Vanderboosh and Me

Adrian is 24 years old, and still wears worn blue sneakers with red cloth letters over the toes—an “L” on one and an “R” on the other. When he is away from home, he carries a toothbrush in the left pocket of his jeans jacket. He has sewn lightning bolts on the jacket’s arms. He smiles often, and laughs just as much. I like him a hell of a lot.

I met Adrian through my friend Sam about 16 months ago. Sam and I were both news editors for the College Hill Independent, a student weekly for Brown University. At the time, Adrian was writing news shorts for our irreverent Week in Review section under the recently acquired pseudonym “Ryan Vanderboosh.” He and Sam spent spring afternoons sitting in their ‘office’ on the steps of Brown’s Applied Mathematics building, drinking 40-ouncers out of brown bags, composing ridiculous articles, and laughing.

In one such piece on a 13 year-old graduate of Randolph Macon College, Sam made the sort of journalistically unorthodox move that became typical of Week in Review: he quoted Adrian. Adrian’s take on the collegiate question was typical of his own gonzo journalism and self-effacing attitude. “When asked to comment on [the graduate]’s amazing talent and maturity,” Sam wrote, “college dropout Ryan Vanderboosh commented: ‘Oh yeah? Just wait’ll he discovers weed, sex and alcohol.’”

This was a sort of joke, but only sort of. Adrian was a college dropout, or, rather, he was a college expellee. Weed, sex, and alcohol did not have much to do with the reason for his expulsion, but these lesser sins probably had something to do with how he got to the greater sin that got him into trouble. They were part of the mosaic, and the fact that Adrian had been expelled did not make it off-limits for jokes in the Week in Review. Indeed, joking was a way to deal with the direction his life had taken.

One spring afternoon a few years ago, Adrian took an axe to the hood of an unmanned Brown University Police car, which was parked right in front of BUPD headquarters on Charlesfield Street. I hadn’t known him at the time, but the incident made him sort of famous on campus. After chopping up the hood of the car he lay down on it, having covered himself in fake blood. When discovered, Adrian said he had fallen out of the sky.

He was summarily expelled and barred from the school’s property. When I first met Adrian, two years later, Brown had just decided to lift his expulsion. This was not because they or anyone else deemed him insane or not culpable for his attack on the police car. They probably saw what I saw and what Adrian has never quite admitted: he attacked that car because he was bored. Surely, the boredom was coupled with something more serious, but my guess is that the university was no more able to figure out what that was than I have been in my 16 months of friendship with Adrian.

Things have not improved in the boredom department. For about the last year, Adrian has been living in New York City without anything in particular to do. He has not taken Brown up on its offer to allow him back, has not taken classes anywhere else and has not gotten a job. In part, he does not work because, financially, he doesn’t need to.

When I visited New York last October, I hung out with Adrian one night at his parents’ home on the corner of 5th Avenue and 96th Street. We walked up to 97th, crossing a serious boundary in the largely class-segregated city. Adrian told me a friend of his mother’s once said, without a trace of irony, that she would like a wall to be built above 96th Street.

At the corner store on 97th, Adrian seemed more comfortable than he could ever be in his family home. He wanted to get fifty-cent cans of inaptly named Country Club malt liquor, but it was frozen solid. We settled for 22-ouncers of Steel Reserve, got brown bags and walked over to Park Avenue. Then we strolled below 96th, showing our contempt for our own wealth and scandalizing the upper-East-Siders by sucking on our cheap beers.

By the time I went back to New York for a job interview this past March, Adrian had moved into an apartment with Sam in the East Village. It was a newly renovated sixth-floor walkup on Avenue B with high ceilings and a flat roof just a short staircase away. Adrian’s room, which had a hammock but no bed, cost him $750 a month. He still was not working.

Adrian said his most important recent activity had been seeing his friends’ bands play. While I was there we went to the Lion’s Den to see Addison Groove Project, whose lead singer is a buddy of Adrian’s. Another night, he’d gone to the Bowery Ballroom to see Zox, a group of friends from Brown and Providence. By the time he’d gotten to the show it had sold out.

Adrian does not play music himself. He had just taken up drums when I first met him, practicing on John Zox’s drum set when he was living with the bandleader in Providence after his expulsion. When he came back to New York, an old high school teacher allowed him to use the drums at the school on occasion, but that opportunity eventually ended. He could have afforded to buy himself a set but he didn’t. He explained this to me by saying that he didn’t need any more things to be bad at. He laughed, but it seemed like another one of those jokes that was true.

I feel sorry that Adrian didn’t finish college and that he probably won’t anytime soon. Not because it’s the kind of thing that embarrasses parents in our class background, but because he seems so lost. What I don’t know, and what I am afraid to ask directly, is whether Adrian regrets this himself. I also don’t know exactly how to explain why an overachieving student, a recovering obsessive perfectionist like myself, would be so drawn to such an unapologetic underachiever like Adrian. I have some ideas, though.

I was too smart and too wealthy for comfort in the public elementary and middle schools I attended. Not that I was super-rich, but, compared to relatively poor white students and the many immigrants and refugees, I stuck out a bit. I was, one might say, not very cool in those days, at least as cool is defined when at 10 or 12. My lunch money was rarely stolen, but I fell prey more than once to that famous northern torture of the whitewash, where a victim’s head is shoved into the side of a snow bank. In college, when an anonymous poster on a Brown Daily Herald web forum called me a “Communist fag” in response to a column I’d written about campaign finance reform, the fag part of the epithet brought back memories of childhood. Like today, being called a fag was probably more about a lack of masculinity than any perceived sexuality, but then those two are often confused in the minds of young and old.

Things improved when I moved to private school in seventh grade, but I was still left with a discomfort. Always doing my homework, always acting the part of the responsible first-born son, always getting the near-perfect grades and thus always drawing the attention of my teachers, I still stuck out in a troubling way.

This, I think, is why I befriended a kid named Aaron in high school, who came in smoking pot and wearing dreads and ended it doing coke and wearing gauge earrings. This is why I was drawn to my longtime girlfriend Katy, who told me stories about her acid flashbacks. This is why I made the odd decision, more than once, to do nitrous oxide on a high school friend’s roof. This is why I made an absurd and ill-fated attempt to be a small-time drug dealer, which ended when two guys pulled a knife on me and stole $400 I’d collected to buy a quarter-pound of marijuana.

Two of that four-hundred was not mine. Though my co-investors never forced me to repay them, losing other people’s money made the run-in much more upsetting. It was a valuable wake-up call. I never sold another bag of pot, and soon thereafter stopped even buying it, but it didn’t really end my fascination with doing bad, and befriending those who did.

Sometimes, “bad” deeds don’t even have to violate my own value system for me to think of them as such. Smoking a joint, for example, if not selling one, seems pretty harmless. But the fascination for me has always been the moral codes of others, of family or community. Smoking a joint can still be an enjoyment, then, not just for what it is, but because it is “bad.”

Adrian, like the other renegades I have befriended, has his own particular moral code. Though he respects my left-leaning politics and activism, he isn’t even politically “moral” in the way I am. (He wouldn’t cross a picket line to work, but he might commit other, lesser sins according to my politico-moral code—such as not voting.) Beyond politics, he is even more likely to thumb his nose at what passes for morality—fuck the Brown police and their cruisers, fuck the rich snobs in the old uptown neighborhood where he grew up, fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you too. It’s a seductive attitude, particularly to someone who often struggles against a possibly genetic pull to do everything right.

Adrian is a great person, and I know a lot of other people who can see it in him. There is more to him, and to my interest in him, than that nose-thumbing at the world, which is as easy to look down at as it is to admire. His humor is world-renowned and ubiquitous, but he is compassionate, smart, and interesting. I didn’t befriend Adrian solely out of attraction to badness, but to the extent that that was responsible, I’d call the attraction much more a blessing than a curse.

A certain amount of discomfort with my achievements, and my white male straight upper-middle-class privilege that helped me achieve them, is to thank for pulling me to various badasses in my life. If I were entirely comfortable with the person I am and have always been, I would never have shared a walk with Adrian along the Upper East Side drinking Steel Reserve. Then again, if he was fully comfortable with himself, neither would he.