THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 65
rectly, by the hour, and I sent him oc-
casional e-mail updates on his son’s prog-
ress. We read plays and short stories and
articles from the sports pages, and ran
through long sets of simple algebra. The
kid didn’t like to concentrate; I could
relate. One day, I got a call from his
stepmother, who was from Chicago. She
was supporting a young Illinois senator
who was preparing to run for President.
His campaign was setting up a fund-rais-
ing office in New York, and they’d need
an assistant. I knew that I was stum-
bling into another unmerited adventure.
Without having finished college, I rode
the first Obama campaign all the way to
Washington, D.C., where I worked at
the Democratic National Committee,
raising money, and then at the White
House, where I helped recruit minor func-
tionaries to work at Cabinet agencies.
On Friday evenings, I’d throw clothes
into a duffel and catch a BoltBus home
to hang out with my daughter—and to
spend most of each Saturday on the Upper
East Side, pecking away at a degree from
Hunter College.
I had run up student-loan debt at Mid-
dlebury, and I was paying my way through
Hunter credit by credit, up front and in
cash. Some semesters, out of fatigue or
because I was flat broke, I gave up school
entirely. Once or twice, I convinced my-
self that I should quit, that I’d made a
fine beginning for myself—unreasonably
fine, given the circumstances—as a college
dropout. But something about the diffi-
culty of this arrangement, and its madden-
ing slowness, helped me focus. At Hunter,
what I learned, I learned well, and in a
hungry way I hadn’t really experienced
since high school. It was the first time
since fifth grade that I’d attended a pub-
lic school. I wasn’t advancing anyone’s
notion of diversity. My classmates were
New Yorkers, and therefore from every-
where. Everybody had at least one job,
and lots of them had two or three. No-
body strolled across a quad to class—
Hunter has no grass—and everybody was
always on the train. Many of my teach-
ers were adjuncts, shuttling between one
city campus and another; they managed,
mostly, to project total sincerity about
the subjects at hand. Nobody complained
when, lacking a babysitter, I sometimes
brought my kid to class. Nothing de-
pended on my presence. I didn’t signify.
One professor, a white woman with
graying hair who wore a series of rum-
pled shirts, wept while recounting the
events of the twenty-fourth book of the
Iliad. By the time she finished, my eyes
were puddling, too. I studied the He-
brew Bible with an instructor in his
seventies who tape-recorded each of his
digressive lectures, intent on one day
turning them into a book. A garrulous
Southerner taught me early American
literature: Winthrop, Edwards, Mather.
A fastidious graduate student with a side-
line in editing technical manuals taught
a seminar on Japanese cinema and an-
other class focussed solely on Kurosawa;
I took both, and now, rereading my es-
says for those classes, I can see that I was
starting to learn how to make my close
readings bearable as prose. When I finally
graduated, at a huge, happily impersonal
ceremony at Radio City Music Hall—
Chuck Schumer was the featured speak-
er—I was living in New York again, writ-
ing speeches for minor executives at an
N.G.O., a few months away from turn-
ing thirty. “Twelve Years an Undergrad-
uate,” I joked with my friends.G
ary Simons stepped down as Prep’s
director shortly before I first left
for Middlebury, in 2002. His ouster reg-
istered as an earthquake among the
alumni, who regarded him both as a fa-ther figure and as a remote, eccentric
guru. Simons had long presented him-
self as a kind of educator-saint, and his
air of extra-professional intensity had
started to wear thin with the board. He
had insisted on involvement in every
aspect of Prep’s operations—including
maintaining personal relationships with
students, which the board found inap-
propriate but Simons felt was intrinsic
to his work. Although Simons was in
tune with the individualism of the age,
his shambly persona, tendency to mi-
cromanage, and allergy to compromise
put him out of step with the era’s tech-
nocratic drift.
“By the end,” Peter Bordonaro, the
longtime director of Prep 9, told me,
“he was sort of impossible to deal with.”
A stocky seventy-five-year-old with a
dark mustache, Bordonaro, who left the
program six years ago, has a philosoph-
ical air but speaks with the blunt dic-
tion of a lifelong teacher. He is a be-
loved figure among Prep alumni. We
met on a cool day not long after Christ-
mas, at a diner in the West Village. He
told me that he’s tried not to obsess over
Prep since he left, and that he was work-
ing on a memoir of his time in Viet-
nam. He recalled a day, in 1999, when
Simons charged into his office and pre-
sented him with a memo titled “Prep