"When I saw your family walking across the Circle on that first day," said Geoff, a rich kid from Pennsylvania, "I thought you were somebody important, like a Senator's son or something."
"What do you mean?"
"You know," he said. "The way you and your father and both of your brothers were all wearing jackets and ties, and your mom and your sister had dresses on."
I remembered how stupid I felt that day, my first day at my new school, the first time I left home to live somewhere else. I wasn't quite 14. None of the other kids had ties on. My father was still living in the '50s, telling me about how all the prep-school kids he met at Georgetown played bridge and wore tweed coats. "We didn't call them preppies back then," he said. "We called them tweeds."
I couldn't wait for my family to leave so I could put on some normal clothes and try to fit in. I guess in a way my father knew what he was doing. He was sending out some kind of coded upper-class WASP-ish signal to the other people on the campus equipped with the right kind of sensory apparatus to pick it up. We are important. We remember the old ways. We are somebodies.
But it was all appearance. My father used to tell a story from his time in the marines about a steward or valet or something for a general who was supposed to have his master's uniform cleaned and brushed and his shoes polished and laid out and his buttons polished. One night he came in too late after drinking to get everything ready, so he polished the general's pocket change that he kept in a silver dish on his dresser. In the morning, the general saw the shiny gleaming coins and assumed that everything else must have been spic-and-span.
My father was full of these strange lessons about how to fake sincerity and get ahead without really doing your work. "Get a reputation as an early riser," he'd tell us over and over, "and you can sleep till dawn."
Years later, when I told him about what Geoff, a kid I'd never liked, had said about us looking important in our dorky blue blazers and rep ties, my father positively beamed. He felt as though his decision had been vindicated, while the rest of us thought it was pathetic.
The thing is, I was there on a full scholarship. My family had gone broke. What little money we'd inherited from my grandparents, now all gone, and my great aunt, had already been spent, lost in one of my father's reckless business schemes. My parents were living on credit and it was easier on all of us - easier on me, easier on their budget - that I was going away to school that fall. My tuition, room, and board were all covered by the generous grants from the school, so I could eat the dining hall food and sleep in my dorm room and use the school's medical facilities without taxing my family's disastrous finances hardly at all.
One time, I opened a letter from home and a single dollar bill fluttered out, rolling onto my lap. I almost cried. My roommate thought it was a joke, such a small amount of money, but it made a huge difference to me at the time (I spent it on the coin-operated pool table in the student lounge) and I knew that my father couldn't really spare it. I took it in the spirit it was meant.
I was embarrassed by the used books and the used down vest discarded by one of my old schoolmates that my mother had bought at a fundraiser back in New York and sent me when it started getting cold. There were rips in it where the down would come out. Other kids learned they could smack the huge quilted ribs of my jacket and make the feathers fly. They all thought this was funny. One kid in my English class asked me why I didn't just get a new one. I stared him down and said, "Because I'm poor." That shut him up.
There were still expenses, incidentals, I couldn't afford. I was ashamed when I ran out of shampoo and had no money to buy more. I tried using just conditioner and it made my hair only seem more greasy. The communal showers in the bathroom were already a place of torture and abuse, embarrassment and shame.
A popular way to gang up on a kid was the pile-on, where eight or ten other boys would make a huge dog-pile heap on one hapless kid in the common room. That was bad enough, but they also had this thing called "throwing you in the shower." I managed to avoid this mostly. I was a scrappy fighter with my New York street savagery intact, and I wasn't easy to grab or hold onto, even though I was small and unathletic. I wasn't averse to kicking or biting if necessary.
One time I was showering late - I had no A period class that semester - and when I got out I saw that my towel was gone. Someone had swiped it for a laugh. I opened the door a crack and saw that a bunch of people were gathered in my room, right across the hall. My roommate was much more popular than I was. I could have made a dash for it if no one had been around, but I saw that there wasn't going to be any easy way out of this, so what did I do?
I acted like I wasn't afraid. I strolled across the hallway and into the room, buck naked (or butt naked, as people say these days), and gave the roomful of guys a little wave before popping open my closet door and getting my bathrobe. It was like "Get a good look, you fags." Most of those kids didn't like me but they all gave me credit for having balls after that.
I hadn't felt confident but by then I knew how to fake it.