Lucking Out - James Wolcott [3]
My Mailerisms became even more pronounced in college at Frostburg State in western Maryland, whose bleak winter spells reminded me of Pennsylvania coal country after the coal mines had closed (I had relatives in Hazleton from my mother’s side of the family). It was a college utterly without pretenses in a town that felt remote from the rest of Maryland, an obscure poor cousin exiled to the end of a long, winding bus ride. It was really Frostburg or nothing. Not only couldn’t I afford the University of Maryland or (dream on) Johns Hopkins, but my grades had plummeted my junior year of high school, when I worked nights as an assistant dishwasher at the country club where my father was bartender and where my youngest brother later served as general manager. It was then and there that I acquired the insomnia, caffeine addiction, hangdog eye pouches, and teenage-caveman habits that became integral elements of my identity kit and prepped me nicely for my freshman year at Frostburg, where I holed up in a study room as if in solitary self-confinement and felt homesick, but not for home. For what then? For some scribbled-over patch of the past before I climbed into the isolation booth and locked it from the inside. For all my autodidactic appetite (I read like a fiend, devouring Dostoyevsky until I developed Siberian wolf breath), I didn’t entertain high expectations for myself. High expectations weren’t nurtured in my neck of nowhere back then; children weren’t fawned over from an early age as “gifted” and groomed for a prizewinning future; self-esteem was considered something you had to pluck from the garden yourself. Attending Frostburg certainly wasn’t touted as the slingshot to a soaring tomorrow. I remember the then head of Frostburg’s English department—in whose office hung a framed letter from T. S. Eliot, the closest thing to a saint’s relic—drawing on a cigarette in class and pronouncing, “Some of you will make something of yourselves in life [here he took a juicy pause worthy of Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh], and some of you will end up wiping the lunch counter at Woolworth’s.” I rather doubt my generational counterparts at Princeton and Yale had their chains yanked so. Then again, he prided himself on his crusty curmudgeonliness, and another one of my English-lit professors, who later went on to become a prison chaplain, loaned me money when I decided to leave for New York, an act of generosity that I wouldn’t want to go unrecorded. Anyway, adversity isn’t the worst thing to have on your side. Frostburg’s inferiority complex helped stoke an underdog attitude that made you want to prove everybody wrong. And by “you” I mean “me,” since I don’t know if any of my classmates felt the same way, or if they were even listening. They may have had a whole different narrative playing through their internal sound systems.
During my sophomore year at Frostburg, my Mailer radar system flashed red alert with news of an episode of The Dick Cavett Show set to broadcast featuring Mailer, Gore Vidal, and The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner. Today every self-respecting dorm suite is equipped with communications technology of which Stanley Kubrick could only stroke his beard and dream, but in those frontier days on the lower slopes of academe students didn’t have entertainment devices tuned to the matrix; we had to get