42 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
PERSONAL HISTORY
M
y grandfather worked four jobs.
He was a fireman, a handyman,
a substitute teacher, and a housepainter.
With those jobs, he was able to put four
children through college. That’s where
he spent all his money, because he knew
that education was the best way to get
ahead in life. (This was before Insta-
gram and sex tapes.)
“Protect your brain!” he always told
me. “Because it’s all you got! Your brain
is your ticket to wherever you want to go.”
(I think he might have been Ms. Frizzle
from “The Magic School Bus.”)
It was definitely my ticket out of
Staten Island, because it got me into
a Catholic high school called Regis,^1
which would change the course of the
rest of my life. I was extremely lucky to
get accepted to Regis, because (a) it’s
one of the best high schools in the
country and (b) it’s free. For Catholics
in New York, Regis is almost like the
Watchtower building for Jehovah’s Wit-
nesses. Tens of thousands of kids apply
for a hundred and twenty spots in each
class. To this day, if a Catholic mother
hears that I went to Regis, she will grab
my face and say, “God bless! What a
wonderful place!”
The only catch was that Regis was in
Manhattan. So on a good day it took me
an hour and a half each way to get there.
I took a bus, then a ferry, then a sub-
way—which, when you type it into Goo-gle Maps, looks like you’re emigrating
from China to San Francisco in the
eighteen-forties.But no one complained about the
commute, because it was a free high
school, and we all felt insanely grateful
to be there. As my grandfather reminded
me, “If you don’t want to make the trip,
there are plenty of kids who would take
your place!” Then he’d say, “By the way,
did you hear about the boy who stuck
his head out the bus window and hit a
telephone pole and his head ripped clean
off his body? Protect your brain!”
Initially, my parents were very wor-
ried about their overweight, dirty-blond,
gap-toothed fourteen-year-old commut-
ing alone into New York City and tak-
ing the subway home late at night. (My
freshman photo is a real “Come and get
it!” to subway pedophiles.) Like many
of the kids at Regis, I was book smart
and street illiterate. There was a nick-
name for New York in the nineteen-thir-
ties that I always loved: the Wonder City.
And for most of us, coming from the
suburbs and suddenly being in the mid-
dle of Manhattan with no adult super-
vision after school ended, New York was
a wonder city on every level.
Some of my friends used this free-
dom to do actual fun things, like tak-
ing Ecstasy and sneaking into clubs like
the Limelight (a deconsecrated church
where you could dance on the altar) orTunnel (which seemed to get shut down
once a month because someone O.D.’d
or got stabbed). Police referred to Tun-
nel as “an open-air drug supermarket.”
(Which today is just a Walmart.)
I was way too afraid to try drugs, be-
cause, again, my brain was all I had! So
I enjoyed the nerdier perks of being in
Manhattan, like seeing a David Lynch
movie that never would have played on
Staten Island. Or sneaking into a private
club to watch poets pay tribute to Rob-
ert Giroux, one of the founders of the
publishing house Farrar, Straus & Gi-
roux. You know, crazy teen-age high jinks!
I wasn’t always so squeaky clean,
though. Occasionally, I would sign out
of school under the guise of visiting a
nearby museum, but would instead run
off to play billiards at a local pool hall,
like one of the troubled teens in “The
Music Man.” Or my friend Milosz and
I would go to the Knitting Factory or
a performance-art space called ABC
No Rio. We’d share a forty of malt li-
quor and watch a twelve-person band
called the World/Inferno Friendship
Society perform punk-klezmer songs
about Weimar Germany, Paul Robe-
son, and the Austro-Hungarian actor
Peter Lorre. The closest thing we had
to that on Staten Island was a waiter
who sang “That’s amore!” And, one
time, my friend Pete and I went to an
Italian restaurant downtown and or-
dered “one glass of red wine, please!”
And they brought it! One glass of red
wine for two out-of-control teens. Then
we stumbled home, flying from the wine
but also terrified because we thought
“The Blair Witch Project” was real and
the witch was coming for us next. (Did
I mention that we were book smart?)
I got to meet the most intimidating
and sophisticated girls in the world.
Girls who attended fancy neighboring
schools with names like Marymount,
Chapin, Spence, and Nightingale—
names that just sounded rich. We would
have high-school dances and somehow
persuade them to attend, and I felt like
a way chubbier Jay Gatsby faking a cul-
tured air to mask my Staten Island-boot-
legger upbringing. (That’s still how I
feel ninety-five per cent of the time.)
All my friends and I would hang out
for hours after school, because no one
wanted to go home. The adventure of
the city was so much more exciting thanCOMMUTING
BY COLIN JOST
ILLUSTRATION BY LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
(^1) Regis Philbin was named after my high school but
went to Cardinal Hayes High School, which was full of
kids who beat the shit out of kids who went to Regis.