Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. David Garrow J.
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capable of because you kind of slide.”
Obama also realized that the beer drinking, pot smoking, and cocaine snorting that Oxy, like Punahou, offered him, and that had cemented his reputation as “a hard-core party animal” to some friends, was incompatible with any self-transformation into a more serious student and person. Sim Heninger and Bill Snider believed that Obama’s decision to apply to Columbia sprang from a desire for greater self-discipline, and over a quarter century later Obama would remark, “I think part of the attraction of transferring was it’s hard to remake yourself around people who have known you for a long time.” He knew he was at a “dead end” at Oxy and needed a fresh start, that “I need to connect with something bigger than myself.” So when Barack mailed his transfer application sometime just before Oxy’s spring break began on March 20, at bottom he was making “a conscious decision: I want to grow up.”15
For Oxy’s spring term, Barack, along with scores of other students, enrolled in Lawrence Goldyn’s PS 115, Sexual Politics, which met Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. His old Haines Annex friend Paul Anderson took it too and recalls “many times having to stand in the back because there weren’t any chairs left.”
A new regular for the daily conversations in the Cooler was sophomore Alex McNear, who had arrived at Oxy the previous fall as a transfer from Hunter College in New York City, where she lived. By the end of winter term, she and fellow sophomore Tom Grauman had decided to start a literary magazine at Oxy. They announced the launch of Feast in the Oxy newspaper and invited submissions of short stories and poems for spring term.
Obama had composed two poems in David James’s winter term creative writing seminar, and he had presented each in class sometime late in the term. One, a twelve-line composition entitled “Underground,” may be no more comprehensible now than it was in 1981:
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.
The second, titled “Pop,” made enough of an impression on his listeners in March 1981 that at least two of them still recalled that morning three decades later.
Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me;
I stare hard at his face, a stare
That deflects off his brow;
I’m sure he’s unaware of his
Dark, watery eyes, that
Glance in different directions,
And his slow, unwelcome twitches,
Fail to pass.
I listen, nod,
Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,
Beige T-shirt, yelling,
Yelling in his ears, that hang
With heavy lobes, but he’s still telling
His joke, so I ask why
He’s so unhappy, to which he replies …
But I don’t care anymore, ’cause
He took too damn long, and from
Under my seat, I pull out the
Mirror I’ve been saving; I’m laughing,
Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face
To mine, as he grows small,
A spot in my brain, something
That may be squeezed out, like a
Watermelon seed between
Two fingers.
Pop takes another shot, neat,
Points out the same amber
Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and
Makes me smell his smell, coming
From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem
He wrote before his mother died,
Stands, shouts, and asks
For a hug, as I shrink, my
Arms barely reaching around
His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ’cause
I see my face, framed within
Pop’s black-framed glasses
And know he’s laughing too.
David James can remember Obama “reading that or an early version of that,” and particularly the “amber stain” reference to urine, because of “how powerful an image it was.” But James thought the poem seemed “dispassionate” because it was “neither sentimental nor cruel.” Margot Mifflin, no doubt with “Underground” in mind, noted that Obama’s “previous poems had been more abstract and fanciful,” but “Pop” made a stronger impression because of its “honest ambivalence and because it was so unabashedly personal, especially coming from someone who tended to be reserved.” Mifflin was also impressed that “it wasn’t sentimental. It had an edge of darkness to it, and that made it genuine.”
Alex McNear and her colleagues accepted both of Barack’s poems for Feast’s inaugural issue. When the fifty-page magazine arrived on campus in May, a review in the student newspaper described it as a “most outstanding collegiate example of writing talent” and said copies “should be sent to other colleges.” McNear and her contributors appreciated that praise, and over a quarter century later, Feast would be discovered by a new generation of readers who sought to understand Obama’s poems. Given both the title and the reference to “black-framed glasses,” most commentators presumed that Obama had written about his grandfather, Stan Dunham, not Frank Marshall Davis. But hostile critics focused on how the subject “recites an old poem he wrote before his mother died” and noted that Stan’s mother had killed herself when he was eight years old, yet Barack would forcefully reject the Davis hypothesis. “This is about my grandfather.”16
Alex McNear was one of two Occidental women whom male students immediately remembered three decades later. The list of men who actively sought her attention included 1980 graduate Andy Roth, who was in Eagle Rock through February 1981; Phil Boerner, who invited Alex to brunch multiple times; and Feast cofounder Tom Grauman, who found her “a magnetic force” before shifting his gaze to Caroline Boss. But interest in Alex ranged far wider. One upperclassman imagined she was “the most beautiful lesbian I ever knew,” and Susan Keselenko recalled that “everybody had a crush on Alex.”
McNear was unaware of the full degree of interest in her, but she was curious about one fellow sophomore she got to know in the Cooler during spring 1981. To Alex, Barack was “intriguing and interesting and smart and attractive,” and they spoke regularly as the school year wound down. Some friends believed the interest was mutual. “I thought he was pursuing her,” recalled Margot Mifflin, Occidental’s other unforgettable woman. She and the dashing Hasan Chandoo had been a steady couple the entire year, but that did not lessen Margot’s own “magnetism,” Tom