Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Part 20

"Probably not." Tollah frowned at his hot dog with skepticism. "Not tonight, anyway."

After a few more minutes of silence Frank suddenly got up, grabbed his guitar, and strode into the darkness. The Ayatollah looked around by the pool and found an old soggy deck of cards. He played Crazy Eights with Zach and Carmella, holding up their cards to the snack bar's yellow bulb to see. Off in the distance, we heard Frank's guitar strumming and his most sorrowful voice yo deling one of his songs. By the yellow bulb, Mich.e.l.le Phillips explained how her affair with Denny of the Mamas and the Papas, Mama Ca.s.s's love, had been inevitable. There was some errant strand in her relations.h.i.+p with her husband, John, she wrote, that preordained that she would sleep with all of his friends.

The next day there was no discussion of doing anything, or at least we avoided taking any concrete steps toward putting our Spring Break back on track. We avoided discussing where we would go next or how we might get back to school. The only clear plan anyone put forth was by Carmella, who around dinnertime suggested we walk the few miles back down the road to a Burger King we had pa.s.sed. We laughed, brus.h.i.+ng the idea aside as Italian foolishness. It would be a few days before it came to that.

We could've summoned a G.o.d of the credit card with a call home to our parents, which, after we absorbed a few hours or so of paternal bl.u.s.ter, would in all likelihood have yielded a wire transfer sufficient to get us bus tickets back to Ma.s.sachusetts. But the humiliation of where we had ended up, combined with a growing grasp of the world-cla.s.s imbecility that had gotten us here, kept us from making those calls. Instead, we waited it out, our bruised but still smoldering confidence telling us that a solution would yet present itself, somehow.

Our lives were soon stripped to their wilderness essentials, laid bare of all the basics of collegiate survival like the dining hall cereal bar, shopping mall video arcades, and the pill dispensary at the campus health services office-the raw elements on which we'd come to depend. With so few diversions to choose from, life at Jellystone calcified into a rigid framework. Mornings we awoke around five A.M., when the stench and heat of five people in the little tent functioned as a natural alarm clock, driving us forth into the day. We showered in the communal bathroom, relieved at least that the early rising meant we would not have to share the showers with our fellow campers. Frank, however, avoided the experience entirely, claiming our habit of daily showering was making us "soft." He stuck to this all the harder as the rest of us insisted his roadly stench had become downright apocalyptic. By day three in the campground, he wore his odor as a badge of honor.

After wandering in a daze for a few hours or sitting on a curb and staring into s.p.a.ce, we breakfasted on egg sandwiches at the snack bar. Typically the day's activities included at least several hours spent trying to sleep in deck chairs by the tiny pool on whose surface floated candy wrappers and halves of old sandwiches, which fist-sized beetles used as rafts. Too much time by the pool, we soon found, raised troubling moral questions, as every hour or so one of the bikers would pummel a howling child into submission. Once the initial shock faded, we discovered how quickly we could entirely ignore the spectacle of unabashed child abuse. A two-hole putting green, with a couple little miniature turns, beckoned us for hours of tapping b.a.l.l.s across gnarled Astroturf. We rented paddleboats on Jellystone's little pond. Carmella and I took one out but found we could only paddle about fifteen feet before we were hemmed in by the thick crust of moss on the water. We sat there afloat at the moss's edge, drifting while shooing away mosquitoes. I pulled a branch down off the tree and tried to carve my name in the moss, but it was too gooey to hold the etchings of complicated letters like R.

"This vacation," Carmella said, "it really sucks, don't you believe?"

I nodded yes, it did. I do believe. We paddled silently back to sh.o.r.e.

At five o'clock every day the children's clogging cla.s.s was held (clogging is a form of dancing indistinguishable from tap to the untrained eye), taught by a mustachioed instructor named Eagle with curly hair and a floppy tie-dye s.h.i.+rt. Every evening we gathered to watch.

By the end of the first day, I had finished California Dreamin' . By the end of the fifth day, all the others had, too, and I started my second reading. We debated whether Mama Mich.e.l.le really was doomed to sleep with her all her husband's friends. From where we sat, Tollah pointed out, it was easy to throw stones, but the pressure of being a super-hot sixties rock princess was something we couldn't understand.

Every other night there was a Bingo game in the Rec Room and some two hundred senior citizens flooded Jellystone. We were the only people under retirement age in the hall, a fact that we thought might endear us to the seniors, perhaps even leading to a dinner invitation or at least permission to come over and watch their TV for a couple hours. But instead our faithful attendance earned only shaken heads and looks of "You kids aren't supposed to be here." We had thought of Florida retirement communities as places where America stored the unwanted elderly, hiding them from the world of the living. But apparently, from the perspective of these seniors, they were here to hide from the young and they did not appreciate the intrusion. No one wanted to chat with us or know what we were studying back at our liberal arts college. We were the geeks of the seniors Bingo hall.

It was a Bingo custom to commemorate the moment when a number of personal significance was drawn with the sounding of noisemakers and festive whistles. For example, if your first child was born in 1921, when the number 21 was called, you blew a swallow-call whistle. After half a week in the campground, our badly frayed nerves were not prepared for the chorus of train toot-toots and silver bells that resounded after each number, throwing us badly off our game. In retrospect, this may have been the idea, because in a week and a half, despite the fact that we each began playing multiple cards, not one of us won a single game of Bingo. In a movie version of our trip, if you had cast a dwarf as the Bingo caller, it would be rightfully condemned as an over-the-top, hollow attempt at creating a macabre atmosphere. And yet Jellystone's Bingo caller was a dwarf, an insufferable dwarf who, when he pulled B-2, could not pa.s.s up a single opportunity to call out, "B-two. Two-B. Or not to be." I prayed he would let the joke slide just once, but a true showman, he knew this was his chance to roll out his best stuff and he never pa.s.sed up his moment, not even once.

By day four, we had sunk our claws deep into each other's nerves. We spent most of our days, before clogging cla.s.s, in solitary wandering around the perimeters of the campground, cursing each other and devising fantasies of abandoning the group and getting back to school. My fantasies generally involved meeting a northbound team of down-home truckers with hearts of gold who would encourage me to write the memoirs of my adventures. But, fantasies aside, the solution to the mess we were in was snubbing its cue badly, and the days drifted on with no means of escape materializing.

We needed a bridge over the river Kwai to build, an activity to draw us together. Every day we lay fallow on the fields of Jellystone we were playing Russian roulette with our remaining sc.r.a.ps of sanity. The Ayatollah suggested we revisit Carmella's idea and trudge down the highway to Burger King. No one thought the idea was a very good one, but as we had nothing better to suggest, we all signed up. We shrugged our shoulders and followed the Ayatollah out the Jellystone gates, marching apathetically down the dusty service road alongside the highway.

We pushed off after breakfast and made it to Burger King just before noon. After devouring consecutive trays of Whoppers and Double Whoppers, we sat outside in the parking lot and gazed around to see if there was any other activity in sight. There wasn't; only the highway streaming by, like the wide Missouri, warbling melodies of escape.

"You guys," Carmella said, "I'm thinking maybe we need to do something now."

"I could see heading back to school," Zach said. "I think we've made our point."

We listened to the sounds of traffic. I almost said, "At least we're not stuck in Daytona!" but then thought better of it and kept quiet, tossing pebbles at a bike rack Back at Jellystone, a man dressed in a Yogi Bear costume was sitting on a deck chair by the pool chatting with the biker parents. In a desperate attempt to keep the meager esprit we'd conjured alive, we decided to play a round on the putting green. We listlessly tapped our b.a.l.l.s along, no one bothering to keep score. Until, suddenly, out of nowhere, we were struck by a bolt of entertainment.

I stood in front of Carmella as she took her turn putting. But driven by some mysterious foreign instinct, rather than putting the ball toward the hole eighteen inches away, she decided to drive it, pulling her arm back and swinging with all her might. Her stroke missed the ball, but connected directly with my mouth. Before I could understand what had happened, my head was vibrating like a bell, and I looked over and saw first Carmella and then the others doubled over in laughter. As I spat up blood and bits of tooth, I joined in with them. Now, that, at last, was entertainment.

The notion gnawed at us all that somehow we still had to get to Disney World, which loomed just twenty miles away, an obsession that overshadowed questions about how to get back to school. Our potential options for returning to campus in five days remained: Plan A-wait for some magical solution to appear, or Plan B-have more faith in Plan A. So we fixated on getting to Disney World as the solution to our immediate spiritual needs. For Zach and me, native Angelenos who grew up with ritual quarterly trips to the Anaheim wonderland, stepping even for a few hours under the Disney umbrella would be a surefire balm for our scorched souls.

After a number of nonoutlandish travel options (bus, tour group, hitchhiking) collapsed under the weight of such road b.u.mps as not being able to figure out how to find the bus schedule, we seized upon the nearest, and stupidest, solution at hand-to take the Ayatollah's Volvo for one last hurrah, rolling it down the highway at whatever speed it gave.

The night before we set off, tensions came to a tragic break in the tent. Once I had finished my second reading of California Dreamin', the only luxury left in my life was a foam pillow I had brought from school. In a moment of inexplicable good sense while leaving, it occurred to me that the hard ground might take a toll on my delicate neck and I grabbed the pillow off my bed before rus.h.i.+ng out the door. Through the long days at Jellystone, the thought that my pillow awaited me at day's end gave my life a faint taste of joy. That night, however, when I climbed into the tent, the breath flew from my chest as I looked down and saw Frank lying on my pillow, smiling up at me.

"Give me my pillow . . . ," I hissed.

"No." He smirked. "I want to use it tonight."

"You can't. It's mine."

"Hey, you gotta learn to rough it now and then. About time you saw what life is really like."

"What does a Man of the Road need with a pillow!?"

"I want it!" I lunged at him and we wrestled for it. Eventually, I won it back, pulling it away from him as the others stared on, more terrified that we would rip a hole in the tent than that we might hurt each other and no doubt, silently grateful for the excitement. The next day, throughout our visit to Disney, Frank and I avoided making eye contact or speaking to each other.

The Volvo drawled over the service road, shaking as though it were about to come undone as it pressed toward its limit of twenty miles per hour. Cars whizzed past and their drivers hurled obscenities unintelligible beneath the rumble of the dying beast's engine. We all stared at the RPM gauge, pus.h.i.+ng deep into the red zone, and wondered how long it could go on like that.

"We probably could've rented horses that would get us there faster," Zach said. We all ignored him. Tollah stared at the road in front of the car as though it might disappear at any moment.

The service road ended after we'd traveled for about an hour and we were forced to get on the highway. Immediately, as cars raced toward us from behind and narrowly swerved away from catastrophe, it became clear that this wasn't going to work. The Ayatollah pulled onto the gravel shoulder, where we discovered that with the hazards on, we could rumble along at our own gait unmolested. We did so for the entire twenty miles to the park, arriving at around three in the afternoon.

Zach and I convinced the group to go first to Epcot Center; he and I had seen the Magic Kingdom's California equivalent so many times, but Epcot was still virgin soil for us. The ticket seller at the parking lot's entrance seemed unsure of whether to let our wheezing, quaking vehicle onto Disney property, but perhaps, moved by our desperate, pleading expressions, he raised the gate.

We drifted listlessly around Epcot's late-seventies vision of the future for several hours, none of us voicing much preference as to what rides we chose. We rode silently through a dinosaur panorama and flew across the World of Transportation. We ate lunch in the Italian pavilion of the park's World Showcase section. Carmella was unmoved by its resemblance to her homeland. We demanded to know if she took a gondola to school every day, but she waved us away. "This is like me asking if you have a hamburger for your mother and father every day."

Finally, as the sun set, we boarded the World of Imagination ride, on which a mystical sprite named Figment teaches visitors about the fun they can have just thinking things up. At some especially wondrous point, a camera secretly snaps a picture of each car; at the ride's end the photo is projected forty feet high onto a giant screen. As we approached the conclusion, we saw the pictures of our neighbors' cars displayed before us. Children clasped their hands together with delight, wide-mouthed adults pointed at the Wonders in amazement. And then our picture went up. The five of us sat as far from each other as we could get, each staring into an endless void, absorbed in a silent prayer for death to come quickly. We studied ourselves in the picture looking sadder and more lost than we had ever imagined we could feel, and we knew it was time to think about going home.

We were down to our last hundred or so dollars, enough to buy us another week at Jellystone, but no longer enough for bus tickets. School started in three days, and if we didn't head north right away, not only would we be late getting back for the new semester, we'd be making the journey without any money in our pockets. Remarkably, the more desperate our straits became, the more unthinkable it was to call home. Perhaps a week before, we still might have had the pluck to pour our hearts out to our parents and beg for help, but after ten days stuck at Jellystone, the humiliation was now too profound for any of us to imagine fessing up to it in a tearful call.

"If I try to explain this to my father he will pull me out from America and never let me come back," said Carmella.

Amazingly, it was the Italian herself who had the idea. Somewhere along the way, she suddenly recalled, Carmella had heard of something called drive-aways. "These people," she said, "who want the cars they have to go somewhere else, they give them to you to enjoy for your drive." It took us a few hours to sort out what she was getting at, but when we finally did, we raced to the snack bar and bought a local newspaper. Throwing open the clas sifieds we found, sure enough, a little section labeled "Drive Aways" where car owners advertised for people to drive their cars to distant locales, some of them even offering to pay the driver's gas and expenses. Our hearts raced as we scanned the listings, "Drivers needed to Alabama . . . Colorado . . . Texas . . . ," and sank when we saw not one of the d.a.m.ned listings was for a point north.

Over hot dog dinner, we faced up to the inevitable. It was Frank who put the idea on the table.

"First thing tomorrow, I'll be by the side of the highway with my thumb out. Just me and the road and I'll see you chumps later."

Instead of making fun of him, the rest of us sadly nodded. We had come to the point where Frank's crazy notions sounded like good sense. We were going to have to split up and hitch our ways back to school. Visions of gang dismemberment at the hands of speed-crazed truckers danced before us all, but we swallowed deeply and resigned ourselves to what we hoped would be fairly quick deaths, compared to the slow journey to the grave looming before us at Jellystone.

And then Frank threw out, "And I'm taking the Italian." His Man of the Road skills kicking in, he had beaten the rest of us to figuring what an advantage it would be to have Carmella when you were trying to flag down a truck. We spent the rest of the night bickering over who got her and who would have to carry the tent all the way home.

The next morning, we arose to face our doom. But before setting off, the Ayatollah and I went to take one last desperate look at the drive-away column in the paper. The snack bar was just opening. We flipped through the cla.s.sified pages, very slowly this time-to postpone extinguis.h.i.+ng the last flame of our hopes. But when we got to the column, we saw something that made us shudder in fright. The Ayatollah and I stared, not daring to believe our eyes.

Before us danced a tiny one-inch ad, "Driver needed for Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts." We grabbed the paper and raced for the pay phone.

Tollah spoke to the owner, who said he'd already received four calls that morning and had told them all that the first person to get to his house could take the car. The house was about ten miles away straight down the highway. I looked to Tollah. "You better take the Italian," I said. He nodded and rushed off to grab her and together they raced to the highway, and raised their thumbs high.

Two hours later, Tollah and Carmella returned in a two-door Accord hatchback.

"How the h.e.l.l are we supposed to fit in that thing all the way to school?" Zach asked. But somehow we did. The backseat was a tiny shelf, not big enough to squeeze the family poodle into, but in rotation, three of us sat there all the way back to Ma.s.sachusetts. We played local radio most of the way. Frank and I didn't speak to each other.

We made the drive in a straight shot, stopping only for gas and fast food. Thirty or so hours later, we drove onto the campus, still blotched with patches of snow. Mercifully, there was no one around to ask how the trip had gone as we parked outside Prescott House dorm.

"You going to do anything tonight?" I asked the others. "There's probably a party. . . ."

"I think I'm going to pa.s.s," Zach said. Everyone nodded and grabbed their bags out of the car. Muttering terse good-byes, we slunk back to our rooms to sleep.

Frank and I never repaired our friends.h.i.+p after that trip. Pre-trip, on campus, I'd always appreciated his Man of the Road routine, seeing it as a charming eccentricity. I couldn't have imagined that one day it would annoy me so much it would drive a wedge between us. Nor could I imagine that a fight over a pillow would be the last real conversation we'd ever have, its wounds never quite healing, as life sent us down separate paths until, finally, we never spoke to each other again.

But before we headed down those roads, two more months of Hamps.h.i.+re loomed. Spring Break may have kicked some of the fight out of us, but the rest of campus returned, eager and licking their chops, to pick up where they had left off. Unfinished business would be attended to before anyone got out of there alive.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Twilight of the G.o.ds.

We crawled back from Spring Break bloodied, broken, and bowed. But while we came creeping in like a quintet of very exhausted lambs, the rest of the school roared back to campus eager to resume the battle and deliver the coup de grace to intolerance, imperialism, and all other ills that had kept humanity in bondage for so long.

Within days, hours even, of returning to campus we were warned anew that oppression was still lurking in every corner. Vigilance was the order of the day. With all those eyes on the lookout, it didn't take long for oppression to reveal itself. In short order, the Community Council itself was rocked by a scandal involving one of its own elected members. Council Member Alex had been an active, if somewhat low-key, supporter of the demonstrations and occupation. Unfortunately for him, however, he had the habit of dabbling as an amateur cartoonist. He also had the extremely poor judgment to bring his talent to bear upon his elective duties. Feeling whimsical at a marathon Council meeting, Alex doodled and distributed a cartoon satirizing the meetings, in what he thought was a gentle, loving homage. Seconds after the copies left his hand, he found himself summoned before a special session, accused of an act of racial and gender hatred thrown in the very face of the Council. The problem with Alex's cartoon, he was told, was its portrayal of the Council president, Cynthia, an African-American woman. Although she was depicted as something of a heroine in the cartoon's text, the rendering of her had drawn on bigoted stereotypes; specifically Alex had drawn Cynthia with b.r.e.a.s.t.s that were disproportionately large-an ancient means of mocking the African-American woman.

There followed a lengthy Council session in which the flesh-and-blood proportions of Cynthia's b.r.e.a.s.t.s were compared to the cartoon version of Cynthia's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. While it was agreed that real Cynthia's b.r.e.a.s.t.s were large, it was argued, they were not so ridiculously large as their hateful cartoon depiction. Alex urged, realizing that he was sinking in quicksand with every word he spoke, that he had intended the objects in question to be realistically large, not comically large. At the meeting's end, he was duly removed from office as a Community Council member.

Meanwhile, the deliberations over the Ayatollah's case were renewed. Shortly after Spring Break the school's Judicial Council-comprised of a mix of elected students, faculty, and administrators-decided to impose four sanctions on Tollah and the other alleged offenders in the late graffiti incident (pending expulsion, which was above the powers of the Council). First, they were ordered to write a letter of apology to the community. Second, they would undergo racial sensitivity training. Third, they would perform some hundreds of hours of community service for the school; and fourth, they would make financial rest.i.tution for the property damaged.

They immediately appealed these to the college president, who they were told would not be able to meet with them for several weeks. Pending that meeting, however, they were ordered to write their apology to the campus at once-the campus's need to hear their contrition was so overwhelming that it could not wait until the president got around to considering whether the punishments were just. Warned more or less at gunpoint that the direst consequences would fall upon them if they refused to comply, the three wrote and signed a letter expressing regret for all disturbances to the community and their commitment to fighting oppression with every remaining ounce of breath. A copy of the letter was delivered to every student and faculty member's mailbox and was roundly considered to have gone not nearly far enough to repay all the damage they had done.

In the week after Spring Break I received some jarring news. One afternoon at the snack bar I ran into my friend Emily, who was part of Elizabeth's circle. Delicately, trying not to show my hand, I asked her how Elizabeth was doing.

"You don't know?" she said. "Elizabeth is gone."

"What do you mean?"

"Her father came and took her home."

"Is she coming back?"

"I don't think so. Not this year."

"What happened?"

Emily sighed. "Things have gotten really bad out there. n.o.body's been outside for weeks. And Elizabeth was kinda out there to start with. She just got crazy. I think she lost it completely."

I tried to sort out how this made me feel but came away confused. Was I relieved I wouldn't have to deal with the two-year-old Elizabeth question anymore, or sad that it had never been resolved? Should I have said more to her, or not said anything at all? Should I have pulled her out and rescued her from her drift into chaos this year? Or, more romantic-sounding at the time, should I have joined her in it?

Although I knew she had left and wasn't coming back anytime soon, it was inconceivable that there wouldn't be another chance for me to be with Elizabeth, that she could actually disappear from my life. For the next few years I heard drips of information about Elizabeth-that she had moved to San Francisco and then away from the city, that she was working on farms somehow-and then eventually I stopped hearing anything at all. Little could I have imagined then, at age nineteen, that it would be another twenty years, more years than I had lived at that point, before I spoke to her again.

We had come to a place where we dared not move a muscle. After two years, it had gotten through my thick skull that Hamps.h.i.+re was not a place to "try anything." With the campus under siege, with people watching their words in the dining hall, with Tollah and the others under permanent interrogation, with glares of open hatred greeting us down every hallway, it was time to take off-campus what sc.r.a.ps of energy and pride we still had left. And so we dedicated our attentions to our neighboring schools.

No one expects trouble to come in the form of an a cappella group.

Sometime in March, Tollah and a few others were roving the Smith College campus during Spring Weekend-a two-day festival of parties, teas, and formal dances all across the school. Any Spring Weekend house party worth its weight in taffeta would host a performance by at least one Ivy League a cappella group. Each year, the Whiffenpoofs, the Katzenjammers, the Kroko diloes, the Counterparts, and the Din and Tonics descend upon Smith for two days of overdressed revelry. On the second night outside a party, Tollah and some others got in a scuffle with the Princeton Tigertones, which somehow led to Tollah shouting in their coach's face that "Hamps.h.i.+re a cappella could kick your a.s.s any day of the week," and challenging them to a face-off in the Smith quad against the celebrated-and nonexistent-Hamps.h.i.+re Happy Notes.

At midnight, responding to the emergency summons from the Ayatollah, six of our friends threw on their best flea market blazers and raced to Smith, where they stood on a lawn waiting for hours for the Tigertones, who never arrived. But no matter-the Hamps.h.i.+re Happy Notes were born.

The next weekend a dozen of us, including Nathan and Roger, piled into Janet's van. Somehow the specter of us got up in blazers and cheap ties seemed more ghastly than our usual day dress of mohair sweaters and wool hunting coats. We set a course for Hamps.h.i.+re's closest neighbor, the cloistered Mount Holyoke College, where we had been tipped off that a formal tea was under way. In the van on the way over we tried to think of some songs that we all knew the words to; Beatles songs and TV show themes seemed to be our entire common frame of reference.

Piling out of the van on Mount Holyoke's foreboding Gothic campus, we were momentarily awed and hushed. Finding our way to the right house, we poured through the doorway, all twelve of us spilling into a candlelit room where a hundred or so students in dresses, pearls, blue blazers, and rep ties t.i.ttered quietly with gla.s.ses of white wine in hand. As we entered, the girl at the door, checking names against a guest list, gasped in alarm. "Excuse me, can I help you?"

"Hey, no problem," Tollah glibly replied, glancing at his watch. "We're the Happy Notes and looks like we're a little late. But we'll just go right ahead and get set up."

We flooded in as panic spread across the girl's face. "The Happy Notes? Who did you talk to?"

"I forget her name. . . . The activities chair? Naomi, maybe?"

"Harriet?"

"Exactly, Harriet. Now you'll want to stand back, we're gonna go ahead and get started." He called out to the room. "Hey, everybody, the Happy Notes are here! Come gather round!" Exchanging quizzical looks, the crowd dutifully a.s.sembled, many taking seats on the floor in front of where we stood in a single-file line. If you ever have to rob Fort Knox, do it disguised as an a cappella group. When an a cappella group is announced, society's defense mechanisms crumble. Nothing in humanity's training teaches it to be suspicious of traveling a cappella groups, even if the head of the social committee hasn't been properly notified by the activities chair.

The Ayatollah took the center stage. "Hi, everyone. As I'm sure you know, we're the Hamps.h.i.+re Happy Notes here to do a few of our most treasured hits for you. We want to start out now with a little number that will take you back, way back before the Cold War to the dark days of World War Two, the big one. Close your eyes now and picture yourself in a simpler time. You're a colonel in the U.S. Army. You've been captured behind enemy lines. And you're taken to a magical place called Stalag Seventeen. That's right, join in if you know the words, this is 'Hogan's Heroes'."

We broke into a vocalized version of the instrumental theme. "Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-be-ba-bep-ba. Bop-be-bop-be-baaa-bop-be-bop-be-baaa." Our first time through the verse the crowd amazingly was with us, laughing and clapping along. The second time, we still drew polite smiles. By the fourth round, people were s.h.i.+fting restlessly. Mercifully, Tollah shut it down after eight verses. Somewhere in the middle of the next song-a bizarrely out-of-tune rendition of "You're So Vain" where two-thirds of the group mumbled through the unknown lyrics of the verses-the crowd began to give each other nervous looks, the first hints of recognition that something terrible was happening here. The mixer had been hijacked and none of its planners knew how to respond, nor what ghastliness lay ahead.

Tollah introduced a song by "those lovable mop-tops" and led us into "Helter Skelter" complete with a mad, chaotic medley at the end. As we launched into "k.u.mbaya" we could see, at the back of the room, our hostesses conferring and racing for the phone. The group had agreed that we wouldn't leave the stage until security came, but nineteen verses into "k.u.mbaya" and Tollah was struggling for more verbs ("Someone's fis.h.i.+ng, Lord; Someone's walking, Lord; someone's whittling, Lord"). When security finally showed up, it felt to us, at least, like they had arrived in the nick of time to save us before our voices collapsed completely.

"What the h.e.l.l took you guys? We were dying up there," Nathan complained, and they manhandled us toward the door.

Over the next weeks we filled out our repertoire, adding the Hawaii Five-O theme, the Beatles' "All My Loving," "California Dreamin'," pieces of "You're So Vain" (mostly the chorus), and the national anthem. With practice, we put together a very tight ten- to-seventy-five-minute set, complete with skits and encores. The Hamps.h.i.+re Happy Notes toured New England, doing impromptu shows and being chased off half the liberal arts campuses in the region. On the road with the Notes, we momentarily revived a bit of the enthusiasm that seemed to have been drained from the glum Hamps.h.i.+re campus. It was, however, during this tour that I sustained the one college injury that would follow me for the rest of my days. One of our skits at Williams concluded with a shoving match, the band degenerating at the end into a giant dog pile. I was trapped at the bottom of the dog pile with my back bent at such a harsh angle, I screamed and feared it would break. Twenty years later, I still feel the pain at times and beg off strenuous activities, citing my old a cappella singing injuries.

Back on campus, the Ayatollah's case finally came before the college president, whose primary interest seemed to be getting the whole matter out of her life in the quickest way possible. Therefore, after being told that Tollah and the others were fighting the remaining sanctions and refusing to comply, with a harrumph she said she was willing to overturn the sanctions and let it go at that, gambling, no doubt, that by this time the campus had moved on and the matter could safely be brushed under the table.

However, the Ayatollah shocked her by throwing in a new element. Pointing out that his entire semester had been consumed in disciplinary hearings, himself held hostage in his mod, expecting to be expelled at any moment, and further pointing out that his parents were not remotely rich and had worked hard and saved their money to help finance his time here, the Ayatollah demanded that his semester's tuition be refunded. An angry face-off followed, with some heated words exchanged, at the end of which the president announced she had to leave in a few days as part of a delegation that was visiting the Soviet Union and that she didn't have time to deal with this silliness. When she returned, she declared ominously, she would straighten all this out. Whether his money would be refunded or whether he would now, after all, be expelled was left hanging in the balance awaiting an opening in the president's schedule. And there the matter was left to sit, unresolved for the rest of the semester.

One evening shortly after this, as Tollah and I loafed around the 89 living room, a question occurred to me that I had never thought to ask. "Tell me, Ayatollah," I said, "what did that d.a.m.n graffiti say, anyway?"

"How would I know?" he answered without blinking. "Is my name Henry?"

"Of course not. Of course. But did he tell any of you that night what it was he might've written?"

Tollah looked at me sideways. "Well, I saw it. They're keeping the sign in the dean's office."

"So what did it say?"

The Ayatollah drew a deep breath. "What it said was, 'Lesbi ans, third world students, and cripples: Suck our t.i.ts.' "

I took that in and thought back on the turmoil of the past semester, pausing to note that the accused trio included one lesbian and one third-world student. I looked at him and thought about what he had endured and the uncertainty still ahead. "I guess that says it all," I said.

"Put it on my tombstone." Tollah nodded.

Despite all the adventures of the past two years, as spring semester wound down, the campus had become a lonely place. The Ayatollah was under virtual lockdown in our mod. Since Spring Break, Frank and I remained on distant terms, generally avoiding each other. After spending a few months milling around Northampton, Jon had largely decamped to New York, where Ox and Tim Fall had rented a ramshackle studio s.p.a.ce in Alphabet City, accessible through a vacant lot dotted with cast-off syringes.

Zach's path had taken him in an unexpected direction. Early in the semester, he and I had made friends with Lori, a girl who lived in a mod next to mine. Our friends.h.i.+p had blossomed when we learned that she was a diehard Bruce Springsteen fan, a species unknown in postpunk/pregrunge Hamps.h.i.+re. Intrigued, we told Lori that we, too, were devoted to the Boss and began a club reviewing the complete oeuvre. Each day we convened in Lori's room and listened to one song, working our way chronologically from Greetings from Asbury Park all the way to Tunnel of Love; discussing the day's song at length after we listened. Armed with two years' worth of a.s.similated critical theory jargon, Zach and I held forth on the mythopoetic archetypes in Springsteen's narratives, on the use of narrative as an instrument of control, and the subtle subversion of the sense of the other in songs like "Thunder Road." Through the spring our friends.h.i.+p with Lori grew until one day, as I got a bit too expansive on the subject of "My Home-town," she suddenly screamed.

"Wait a second!" Lori hollered. "You guys are joking! You've been joking this whole time!"