Authors: David Samuels
someone like that could go through life thinking she was poor.
“Are these the details that you wanted?” he asked. He admired Peter Hessler, who ran
track, and who went to the library most nights and took reams of notes on the books he read.
Hessler came from a town in Missouri, Hogue recalled, and he liked to shoot water balloons
across the quad with launchers made out of surgical tubing. So it was hard to say that the people he met at Princeton were alike in any particular way.
“How would the world be different if people were allowed to make up any story they
wanted?” I asked him.
“They are allowed to do that,” he said. “Somebody invented whatever name you got. And
up to a certain point in life, that’s all you have. And then you start obtaining your own things. So I guess I see it more as an evolution within the self,” he added. “And I think it occurs in everybody.”
He began to drift and then he kept drifting from one thing to another, playing little games that occupied his mind. He liked pushing other people’s buttons. He said that playing with other people’s heads made him uncomfortable, but the truth was, he liked it. He liked imagining what he wanted to accomplish and then making it real. When the people he befriended found out that he was actually a different person, with a different life story, they could be freaked out, angry, hurt. But the truth is that we live in a society where people are inventing themselves all the time.
The first impostor he ever heard of was a kid down in Wichita who had a friend in the high
school registrar’s office.
“You said you personally know fifteen people who have done this successfully in similar
situations,” I asked him.
“At least,” he answered. They wrote him letters, he said.
He admitted that what he had done belonged, perhaps, to a different category of
invention. “I was just using the basic fact that people are going to believe whatever they’re told unless they have a good reason not to,” he said. What made his actions possible, he explained, was his ability to tolerate guilt. His habit of wearing a mask was simply an impulse that he couldn’t control. “Say you’re a diabetic,” he explained. “You know you can’t eat certain foods, but you do it anyway.”
What really interested him was the process of psychological manipulation that helped
him to fill in the blanks in the appropriate way that would generate the result that he wanted.
“The character itself was just something I made up,” he explained. The finer points of Santana’s biography were arrived at by trial and error. “It was the process of trying to figure out what would push other people’s buttons, I guess. You know, it’s a harsh thing to do, but. ...” He didn’t feel guilty about lying at all.
We had been together at Princeton now for three days straight, and there were still many
questions that I wished to ask, and that I hoped he might answer. Being around rich people had its upsides and its downsides, he said. “The only reason I would rather be near them is because what I do for a living sort of requires being around them,” he told me. “In fact, I’d rather not be around them. I’d rather not be around anybody, to tell you the truth.”
“What are you doing now?” I asked him.
“I’m building a house,” he told me.
XIII. The Freshman
The story of Alexi Santana was a way of redeeming the injuries James Hogue had
experienced in his life, or so I imagined. The eighteen-year-old runner whose spirit had been broken came back ten years later to reclaim what had been taken from him, only to be broken again, by something that was larger and more powerful than he was. Some parts of his stories were verifiable. Others were not. I knew at least that I could trust him on one count: the story of his life would have only a tangential relation to whatever version of it I chose to write. The act by which America transformed itself into a supernova of self-invention—a stupefying explosion of individuals guaranteed the right to pursue their own happiness—meant that in every
generation Americans would break free from the past and make themselves over. The fact that the dream of becoming someone new is doomed to failure is not really so bad, since every story ends in failure. It’s just a particular kind of story, that’s all. Living suspended between the present and the future, 300 million flowers bloom in midair.
“I think it’s a common fantasy,” Jim told me, when I asked him whether making yourself
up from scratch as an entirely new person is really possible, even in America. “What I know about it is that you can do it in actual fact if you really want to. And you can probably only do it so long, before you have to go back to where you started out.”
At one point during my last conversation with Hogue at Princeton, a freshman named
Dennis Dugan entered Hogue’s old room, which was his room now, to retrieve his coat.
“It seems like everyone is a Princeton alumnus,” the freshman said. “That’s what some
people are saying.” He was friendly and open-faced. He was eager to meet the man who had
lived in his room however many years ago. Hogue was eager to talk to him, too. He was glad to play the role of a Princeton alumnus, offering avuncular advice about the eating clubs and the food. When I think about James Hogue, I find it hard not to return to that day, which was the only time I ever saw him look truly happy and at ease.
“A lot of people tend to put the little stickers on their cars,” Hogue told the freshman.
“So, I mean, you’ll see that and you’ll probably stop and talk to them. There’s one fellow in Aspen. Oh, he must be sixty or seventy. He’s got an orange car, bright orange, with the tiger on the little antenna and stickers in the windows. I mean, you’ll see stuff like that. And you’ll probably go to work on Wall Street and I’m sure you’ll run into people there.” I sat on the fold-out couch and took notes.
“They say college is the best time of your life,” Dugan said. “Do you believe that?”
“I think it’s supposed to be,” Hogue responded.
“What are some of your memories, Jim?” I asked.
“He’s living them,” Hogue answered. “He’ll remember.” He turned to Dugan. “I mean,
have you had your nude Olympics yet?”
The freshman appeared eager to keep the moment alive, to maintain this fleeting
connection to a person who had gone this way before. “I think he has great memories of this place,” he offered, as Hogue stood by with a mild, quizzical expression on his face. “I think he had a lot of fun here. I think it really helped him out. Not just the diploma itself but the actual things that he learned while obtaining that diploma . . . not just the actual facts and figures and theory, just the existence, how to exist with people. I know a lot of people, they’ve had their own room their whole life.” I thought about the storage shed in Utah with the bare light bulb and the aluminum walls. I thought about the stolen bicycles. I thought about what Princeton had meant to Hogue. I saw that he was smiling.
“I don’t want special preference just because of the name of my club,” the freshman was
saying. “I want to prove myself.”
“But you’ll put that on your resume,” Hogue said. There was nothing bitter in his voice.
Dugan had worked hard to get to Princeton, he said. He had grown up in New Jersey in a
middle-class family, just above the line that allows you to raise your head to see the path before you and win a scholarship to prep school. The day he found out he was accepted at Princeton was the best day of his life, he said, quite sincerely. “For the week after that, I was sort of in disbelief,” he went on.
“So you would tell all your friends to work hard and to do—”
“Yeah. I tell my little brother every day,” Dugan said.
“How old is he?” Hogue asked.
“He’s eight.”
“Because,” Hogue said, “they really like to let in brothers and sisters and friends.”
The freshman nodded. He liked that idea. He would grow older, protected by the circle of
shared experience and tradition that binds Princetonians together, secure in the benefits of a good education and a wealth of useful contacts that would ease his way through the snares and thickets of life. Being accepted at Princeton was a blessing, he said. Everything he had seen about the place was exactly as it was described in the brochures.