The year I took off between high school and college was like a little oasis in time, a sweet bridge between adolescence and adulthood. I had two goals for that year. The first was to spend as much time with Debbie as I possibly could, and the second was to earn enough money to pay for my college education. No loans for me, no handouts from Daddy or Uncle Sam. If I was going to get a Harvard diploma, I was going to get it the old-fashioned way. Earn it. If I’d known how little it was worth, I wouldn’t have worked so hard.

My partner, Alex, went off to Columbia (he eventually became a doctor, so at least someone wound up with a proud mother), so I was on my own in the mail-order business. Since I’d also passed the insurance broker’s licensing exam that I’d been studying for on the day of the tape tour fiasco, I had another angle to pursue as well. So I spent part of my time hawking plants in the tabloids, and part of the time working in my father’s commercial insurance business. In April, Debbie got into Harvard, which meant we could stay together. We’d go from being high school sweethearts to college sweethearts. Everything was coming up roses.

This, as it turned out, was my undoing. Her educated, liberal parents had their every dream fulfilled with her acceptance. Although I’d had second thoughts about dropping everything and moving to Cambridge, she was going there and that was that. Either I could follow or she’d probably find a better-looking, nicer guy from a better family up there. They suggested that maybe I should stay in New York. Oh, no, not me. I wasn’t going to lose her. I was going to Harvard. I could leave my business in New York and run it and still have Crimson, Ivy, tradition, great education. After all, I’d always been able to have it all up to now. During the year off I’d taken and passed advanced placement exams that gave me full credit for my freshman year, so I only had three years to go. It would go by in the blink of an eye. Harvard wasn’t Columbia. I ignored my misgivings and told Harvard to expect me in September. Big mistake.

From the start, it was a disaster. Debbie wanted to live “the college life,” felt I was suffocating her, and started to cool down the relationship. This began a turbulent time for us that, though finally and happily culminating in our marriage five years later, was a period that could be described as stormy at best, and hell at worst.

The political orientation of the school was just as left-wing as Columbia. The only difference was that the administration was just as left-wing as the students and faculty, making for less visible intercampus turbulence.

I and, it seemed, the entire rest of the university were always at loggerheads, ideologically. I cite three examples. During my first year I was taking a course in the ideology of the American Revolution. The professor invited me into his graduate section, where I noted that many of my fellow students seemed to be Marxists, ascribing to Charles Beard’s theory of the Revolution (that is, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson did the whole thing because they were rich capitalists whose ascendancy was being thwarted by the British. Also, they needed a diversion to distract the lower classes from the growing concentration of common wealth).