Greene quoted a participant as saying that Rubin had gone from being the leader of the Yippies to the leader of the yuppies. The term probably first appeared in print in 1983, when columnist Bob Greene wrote a piece about former Yippie leader Jerry Rubin, who was hosting “networking” events at Studio 54. My younger brother, a Deerfield senior, was a preppy. As a Williams alum, I knew all about preppies even before they’d gone mainstream with the publication of The Official Preppy Handbook in 1980. We were all uniformly nonconformist in our black jeans and our black Ramones and Television T-shirts. They looked as if they were visiting from the Upper East Side-all chinos and oxford cloth. An ostentatiously besplattered painter I used to see around the neighborhood was sitting next to me at the counter, and I heard him mutter, “Fucking yuppies.” I looked up to see a young couple I myself would have characterized as “preppy” waiting to be seated. My former breakfast spot, the Binibon, had recently been shuttered, having never recovered after Jack Henry Abbott stabbed waiter-playwright Richard Adan outside, on the sidewalk. I was enjoying a hung-over midday breakfast (we didn’t use the word brunch in the East Village it was breakfast whenever you woke up) at Veselka on Second Avenue. I first remember hearing the Y-word in ’83, when I was living in the East Village, sharing an apartment with my best friend while working on my first novel and paying the bills as a slush-pile reader at Random House.
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