Free Old School by Tobias Wolff Page A

of derision, wet and cold, sneering at everyone except the drunkards and bums who’d at least had the guts not to buy into the sham. Despising any sign of uniformity, I saw uniforms everywhere—not only on soldiers and policemen, but on high school girls and housewives out shopping. The businessmen struck me as especially pathetic in their hats and suits and London Fogs, each with some laughable flag of individuality hanging from his neck.
    The Fountainhead
made me alert to the smallest surrenders of will. Passing a shoe store, I saw a young salesman in the act of bending over a customer’s foot. I stopped by the window and stared at him, hoping he’d sense my rage and disgust.
You—is this your dream? To grovel before strangers, to stuff their corns and bunions into Hush Puppies? And for what—a roof overhead and three squares a day? Coward! Fool! Men were born to soar, and you have chosen to kneel!
    But he never looked my way. Instead he continued to chat up his customer, a grizzled old guy in overalls, all the while cradling the man’s stockinged foot in one hand, examining it as if it were an object of interest and value. The salesman laughed at something the geezer said, then lowered the foot gently to the sizing stool. He rose and walked toward the back of the store. The old guy, smiling to himself, fingers laced across his stomach, stared past me into the street.
     
    I returned to school three or four days before we were actually due back. Only a few boys were around, luckless scholars retaking tests they’d flunked, red-eyed swimmers tuning up for the season; otherwise the place was deserted. My reason for cutting the break short wasn’t just to get away from Grandjohn and Patty. Our entries for the Ayn Rand competition were due the third week of January, and I wanted to get a jump on my story before classes started. But I wrote nothing. I took long walks through the snowy woods and fields, watching myself do it, admiring my solitude as if from a great height. Like Howard Roark, I kept a cigarette clamped in my executioner’s lips—once I got a safe distance from the campus—and between these bouts of passionate striding I pigged out with the jocks at the training table and lay on my bed reading
The Fountainhead
for the third time.
    I wasn’t writing, but that didn’t trouble me—I knew I could deliver my story when the time came. What I was doing was tanking up on self-certainty, transfusing Roark’s arrogant, steely spirit into my own. And as I read the book I could feel it happen, my sense of originality and power swelling as my mouth resumed its tightness of contempt.
    For once I had a complete picture of the world: over here a few disdainful Roarks and a few icy Dominiques, meltable only by Roarks; over there a bunch of terrified nobodies running from their own possibilities. Now and then I caught glimpses of other ideas in the novel, political, philosophical ideas, but I didn’t think them through. It was the personal meaning that had me in thrall—the promise of mastery achieved by doing exactly as I pleased.
    When classes started I still hadn’t begun my story; and the longer I went without writing, the more convinced I became of its inevitable superiority. By now I was reading
The Fountainhead
for the fourth time, my confidence at a boil as I fell behind in my assignments and picked up demerits for missing chapel and chores. Bill had to prod me to keep my side of the room halfway neat, and one afternoon he confiscated the novel and wouldn’t give it back until I’d picked up the mess around my bed. Man, you’re really hot on this stuff, aren’t you?
    She’s good, I said. She’s damned good.
    She’s okay.
    Okay?
Come on. I distinctly remember you saying how interesting she is.
    I said she had some interesting ideas. Have you read her other book—
Atlas Shrugged
?
    Not yet. I will.
    It’s all right, I guess. Same kind of thing. More speeches. Longer speeches. It kind of got on my