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Editor's Notes |
 | Introduction |
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It was Felix, that well-dressed, obnoxiously slim and fit and charming hand surgeon from Florida, who had the idea for the time machine.
In that time machine, we visited places thought to have vanished from this earth. We didn't go back to any era as mundane as the Cretaceous period or the French Revolution. Instead, we visited a far more exotic time: the 1960s. Within the thoroughly incongruous confines of New York City's Yale Club we gathered, the sons of Stuyvesant High School, graduates of '64. Not just any group of alums, but a bellwether class that collectively helped America descend into chaos for more than a decade.
We were seniors when the bullets in Dallas destroyed innocence, and, like thousands of other graduating classes, we dedicated our yearbook to a fallen president. We had very little insight. We never realized that a better dedication would have been to a generation that would soon be ripped apart by war, self-indulgence, and drugs, a generation that exemplified hypocrisy even as it spoke on behalf of virtues still not achieved in our society.
Time travel is not for the faint of heart. Despite all the outward enthusiasm I could muster for this 35th reunion, I feared reliving a time when I majored in doubt and insecurity, a time when the people around me made me feel insecure with their self-possessed manners and their intellectual brilliance. (I ranked in the lower third of the class and could have made the lowest fifth, had they chosen to make that calculation.)
Actually, the pain of that time, the agony of adolescence, has never really left me—nor, I found out, has it ever left those I envied. During a tour of the new building that now houses our alma mater, we visited the "historical exhibit," a classroom of our era. As we sat in those graffiti-pocked desk-chair combinations with forever-empty inkwells, we experienced a collective catharsis.
One courageous classmate introduced the dreaded topic—sex. Reflecting the sexist society in which we lived, Stuyvesant, New York City's pioneer public science high school, did not allow girls until years after we graduated. The esprit de corps of our class was, therefore, dysfunctionally all male (among other things). Because the school was located in Manhattan, it was not a neighborhood school, and most of us traveled to school daily. A few of us—my Canarsie classmates and I, who lived on the fringes of Brooklyn—made a Marco Polo-esque journey, almost 2 hours on a bus and a train. In school, we never saw girls, so there was no socialization with anyone except ourselves, and in retrospect that had to be one of the dumbest ideas in history. Many people believed our class had a disproportionate number of what might derisively be called "geeks." But that would have been incorrect, because we were far more diverse in our neuroses. Our class members personified almost every maladaptive excess known to civilization at one time or another.
Back then, I fantasized that on weekends my classmates—that is, everyone except myself—turned into Fred Astaire (if not the then-unknown John Travolta), sweeping women off their feet with charm and bravado. As it turns out, each of us had that same fantasy. Each of us was isolated and painfully aware of his own social incompetence. After 35 years, we could finally admit, as one classmate put it, "I never knew what a girl was." As paunchy (and even fat), gray-haired, balding men in their early fifties, we could finally admit to those shared insecurities. There were, of course, a couple of guys who would not let the fiction go. But apparently almost everyone else had been as thoroughly insecure and fearful as I had been. That knowledge alone was worth the price of the plane ticket. Now, instead of telling vile locker room fictions to impress one another, we could share stories of our failures and inability to relate to the wider, coeducational world. (This kind of honesty earlier in our lives would have deprived a great many mental health professionals of a great deal of income!) By and large, most of us headed off to college at the ripe old age of 16, and that didn't help either.
There were more than 100 of us at the reunion, and during my visit to the past I saw not only what time has done to us all but what we have done to ourselves. I came to better understand from whence we came. While waiting in the buffet line, one of my classmates, the famous and infamous presidential advisor Dick Morris, remarked that Columbia University and the White House were never as competitive as Stuyvesant. For the first time, I remembered that I never shared that feeling, most likely because my grades were so awful. Those that I envied had apparently enslaved themselves, unbeknownst to me. I thought I was in hell struggling to keep up, but I was really just in an adjoining room next to the brighter guys!
As the noise grew louder, echoing off the dark-paneled, portrait-adorned walls of the Yale Club, the food kept coming. But my mind wandered to thoughts of other classmates, particularly Ted Gold, whom I always viewed as an insular young man of remarkable intelligence and who later died making a terrorist bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse. I had not seen his devils at Stuyvesant. But then again, neither had I seen the wit and insight of Len Berman, a classmate who was not there that night but whose sports reports are a joy to listen to on NBC.
Although my time travel didn't give me perfect vision, it did give me some insight into demons past and present, into behaviors and attitudes that are part of my being and a large part of my generation's baggage. We aging men from across America came together to tell stories, sing songs, and feel once again some of the joy of youth, this time without the obligatory fears and insecurities. Of course, now we have new fears and insecurities, but among these friends of young adulthood they were too incongruous to make an appearance. Even the guys who now work for the Board of Education joined me for a backroom session where we exchanged tales of our misdeeds—and there were many. We also remembered teachers who seemed most notable for their incompetence and idiosyncracies rather than for their pedagogy, but we used reverential tones to talk of those who stood above the pack and whose teaching helped us face the world.
Felix, our classmate and creator of our time machine, called us together to remember. He was the conjurer of images long faded. He reminded us, more than any of our eccentric teachers, about the importance of history—our own. Too few of us pause to reflect on our personal, professional, and family histories. Time travel has much to offer all of us—as long as we aren't afraid of confronting the past. Perhaps we fear to go to places where we may find pain, or perhaps even more we dread seeing happiness that we cannot recapture and images of acquaintances lost. As for me, that night had many magic moments, and I have found a way to relive some of it almost every day.
There is one classmate I do not remember at all, named Robert Siegel. Today with his cohosts he presides over National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His comments and commentaries betray the well-educated mind he clearly possesses, but ah! it is that voice that moves. He speaks with an eloquence that belies a New York City upbringing. He delivers each utterance with a stunning clarity. For years I listened to him never realizing he was my classmate. Now when his voice drifts from my car speakers, I listen and wonder, "Where was that voice when we were in high school?" Then I smirk, imagining the squeaky voice of an embarrassed, tormented young high school student. I don't care whether this is true. After 35 years, I allow myself the fantasy.
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