A very Dartmouth story

Intimations of violence in male sociality

🥇 Best quotes from Doctor Rooney (aka Doc Roon aka my mom) since I moved home for the ~summer:

• “They’re putting in an outdoor kitchen. Which is ridiculous in this climate.”

• “This woman—she’s sending him vile letters…”

• (With trepidation) “Is that the end of the Triscuits?”

Also, today Chipper Steve (dad) requested I get “about 1.2 pounds” of tuna.

🥇 Best reviews of Available for Parties by the parents of a subscriber:

Maybe she’s born with it… maybe she’s a bit manic.

Be like Jake Schefer. Make your parents read my blog.

🥇 Best reason for not subscribing to Available for Parties:

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The narcissism of small differences (but like, not that small. Super normal & medium)

Last month I gained a scar on the bridge of my nose.

I’m excited by it. My mom finds my excitement disturbing.

My plan was to wait for people to ask about it at parties, then tell them I gained it in an encounter with one of their haters. The scar, I’d explain, resulted from my defense of their honor.

The flaws in this plan were manifold.

For one thing, I just blogged about how I’ve never been in a fight. For another, I live with my parents; parties are sparse. Finally, I suspect honor-defending is canceled.

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When the nose wound was fresh, I received curious glances from male strangers. The young busboy at a restaurant, for example. These glances were full of import, even intent, yet asexual: I was being “sized up,” as the expression has it. This was new.

In encounters with strangers, the atmosphere I’m used to includes the usual registers—elements, if you will: the nitrogen of class distinction, the oxygen of sexual potential, and the… argon(???) of physical threat. Status, attraction, repulsion.

For muscley dudes and fight-y guys—M.D.F.G.—the atmosphere is different. The physical-threat response is, at times, inverted. (I must’ve scanned as marginally fight-y when the scar was new. Never mistaken for muscley, I’ve long campaigned to rebrand “working out” as “buffing the husk.”)

Even the cuddly pacifists among M.D.F.G., if their appearance is sufficiently suggestive, receive the Should We Maybe Fight glance from random men. Like 12-step recovery and fight clubs in Fight Club, it is a vast shadow world, invisible to nerds. And like 12-step recovery and fight clubs in Fight Club, it’s probably their parents’ fault.

Presumably, the Should We Maybe Fight glance leads to actual fighting on a non-never basis; I haven’t gotten that far in my queries of muscle persons.

Meanwhile, my nose is healing anyway.

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And yet. They say politics is war by other means; some conversations are just sublimated conflict.

In 2012, my college pal Andy convinced me to join him at a New York alumni event at the Dartmouth* Club.

The asterisk is because there is no Dartmouth Club. The fucking Yale Club lends us space when they’re feeling charitable.

The mark of a Dartmouth man is the ludicrous chip on his (my) shoulder. You know that joke about the world’s smallest violin? If you think about it, the world’s smallest violin would also be the world’s most expensive musical instrument. (The nanoacoustic industry has so little to offer the budget-conscious shopper.)

Like I was saying, I’m competitive or whatever.

When I told some dude at the fucking Yale Club that I was a paralegal, he said he was confused by paralegals, since it’s a job with explicitly zero prospects for advancement.

This ruffled my feathers, mostly because he was right. (In truth, I was also confused about being a paralegal.)

So when I met my next male strangers, I was already in a bit of a state. And uh, freshly interested in job opportunities.

Enter: Random finance bro, late 40s—finance dad, really. And: His short steroidal drunk companion, also finance.

Finance Dad is fascinated by the fact that I live in Williamsburg on purpose: “I haven’t been to Williamsburg since the 90s. And that was just for Peter Luger [famous steakhouse, barely past the bridge].”

Short Steroidal Drunk Companion (S.S.D.C.), on the other hand, seems to dislike me immediately. Or maybe he just detected that I disliked him immediately.

I don’t remember the details, but me and him kinda get into it.

S.S.D.C., I’ve learned, is not just a hedge fund manager: he’s a hedge fund manager who runs a fund-of-funds, i.e. a hedge fund that invests in… other hedge funds. As an avid reader of the internet, I know that funds-of-funds are categorically clownish and parasitical, even by the standards of high finance. Furthermore, I feel he is being condescending to me. So like the good Italian-American I am, pride always-already wounded, I decide that what this inane circumstance really needs… is a drastic escalation of the stakes.

(Relatedly: ask Italian women of a certain age and this dude’s problem was simple. “Well—he’s short.” I can hear them saying it. Like it’s a moral condition.)

Finally my big retort is ready: “Oh yeah? How are your returns this year?”

This is an attempt to say “You’re bad at money.” My hope is that it comes across as a euphemism for “Your dick might not be super nice.”

S.S.D.C. responds with something like, “My returns? They’re great,” like he’s Tony the Tiger.

Later, Finance Dad pulls me aside. The room is wood-paneled.

No bullshit, this man wants to know if I’ve considered a career in investment banking.

What?

Referring to my asinine pissing contest with his buddy, Finance Dad, investment professional, looks in my face and says, “You have leadership qualities.”

I’d love to tell you the old boys’ club is a relic of the past, but as everyone already knows, it’s a relic of the present.

Finance Dad slips me his business card. I feel something like joy.

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Where have you been hiding out lately, honey? / You can't dress trashy till you spend a lot of money

Have I considered a career in investment banking.

There’s this social tic at Dartmouth, an inverted status competition in which students pantomime being outrageously behind on their schoolwork. Hearing others describe panic and failure much like my own, I took comfort in the idea that I wasn’t alone.

I was also, of course, “drunk constantly,” without the scare quotes.

Then came senior fall.

Corporate recruiters descended on campus like well-starched locusts. They set up tables and sought applicants for management consulting, investment banking, hedge fund-ing—the whole wholesome menu of East Coast power futures.

To my guttural horror, the very acquaintances with whom I’d bonded in the library over how rarely we entered the library were suddenly collecting six-figure job offers like so many cans of Keystone Light. They’d been secretly working hard the entire time. A shadow world of nerds, invisible to Alex.

In desperate hope, I consented to an informational coffee with a bizarrely handsome Teach for America recruiter, a literal Yale graduate, who, when I described my checkered disciplinary/legal record, laughed in my face, then apologized for laughing, then continued to laugh. And I mean like, anomalously handsome. His appearance was a social topic that week. People were emailing each other.

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So when Finance Dad liked the cut of my jib a few years later, it meant altogether too much to me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be an investment banker, but I was sure I didn’t want to be a paralegal.

Per his request, I emailed my resume.

No response.

Two weeks later, still no response.

I asked one of my disconcertingly successful college pals what to do. She wisely and emphatically talked me out of my initial draft follow-up, a mewling half-apology for my continued existence, and advised me to send something closer to a demand.

To my astonishment, it worked—worked so well, in fact, that it was Finance Dad who apologized. Emphatically, even. Could we hop on a call?

I called him from the paralegal office, where our pigeon-frequented window looked onto the walls of other office buildings.¹

On the phone, Finance Dad apologized again. Then he said, “So, you have no underwriting experience?” The job I wasn’t sure I wanted had the temerity not to want me.

After the call, I Googled “underwriting.”

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A few years later, I reached the blindingly obvious realization that I was never supposed to work in finance. And that the point of these events, for me, was to write about them. And that even in the timeline where I weasel my way into a finance job, finance jobs are a severely time-consuming way of not writing. And like any writer, the only thing I don’t need help with is coming up with ways not to write.

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Okay but how did I actually get the scar?

Multitasking.

I was in the kitchen after dinner and simultaneously eating ice cream, doing dishes, and having an animated conversation with Doc Roon about abortion. I went to pick up a piece of cheese or pasta from the ground and my nose became acquainted with the granite kitchen island.

What can I say. I have leadership qualities.

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Hey. HEY

Probably buy a subscription, you.

SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.

1. My job at this law firm resembled Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” to an uncanny degree. For one thing, that story is basically the plot of Office Space. For another, the view: “Owing to the great height of the surrounding buildings, and my chambers being on the second floor, the interval between this wall and mine not a little resembled a huge square cistern.”