I started off thinking this was going to be a story about class in America. The narrator is the wealthy son of a developer, but his dad wants him to learn the value of a buck when he graduates from high school, so the narrator ends up hauling dry wall for his dad at eight bucks an hour. It's the mid-90s in some mid-sized, middle-of-America city, so that's enough to live on, but the narrator's got bigger dreams. He studied acting in local classes growing up, has done a few small-town theater plays. He wants to fill up his U-haul and head off to LA to make it big as a star, like Seinfeld.
He doesn't want anyone he works with on the construction sites to know he's the boss's dad, so he has to act. His whole work is a role he settles into. He studies the speech patterns and actions of his fellow workers. He imagines he is studying "real life," and this will help him as an actor later. Over time, he convinces himself that he envies his co-workers, because "their problems were immediate, distinct, and resolvable; mine were long-term, existential, and impossible." He is romanticizing his working-class colleagues, using the same language as a well-meaning but pretentious American tourist abroad. When he visits the home of a co-worker, he notes that the inside is much nicer than the outside, and he congratulates himself for having discovered "the kinds of detail that would have eluded a person who had merely driven through the neighborhood without bothering to stop, like the passenger on a cruise ship who thinks he knows the island from the port."
While in that house, the story does one of its changes of direction. The narrator tries crack cocaine with Duncan Dioguardi, a co-worker so hard-up he doesn't have a car to get to work. At this point, it seems to be more a story about a young man's fall than it is about class.
When the narrator gets cast in a play, but starts to realize community theater is, well, community theater, he goes back to Duncan's house to "party" a second time. After smoking crack this time, he goes through three consecutive emotional states: euphoria, panic, and then peace. The euphoria is because he thinks he is "the passenger on the cruise ship who has become acquainted with the island." He feels close to Duncan. He feels optimistic about his prospects. It is early in the evening, as nineteen years old is still early in life. But panic follows euphoria as he is watching an episode of Seinfeld while high:
"Suddenly I was in possession of that thing called clarity. I was watching the most vapid show in the history of television—it had always been vapid and we, the viewers, had always been duped. I could see straight through it now—solipsistic, narcissistic, false reality, easy tropes, barely amusing. The clarity that I thought I’d had moments earlier had not been clarity at all but, rather, its opposite, delusion, which was now being usurped by an all-encompassing awareness, horrible and heavy, through which I understood at once that I was not talented, had never been talented, that my life as a general laborer was proof of this lack of talent, and that being cast in a role with zero lines was not a step toward fame but a step into obscurity in a midsized city. Who but a fool agrees to move through space for three acts without saying a word?"
At this point, I felt like the story was a coming-of-age story of painful yet needed shattered illusions. But the story does one last juke before sticking the jumper. The narrator regains his sense of calm. He is young. The night is young. "It would be night for many more hours to come. I was nineteen. Nineteen was young. I would be young for many more years to come." He goes off to get money for more drugs. So I was left thinking this was the story of a young man's self-delusion, leading him into drugs and a long detour from happiness in life.
Where is the narrator?
Part of what makes the story so elusive is the uncertain stance of the narrator. From the opening words of the story, "The first time I smoked crack cocaine..." we know that the narrator is older now than he was when the events took place and is looking back on them. But it's unclear how much distance there is between the events and the telling. If we assume he's now twenty-some years older, because we're reading the story in The New Yorker twenty-some years after the time of the story, where is the narrator now? Is he telling this at an NA meeting? Recounting his memoirs as a famous actor? Recollecting to himself the moment when it all went wrong?
As the young man in the story is pulling off his act, spoiled rich kid playing at working-class drone, the narrator is working with Shakespearean negative capability. He hints at a number of attitudes, but never quite tips his hand as to which one he sides with. Does he think of his younger self with pity, with bemusement, with anger for having messed up the life of the man the narrator now is?
I think it's some of all of those. The younger version of himself has some good reasons to be confused about life. Teens are told to follow their dreams, but also to stay grounded and be realistic about expectations. The narrator's father gave him mixed signals in this vein, sending him to acting classes, acting proud when his son performed in a play, but then immediately discouraging it when he realized his son wanted to do more with acting than make it a hobby.
The narrator as a young man also is stuck in a tough calculus, one I'm still working out in my own life. How do you know when you're dealing with the adversity on the road to accomplishing your goals, as opposed to just holding on to a dream that's never going to happen? How do you know the difference between tenacity and foolish hope? The young man sees Michael Jordan drive to the basket and thinks he never had to wonder these things, that Jordan never heard, as the narrator has from his theater peers, that "it takes as long as it takes."
He's wrong, of course, Jordan famously faced a setback in high school that left most people thinking he'd never even play in college, let alone be considered the best pro of all time. But it's easy to see how the young man could have begun to think that those who've "got it" should be starting to show it by the age he is. He isn't, and he's starting to feel less like a tourist and more like he's actually where he belongs.
Of course, drugs offer the possibility of not thinking about these things, at least for a while longer. By the end of the story, the young man has, somewhat ironically, ended up giving himself one of those "immediate, distinct, and resolvable" problems he used to envy.
Ultimately, the story's not really about where the narrator is now as he tells his story. It's about the moment when it all starts to be too much for him. It's less about how he tried to face the problem and more of a statement of how profound the problem is.
Your first line is terrific, a perfect encapsulation of the reading experience.
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