Showing up the Actor

Showing up the Actor

When I was younger I spent much of my time alone. My father bred in me, perhaps by nothing more than his example, a certain New England stoicism which thrived on solitude. Nothing displayed this rustic discipline more than the pop-up camper my father bought from our neighbors when I was six. From that summer our family spent most vacations on the road, pulling the camper behind us, my father winching it up and spreading the canvas roofing in Nova Scotia or Florida or upstate New York.

Many summers later I insisted that I live in the camper, parked in the driveway. My mother brought me my meals and my father decided I should begin reading Hemingway. I sat propped in the tent-like house, eating hot dogs and reading terse, athletic prose about boxers and bullfights and impotent veterans. I figured out why my father named our dog Brett.

I also spent a good deal of time at elite institutions of learning. When he wasn't camping my father taught math at prep schools. From my birth until my fourth birthday we lived at St. George's in Newport, Rhode Island, among the brocaded mansions like Egypt's pyramids, crafted of heavy-set stones. Then, in 1981, we moved to Phillips Academy in Andover, where the shops on the main street came in threes: bank boutique salon bank boutique salon.

I can think of no better reason than that for why I took up boxing in the summer before my Senior year of college -- than that I spent most of my youth alone at elite institutions. And yet, in my four years as a student at Phillips, enrolling eleven years after my family's arrival, I wasn't entirely alone. A friend of mine, Noah -- his father also taught on the faculty. Noah also received the ninety percent tuition discount. Noah's fridge was also usually empty, because he had also eaten in school cafeterias for most of his life.

He had also, for four years, somehow slipped between the kid whose wealth was a ticket to fuck around and the boy whose mother was a janitor, between the blonde suburban girl whose father owned The New York Times and the tight-knit handful of urban kids who came under the banner program of "A Better Chance" -- that is, between privilege and opportunity. This is not to say that the two sides of this educational gauntlet weighed in equally.