3. Learning about friendship, good old school spirit, and the American way while being friends with the manager

SO DURING freshman year I was isolated and pretty much stuck to my courses and tried to get along with them. As far as social life, I had a girlfriend from Antioch who happened to be in Providence and that took care of that. I spent every weekend in Providence.

I had Hum 5 and tried Math 11. I really wanted to be a mathematician, but the instructor...I just couldn't understand what was going on, he was too disorganized and I couldn't do the work on my own sort of. I couldn't provide any order from his disorganized lectures. I dropped out of that.

There weren't any friends, none. Most of the kids I knew were all NYC Jews. I didn't get to see most of the Harvard men I expected to see.

I was very adaptive at this time. I thought I could get through, make use of Harvard, and get what I wanted. Get the courses, get the intellectual training. I was free to do what I pleased. That is, I felt very free at the time, in the sense of the courses available. Not that I made use of them. It wasn't a matter of being unhappy because of the pressure of the environmental life, but because of the lack of environmental life. It was all very impersonal. That was not too hard to stand because I had been isolated long enough through work and school and so I managed to get through pretty easily or at least normally.

IN MY SECOND high school, I kept up some social life by joining all the activities around. I didn't get high up in any of them cause I didn't do much work--it was just a way to keep myself busy. I worked after school until 5:30 or 7:30 or 8:30 and Friday and Saturday nights I had another job. My real activities were school in the daytime, work in the afternoon and nights on weekends, and family.

The first three years I got a job in a local Chinese restaurant where people knew my family, a place where upper middle class people would go to dinner. After I got sick of being around the neigbhorhood I got a job somewhere else where in the daytime they fed people from the local universities and a local medical center and in the evenings there were professional women; that is, prostitutes were my regular customers.

In the front I got to know the waitresses and in the back I knew the Negroes and Puerto Ricans who were the bus boys and who washed the dishes. I was a bus boy and then a waiter and my role was somewhere between the kitchen and, and...I was young enough so as not to be identified with the white group up front and my status on the job was low enough so I could talk to the people in the back and I was smart enough so I got to be friends with the manager. In effect, I got to observe a microcosm of American society.

I identified with the people I read about in books: people who believed in a liberal education, the Greeks, Socrates, and that stuff. I found something in every author I read. The best education I got was in the arguments with my teachers.

During lunch break, since our classes were made up according to ability, I always hung around with the smart kids, but since the smarter kinds always tended to be middle class, there was only partial identification with the group. We had a common language, but different values. The group I belonged to was more of a debating society than a friendship group.

4. How he prepared in his sophomore year for his father's fortune

SOPHOMORE YEAR it was a little different. I had proved I could make it as far as grades went--I had been group III. I went into a House that was supposed to be a community. There was supposedly more of an interest in people, more of a common cooperative effort. So I expected . . . Since there was supposed to be a community, I was tempted to be part of it; but I didn't find much of a community at all.

I found a House too large and filled with people who didn't know each other and didn't care about knowing each other. So it became . . . it was worse than freshman year. That was just isolation. Sophomore year was isolation psychologically while being in the middle of other people. So there was always a constant reminder that there were all these people around who didn't care about knowing anybody else. So I got pissed off and I kinda stopped working. It made work kinda difficult, that feeling. Also I didn't have that girl back in . . . that girl wasn't very close by, I'd broken up with her. And the way to meet girls I didn't find very . . . I didn't find anything very significant there . . . by the time Spring came along I was really disliking this place.

And then I did find a real nice girl; we were getting along fine but there was a limit to how close I could get to her as a person because of my commitment to the academic life. I felt that it was . . . seeing a girl only on the weekend for entertainment wasn't meaningful enough. I wanted . . . a . . . girl should either be . . . there was the promise of much more intimacy which wasn't possible. I found out that part of being here is just cutting out some personal relationships. It wasn't until I found this really nice girl that I knew this was missing.

And then the parietals business started as a result of this. Given that she could only be around on weekends. I sorta blamed the parietal system for this lack of closeness. Blamed Harvard for structuring the life to make woman and intimacy impossible or at least to discourage it. So I tried to change the system to permit women to be around more often, for a more intimate role, not just of sex.