Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Part 17

"But it never occurred to you that he was just babbling. You live with him, you know he says all kinds of things."

Her eyes narrowed. "There are some things you don't joke about."

"Like wet T-s.h.i.+rt contests?"

"Everyone agrees. Everyone. People are going to have to start being a lot more careful what they say around here." She turned and stormed off.

On the second day of the crisis every student received a letter from the Women's Center in their mailbox; a warning to all Hamps.h.i.+re women to beware of predators on campus, naming Frank, Zach, and me as the school's reigning masters of exploitation. Our friends noticeably began to squirm when we spoke to them in public. "Everyone asks me how I can be friends with you," Marilyn said.

"Do you say it's because we didn't do anything wrong?"

"No one wants to hear that."

A candlelight vigil was held outside Zach's mod, a public mourning at the site of oppression, or of planned oppression.

Amid this furor, we were called into the dean of students's office. We sat at his round conference table and he stared hard into our eyes, a sneer of hate across his lips.

"How could you guys have done this? Do you know how many people have been in my office demanding your heads?"

"How many?" I asked.

"The whole d.a.m.n campus!"

"That must be tough." I nodded. "But the thing is, we haven't actually done anything. . . ."

"So this is just trouble following you around again? Everywhere you go, trouble just comes chasing after you. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe the trouble is you?" Frank, Zach, and I looked at each other. That hadn't occurred to any of us. But now that he'd mentioned it, the dean might have a point. . . .

"We," Zach finally broke in, "we are innocent men." We explained to him how the commotion had started, with Frank's comments in the dining hall, mere bravado, we explained. The dean listened impatiently and finally broke in, "Innocent!? You call that innocent!? Do the standards of this community have any meaning to you?"

"We're all for the standards," Frank said.

"We love the standards," I agreed.

"Because of you, a lot of people feel very uncomfortable here."

"But we-"

"Don't tell me again that you didn't do anything. If you guys weren't at Hamps.h.i.+re, there wouldn't be this trouble, would there?" We couldn't argue with that.

"But still," I insisted, "you can't actually expel us if we haven't done anything. There'll be"-I paused before whispering the word I knew could stop a charging college administrator cold in his tracks-"there'll be lawsuits."

The dean let out a blast of harrumph and glared as though he were willing me to never have been born. After a few minutes of silent stare-down, he said quietly, barely audible, "Get out of my office."

"I mean, we'll own the school if you do that," Zach prodded.

"Get. Out. But don't think you're getting away with this."

Outside his office a cl.u.s.ter of activists waited and vigorously booed as we left.

Later, we learned that the demonstrators had been so incensed that we had walked away unexpelled that they had begun taking steps to occupy the Gold Coast (as the hallway of the Cole Science Center that housed the administration offices was known). Just before the ramparts went up and the occupation pizza orders were placed, however, the dean persuaded them that though Hamps.h.i.+re's wheels of justice moved slowly, once they began moving no force on earth could stop them; justice would be served in due course. That seemed to satisfy the activists only very briefly. By nightfall, as we camped out in the living room of Zach's mod, friends brought news that the word was sweeping the campus: The administration hadn't really failed to move against us but had revealed their true colors-shown themselves to be in league with our wealthy parents and the s.e.xist, cla.s.sist, racist cabal that held the school in its iron grip and would never allow its own to be punished. If we were expelled from Hamps.h.i.+re, the theory went, our inexorable rise to the heights of society would be halted. The zillion-dollar-a-year corporate jobs overseeing Burmese slave labor camps we had been promised from birth would be withheld from us if we were expelled. Thus we would not go on to join and contribute to the ruling cla.s.s and we would not be able to write the annual seven-figure checks we'd otherwise give Hamps.h.i.+re. Thus, as the administration had proved by failing to lop off our heads at the first hint of a wet T-s.h.i.+rt contest, the patriarchy was firmly in the driver's seat at Hamps.h.i.+re College and only a ma.s.s mobilization could bring it down.

"I don't have any rich parents like you dopes!" Frank exclaimed in outrage. "I wash dishes in SAGA, for Chrissakes."

"That makes you worse," Zach said. "You're a cla.s.s traitor."

Outside, the planning continued as the activists now saw this was about much, much more than expelling three wayward oppressors; this was a battle for the soul of education.

The next day the campus simmered while the dean sat across the table from the student leaders. Somewhere amid the deadlocked discussions, a burst of inspiration ignited the room. Even more effective than expelling us would be to force us to prostrate ourselves before the college, issue an apology for our insensitive behavior, for violating community norms, and for the scope of our entire lives, which we would acknowledge had been dedicated to oppression, imperialism on a global and personal level, and to objectification of "the other" in all its forms. It was suggested that expelling us would in fact be doing the community a disservice because once we were gone, they wouldn't be able to punish us anymore (and-the thought flashed through their heads-no new oppressor might present himself for years). After we had completed a seminar taught by heads of the Women's Center and representatives of any other groups whom our behavior had offended, we would make a public declaration of fealty to principles of inclusion and progress. And then, the dean told us, smiling, "and then I think the community might be willing to put this behind us."

The dean and the two other administrators who flanked him on either side smirked at us. "I really think we've found a great solution here."

"So you're not expelling us?" Frank asked.

"Once you've completed the course we've prescribed, I think we'll be able to take that off the table."

"So let's talk about your apology," the woman on the dean's left said. "We were thinking we could call a gathering in the gym where you apologize-"

"Apologize? For what?" I said.

The dean and his cohorts threw up their hands. "We're trying to work with you. Please tell me you're not going to start that again."

"d.a.m.n right we're starting that!" Frank fumed.

"Besides," Zach said, "even if we were planning what they said we were, I don't see anything in the student handbook about not throwing a wet T-s.h.i.+rt contest in a kiddie pool full of beer."

The three smirks vanished and were replaced by grim looks of concern.

"Look," said the dean, "if you don't understand why you need to apologize for making people feel unsafe at their school, I really question whether you belong at this inst.i.tution. We are offering you a way out of this mess you've created."

Zach suddenly stood up. "The only way out I see is the door. Good day, gentlemen."

That night, at the Red Lion, Steve Shavel confirmed the wisdom of our actions. "If they could expel you, they would've done it. They know they can't get away with that."

"So we just tough it out?"

"I think that's your only plan."

"But they can make life miserable for us."

"The road of a Supreme d.i.c.k is long and dark," Steve consoled. Still nominally a student-although again not enrolled this semester-Steve was embroiled in his own battle. For his past seven or eight years as an undergraduate, Steve had taken all his cla.s.ses from one professor-an esoteric philosophy professor, a specialist in the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who taught, fortunately for Steve, only at night. This professor's cla.s.ses were attended by a small but fanatical legion of followers who sat in for marathon debates winging late into the night. These cla.s.ses were a sort of quiet alternative to the critical theory workshops that dominated the Hamps.h.i.+re literature curriculum, in which Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault competed to define the postmodern ironies of our civilization-as well as to make the cla.s.ses completely incomprehensible to anyone who dared join them. In contrast, Steve's professor offered what resembled an old-fas.h.i.+oned, almost ancient, philosophy lecture and dialogue, drawing little from "recent texts" or "critical rethinkings" and offering an intense but traditional approach to modern philosophy.

This professor not only sent Steve down his all-consuming road of Wittgenstein studies, but he served as Steve's advisor, and thus the person who had kept him in good academic standing for a full decade. When, a couple of years before, he had been forced by the administration to put Steve on an academic contract, the two wrote out and filed the following plan: "Whatever Steve accomplishes this year will be exactly what we have agreed upon."

A Hamps.h.i.+re professor could get away with having a minuscule following and enrollment in his cla.s.ses. He could also get away with teaching at odd hours and lackadaisical attention to administrative duties. A professor could even get away with thumbing his nose at the Hamps.h.i.+re establishment. But in this time of campus upheaval, he could not get away with all that while teaching an uncritical study of dead white male philosophers. Steve's professor had been informed by the reappointment committee of the School of Humanities and Arts that his contract would not be renewed the following year. For the professor, who had spent almost his entire teaching career closeted away at Hamps.h.i.+re, this was a career catastrophe. For Steve, without the professor's protection, there was little likelihood he'd be able to draw his Hamps.h.i.+re career far into a second decade. Along with Nathan, who had also become an acolyte of this professor, Steve began planning the fight to save him, but the hopelessness of their position was quickly becoming apparent and Steve was sinking into a depression.

"Hamps.h.i.+re College has mortgaged its soul to a bunch of carnival hucksters," Steve mourned into his tomato juice. At the counter, one of the crazies was screaming at the top of his lungs, calling Mike a "toy f.u.c.king soldier" and threatening to murder everyone in the diner.

Steve sighed. "You used to be able to get this kind of atmosphere in any Hamps.h.i.+re dorm hall. Now the Red Lion is the last refuge for intellectual stimulation."

The next day I was told that the faculty had joined the Community Council in voting unanimously to recommend that Zach, Frank, and I be expelled. Sitting in Ninotchka's Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov cla.s.s, empty seats on either side of me, I wondered whether unanimously had included Natasha. Had this woman who had spoken so seductively about Dead Souls really voted my presence so offensive that the only hope for peace in our time was that I be removed headfirst? I studied her for signs of disgust when she glanced my way, but then realized that she probably didn't even know my name and had no clue that I was the person whose fate she had cast her vote on. For that matter, Ninotchka didn't look like the type who spent a lot of time hanging around faculty meetings. At least, I managed to convince myself of that.

The pressure to publicly apologize mounted. One night in my dorm I received a secret delegation from the activists. Janet, an acquaintance loosely connected with the b.u.t.t Buddies who also did a weekly s.h.i.+ft in the Women's Center, stopped by A-1 to talk with me and Frank.

"They're good people," she explained of her comrades. "People are just scared. They are scared of what can happen to them here."

"I don't care if they're scared of the Loch Ness monster. I don't see how that adds up to us apologizing for a party we never even got a chance to throw," Frank shouted, "and that would've been amazing," he added, still not quite able to accept that the bash would never occur.

"Can't you just appreciate what they're going through? Why can't you guys think about someone besides yourselves? They are willing to forgive you-"

"Forgive!"

"But you've got to give them something."

The drumbeat for our apology grew louder and louder and then, as Thanksgiving approached, began to subside. Having made us pariahs, having demonstrated, protested, and raged against us, they could do little in the face of our unwillingness to be cast out. The dean, after a few more rounds of browbeating, had apparently consulted with the school's lawyers and decided, much as it pained him, that while we continued stonewalling, expulsion was not in the cards. Other punishments would have to be found down the road. By the time he finally announced our sentences, a month after the kerfuffle began, the campus's attention had moved on. The dean told us that we were all three being placed on behavioral and housing probation, that Zach, who lived in the mod where the party was to have occurred, was to move out and was banned from living on campus, and that Frank and I had to vacate Merrill House. I realized that in a mere year and a half I had been banned from four of the five houses at Hamps.h.i.+re. This really had to be a record, I planned to challenge Steve.

The dean dismissed us with stern warnings about this being "the last time" and not wanting to ever see us in his office again. Outside, the cold was returning and people rushed from building to building, the pa.s.sersby barely pausing to cast looks of scorn our way.

"I don't know if I can ever look this place in the eyeball again," Frank declared. It would be a while before we would return to semblances of "normal lives" at Hamps.h.i.+re. And then, far worse was yet to come.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

The Writing on the Wall.

The furor over wet T-s.h.i.+rtgate had died down. As December arrived, the campus took cover from the cold, like frontline troops digging in for winter, keeping their ammunition dry and ready to recommence hostilities with the first spring thaw. Winter break came, then Jan term, and eventually I stopped even noticing the leers as I wandered campus.

But while the campus had gotten past wet T-s.h.i.+rtgate, little did we realize that it had only been a prelude to greater adventures for the ongoing PC uprising. The lion had been awakened, had tasted flesh, and its appet.i.te would not be sated until it bathed in blood.

Once again I was hunting for a new place to live. Things being what they were, I wasn't terribly heartbroken about saying good-bye to Merrill House; the acc.u.mulated bad vibes had long since poisoned what domestic bliss I had found in its cinder-block halls. My days on A-1 were capped by the fun of living with Sally, the person who began this party. We showered in neighboring stalls in icy silence.

The only house left on campus where I was still allowed to live was Prescott-traditionally known as the party house, where the New York types and the punk-affiliated lived, as opposed to Preppy Deadhead-centric Enfield and hard-core hippie Greenwich. Throughout the eighties, Prescott's tin village of towering ski chalets had been the scene of Hamps.h.i.+re's most notable debauch eries; it was through its narrow alleys that one would search for a party on any Friday or Sat.u.r.day night (or Monday or Tuesday night, for that matter). Prescott House was also the location of the campus Tavern, which, to the disgust of many, had begun carding for beer, another sign, it was said, that Hamps.h.i.+re had sold its soul. Although, by process of elimination and banishment, I had no choice in the matter of where I lived, it seemed that in Prescott I might find a home at last.

I was lucky just at this moment to find a friend in Prescott with an empty room. It was a campus axiom that there were no weirder people at Hamps.h.i.+re than the ones who looked really normal, and Tyler was one of the leading examples. From Nebraska, of all places (Nebraska!), Tyler (whom we called Tollah, short for Ayatollah, short for the Ayatollah of Rock 'n' Rollah) had short brown hair and he typically roamed campus in white cotton oxfords, blue jeans, and blazers. Often mistaken because of his appearance and midwestern background for the president and sole member of the campus Republican Club, he was in fact the school's most subversive wit.

With two rooms open, both Nathan and I moved into mod number 89, dominated by one of the school's more Warholesque trios. Deidre, a platinum-blond Edie Sedgwick look-alike from Philadelphia's Main Line, was a burgeoning performance artist and, with her low, barely audible voice, one of the school's deadli est terrors. Roger, who resembled a blond David Byrne, was an abstract painter; Danielle was a Preppy Deadhead and an insanely wealthy heiress from New York City, who, thanks to some unseen deviant streak, had fallen in with the pair. I had seen the three of them lurking in the corners of various parties, scowling at the rest of the crowd, but I had been too intimidated to approach. Whenever the rest of a room became infuriated with the Supreme d.i.c.ks, the trio merely rolled their eyes at antics they had given up five years ago. On my first night in 89, Deidre started to tell my fortune with tarot cards but, after looking at the spread, refused to speak, saying, "Oh, I'm sure it won't be that bad."

With Prescott to roll home to, and a gathering somewhere within forty feet or so every night, I managed to get through January Term and well into the new semester without ever setting foot in a cla.s.sroom. And somehow, while the rest of the school was getting all uptight and angry, in Prescott one could still hold his head up high while sleeping until three, and then going straight to the liquor store and loafing around the Tavern playing Galaga until dinner. I found the Prescott lifestyle suited me. Had I at last come home?

Amid the party in Prescott House, the upheaval spreading over the rest of the campus seemed a distant memory from a far-away land. One night in February, a girl in the Tavern told me about a demonstration she had gone to that day, apparently set off by some offensive graffiti that had been found.

"What did it say?" I asked.

"We don't know exactly. Thank G.o.d the person who found it erased it before it could really do some damage."

"Well, what were you protesting about?"

"The woman who found it said the content was s.e.xist, h.o.m.o-phobic, racist, and imperialist."

"All of those?"

The girl nodded grimly. I smiled in sympathy, very happy to be safe in another land.

The next morning, I rolled out of bed around noon and found Tollah sitting in the living room with Deidre, Danielle, Roger, and Nathan gathered around. "Danielle," I bellowed, rubbing my eyes, "you need to drive us to the liquor store."

No one replied. They all sat looking glumly at the floor. "What the h.e.l.l? Who died?"

"Tyler is having a little problem," Deidre said calmly. I sat down and they told me the story. Two nights prior, Tollah had been out wandering the campus with two other Supreme d.i.c.ks refugees-Edward, an Asian-American second-year who had transferred from University of Vermont, and Janet, a motorcycle-jacket-wearing belligerent lesbian. Drifting around, they had run into Henry.

"Who is Henry?" I asked.

"You know," Tollah said. "Henry. From Northampton."

I nodded in unison with him. "Riiiight . . ."

With Henry in tow they had wandered campus until well after three A.M. At one point, Tollah explained, Henry had left them and disappeared, only to return to their sides a few minutes later.

The following morning, the graffiti was discovered, setting off the most furious manhunt since Steve Shavel stole the bell. By that very evening, the case was cracked. One young woman had recognized Edward walking in the vicinity of where the graffiti was found and had called security. By nine P.M., he had been hauled into the dean's office. Hearing that he was about to be charged for the crime, Janet came forward to the dean to say that she had been with Edward and he hadn't committed the vandalism. But to her dismay, the administration seemed to hear the part about "I was with Edward" while missing the part about "He didn't do anything" and were on the verge of charging her with the crime as well. Wanting to support her, and make clear that, no, we hadn't done anything, Tyler then came forward and admitted that he, too, had been with Edward and Janet, and, yes, he could confirm that no one had written any graffiti. The administration's takeaway from this was-we have our three suspects!

Sitting in the dean's office, Tyler, Janet, and Edward suddenly thought they were about to be strip-searched and told to place their orders for their last meal. The dean charged out from behind his desk and asked them point-blank whether they had written the graffiti. The trio denied it vehemently. Pressed, however, about whether they knew who might have done it, they paused and said, it was possible that this guy Henry, when he had parted from them, just might have done something like that, they couldn't be sure, because if he had, he had done it when he was not with them.

They were interrogated about Henry, who, they explained, was an acquaintance from the Northampton scene. No, they didn't know his last name, or his phone number, or how to get in touch with him, he was just someone they ran into at parties now and then. For the hours that followed, late, late into the evening, Tollah, Edward, and Janet were relentlessly drilled about this Henry character. But to the dean's disgust, the three stuck to their stories. They were warned, however, as they were released into the cold after-midnight campus, that there was much more to come.

The campus uproar that ensued made the noise over wet T-s.h.i.+rtgate seem like a child blowing on a kazoo next to the University of Michigan marching band. When word got out that the school had identified the suspects but had not yet disciplined them, rage boiled over and the campus was soon awash in a sea of protest. The protestors, this time led by the minority students group SOURCe (Students of Underrepresented Cultures), appeared everywhere-grabbing the podium at the start of cla.s.ses, speaking in front of the library, stopping the music at the Tavern-to demand that at last justice be done for their people. Round-the-clock meetings were held to decide how to deal with this ultimate threat. Even the peaceful remove of Prescott was shattered as the voices of protest spoke up everywhere and began to make clear that anyone who didn't join this movement was, in effect, in league with the perpetrators of this foul crime.

The question of whether the suspects-names still unrevealed-should be expelled was so basic, it seemed not even to merit discussion. Of course they needed to be removed from campus at once, and every minute they were allowed to live in our midst was a minute the administration tolerated, nay, encouraged racism as the dominant means of social discourse. This was so obvious to all that it barely needed to be stated. The protestors wanted an answer to the question of how the administration would use this moment, when racism held the campus in a grip of steel, to send a message to the world that intolerance was going to be wiped out. With an iron fist, they demanded at last that the forces of "social change" should be given not just a seat at the table, but the table itself.

Tollah, Janet, and Edward cowered in fear that their names would be revealed as the causes of this commotion. Sequestered in round-the-clock interrogation sessions with the dean and half the administration, the trio quickly forced the negotiations into a stalemate by refusing to back down from their story. Much as the administration wanted to hand their heads to the mob on a platter, all they had to work with was one girl who had seen them walking around that night, and their admission that they had been in the company of Henry, who had been out of their sight. As seen in wet T-s.h.i.+rtgate, by the rules of due process that applied even to the administration of a private college, this was not enough to go on. However, the rules were about to change.

With so many administrators involved in the case, and so many of them in deep sympathy with the demonstrators, the suspects' names inevitably got out. They leaked initially through the rumor mill but then spread across the campus in minutes. It is heartening to look back today and see how effective word-of-mouth was in the days before the Internet, delivering this information to every last person on campus in a matter of seconds. When the names were unveiled, and it was revealed that Tollah was the white male oppressor among them, a ma.s.sive "Aha!" shook the campus. This was followed by a tiny pause, and a noticeable campuswide scratching of heads when they learned the remaining two perpetrators were an Asian and a lesbian. But this only lasted a second. The movement was on the march and not to be delayed by such contradictions. Oppressors had always bribed lackeys and Uncle Toms into doing their dirty work. As the clamor against them built, Tollah spent most of his days darting from interrogation sessions to hide out in our living room, not even daring to go to cla.s.s.

The fuse had been lit and the bomb went off in short order. One afternoon, word raced through the school that an African-American first-year girl living in Dakin had been attacked while entering her dorm room.

"Attacked?" I incredulously asked the hippie girl who brought this news to our table at SAGA.

The girl nodded. "Her room was b.o.o.by-trapped."

"What does that mean?" From neighboring tables shouts of horror sounded, speeches erupted, crying for justice.

"Someone put a pin in her door so she'd stab herself. It could've been poisoned!"

"Was it poisoned?" I asked.

"No. But it easily could've been. She was stabbed!"