In 1964, I graduated from Woodmere Academy, and the editors of the yearbook made predictions for what would become of us, 20 years down the line. The yearbook is in the house somewhere. I couldn't find it. I will paraphrase. In the prediction, I bump into one of the fancy girls from our class in Reno, Nevada, where I’m fresh from divorce number six. I don’t remember what the fancy girl is wearing. I’m wearing leopard-print pants. One of the rich girls in my class wrote the predictions. Mainly it was a school of rich kids and a few others like me. Mainly what was going to happen was going to happen to the boys.
There was a boy in our class everyone thought was the one to go into the world and look back at the rest of us from a distance as far as the moon. He wanted to be a writer. He wanted to be some kind of artist. He didn’t become a writer. He didn’t become an artist. His family had a big business. The business had tentacles, and they wrapped themselves around the boy, or who knows why anyone does anything. He was the smartest one in our class, everyone believed, and he went to the college where the smartest boy would go. If you’re me, you look at a picture like this as if you’re not in it. That’s why it remains clear.
One night I saw him at a gala dinner party at Lincoln Center. It was a benefit for an organization he gave money to or sat on the board of. We were 54, and I recognized him immediately. His name tag was above his plate. I was a cater-waiter, and he was sitting at my table, and I didn’t say a word to him. I was wearing a tuxedo and a necktie, the uniform of the catering company I worked for. Guests don’t see who serves them. You could kill someone at a dinner like this, and no one would pick you out in a line up.
I knew nothing about the sort of person he’d become. In high school, we had not exchanged two sentences. It’s weird to tell you this because our class was small. There were only 60 of us, 40 boys and 20 girls. I sensed something of the bully in him, but only from a distance. Other boys were better looking than him and kinder, and I couldn’t understand where his power came from. People wanted to be near him. I might have wanted to be near him, too. Some of us when he saw us his eyes glazed over.
The prediction made for me in the yearbook has a slick of truth. You can see me in the leopard print pants, right? I married only once, when I was 19, knowing I shouldn’t marry. I didn’t believe in marriage. Who knows why anyone does anything to get into the world? I have been sold short many times the way I was sold short at Woodmere Academy. I have been sold short the way many others are sold short as we look out the window of ourselves and say, "Wait, what? You don’t know who I am.” I have been sold short, and oh the freedom of being tied to zero expectations for you. The freedom, while no one is looking, to become whatever you want.
A few weeks ago, I learned a book of mine had been long listed for an award from PEN. I didn’t get the award. But when I thought there was a chance I would, I thought about the prediction in the yearbook, and I was reminded of this joke told by Gilbert Gottfried: "In the old days, if you flipped the pages of the Bible in one direction, you got Jesus riding a horse. If you flipped the pages of the Bible in the other direction, you got a fat lady twirling a hula hoop. Back then, everyone thought she would be the famous one."
Notes on Another New Life #2
Thanks, dear Sari Botton, brilliant writer and editor, for this joyous collaboration. I love having a column on Oldster. xxL
I once found myself for five years in the position of having to politely serve a dude from my past at the cafe where I worked in my 50s, and he seemed to think he was high and mighty to my low and humiliated except I wasn’t. (He recognized me but I didn’t recognize him, btw). I loved that job. For one thing it was quite the inoculation against becoming, or dating (sometimes the same thing) a douchebag like him! And for another, I didn’t know many people my age who’d have even asked for that job, much less loved and thrived in it. I was proud to get that job and all the other ones I took and still take while corporations give me that glazed over look the boys gave you in high school! (Most boys/men looked frightened whenever I looked at them, their eyes saying, “no, don’t choose me!” I get it already!)