About a month before orientation began, I got a postcard with my freshman roommates’ names and addresses. One lived in a wealthy suburb of a south-Midwestern city slightly larger than mine. One lived in a mid-size city in the western, non-coastal Northeast (or perhaps the easternmost Midwest), and had an obviously Jewish name. That was I. One lived in a dying southeastern Pennsylvania steel town. And one lived in a neighborhood in Washington DC that was 99% African-American and desperately poor.
A day or so later, a letter arrived from the Pennsylvania kid that was so outrageously nerdy that I can quote it verbatim 45 years later: “September rears its ugly head, and we will soon be together at Yale (salaam, salaam). If we are to believe Doonesbury, circa 1970, our room should consist of one freak, one jock, one prep, and one molecular biophysicist. I claim the latter position. . . .” (He did, too. His life goal – which he shared enthusiastically, and which he missed, but not by so terribly much – was to win a Nobel Prize in medicine.)
The big surprise was that our room really did have a freak, a jock, and a prep – and they were all the kid from DC. He really was from the ghetto; his brother was in prison and he had never met his father. But he had effectively been shanghaied in eighth grade by A Better Chance and sent to Groton, where he had been the football team captain and a house proctor. He was into the Grateful Dead and Yes; he did black-and-white landscape photography; his friends had fathers who were household names. (He was also addicted – literally, physically addicted – to marijuana. But this is the funny stories, so I won’t dwell on that.)
The fourth roommate had gone to a school much like mine – the best private day school in a provincial city – but unlike me he was tall, blond, beautiful, and wearing his high school football jersey. He was enthusiastically, good-naturedly offensive, in a manner not unlike a certain President, except that in his case the show masked what turned out to be a heart of gold and real attention to the needs of other people, if not always their feelings.
Anyway, I had been in the room about 20 minutes, and I had said my awkward goodbyes to my awkward father, who had driven me there but had no idea what to do with himself once we arrived (nor did I). I was standing in the middle of our small common room looking out at the ant-colony move-in day activity on the Old Campus. Blond, jocky guy came and stood next to me, looking out, too, silent for a while. Then he casually draped his arm around my shoulders, and without looking at me, my new roommate (my future lifelong friend) said, “They told me back home this was Jew Haven, but I had no idea it could be this bad.”