Hudson Valley

Smoking seemed to work wonders for his phlegm problem. He certainly spit out of the window less after he lit up one of his Pall Malls. We could debate whether the cigarettes were also its cause, but at the moment I was quite grateful for this particular habit.

I was taking the $40 cab from Bard College to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., because I had misread the shuttle schedule, and now the taxi was the only way for me to get home. I had forgotten my wallet in my dorm room before I left. I had borrowed $100 from my mother for the week, and then I spent all of it in diners. That morning I borrowed my girlfriend's laundry money to pay for the last leg. I warn you: Taxi drivers don't like it when you pay them in quarters, and the Metro-North ticket machines take a maximum of 30 coins. It wasn't the most organized Fall Break, and my time with this driver was becoming a kind of solemn coda.

He had the same spirit as all the other men I saw in the Hudson Valley towns around Bard, same as the drunken biker who asked me how you pronounced "Darjeeling" and whether the movie was worth seeing, same as the health-food store owner who told me brand-new condos were being built but there was no one to buy them. I imagined that he didn't spend more than 20 minutes a day on his feet; I could tell he was divorced. He never looked at me in the rear-view mirror. The men in that area were nothing like the women — the women seemed just as worn, but they were chipper and witty. It will be women, surely, who run things after the apocalypse.

We chatted morosely, and I filled the pauses with long, thoughtful looks out the window; he continually failed to take the hint. He asked me where I grew up, and I told him. "You're a city boy like me, eh?" he said, in such a way that I wished it weren't true. I mentioned that I had a brother who was a Marine, and he asked me what my other brothers did. But when I told him I had a sister, he didn't ask a thing. He asked me where I went to college, and when I answered he asked me where that was. "Where's Princeton?"

When I first arrived at the University, I was amused at how everyone pretended they weren't ecstatic, that the college admissions process wasn't a big part of their lives. It was a ridiculous exercise, of course; when the sense of importance is so internalized, it's impossible to hide. I don't think there were good reasons for it, though: To betray glee at entering the ruling class would be gauche, but hardly shameful; the key was to treat admission as unsurprising, not like it was undesirable.

This driver, though — he would have been a perfect new admit. Here was a man who didn't know where Princeton was, who came from a world in which it practically did not exist. He seemed more sluggish than miserable, too empty to suffer. He had the resignation of one born into a place too old and senseless for indignation or injustice. Tivoli, Red Hook — these towns were dying at no one's hands. It had dawned on me that week — paging through old issues of People Magazine in antique stores ("Dan Aykroyd Lashes Out at the Drugsters that Killed Belushi"), riding on the too-fast shuttles driven by mute acid casualties who played the Doors at maximum volume in complete darkness — the ruling class only existed in the minds of its favored children. Out here, things moved slowly and unflinchingly downwards, as they always have.

When I got to the train station, I stood in line behind a boy wearing white stunna shades. As I ate a Pop-Tart (on which I spent my last six quarters), the man next to me reported the weight of his newborn nephew. The train station, at least, was a busy place. People there moved quickly; they moved their faces — even the grim youth with the enormous sunglasses looked like he was pissed off about something. It would be a relief to leave the Hudson Valley. I was looking forward to traveling through the places between there and the University, via Grand Central. There everything is uncertain, petty, marked by a delusional urgency — no one is slowed by a sense of grand descent or mastery. But I could only pass through.