As trippees trickled into Hanover and brought America to Dartmouth, Kapil Kale '07 and I roadtripped across the country and brought Dartmouth to America.
Kapil was a Lodj-er and, to quote Swingers, the guy behind the guy behind the guy. A representative Facebook group proclaimed that "Kapil Will Save Your Ass From Being Parkhursted." (Win some, lose some. Freshmen -- I was suspended. You're caught up.)
We drove from New York City to Los Angeles in his kinda-bangin' Rolls-Civic, our itinerary dictated not by sightseeing but by where we would have a free bed. Kapil is from India but looks ambiguous; I proposed slapping a "Nuke Pakistan" sticker on the car to clear things up, but he said no.
Halfway through Kansas we saw an obviously Indian girl in Wal-Mart. Kapil was surprised. "And she's fobby!"
I was embarrassed, I had no idea what that meant. "Um, what -- what region of India is that? Or, like, what sect?"
"Haha no man, fobby, like F.O.B.--Fresh Off the Boat."
Just like freshman fall, when I heard the post-WWII "jap" for the first time.
In Lawrence, Kan. we found ourselves at the KU football game. After the first Jayhawk touchdown, everyone around us put their arms in the air and waved them back and forth, slowly. I was confused -- rather unintimidating, as sports celebrations go. We asked our man in Kansas, Nat Wells '09, what was going on.
"Oh. From a distance, it simulates the effect of wheat blowing in the wind."
I looked across the field, and sure enough -- a huge field of blue human wheat. It was a thrilling reminder of the biggest thing Dartmouth is missing: state school sports.(Rage call, 07F: UNH-HANOVER! De-privatize!)
In the nicest possible sense, it's enough to make a guy appreciate the appeal of fascism. Everyone's the same color and hates the same people, who are a different color. Loud music; battle.
Indeed, sports got us through the Midwest. We would Wikipedia each city before we got there to get the name of the local mascot; whenever things got hairy, we'd chant "GO MASCOT." Or, when it was really dire, "BEAT THE RIVAL MASCOT." (And "OBAMA '08," to keep people on their toes.) Miraculously, Kansas and Iowa City were both Hawks.
In Utah, we climbed a mesa in flip-flops, fulfilling our solemn road trip goal of "doing nature shit." Later we pulled over to watch a badlands sunset so gorgeous that I lost myself in thought. Kapil took a fire hose to the delicate pansy of my reverie: The moment the sun slipped below the horizon he said "It's night o'clock!" We spent the night in Salina, Utah. Walking into the town's only bar, we found only three silent patrons and a sad female bartender with bleached blonde hair, 35 going on 60, Thousand Dollar Baby.
We talked to her. A nearby mine had recently collapsed, the town was hit hard, her brother-in-law was killed. I realized where I was -- that collapse had been in national papers for weeks. Kapil was unphased; as I chatted up a guy with a tattoo of the Devil with a fishing pole catching the Jesus fish, Kapil proposed a chugging contest. With Devil-tat timing, we drank a pitcher boat-race style as fast as we could (a minute -- it was cold, don't judge) and the bartender's spirits lifted. She kept thanking us and said she would put our names and time on the wall and make it a regular thing.
Two days later we hit Los Angeles. Kapil has a job at Bain doing management consulting -- a field which, as far as I can tell, consists of ruling at PowerPoint and getting paid too much.
The first thing I saw in L.A. (I wish I even had the ability to make this up) was two women on horseback at the window of a Starbucks drive-through. I fumbled for the camera as we drove by, and they both turned and smiled. They had to. In L.A., the picture is the point. Once they had their lattes, they probably threw the horses away.
In L.A., cars are everywhere all the time, worshipped by everyone. The city is better fit for cars than human life, and they all have the shine that's only possible in a place with no weather. Since I left I've had a recurring nightmare about going down the wrong alley in West Hollywood and stumbling upon a six-Mercedes orgy, engine oil and rubber everywhere, all of their stereos blasting the Paris Hilton album played backwards.
There are too many BMWs; it's not possible they can all afford them. The impression one gets, to employ a term that's not even close to okay for white people yet, is that everyone's hood-rich: financing the Benz by not paying the heating bill. (Again, all the more possible with no weather.)
The abbreviation for West Hollywood, by the way, is WeHo -- uncannily appropriate for a place where everyone is for sale. In a WeHo bar, the bartenders were clearly failed actor/models. I started to approach one of the bar's several actress-pretty patrons; noticing that her male companion was rather all over her, I decided to talk to him first.
"Excuse me, sorry -- uh, maybe you get this all the time, but -- has anyone ever told you that you look like a combination of Al Pacino and Jake Gyllenhaal?"
Of course, no such creature exists.
"You know, I have gotten Gyllenhaal!"
The girl squealed. "I see it, I totally see it!"
He was an aspiring director. Within minutes, he whipped out his cell and emailed me on the spot. Now I have an artifact in my Inbox, the precise image of The Beginning of L.A.: "Send me a script. [Sent from my iPhone.]"
I couldn't be happier to be back in Hanover. Campus analyses to come. Please, Blitz me. Please.
