an apartment there. Sasha lived just off Washington Square Park on Waverly Place, Liv on Eighty-First and Riverside Drive, Cece on Park and Sixty-Sixth, and Feren’s dad in a high rise on the East River.
We stayed at these apartments on the weekends, when my friends’ parents were out at their country houses, and spent our days trolling the West Village. The Village dazzled with its array of head shops, art house cinemas, and the most coveted suppliers of bohemian wear in Manhattan—Canal Jean and Reminiscence. Indian print T-shirts soon replaced my Alligators; dangly silver filigree earrings replaced my tiny gold studs.