Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Part 8

"We're just being supportive!"

"You think Larry needs this kinda support? You think seeing you freaks in the middle of the night is gonna help him swallow any more dogs?"

Ogletree vaguely defended us but the rest of his hallmates looked ready to riot. "Get them out of here!" someone yelled.

The security officers eventually herded us all, step by step, down the stairs and out of the dorm. As we s.h.i.+vered in the cold they made us show them our campus IDs and they recorded our names in a little notepad. About two-thirds of us didn't have IDs, which, in the case of Jon, Dan, Jim, Angela, and some others, was not a problem, as they were already on intimate terms with the officers, whom they called Paul and Mike. "You know you have to carry your ID at all times on campus?"

"Totally, Mike. We will."

"Then why do we have to go through this every time?"

For the rest, however, the request set off a series of confusions that took at least half an hour to sort out. Their questioning revealed to me, for the first time, who among us actually went to school here. We turned out to be a fairly even mix of un-enrolled students, ex-students, visitors from out of town, and, it turned out, two punks who went to Amherst High. This produced long queries of "Who's responsible for this one? Whose guest is he?"

Our non-Hamps.h.i.+re student majority were warned that they should not step foot on campus again without first registering with security and having someone sign them in. By the time Paul and Mike came across the high school kids, they were so flummoxed and put out at the thought of having to call their parents that they let them off with a warning to never ever come back again.

When it was finally my turn, Paul and Mike took my ID and looked me up and down. "You're a first-year. What are you doing with this lot?"

"They're my friends." I shrugged.

"Well, you need to get new ones." Paul put his face close to mine, the mist of his breath wafting across my skin. "Listen, the days of the Supreme d.i.c.ks are over, kid. The school's had enough of these a.s.sholes, and by next year they are all gonna be gone. Do yourself a favor and don't go down the tubes with them."

I nodded and looked at Jon and Ox. "It's true, Rich. You better run."

For the next couple hours, we stood outside the dorm in the cold, again debating how we might get to Denny's, semiplausi ble schemes derailed by a new topic and each conversation running down another rabbit hole. Every few minutes an irate voice would yell, "SHUT THE f.u.c.k UP!" from the dorm windows above.

By four-thirty cold and mounting exhaustion urged me to walk away-as some others had done-and go back to the mod. However, the thought of appearing anxious, of missing any of the action, made quitting unthinkable, as deeply painful as this journey had become. There were seven of us left standing in the cold; our number had been whittled down but we were still too many.

The first traces of thin, reedy light appeared behind the quad. I winced as the world became disturbingly visible. The trash-strewn, patchy Merrill House lawn we were standing on looked unspeakably tawdry in this first light. We all fell silent. Jon finally said, "I guess maybe Denny's was a bad idea."

No one said a word. Then Angela spat, "f.u.c.k you, guys," and stomped off, giving me, I imagined, an especially accusatory glare.

In the dawn light, we watched her walk out of the quad, across the main campus road, and down the path behind the library leading to the Greenwich House woods. As she disappeared from sight Ox murmured, "I guess we could fit in Jon's car now. . . ."

Ninety minutes later, at around seven in the morning, with Marilyn lying across our laps in the back and two people squeezed into the front pa.s.senger seat, we pulled into Denny's in Chicopee. A couple of trucks idled in the parking lot, steam pouring from their exhausts. The restaurant was a quarter full with men in jackets, ties, or work uniforms sitting alone and reading newspapers. After the standard million or so questions to the waitress from Jon about what was made with animal fat and what was cooked on the same grill as the meat, we ate our bowls of cornflakes in silence.

Finally Ox spoke up. "This was definitely worth it. I'm really glad we came."

The night after our Denny's trip word drifted back to 21. We learned that Larry Ogletree had failed to capture the world's record for most hot dogs consumed in a minute, falling short by a single heartbreaking dog.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

The Legend.

In dribs and drabs, around the living room and during nights spent talking over cardboard cups of drip coffee in the Bridge Cafe, the full story of the Supreme d.i.c.ks began to emerge.

The conversation always started with my question "Why do people hate you so much?" In my first months I began to sense an empty s.p.a.ce in d.i.c.k history. Somewhere in all our conversations was a void that the residents of 21 often walked right up to but then scurried back from with an uncomfortable giggle.

At first there were references to "after what happened last year" and allusions to three members of the group who were no longer present, Billy, Stan, and Joel, who had once played a huge role in Supreme d.i.c.ks life.

But nothing I had heard explained the intensity of the hatred that punched us in the face every time we left 21. Clearly the group had bugged many in its time. Their refusal to take anything even a little bit seriously got under the skin of the school's more earnest sorts-the activists, the alternative music nerds. But in these days, the earnest activists still remained a minority; the only thing the bulk of the campus took with true seriousness was comparing the seed levels of different marijuana strands.

By the end of the semester I had managed to piece together the full story; the curtain fell from d.i.c.k history and I began to understand that I had fallen in with a group that wasn't just unpopular but despised on a primal level by a school otherwise dedicated to peace, love, and apathy.

The Supreme d.i.c.ks had come together three years before I arrived, somewhere around 1982-3 (dates varied according to the telling). By all accounts the group began gathering in an earlier mod where Jon, Ox, Tim, and Arthur had lived. They came from different tribes-Jon had been a New Wave skateboarder when he first landed on Hamps.h.i.+re's sh.o.r.es, Ox a devout Deadhead, Jon a hippie avant-gardist, Arthur a working-cla.s.s punk. The group was rounded out by Joel Jacobs aka Joel Joel, a roly-poly jester, whose gigantic, perpetual broken-toothed grin had the power to unnerve all who looked upon him, leaving them shaken for days as if they had walked away from a car crash. Joel Joel lurked around campus in tandem with Stan Moser, a dark, brooding, mop-headed, emaciated native of the Amherst area.

The group initially came together as a loose conclave, united by a low-grade destructive impulse, a lack of ambition, and nocturnal schedules. None of these traits was particularly remarkable in Hamps.h.i.+re of the early eighties, when the school was dominated by a checked-out breed of hippies, the angsty dregs of the last days of punk rock, and a smattering of rich New York downtown types. The group coalesced around a disdain for any organized anything (movements, seminars, parties, schedules) and a common aesthetic-layers of secondhand rags later described as "old man clothes." Their early jam sessions were flailing attempts at postpunk intensity, undermined by a common lack of willingness to take basics such as rehearsing or learning songs seriously. The musical side of the group was augmented by Joel Joel and Stan's merry pranksterism, which was initially limited to merely bugging people around the dorm halls.

With the addition of Steve Shavel, the movement began to take on philosophical underpinnings. A tall, lanky philosophy student, Steve was a notable figure around campus in his unvaried attire of gray cardigan sweater, white oxford s.h.i.+rt, skinny tie, and red Converse high-tops.

Steve came into the d.i.c.ks' life one morning when Ox wandered into the lounge of Dakin Hall and found Steve asleep on the couch with a young waiflike girl. For the next several mornings, Ox awoke to find this strange older person (Steve at this point had already been at Hamps.h.i.+re well more than the traditional four years) asleep on the tiny lounge couch, head to toe with the same girl, and he'd give the slumbering pair a nod as he took his tea with soy milk back to his room. On the third day, Ox was mixing his tea when a deep and sonorous tone called from the couch, "I say, that's not Lapsang souchong by any chance?"

"Oh, yeah." Ox tried not to stare at the half-dressed girl at Steve's feet. "It is."

"Say there, could I get a cup of that? With sugar and just a tiny bit of half-and-half, please? And not too hot."

Ox fixed Steve his tea and they chatted as Rose-Steve's friend-slept. When Ox got around to asking why the pair slept every night on a threadbare, tiny, dilapidated couch that was uncomfortable to even sit on, Steve explained that he was a follower of the teachings of Wilhelm Reich. He had taken a vow of celibacy and was enjoying, as he described it, a "spiritual friends.h.i.+p" with the sleeping Rose; together they had committed to a path of "problematizing" his celibacy. "It's very dangerous work. We're walking right on the spiritual razor's edge. One has to stay above suspicion." And thus they only slept together in public places so there could be no doubt that Steve's celibacy was beyond reproach.

Steve was then in his fifth to seventh year at Hamps.h.i.+re-although he claimed that even to keep track of such numbers was to accept a hierarchic system where abstract notions of time were used as instruments of control. Since his first year, Steve had devoted himself to philosophy, only taking cla.s.ses from Hamps.h.i.+re professor Mark Adler, who conveniently held his cla.s.ses at night. For the past several years, Steve had been working on his Div III, a paper on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He claimed his work had been slowed by the fact that there were no decent translations available in English, and he read very little German.

Steve soon became a regular among the still loose confederation (and lost Rose to several of the group who hadn't yet taken any vows of celibacy), joining jam sessions with his tabletop slide guitar and devising a philosophical rationale for the increasingly cantankerous, discordant sound coming from the jam; shortly after Steve's arrival the group began expressing their formula of s.e.xual sublimation through music.

Since d.i.c.k philosophy held that it was impossible to achieve Wilhelm Reich's orgone-energy-liberating seven-stage o.r.g.a.s.m in corrupted modern society, those desiring orgone purification had no choice but to seek other outlets. Somehow in these conversations, the d.i.c.ks determined that the music thrashed out in their jam sessions-musical throbbings that were becoming increasingly turgid, wordless, and melody-neutral-was in fact a sublimated expression of the stagnant orgone energy within the band members; d.i.c.k music was the only acceptable way to regain the flow of orgone. The more discordant it was and the more it sounded to the untrained ear like random noise, the more it tapped into those spiritual/physiological needs. So went the theory.

The late-night jams in Jon's living room grew louder. Some say that the early jams actually sounded like songs, but by the end of their first semester together the music had evolved into "pure noise" (although, it was said, the truest adepts could hear the songs within, like a Magic Eye painting, and the harmonies were audible to a chosen few). The music was not quite a random cacophony; the various players worked toward a common throbbing sound that could not be dismissed as random, but neither could its intent be discerned or explained.

The cacophony grew so loud that it drew what may have been the first noise complaints in Hamps.h.i.+re College history. The early visits by security seemed merely amusing oddities and inspired the group to play all the louder at ever more obscure hours of the night. The security drop-bys, however, soon turned into notes from the house office, which became meetings with the house office and escalating tensions between red-faced administrators and the smirking d.i.c.ks, who claimed not to understand what the problem was.

Wanting to extend their influence beyond merely annoying their neighbors, the group soon began to perform around campus. They would set up in the dorm laundry room, the Art Barn, or anyplace where their presence would ultimately become obnoxious, drawing the usual call from campus security. The various tellers of this tale reminded me that at this time in Hamps.h.i.+re history for people to call campus security "was, like, insane." Campus security, as far as anyone knew, existed only to help people who were locked out of the rooms and too stupid to know how to card the door. The d.i.c.ks had found a way to get under Hamps.h.i.+re's skin, by bringing out the one side of itself it liked to pretend didn't exist-its uptightness. It was an uncomfortable feeling, for a campus full of apathetic loafers, hippie dreamers, and night-clubbing hedonists to find themselves suddenly phoning security and demanding peace and quiet. (Soon enough, though, calling up security crackdowns would become many students' proudest moments.) Once the band members stopped playing and began wandering the campus together, they began to get into ever more colorful chases with the campus law. Most famed of these was the Great Bell Theft of May 1984. The school was still just a decade old and the students poured all their yearnings for tradition into the Division Free Bell. Donated by an early alum who had stripped it from his family yacht, the bell hung about twenty-five feet in the air between two concrete pillars in front of the library. After turning in his Div III project, each Hamps.h.i.+re student would take a final meeting with his advisory committee, which would either pa.s.s him and thus grant him his diploma or ask him to return for another semester of work. (In my years at Hamps.h.i.+re, I can count on one hand the number of times I heard of the latter occurring.) As the student sat nervously in his final meeting, his friends would congregate outside the library with champagne, saluting him as he appeared at last to ring the Division Free Bell. The bell was treated with a mystical aura; anyone who rang it prematurely was said to have cursed his chance to graduate. One night in our first semester, Zach, Nathan, and I decided to ring it, "just to practice." Within moments half the library poured outside, security appeared, and we were bodily pulled from the bell rope seconds before a riot erupted.

Two years before I arrived at Hamps.h.i.+re, Steve Shavel decided to steal the bell. It was a week before the 1984 graduation, the height of bell-ringing season, when Steve noticed a stack of platforms sitting on the lawn outside the library, waiting to become the graduation stage. Late that night, a dozen or so members of d.i.c.k society crept out under the cover of darkness and began stacking the platforms on top of each other, until they were able to scale the entire height of the columns and climb up to the bell.

They later recalled the superhuman strength summoned in the final stages to pa.s.s the heavy platform hand-to-hand some twenty feet to the top. Several times they dropped platforms from the heights, setting off thunderous explosions when they hit the ground, but remarkably security never appeared. When they reached the bell, Arthur brought his tools and wrenched it from its housing.

The next morning, the greatest manhunt in Hamps.h.i.+re history began; in fact it was the first manhunt in the history of the heretofore anarchic campus. With the donor alum about to make his annual trip to visit his bequest, the dean of students rounded up the usual suspects, summoning, so legend goes, the campus's most conspicuous characters, and demanded that they find and rat out the bell thieves or be expelled themselves. Jon, Ox, Steve, Tim, Arthur, and the rest were one by one brought into the dean's interrogation chambers (his conference room) and they recited their denials under withering glares. Meanwhile, hidden inside a ba.s.s drum, the bell was smuggled off-campus to a friend's apartment in Northampton just as the house-to-house searches began.

Inevitably, with so many people involved in the theft, Steve's name was pa.s.sed along to the authorities. When he realized the dean knew the entire story, right up to the ba.s.s drum, Steve switched from denial to a proud defense of the heist, claiming the bell was a symbol of the hierarchical oppression that Hamps.h.i.+re had been created to fight.

Sadly for Steve, the uprising he had hoped to provoke was drowned out by the outraged voices of students who had been denied their turn at a bell-ringing party. Ultimately, the bell's return was negotiated but the adventure was the first of many that the d.i.c.ks would pull off, achieving the unheard-of feat of enraging the administration and the students simultaneously. Many more such milestones would follow.

In the fall of '85, once the musical element of the d.i.c.ks society had begun to get under the school's skin, the group's theatrical wing, led by Joel Joel and Stan Moser, began to stir up feelings of outright revulsion. Hamps.h.i.+re had a closed-circuit TV station and a small studio in the library bas.e.m.e.nt that broadcast to In-Tran, the school's internal cable channel, which fed into every mod and dorm lounge. (The school's founding doc.u.ments included many futuristic elements that in the eighties still smacked of overindulgence in sci-fi utopianism. Leading among these was the plan to hook every room in the school to a central computer network. All dorm rooms on campus were wired to this network a full decade before a single student would own a personal computer.) Joel and Stan broadcast a weekly show called Top of the Two, which tested Hamps.h.i.+re's boundaries of taste with gruesome stunts and theater pieces. It was an upleasant awakening for a school that prided itself on a blase shock-the-bourgeoisie att.i.tude to suddenly learn that it was capable of being shocked and even offended. This all the more increased the growing hatred toward those who brought the limits of their tolerance to their attention.

While the TV show could be turned off, Joel and Stan began spreading their message off-screen. One afternoon, with his roly-poly Ches.h.i.+re-cat grin, Joel Joel appeared at dinner in the dining hall's back room and announced a special Top of the Two/Supreme d.i.c.k political action. That week, he wheezed, the show would sponsor a telethon-to be specific, a spermathon-for South Africa, a benefit concert wherein students would be encouraged to bring their e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e to the show, which Dave would drink in support of the suffering people living under apartheid. And to demonstrate his point, he produced a clear plastic bag containing, to all appearances, s.e.m.e.n, climbed atop a table, and drank it.

Had such an incident occurred three or four years before this time, it would have been laughed off. Three or four years later, Joel would have been shoved into a gunnysack, taken to the nearest bridge, and dropped into the river, his dorm room contents donated to Goodwill. But in 1985 the school had no provisions for this type of emergency. And so, several weeks later, Dave was able to stage a sequel, climbing on a chair in the back room of the dining hall and announcing Top of the Two's s.h.i.+tathon for the Contras.

When one looks back at the trail that led up to these disasters, one can see individuals, groups, nations careening down roads that clearly lead to nowhere but catastrophe. Taking stock, most of the people I knew in that era seemed, on any typical day, headed for disaster. But more often than not, the disaster never arrived. Friends whirling out of control somehow took another fork in the road at the last second, or managed to just keep plummeting downhill forever, never to fly off the inevitable cliff, never to hit the rocky bottom.

While in retrospect, it seems clear that something terrible had to come from the trajectory the d.i.c.ks were on, by all accounts they had no reason to think that something terrible actually would happen. What now seems predetermined would have at the time seemed a ridiculous notion; they were young, away at college, stirring things up as youth will do. What bad could happen? But disaster did come, and in a much worse form than even the d.i.c.ks' worst enemies would have predicted.

All through the 1985-86 school year tensions mounted between the d.i.c.ks, the administration, and a vocal anti-d.i.c.k segment of the students. The d.i.c.k jams grew louder. The complaints grew more frequent. The spectacles more disgusting. The d.i.c.k mods, 21 and Jon's in Enfield House, were placed on probation. Each member was called regularly to the offices of the deans of students and housing on various infractions and the threats grew stronger. Until, finally, the event occurred that abruptly and forever ended the game.

Stan Moser had a little brother named Billy, a senior at Amherst High, who frequently visited the d.i.c.k mods and had become something of a mascot to the group. On an April episode of Top of the Two, Billy stepped forward and announced that he wanted to make a speech. Cameras rolling, broadcasting live to the campus, Billy decried the school's Gestapo administration and its oppression of his Supreme d.i.c.k brothers. Proclaiming solidarity against d.i.c.k persecution, Billy announced that he would drink a gla.s.s of cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and end his life.

Thinking the speech was a joke, the others in the studio laughed and cheered Billy on as he lifted the gla.s.s to his lips. They continued applauding, and the cameras continued rolling, as he dropped to the floor and writhed around in what they thought were mock seizures. Within moments the applause died, as Billy's body stopped spinning and settled motionless in the middle of the studio floor.

The aftermath was the biggest PR spectacle the school had ever known. The campus was flooded by TV crews from around the world who picked up the bizarre story. The d.i.c.ks, on orders from the administration and the local police, stayed off-camera and away from the reports, which were filled with tales of a mini- Jim Jones drug cult and weeping images of the traumatized students who had watched the show live.

When the media fury died down and the TV vans left, the d.i.c.ks suddenly found themselves alone on a very isolated campus with a very angry administration and a thousand students who looked upon them no longer just as annoying miscreants but as fratricidal inhuman freaks. A zero-tolerance regime fell into place. When the band tried to play under the solar panels, security was there before they could plug in. When they made noise in the mod at night, security instantly materialized. The Enfield House office doc.u.mented every health-code, cleanliness, and "community standards" violation. When they showed their faces in the Airport Lounge, conversation stopped and they were greeted with angry glares.

And then came Spring Jam. Halloween and the spring concert were the High Holy Days of the Hamps.h.i.+re calendar. For a full day each April, a giant music festival was held and every Hamps.h.i.+re band was given a slot to play on a stage behind the library. The entire campus a.s.sembled, along with thousands from neighboring schools and the surrounding area. It was held that this was an era when Hamps.h.i.+re produced giants of alternative music. That spring, the lineup included the greats: Beatrice, the Lonely Moans, Five Dumb Broads, Jersey Slim and the Prescott Playboys, the Loneliest Christmas Tree, and Jambone were all on the bill. As were the Supreme d.i.c.ks.

It still was not yet in Hamps.h.i.+re's DNA to quash anyone's ability to speak or perform in public. The need or desire had never come up before. And if eyebrows were raised by the d.i.c.k name in a prime-time late-afternoon slot on the bill, no one dared suggest that the school should not let them play. That, people would have said, would be fascism. And that still lay in the mists of Hamps.h.i.+re's future.

And so at five P.M., the d.i.c.ks climbed to the stage. It started out as a fairly typical show, discordant noise, disparate strains of melody. Jon barely audible, gulping out the words to the d.i.c.ks' one actual song, "I'm in Love with a Vegetable," a tribute to life-support cause celebre Karen Ann Quinlan. And then Stan came to the stage.

At first it wasn't clear, over the music, what he was hollering about. But as he repeated his refrain and the words "Billy died for you," the crowd erupted in horror and revulsion.

The semester quickly lurched to a close. Joel and Stan were removed from campus. Jon's mod was disbanded. And the d.i.c.k joke became no longer a public spectacle but a weird, underground, whispered-about dirty secret.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Jan Term.

So you'resaying pa.s.sing only two cla.s.ses is good?" My fa ther stared at my evaluations, held them up to the light, turned them over, and inspected their backs, searching for something more to show for a semester of college.

"I'd say it's pretty good. Not stupendous, but very respectable, certainly." My father looked at me. "You have to remember with the Hamps.h.i.+re system, the vast majority of what we do never shows up on paper." I went on to explain the subtleties and nuances of our academic model-the Divisional requirements, the personal relations.h.i.+p with your advisor, the premium placed on exploration, ultimately leading to a final project into which I'd pour all the vast acc.u.mulation of my Hamps.h.i.+re years-not just in cla.s.s but, far more important, my life experience.

My father rubbed his eyes and shook his head. "Well, at least this Emerson and Nietzsche professor seems to be pretty excited about you. . . ."

"Yes, we really hit it off." I didn't have the heart to tell him that that professor thought he was writing an evaluation for someone else, or to fill him in on what a stroke of ridiculous luck it was that I finished even two cla.s.ses; in fact how close I had come to not finis.h.i.+ng any.

Back at 21, as first semester entered its final days, a vague apprehension seeped into the corners of our lives, as a steady trickle of rumors reached us about the administration's rapidly deteriorating tolerance for d.i.c.k Nation. "They've driven us underground," Arthur reported. "Now they'll spray the poison."

Monica, who had, amazingly, transferred from Radcliffe and thus sometimes, it seemed, alone of the group still had a foot rooted in reality, had taken me aside one night and asked me if I had been going to cla.s.s at all. "You know, you might want to try and finish one if you can, just to, like, show them you're trying?" she said. "That might help later."

"But no one else seems to care about that."

Monica nodded and looked solemn. "Well, you know, Rich. Most of these guys are in their, like, fifth or sixth years. Most of them know they're never going to graduate, they're just hanging out until someone figures out where to hang out next. But it's different for you. This is just your first year." She looked at me. I looked at my shoes and nodded. I didn't want it to be different for me.

"What about you?" I asked.

"Oh, I'm outta here at the end of this year."

"Aren't you only a third-year?"

"Yeah, but I've had enough. This place is getting really lame."

A week later, a letter arrived from my advisor. "Don't you think it's time we checked in again?"

The ground was frozen solid, the paths covered with a sheet of ice over which I scurried to meet with Leo, my advisor. In front of the Social Sciences Building people huddled close in little groups of three and four, hopping back and forth on their feet to keep their blood flowing. A cla.s.s had just ended, and the emerging students raced to get out of the cold. I drew back, horrified at the specter of people bursting from cla.s.s, diligence furrowing their brows, like a rabid phantom army I'd managed to hide out from for so long I thought they must've died off. But here they were, still alive and flouris.h.i.+ng.

I had spent the night before fretting about how I would wake up in time to get to my eleven A.M. appointment. I ransacked 21 and the neighboring hippie mod searching for an alarm clock, but the only timepieces available were an antique grandfather clock in Susie's room and Jerome's Casio digital watch, both of which, it turned out, hadn't worked for years. I canva.s.sed the house to find someone who would be up the next morning but was met with blank stares. Finally, I just stayed awake all night.

Behind his beard, nestled in corduroy, Leo managed to look both amused and concerned. "So I understand you've made some interesting friends."

I slumped into the metal folding chair reserved for students. "I guess so. . . . Can I ask, how did you know who I hang out with?"

"Small campus, Richard." He tilted his head and looked at me over his gla.s.ses. "Very, very small. So how are your cla.s.ses coming?"

"Cla.s.ses? I mean, good."

"And are you going to complete all four that you signed up for?"

"Well, yeah, I mean . . ." I gaped at him, dumfounded. "But I thought we agreed, you said to focus on finding myself. That was kinda the plan we discussed."

"It looks like you've done a bit too much of that, haven't you?"

I stared at the floor.

"Richard, I'm not going to tell you who you can and can't be friends with. But I have to warn you, the choices you make have a big impact on the community."

"The community cares who I'm friends with?"

"The community cares that people can feel comfortable here. And you have to accept your responsibility for your part of that. I don't need to tell you, things are going to be changing around here."

"Um, really?"

"So how is it coming with your cla.s.ses?"

In the remaining two weeks of the semester, I returned to cla.s.s on a nearly regular basis. Waking up obscenely early, I'd sneak out of 21, muttering excuses about going to visit Zach and Nathan. My European Fascism professor did a slight double take the first time he saw me in his cla.s.sroom, trying to figure out where he knew me from, but continued without questioning me, no doubt thinking that if someone wanted to sit through a discussion of Mussolini's relations.h.i.+p with the Italian peasant cla.s.s, who was he to stop him?

By my second visit, however, I learned that since I had turned in a couple short papers at the beginning of the semester, I was, in fact, amazingly still in the running to complete the cla.s.s. All I needed to write was one giant ten-page paper on "the ways the fascist mind-set enters the consciousness of the ma.s.ses." One night, I locked myself away from the junta in the living room and madly skimmed a copy of Wilhelm Reich's Ma.s.s Psychology of Fascism that Steve Shavel had left behind.

Three nights later, the night before I was to fly back home for break, I tore myself away from the group again, sat down on the floor, and put my typewriter on a milk carton and wrote the following: "Studying the economic and political factors which lead to the rise of a fascist regime can only take us so far. To truly understand what turns a ma.s.s of people to fascism we must look at the deeper subconscious conditions of their lives." At four A.M., having waxed poetic about the subconscious repressed s.e.xuality of the German people, by way of Reich, I paper-clipped ten sheets together and attached a note to the professor reading, "Sorry to be so late. Had trouble finding a new typewriter cartridge. Hope you enjoy!"

Completing my Emerson and Nietzsche cla.s.s was a bit more challenging. Returning, I found that I had missed eight of the weekly papers-and done none of the reading. The ancient white-bearded professor showed no sign of recognizing me, but then it didn't seem he had ever recognized anyone. The cla.s.s was deep in a discussion of The Gay Science, on Nietzsche's views of man's instinct for self-preservation. After cla.s.s, he stopped in front of my desk and said, "Andre, I appreciated your thoughts on the uber mensch very much. It is a parallel to hermeneutics after all!" He chuckled heartily.