Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Part 15

"But, Todd," Zach cut in again, "don't you understand what this means? We're a hit!"

"I wouldn't say that exactly."

"We have several listeners!" Zach and I whooped, high-fived, and raced around the studio for a few minutes in a victory dance, pausing to restart the song.

"Okay, guys. Before you get too excited, it's finals week. Everyone is doing all-nighters getting ready."

"Oh." We stopped in our tracks. Todd's invocation of tests and their relations.h.i.+p to sleeping habits introduced such a foreign element, we had to pause and take it in. If Todd had told us that they were listening to the show because they calibrated the radio waves and used them to cook their breakfasts in order to have energy to telekinetically rea.s.semble their home planets, it would have been only slightly less startling. But whatever he meant, the bubble of excitement about our explosive audience-growth patterns was duly popped.

"So I'm not telling you what to play-"

"You said that before and I said good."

"Heh, right. It's just, maybe you might mix in some other songs here and there?"

"So you are telling us what to play?"

"No, no, no. Play anything you want. Just try maybe another song during your slot."

"Fascist," Zach spat.

"Guys . . ."

"You never told us censors.h.i.+p was part of the deal."

"Come on. . . . I'm not censoring. . . ."

Zach planted himself directly in front of Todd. "I think you need to leave."

Twenty minutes later we were on the bus back to Hamps.h.i.+re. "I don't care what he says," Zach said as I dozed off to sleep in the next seat. "I love that song."

The shoes fell and fell. Ox met with his Div III committee. He had turned in, by his accounts, a still very rough, unfinished draft of his Div III thesis ent.i.tled "Beyond Logocentrism: The Postmodern Philosophies of Derrida, Nietzsche, and Foucault." I wondered to myself when he had found the time to even come up with that t.i.tle, let alone flesh out any part of a paper. He returned stoically from his meeting. "Yeah, I think maybe it's time for the d.i.c.ks to play on a bigger stage."

"So you're not going to finish it next year?" I asked. Ox was at this point at the end of his sixth year.

"Oh, well. Probably not. I mean, the world needs us, don't you think?"

Arthur announced he was moving back to Iowa. Others were summarily granted diplomas, some against their will. "If they've done any work since they got here, it's easier for the school to graduate them than expel them," Steve mused.

"Graduating people against their will," Ox reflected. "That sounds like a human rights violation."

For myself, just as I had tumbled into the abyss of despair, a ray of hope shone onto me. One afternoon I confided to Steve Shavel that all was lost, that I had no chance of fulfilling the terms of my academic probation; that I was going to have to go back to California, where, separated from the others, I'd meet a fate so ghastly I dared not contemplate it. Steve asked to see the academic contract Leo had drawn up, and my Tolstoy a.s.signment. He put on his gla.s.ses and studied the papers carefully. "I think we can do this."

"What do you mean? How can I finish two cla.s.ses?"

"Ah, but, you see, it doesn't just say two cla.s.ses. It says two, or one cla.s.s plus a Div One."

"That's even worse. I'm not going to be able to do some monster project in the next four days. I wouldn't even be able to get a professor to work with me on one."

Steve took off his gla.s.ses, blew on the lenses, and polished them off. "In my day, yes, you would've been doomed. But two years ago the school inst.i.tuted a little travesty of alternative education known as the two-course option."

"I see. . . ."

"Which gave students a choice for each of their Div Ones: Instead of doing a project, you can take two cla.s.ses in that field, and you can count those two cla.s.ses as a Div One. Didn't you say you finished the Nietzsche cla.s.s first semester?"

"Yes . . ."

"So if you finish the Tolstoy cla.s.s, that's two in Arts and Humanities. You've got a Div One."

"But don't I need that cla.s.s to count toward the finis.h.i.+ng one cla.s.s on my contract?"

"There's nothing that says it can't count for both."

I paused to think. "So one Tolstoy paper can be parlayed to fulfill all the requirements of my probation?"

Steve nodded. "Now, mind you, Supreme d.i.c.k scriptures do not approve of the two-course option. But I can see where we might grant wartime emergency exemptions."

"But there's one problem: How am I going to read Anna Karenina in four days? It's like eight hundred pages."

"Again you're not reading the fine print. Ninotchka says the paper should be on Anna or any work covered in this cla.s.s."

"And . . ."

"I took that cla.s.s my third year-"

"What was that?"

"Never mind. But I just happen to know the first book that cla.s.s reads is Master and Man. Which is under a hundred pages."

I gazed upon Steve as though I were looking at one of the great thinkers of human history, a Socrates or Isaac Newton walking among us. "That's amazing," I murmured.

Four days later, after two consecutive all-nighters, I sat down and typed, "The repression of man's nature and subversion of his will and instinct toward the servitude of other men comprise the motivating force behind Tolstoy's Master and Man." Four pages later I wrote, "Lying on top of Nikita, while the storm is closing in around him, Vasilii Andreich realizes himself through this liberation of his s.e.xuality. His petty societal protections far away from him, he is finally able to liberate his s.e.xuality, and merge with the universe."

I tore the last page out of the typewriter and raced over to Ninotchka's office, handing her the paper just as she was about to leave for the weekend.

Jon screened his top-secret film for his committee and pa.s.sed his Div III. Meg reported that the word around the film/photo building was that his professors had told him it was the best student film they had ever seen and demanded he enter it in festivals. In response, Jon said he would probably "throw it out." We all went to the final film showing, sat through hours of abstract color experiments and, ultimately, the much-awaited music video featuring half the school lying on the ground in the shape of a peace sign shot from a helicopter. Jon's name was listed on the program, but when his turn arrived, they skipped ahead to the next film. In the end, none of us ever saw the fabled work and the rumor spread that Jon had burned it.

On graduation day, Zach, Nathan, and I stood at the back of the lawn, watching from a distance, as Jon, Tim, and a handful of the others accepted their diplomas.

"Do you think that someday, seven, eight years from now, that will be us up there?" I asked.

"No," Zach firmly replied.

"I'll try one more semester," Nathan said.

A group from 21 gathered around Jon to look at his diploma. "Can you even imagine what these guys are going to do now?" Meg asked me.

"What do you think they'll do?"

"I don't know. Something major," she said. "But a year from now, this school is going to really regret it treated them this way."

A lazy heat covered the school, the first grips of summer's mugginess. I sat by myself on the wall outside the library and watched the crowds wander off from the central lawn while crews loaded the chairs and platforms onto a flatbed truck. The warmth and light sun made everyone walk in slow motion and made the campus look relaxed, pleasant, and happy, and I wondered for a moment what we'd all been so worked up about. Down by the road, cars crammed with luggage honked a final salute as they carried people away, the campus breaking up, many, including my friends, I thought, never to return. I sighed and lit a cigarette, thinking back on all that had happened since I'd walked up that lawn, duffel bag on my back, eight months before.

Someone sat down next to me and from my peripheral vision, a glimpse of long red hair made me gasp.

"Elizabeth!" I managed to say. "You're still here."

"Where've you been?"

"Oh, you know. Pretty much around."

"Lucy misses you."

I nodded. "You know, I mean, this semester. It was, like, you know. We had fun, I think."

Elizabeth smiled benignly as I babbled, watching as every trace of cool I had struggled so hard to a.s.semble was shredded into tatters with each word out of my mouth. I kept going. "I think maybe next year, do you think we should, I dunno. I mean, what were you-"

She finally took pity and whispered, "Shhhhh," and put her index finger over my mouth and then her lips. We kissed in the open for the first time in the warm summer day.

"Can I write to you this summer?" I said when she pulled away. She smiled and wrote an address down on a graduation program that was lying on the ground.

"I'll be staying with my friend in San Francisco. You can write me here."

"I will." I nodded. We kissed again and then I watched her walk away. I lit another cigarette and soaked in the campus. What was all that fuss about indeed. I smiled to no one and looked down at the address, written in Elizabeth's hand. Were zip codes only four numbers long? For a second I panicked and, seeing her walk down the path toward the dorms, thought about running after her but brought myself to order. Maybe in San Francisco they are, I told myself. Maybe they are.

Later that day, everyone gathered at Joel Joel's house in Northampton to observe one of the d.i.c.ks' most hallowed traditions, the Blonde on Blonde d.i.c.kel. According to Steve Shavel, every nine months the Supreme d.i.c.k extended family must a.s.semble to listen to Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde alb.u.m and drink d.i.c.kel whiskey, because "that was what Tennessee Williams drank himself to death on," he said, I later learned erroneously. According to tradition, the day would also be marked by Steve Shavel jumping off a roof. At the last BBD he had leapt from the top of 21 and gotten stuck in a tree. This time around, we a.s.sembled on Joel Joel's balcony, which hung a good twenty-five feet above a concrete sidewalk. I looked down dubiously as Jon and Ox described Steve's leaping history. "Somehow d.i.c.kel makes him a little weird," Jon said. On cue, with a roar, Steve leapt through the window and out onto the balcony. Racing toward the precipice, he lunged for the edge, stopped only at the last moment by Arthur, who grabbed him by his skinny tie.

While Arthur and some others bound Steve's hands and feet with extension cords, Jon, Ox, and I talked about their plans. "What are you guys going to do now?" I asked.

They looked at each other as though this were a subject they hadn't really discussed before. Ox's head bobbed in nods. "I guess I might go to New York. Maybe to the East Village."

"To do what?"

They both looked astonished at the question. "I suppose get an apartment. Oh, why, is there something going on?" Ox said.

I looked at Jon. "Are you going to New York?"

"Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I guess I have to think about it. I mean, what's really the point in picking something or someplace when you're probably going to change your mind once you get there, you know?"

Yeah, I nodded. I looked around the balcony at the thirty or so people who had become my friends, who, as far as I was concerned, had saved my life at Hamps.h.i.+re. Many were bellowing along, loudly, badly out of tune, off-rhythm, with "Visions of Jo hanna," Steve, lying tied up on the floor, singing the loudest. I remembered how desperate I'd been when I found them and wondered if that was the life I'd return to in the fall. I wondered if this group would ever get together again. And I wondered, not having been told that I was being expelled, if that was that, the coast was clear, and now that the d.i.c.ks were gone, I was free to return.

As if hearing my thoughts, Ox said to me, "Maybe we should see if people want to go to Denny's tonight. . . ."

A week later I lay on my bed in Mod 21 listening to the quiet. The others had moved out-Susie went back to New York, Jon was living with Joel in Northampton, Arthur had loaded up his car and driven to Iowa. In fact, the entire campus was empty, the school having shut down after graduation. I had planned to drive back to L.A. with my high school friend Will, but as Va.s.sar didn't get out for another week, I had time to kill. Whenever I looked at my room, the thought of packing depressed me so much that I had to open a detective novel to chase the feeling away.

I spent my ghostly days in Northampton, sitting with Jon and Steve at the sidewalk tables of Bonducci's Cafe enjoying the now warm weather with an endless chain of cigarettes and espresso shots. At night I slunk through the empty, deserted campus, jumping into the woods when I saw a security van approach in the distance and slipping back into 21, lights out to avoid drawing attention, to sleep there alone. On the final morning I lay in bed for hours, listening to the silence. I realized I was having some issues with letting go of 21 and I wondered if I should do something about it.

The silence broke and I sat up straight in bed as I heard the front door spring open and a pair of gruff voices stomp inside. "Holy c.r.a.p, look at this place!" I heard one of them say.

"It would be easier just to torch it."

I heard the steps draw closer. They opened the door of the room next to mine. "PU!"

And then the door to my room flung open. Two workmen in overalls stood in the doorway looking at me lying in bed, reading a comic book. I looked up and smiled. "I was just leaving," I said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

What's Left Behind.

In September I was a.s.signed to a room in Merrill House, one of the two remaining dorms where I was still allowed to live. Along with Dakin, Merrill House formed the other half of the brick-and-concrete dorm quad surrounding the cafeteria. While Dakin took in the dregs of Hamps.h.i.+re housing-the Ellis Island of incoming freshmen-Merrill had a somewhat more selective, urbane reputation. About 10 percent of each incoming cla.s.s was sent directly to Merrill, forgoing their Dakin initiation. It was widely believed that the school selected the worldly sophisticates of each cla.s.s to go straight into Merrill's social big leagues. It was never clear how the housing offices would have determined their selections when they barely knew our names, let alone how well we might mix at parties. Nevertheless, it was undeniable that an outsized percentage of incoming students from New York City were sent directly to Merrill.

Built in three wings of four floors, Merrill House was also home to Hamps.h.i.+re's famed clothing-optional hall. The house's older students were an odd grab bag. While possessing the social skills necessary to mingle in Merrill's swift currents, they were missing one or another DNA particle that would have guided them through the communal demands of mod life. Typical among these was Dirk Cahill aka Duke. In his fifth or so year at Hamps.h.i.+re, Duke was a paramilitary enthusiast who often threatened those who rubbed him the wrong way with complex revenge plots featuring exotic imported weaponry. Every night Duke and an oddly a.s.sorted gang of Merrill's older students sat in the dining hall at a corner table adorned with candles, where they ostentatiously served each other from bottles of red wine.

I limped back to campus and carried my duffel bag to the dorms with a sense of doom, remembering the trials of the last year and still not quite believing that my friends were gone; my home in 21 was no more. I was set a bit at ease, however, when I found my new hallmates on A-1 were considerably more welcoming than those who had greeted me on J-3 a year before. Among my new neighbors were Ike, a freshman from a Pennsylvania Quaker school who spent long hours strumming REM on his acoustic guitar; Sarah, a perpetually cheery Preppy Deadhead girl from Westport; Sally, a slightly sullen, borderline hippie social science student from Vermont who, I was delighted to find, had a small collection of Sinatra alb.u.ms; and Frank, a working-cla.s.s rocker who soon became one of my closest friends.

While I had been hiding away in the Greenwich woods the previous year, Frank and a few other first-years had formed a postpunk band named the b.u.t.t Buddies, which had alternately become the terrors of the dorm and the gravitational center for the discontented fringe of the cla.s.s. When I told Frank that I had been a member of the Supreme d.i.c.ks, he was at first disbelieving; having heard the d.i.c.ks legends, he'd thought it an ancient clan long extinguished. "No, we were very real," I told him.

Real as they may have been in my time, the void left by the disappearance of Jon, Ox, Steve, Arthur, Tim, and all the others from campus was constantly in my mind. I knew that Jon and Steve, at least, were probably in Northampton, but I wasn't sure how to get in touch with them. Since May, I hadn't received any letters with their new phone numbers or contact info. I thought to go into Northampton and ask at Bonducci's, but in the first weeks of the semester, there had not yet been time. Steve was still, I believed, an enrolled student at Hamps.h.i.+re, or at least, since he hadn't been expelled or forcibly graduated the year before, he was eligible to become a student again, so I a.s.sumed he would appear on campus eventually.

I soon learned that one of the responsibilities of living in hall A-1 was greeting a constant parade of visitors to the Hamps.h.i.+re campus. Several times a day, I walked out of my room and found a stranger, or several strangers, standing in the hallway, seemingly looking for someone. If I greeted them, they would reply without hesitation, "Could I buy some pot from you?" To the entire East Coast liberal arts community and to a good percentage of the surrounding counties at the time, Hamps.h.i.+re College was legendary as a land where drugs grew from every tree, where dorm rooms were wallpapered in LSD, where Quaaludes were pa.s.sed out at the beginning of each lecture. Throngs of drug seekers wandered onto campus every day in search of this magical kingdom of drugs and honey. When they came to campus, they generally wandered toward the dorms. And when they got to the dorms, they walked into the first door they saw, which took them to Hall A-1. Amazingly, none of the campus dealers had thought to take advantage of this walk-in trade and set up shop on our hall, but my hallmates knew where to refer the visitors and cheerily sent them on their way, later visiting the dealers they had pointed the way to and asking for a referrers' discount.

More disturbing than random drug seekers were the signs of a terrifying new trend in the incoming cla.s.s. One afternoon in the dining hall, Zach and I met a trio of long-haired, flannel-s.h.i.+rted metalhead first-years, who told us they were starting a band called Power Slave. The hyperactive lads gave us a little demo of their sound, air-guitaring and drumming one of their songs on the table. But our jaws dropped when, to our horror, they began bragging about the number of cla.s.ses they were taking-five apiece. They went on to explain how they planned to finish all their Div I's in their first year.

"I'm not sure you guys understand how this place works . . . ," I said. "First year is supposed to be about getting to know yourself. Understanding what, you know, like, motivates you."

"f.u.c.k that," one of them bellowed. "What motivates me is to get into a decent grad school as quick as I can." Zach and I looked at each other and wondered what sort of world we were suddenly living in.

Another element that perversely seemed to act in our favor was that the previous year's steady trickle of demonstrations against the injustice of the week had now exploded into a flood. Almost every night at SAGA, dinner was interrupted by some earnest group announcing an urgent community action, an all-campus demonstration against s.e.xual orientation discrimination, or gender bias, or racism or cla.s.sism or hara.s.sment. The announcements often droned on for as long as twenty minutes, ruining many a dinner, but they had the ironic effect of taking the attention off those who remained from the Supreme d.i.c.k ranks. With the campus constantly running off to one or another teach-in or sensitivity training session, mobilizing against the great isms of our times, everyone seemed to have forgotten their loyal adversaries of yesteryear, the Supreme d.i.c.ks. Those few who bothered to remember seemed to have forgotten that Zach, Nathan, and I had once been members of the campus's most hated social club. And so we slid back into the general population unnoticed, back into lives of tranquillity and dissolution.

By the end of September, life at Merrill House felt if not idyllic, then at least manageably annoying. The fog of marijuana smoke was persistently irritating, but I had managed to bond with enough of my hallmates that I did not live in dread of coming home every night. Frank and the b.u.t.t Buddies gathered on most nights for some sort of impromptu party. I even took steps to sign up for cla.s.ses, although I realized as I did it that this was a pointless, if n.o.ble, step. What's more, my advisor was so flummoxed with the way I had weaseled through last semester's probation, he hadn't bothered to renew it.

I was even inspired to decorate. One night in the laundry room, my eye was caught by the stunning array of colors of the lint sheets removed from the dryers. I gathered up an armful, gently carried them up to the hall, and stapled them to the wall. I spent the rest of the night visiting the other laundry rooms around campus to complete my Wall of Lint. Frank and Ike seemed impressed, but Sarah and Sally shrieked and demanded I tear it down. I refused, accusing them of wanting to stifle my artistic expression. Sally settled the dispute by summoning the House Office, who declared my installation a fire hazard and demanded I remove it at once. I complied but found myself muttering, "Narc," under my breath every time Sally walked past for the next few days.

Since my first moment back on campus, I had both prayed for and lived in fear of my reunion with Elizabeth. During the summer, in one of my lowest moments of melancholy thinking back to the lost friends of Hamps.h.i.+re, I poured all of my thoughts and regrets-all of them-into a letter to Elizabeth and sent it to the address she had given me. Two weeks later it came back-apparently a zip code needed more than four digits, even in San Francisco. But somehow, despite the fact that she had never received my gus.h.i.+ngs, the fact that I had set them down on paper, the fact that I myself was aware of them, put me in terror of running into her again.

For the first few weeks our paths never crossed. I heard Frank talking about her one day and learned that she had moved into a mod in Enfield with some friends and that things had gotten "really intense out there. Those guys never go out." At the tail end of a few drunken nights I had come close to wandering across campus and knocking on her door, but always held myself back.

Finally, halfway through September, at a party in Prescott, I saw her. I was walking up a stairwell. The steps were wet with spilled beer. I slipped and grasped the metal handrail for balance, only to discover it was gluelike, sticky beer. Prying my hand loose, I looked up. Elizabeth was standing at the top of the stairwell, Lucy by her side, glaring down at me. I looked around to see if there was still room to run, but finding myself trapped, the crowd pus.h.i.+ng up behind me, I pulled myself together and stumbled to the top.

"Oh, hi, Elizabeth. Hi, Lucy," I muttered.

"Those stairs don't like you," Elizabeth said. I noticed, through my own drunken haze, that the gla.s.sy distance in her eyes was even more p.r.o.nounced than it had been last spring.