The Great Misery of the Main Line

Matt Rosen
Aug 25, 2017 · 6 min read

I often start writing things and never finish them. They stay in the DRAFTS section of this stupid website, waiting for their beginnings or middles to get endings but they never come. I lose interest or get distracted most of the time because there are photos to like on the internet and horribly racist people to read about in our government. Seriously, there was a time in my life when I only spent about an hour a day on the computer. And now I spend all day. But in all my years of letters (many of which I just declare my undying love for Los Angeles and its culture) I’ve never really written about the place I grew up.

Mainly because it doesn’t matter. I came from white privilege as did most of the people around me. I never had to sacrifice much nor was I discriminated against because of the color of my skin. My biggest struggle was thinking up an original way to ask a girl to be my Senior Prom date. I came from middle/upper class surroundings and was raised to be a kind person and was supported in my silly film school dreams by my parents.

My father loved books and going for long walks. He loved doing the New York Times crossword puzzle and watching the Eagles play on Sunday. He loved David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects and other old film noirs.

My mother loved talking to people. She loved making coffee in the morning. She rarely slept. Her favorite song was that one about the woman whose dreams were clouds in her coffee. She loved Denzel Washington movies and bike riding.

We went to Temple with Jews much wealthier than us. They came to my soccer games (my parents, not the Jews) and took me to the local bookstores at midnight to get the latest Harry Potter novels when they were released. My sister and I spent our youth getting lost between library aisles, eating ice cream and watching Boy Meets World.

Then I got a little older. I tried to make myself invisible in middle school even though I was an awkward, loud, overweight B student. I had serious crushes on girls that I knew would never give me the time of day. Insecurity soon welcomed itself into the back of my brain like a long lost friend that wanted to stay on my couch forever. My best friend (since first grade) and I spent our days after school playing tennis or ordering Chinese food, being weird in ways we only found to be funny. We were Superbad before Superbad.

Then came high school. Which in all honesty, amounted to four years of alpha-male lacrosse kids calling each other faggots and other horrible things like that. The popular girls were petty, fake and vicious while the incoming athletes tried to top one another in their quest to buy the most dip at a gas station in a single purchase. There were parties and fake IDs. Beer runs before midnight and bowls of weed being passed before, during and after school. Basically like every other high school on the Main Line.

Or to put it another way. Like every other old money neighborhood suburb of Philadelphia

If you took the spoiled Catholics, the boring WASPS, and the vindictive JAPS and put them in a single place, it would be the Main Line. The Polo-Ralph Lauren-Lacoste capital of the world. A preppy, country club infested place full of spoiled King of Prussia pricks. Abercrombie and Fitch on fuckin steroids. I could go on, but I won’t.

Ok, fine. An annoying place that comes with an even more annoying connotation that always begins with “ohhhh you’re from The Main Line”.

Obviously, many adore the Philly suburbs and continue to live there. I’m certainly not the only white male (or neurotic jew) to come out of high school wanting to immediately leave the town he grew up in (see Garden State). But the fear/anxiety of running into someone at home after I graduated college was too great. I packed my bags because in my head, I couldn’t stand 93% of the people I went to high school with. I had nothing to say to them and they had nothing to say to me. It’s a crazy concept — that you can share classrooms and hallways and cafeterias with hundreds of people (save for a few) over the course of 8 years and not feel any connection to them whatsoever. You can, in fact, reinvent yourself over again after high school, even after college, and become the person you secretly always wanted to be.

But I’m often puzzled why I felt so lost and awkward back then. Maybe because it often felt like my high school fell into these terrible stereotypes, ones that you’d only see in movies or on television. I walked around wishing everyone was just kind of a better human being. I found most of the high school bros to be standard, run-of-the-mill douchebags (whose fathers were probably douchebags before them). That’s not to say there weren’t good guys. Radnor had its share of really decent humans willing to listen to one another. But they were always in the background. At the forefront were the athletes, the party animals, the class clowns, the troublemakers, the stoners, and the deadbeats.

The women were harder to categorize. The main group of girls (call them the Pretty Main Line Plastics ) were made up of 8 or 9 girls, all very gorgeous or vain or gorgeously vain. They walked the hallways without a worry in the world. Another group of nicer, less clique-ier women (who were just as high school glamorous) would also soon enter the fold.

And then there were the good seeds. The women who wrote for the school paper (and they could write very well) and the women (some athletes, some that got straight A’s) who were beautiful but didn’t care about it yet. Being popular wasn’t a priority to them. They minded their own business and went to great schools and went on to get greater jobs. And I still keep in touch with these women today.

Was I perfect in this mess? Hardly. I was overweight and often loud, at times obnoxious in the way I came across to people. I took to buying alcohol for others (with my Mclovin Fake ID) so that they’d invite me to parties after. It rarely worked because simply put, I just — what’s the dumb ass clichéd phrase?- didn’t fit in.

I don’t know if most people harbor grudges for the places that they grew up in. I do know that whenever I go home, I’m less excited to see people and more excited to see my parents, who have continued to live a very happy life on the Main Line. They have both ignored a lot of the gossip, noise and pretentious social circles that most soccer mom and dads seem to live for. My father still loves the crossword and my mother still loves her morning coffee. I suppose that’s the great misery of the Main Line. It’s unescapable in many ways — that you can grow up in a place you may not like, surrounded by people you may not enjoy either, but at the end of the day it’s still your home. You are stuck. And that conflicted soul-searching moment where you finally realize what it all means — it never arrives.

If anything, you learn that some people grow up and get better. They become self-aware and kinder. They too, reinvent themselves in ways you thought were impossible. Time takes it toll in the right ways.

This is joy. This is life. This is home.

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Matt Rosen
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