Random Reader Reaction

Gopal Metha was a Princeton student not unlike other Princeton students. He loved blue pants, girls in frocks, waxing philosophical, and most of all, elitist institutions.

To elucidate, after Gopal’s college application process, he had gotten into every top school in the US, but his decision making process was quite simple. He knew he could never go to Wharton for fear of association with the Nittany Lions, Stanford was too jock-y and Bay Area hippie, and the only thing prestigious about New Haven was its gangs (Tre Douce!). Harvard and MIT did have lower acceptance rates (good sign), but they had significantly higher Asian-American student percentages (17% and 28% vs. Princeton’s 13%). Gopal found the acceptance into the Old Boy’s Club far more elite and eagerly matriculated at Princeton.

Gopal loved it at the top where the air was crisp. But unfortunately for Gopal, the air’s crispness is relative. At Princeton, he was systematically refused entrance into any secret society, comedy troupe, dance group, vegetarian co-op, bible study or anything even remotely selective. He incessantly bickered the University’s eating clubs, but eventually had to resort to the painfully common “sign-in” process.

And so Gopal was ordinary for three years. Everyday, he looked in the mirror and sulked. He couldn’t stand not having a group of random people reinforcing his dwindling self worth. He needed to feel like he was among a select few, and most importantly, he needed to be able to make fun of people that couldn’t enter his circle. The unfortunate fact was that Gopal was the person getting made fun of.

But this all changed Gopal’s first semester senior year. After weeks of grueling Vault book and message board reading and interviewing, Gopal was offered a job as an investment banking analyst in the Consumer Products Consumer/Retail group at Goldman Sachs. At last, the fox was in the henhouse. He had put himself out on the line, taken a huge risk, and it had paid off. He had gotten the job that every single Princeton student dreamed about but could never get. He was, once again, special. Goldman Sachs had faxed over their congratulations. It said “Welcome to the club.” Elated with his rediscovered prestige, he went home and set the following away message:

I am so elite that my collars pop themselves. Even when I try to fold them down (like at a funeral or a day of national tragedy) it just won’t work.

He thought that showed class.

…

When Gopal started training early that summer, he knew that he would do anything to ensure that he was not the prole, friendless loser he was at Princeton. He would be cool. And since he was instructed that training for bankers didn’t really mean anything at all, he decided his best angle was to be the drunken, boisterous fool that everyone loves to hang out with. He’d be even more loud and more boisterous than the kids from Australia and more irreverent than the Japanese. Fuck winning the hearts of the back row, Gopal would be the entire back row himself.

He started out by taking his name tag on the first day and writing “Fun Guy” next to his name in big red letters. This was an excellent ice breaker. Within 30 minutes everyone knew him, remembered him, and couldn’t wait to drink with him at the first social event.

And on cue, at an event a few nights later, Gopal went to the bar and ordered four mixed drinks and a couple of beers. The entire stock was for him. He figured, if the price of inebriation was warm drinks with melted ice, so be it. Gopal got sloshed quickly, danced double-fisted, told jokes he’d read on the Internet, and flirted openly with older female bankers. He was the center of attention, in a good way, and the surge of acceptance flowed through his veins for the first time in years. What bliss.

Soon however, the bliss turned into a heaviness settling in down below the belt. Maybe it was just that after twenty two years he was sick and tired of having to relieve himself the way everybody else did. In a toilet, that is. Gopal began to contemplate alternative options to trudging to the bathroom for a quick draining of the plumbing. Luckily, the table was covered with a white linen tablecloth whose edges hung halfway to the floor, and he had just finished a bottle of beer—a fitting receptacle for his golden gift. Gopal sidled up closer to the table, slipped the empty beer bottle down below, covered his lap with the tablecloth, and relaxed…

Gopal went uncaught and got up and walked around the party some more, schmoozing like a pro, basking in everyone’s love for him. Then, he spotted a thin little Indian girl standing in the corner with a friend and his mother’s cries for a daughter-in-law that she could verbally abuse in her mother tongue took over: a marriage candidate? So Gopal went over and began chatting with her (name: Sheetal). As drunk as Gopal was, they hit it off famously; they clicked. Gopal told stories about how everyone called him “Gay Pal” growing up and Sheetal confessed she cried herself to sleep every night because even her teachers pronounced her name “Shit All.” It seemed like all the astrological signs were in place. Everything was on track for Gopal and Sheetal to dance coyly around trees, make out, clash teeth from inexperience, and call their parents to elate them with the news that a nice Brown mate had been found.

Then Gopal went to the bar to get them two drinks. And en route, he spotted a tall, blond, Aryan goddess. Everything about her screamed: Mayflower, Spence, and “My only entertainment in life is destroying the self-confidence of boys that try to hit on me,” and Gopal was captivated. Sheetal was far gone from his mind, White girls were a far more elite catch.

The girl was talking casually with similarly endowed boys and girls, and they all looked far less uncomfortable than everyone else. Naturally so, they’d been living this scene since they were 5 years old.

Anyway, Gopal was on top of the world and drunk and figured he could win over anyone at the party. Getting drunk was the universal cool. So he went up to the she-pedigree and said:

“Did you invite all these people? I thought it was just going to be the two of us?”

The girl and her posh-posse all stopped talking for a brief moment, taken aback. And then, as if they’d been trained to mock immigrant children from birth, they, in unison, burst out in laughter. Gopal was mortified.

One of them cruelly mimed Gopal in a high-pitched voice. Someone else shouted, “Woah there Fun Guy!” as if scolding an overheated poodle. And worst of all, the girl in question asked him, perfectly seriously, “Equities in Dallas?”

And it was a quick and hard fall from glory for Gopal. This was a trainee-wide event, and the absolute worst position any trainee in any division could imagine was being slotted in Equities in Dallas. No one could imagine anything less successful in their small world than an equity salesman in Dallas; the equity department was powerless, and Dallas was, well, a long way from New York.

The comment pierced through to Gopal’s core. All the rejections he’d felt at Princeton came rushing back at him. He felt like a dead rat being hosed off the curb by a deli owner.

He folded. He scurried away from his mockers, grabbed a bottle of Beam from the bar and ran. He escaped back to his parent-subsidized (for the time being) Murray Hill studio, and drank and cried himself to sleep.

The next morning, Gopal showed up at training, stumbling drunk, eyes still bloodshot, smelling like a speak-easy. He name card no longer read “Fun Guy.” He was just Gopal Mehta. He was no longer elite or cool. He was just another douchebag.