Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Part 9

"Who would've thought?" I joined in, laughing.

I decided not to go back to Emerson and Nietzsche. When my evaluations arrived in Los Angeles three weeks later, my evaluation read, "Richard's cla.s.s partic.i.p.ation was pointed and inspiring . . . his papers articulate and profound." I gasped, wondering if at that moment there was an Andre in the cla.s.s who was in tears reading the most blistering evaluations of his life. Grinning madly, I brought the envelope to my parents, eager to share my two glowing reports (or one glowing report and one so-so one, to be precise). I hadn't expected that the quant.i.ty of my evaluations rather than the quality would catch their eyes.

After spending December in the eternal night of Mod 21, I felt like a vampire facing the sun for the first time since the Middle Ages. The neon hum of Los Angeles's shopping streets, ominously balmy even at eleven at night, the manicured housefronts, the quiet, order, and cleanliness of my parents' house, all seemed to point an accusing finger my way.

My first day back my parents tried to hide their anxiety when I slept until five. The second day, I slumbered past six, awakening as my father came home from work. They shared their concerns.

"It's the time change," I explained.

"You sleep until three at school?"

"How do you get to cla.s.s?"

The Hamps.h.i.+re system, I wearily explained once more. You can't judge it by your hidebound, Old World notions.

The next day I woke up at two and sat in front of the TV, flipping between F Troop reruns, Donahue, and soap operas, fixating on Stacey Q's midriff in the "Two of Hearts" video. On my parents' wall calendar I counted forty-three days until I was to return to school on January 30. I called Northwest Airlines and learned that for a mere twenty-five dollars I could move up my return to January 3.

Between fall and spring semesters, Hamps.h.i.+re held a special month-long session known as January Term, during which students could take cla.s.ses and workshops taught by other students. Whether motivated by pity for the students who would otherwise have to endure the below-zero temperatures or, as more commonly rumored, by a desire to save money on the school's heating bill, attendance at Jan Term was not only optional but tacitly discouraged. At the time it was estimated that only two to three hundred of Hamps.h.i.+re's twelve hundred students showed up each year. Still stuck in some of my pre-Hamps.h.i.+re thought processes, I cringed at the notion of "extra school" and so hadn't given any thought to returning-until the day before I left for L.A., when I heard the crowd in 21 speaking of Jan Term in ways that fired my imagination.

"Really weird things happen," Susie told me.

"Like what?"

"Campus is empty. It's so cold that you can't go outside. It's when people go crazy, they just lose it," she said, her eyes lighting up at the memory.

The room nodded and seemed shocked that I wasn't planning to return.

Three weeks later, I flew back into Hartford at five o'clock on a Tuesday evening. As I stepped out of the airport, I gasped at the cold. Three weeks in L.A., and had I forgotten this? I jumped up and down, duffel bag on my back, waiting for the Peter Pan bus. Even on the bus, where the heat blasted in blazing gusts, I still felt cold. Cold lodged itself between my toes and under my legs like a parasite. I s.h.i.+vered violently in my seat on the empty bus, peering into the darkness, trying to make out traces of the Connecticut River. In the seat across from me, a metalhead in a puffy blue windbreaker air-drummed to the Poison alb.u.m he was listening to on his Walkman, which I could hear clearly where I sat. When he caught me glancing at him, he stopped the tape.

"What's up, man?"

I shook my head.

"Wanna score some wicked crystal?" Tempted for a moment, I nonetheless declined.

The rest of the buses I had to take were nearly empty along my route. Even the normally humming Springfield Peter Pan station was abandoned but for a few homeless people s.h.i.+vering on the benches, wrapped in layers of blankets. In Amherst, I waited on the deserted main street for the Five College bus, which the schedule informed me came only every two hours in January. Arriving on campus just after ten, I didn't pa.s.s a single person as I shuffled down the icy trail, past the looming concrete library and campus center, into the Greenwich woods.

I stopped and stood still as I entered the cl.u.s.ter of wooden doughnuts. I didn't hear a sound anywhere in the world. Greenwich sat deserted, as though it had been evacuated ahead of a marauding army. The lights were out in every window. The tree branches were bare and coated with ice.

Outside 21, slivers of light peeked from behind the black sheets on the doorway and reflected off the snow. From Susie's window upstairs, Bessie Smith warbled out into the night. I climbed onto the porch, trod over the snow-covered broken bottles, the ventriloquist's dummy, and the car transmission, and, taking a deep, frigid breath, opened the door.

In the living room, Meg, Tim, Ox, Jon, Sa'ad, Marilyn, Michael the Krishna, Monica, Jerome, Susie, and a dozen others sat talking. Meg was saying, "I can't believe you don't like the b.u.t.thole Surfers. You're such a f.u.c.king hypocrite."

Jon giggled and said, "Just another Supreme d.i.c.k cover band, if you ask me. Rich, what do you think?"

Everyone looked up at me, waiting for an answer. I put down my duffel bag. "I guess I kinda like them."

Meg and Sa'ad hooted at Jon. "You see!"

"Rich, I can't believe you're saying that." They dove back into their fight. I stood in the middle of the room. No one gave a hint of recognizing that I had just returned, or that I had been gone. In fact, looking at them, sitting in the same places in the same outfits, I realized there was no evidence that anyone had even left the living room or been off the couch in the three weeks since I'd been to California and back. There was nothing, in fact, to indicate that the last three weeks had actually happened and weren't a hallucination of mine.

My room was freezing cold and smelled more than ever of cat urine. Someone had opened a window to smoke, which I gathered from the heap of cigarette b.u.t.ts stubbed out on the sill. I pulled out a Camel, lit it, and sat down on my bed. On my Sid and Nancy poster someone had drawn X's over the protagonists' genital regions and written s.e.x KILLS. f.u.c.kING IS FOR f.u.c.kERS. I pulled a blanket around my shoulders over my overcoat and listened to the chatter from the living room. I looked out the window into the dead night. Somewhere out there, Zach and Nathan were still warm in Los Angeles. I shuddered and went back out to join the crowd.

During Jan Term the whole campus seemed to give in to our way of life. It wasn't even a question of our being unmotivated to move-there was no place to move to. In the few hours of thin daylight, we wandered s.h.i.+vering through the arctic cold across a deserted landscape. The library was open only for a couple hours a day. The snack bar and Tavern were closed. In the dining hall the few people who dotted the back room in little islands spoke in whispers, afraid to disturb the hush. Even security couldn't be aroused when the band set up in a Merrill House hallway. During our two-hour recital, three students wandered by, encased in dozens of layers. They peeked out under the brims of their hats, and wandered past without a word.

At night, the group, or breakaway cl.u.s.ters of three to six of us, ventured up to Prescott House, where every evening the hundred or so people on campus packed into a mod and s.h.i.+vered together. The drink of choice at these gatherings switched from beer to bottles of Jack Daniel's and Maker's Mark, which pa.s.sed freely through the crowd. By eleven o'clock several people would be vomiting off the fire escape, the Joy Division alb.u.m skipping unattended on the turntable. Some hippie girl would be making out with a Mohawked punk in a corner while the hippie boy she came with stood up on the counter and wept that our souls had been destroyed by the Reagan War Machine and we were too blind to see how f.u.c.ked we all were.

After a few of these parties, I noticed that between the gazes of emptiness and dread, under the looks of longing that people stared each other down with, there was another element flying between people's eyes. I caught it first when I saw a guy named Carl, in a leather jacket, emerge from a bedroom in the back of one of those mods. Around the room, I caught a dozen sets of eyes fix on him with a slightly terrifying intensity. While most of the room was stretched on the floor, singing along, or bellowing at the top of their lungs, with "Bela Lugosi's Dead," which creaked out of a boom box, Carl adjusted his motorcycle jacket and strolled into the midst of the room, feigning nonchalance while twitching almost imperceptibly. He caught the eye of one girl who had been staring at him, nodded to her, and she sprang up, and together they scampered back to one of the bedrooms. I noticed the little tableau soon repeat itself, in other mods, with other people emerging from the back rooms.

A couple nights later I pointed this out to Susie and asked her what was going on. "They're buying c.o.ke. Everyone here is completely buzzed. It's really gross."

I looked around and noticed a more than average number of people talking to themselves beneath the music and pacing in corners. Even the few people pogoing in the center of the room to a Cramps song seemed, now that she mentioned it, a little too anxious about it.

"c.o.ke makes people so boring, don't you think?"

I agreed it did. "But not like pot, I guess."

"Nothing is as boring as pot. Last Jan Term was all about Quaaludes. That was so much better. Well, I'm sick of watching this. Did you want to try some?"

"Oh, really?" I shook my head. I hadn't done any since my interview that first night at 21. "I mean, maybe." Susie smiled, got up, and beckoned me to follow. She walked us around a corner to the double room, outside of which six people stood s.h.i.+vering in a line. Susie vamped her way past them, shooting them shriveling looks, and pushed open the door. A deep voice yelled from within-"GET! THE! f.u.c.k! Oh, hi, Susie."

Kneeling on the floor, Carl was measuring out tiny Ziploc baggies from a heap of white powder for a club kid dressed in black with a blue streak in his hair. In the back corner, three girls sat on a futon, focused intensely on a mirror coated with white dust and finger trails that lay on the floor beside them.

"Carl," Susie beckoned. "Rich here has lived too sheltered a life with us. He needs some c.o.ke."

"All right, but I gotta charge a hundred fifty a gram. It was a huge ha.s.sle to get it this time of year."

"A hundred fifty? You know we don't have money."

"But, Susie"-Carl looked at her as though he'd been dreaming of throttling her for ages but was unable to make his body respond to his wishes, so instead he went from threatening to whiny-"Susie, this is, like, my job!!"

"Don't be silly. We hardly need any at all. Why do you bother selling c.o.ke if you're going to be such a pain about it?" She s.n.a.t.c.hed the baggie out of his hand. The club kid across the table whimpered in protest. We plopped down on the futon with the three girls.

"Hi, Malaria," Susie said. "Do you want some?" I looked up and noticed to my horror that the girl by the mirror was the girl I'd danced with as a prospective student. Her jet-black hair was now orange. Then she had looked impossibly grown-up and adult; now she looked understandably grown-up, sitting on the futon, resting on the shoulders of two death rock girls, her heavy makeup smearing her face as she wiped away the trails of snot seeping from her nose-still, to my eyes, the picture of glamour and mystique.

"Malaria . . . ," I whispered as Susie beckoned me to a narrow white line of powder on the mirror. I put the rolled twenty Susie handed me into my right nostril and leaned forward. I felt an explosion of blood to my head and wanted badly to laugh, or at least giggle.

"Rub some on your gums," Susie ordered.

The metallic taste numbed my mouth in a surprisingly pleasant way and I ran my finger over the mirror, searching for more. "Malaria," I said, "you're the reason I came to this school."

Conversation stopped. The two death rock girls whispered something to each other. Malaria looked at me, eyes wide, as though she were about to make a run for it. "You're not going to hit on me, are you?"

I convulsed. "What? I mean, no. I mean, what I'm trying to say is, you danced with me."

"I do that sometimes."

"When I was a prospective student. I was taking the tour, from my friend Drake. And we went to a party and you danced with me and you really wanted to talk and I thought you were the coolest, like, grown-up woman who had ever talked to me." I heard the words flooding out and tried to stop them, but the tide would not be held back, my brain now spinning too wildly to have any influence on my tongue. I considered throwing my hands over my mouth to shut myself up, but my hands were waving in the air and couldn't be reined in and the horrifying words were coming still. "And then you left with some guy and I came back to school here to find you." Susie, Malaria, Carl the drug dealer, his client, and the two death rock girls stared at me, I thought, not completely unkindly.

"Well, here I am. But you know, I'm a d.y.k.e now."

"Yeah, I know, I mean I didn't know. But that's not what it's about. Do you ever just feel like you're talking and you want to know somebody but it's like you're talking to somebody else and it's not really them listening?" Shut up, please shut up, I pleaded with myself.

Malaria inhaled a line and nodded. "It's the mind/body problem. We want to talk to people's bodies but only their minds can hear us."

"Exactly! The mind/body problem!"

"Yeah, universal incomprehension is a drag."

"You're the first person who understands!"

"And it's like that Cure song. You know, 'I'm alive. I'm dead. I'm the stranger.' We're all of that. Totally just ripping off Camus, but it's so true."

The death rock girls-Elizabeth and Lucy were their names-perked up at the mention of the Cure and offered that Robert Smith was the only artist who understood that love is the harshest form of murder.

It was after seven A.M. when I finally s.h.i.+vered my way back across campus, grinding my teeth and trying to manage the explosions that reverberated through my skull with every step. Rays of sun poked through the darkness and slammed into me like rubber bullets. The pasty yellowish sky over the Farm Center made me want to cry. I realized I didn't feel anything for Malaria anymore and it occurred to me that, in fact, I would never love anyone ever again.

A week after my return, Monica announced that the air in Mod 21 was becoming dangerously unhealthy. Indeed, even as she mentioned it, half the room was too absorbed in coughing fits to hear her. The normally vigorous fog of cigarette smoke, sweat, rotting food, unwashed clothes, incense, and Susie's perfumes no longer merely hung over the room but clung to every pore. No one could recall the last time the windows had been opened. Whenever a new arrival entered, he or she spent a half hour or so doubled over wheezing, while acclimating to the environment.

Monica suggested we open the windows and doors and air the place out, "just for five minutes." "And maybe take out some of this trash," she added.

We glanced nervously at each other. The temperature outside was right around zero. If she opened the windows, we'd have to leave the room, at least to get our jackets.

"Maybe we should focus our orgone on purifying the air," Ox suggested.

"I'm serious. I can't breathe in here."

"Are you sure this is about the air?" Jon asked. "Or is it that you're s.e.xually frustrated?"

Monica screamed at Jon and a fight broke out, which, we all happily realized, eliminated any immediate threat of a window-opening upheaval.

Taking advantage of the commotion to change the subject, Sharon, a pint-sized rocker, the lead singer of the d.i.c.k-friendly group Five Dumb Broads, said, "Flavio told me he talked to Steve Shavel in Northampton last night."

"No way." "What's he doing?"

"He said he's living in some dorm at Smith. They have a guest room."

"Why doesn't he come back here?"

"He said he's planning a production of The Tempest on the island in Paradise Pond." This sounded credible to most. The Tempest was, I was informed, one of Steve's favorite plays and in the winter, when Smith College's great pond froze, he was known to stroll out to that island with whatever Smithie he could lure and hold impromptu philosophy seminars.

"What if he comes back?" Meg, sitting next to me, said. "What will you do, Rich?" She looked at me and I shrugged, suppressing a flash of panic.

Much later that night, after most of the crowd had moved into various rooms and I sat on the couch reading and trying hard to like a Kathy Acker novel Meg had recommended, the front door creaked open and I looked up to find Elizabeth and Lucy, the death rock girls I'd met in the back room at the party. They glanced around and nodded in approval. Amazingly, both seemed impervious to the smoke, breathing freely.

"So this is the Supreme d.i.c.k mod," Elizabeth, the red-haired taller of the two, said.

"How's it going?"

They looked at me, or glared in suspicion. "You live here?" Elizabeth asked.

"I guess so. You didn't know that?"

"We didn't know who you were," Lucy said.

"We thought you were from the library." They walked in and nodded some more at the plates of food on the floor, the backlit photo of three Gemini astronauts, the Velvet Underground alb.u.m playing, the c.o.c.kroaches strolling the walls.

"This place is cool," Lucy, the shorter, blond one, said. They both plopped down in the armchairs across the room and stared at me. I looked back in silence. They waited for me to say something.

"So you're first-years too?"

They nodded in unison. "Yes, we're first-years." They looked at each other and both burst out laughing.

"I guess I didn't see you around the dorms. When I was living there . . ."

Elizabeth leaned forward and said slowly, pausing significantly after each word, "We don't socialize much."

"No. I mean, me neither. I just mostly hang out."

"So do you have any more c.o.ke?" Elizabeth asked, staring deep into my eyes.

"No. . . . No. Just what we did there."

"Maybe we should go get some more." Elizabeth looked at me so intensely, I dared not refuse. A few minutes later, bundled up in a couple hundred layers, we stomped across campus. Elizabeth and Lucy explained they were from a small town in Ohio, had been best friends since they were born. I asked them how they'd ended up at Hamps.h.i.+re. I had begun to notice that every Hamps.h.i.+re student had a funny story explaining how they got here. Flunking out of another college, expulsion from high school, bizarre dedication to some obscure corner of the curriculum like animal husbandry; it was like asking prison inmates how they'd ended up behind bars and hearing the convoluted tales of mistaken ident.i.ty and oppression at the hands of corrupt authorities. Elizabeth and Lucy, I learned, had come to Hamps.h.i.+re after a high school senior year road trip in search of affordable LSD, which had inevitably led them to an Enfield House mod.

"So do you guys, like, go to cla.s.s?" I asked.

They looked at me. Elizabeth said, "Why, do you?" Lucy, I noticed, seemed not really to speak.

"Not much. I mean, I've been."

At the Prescott Mod, where the party had happened, ten or so nervous-looking people sat or paced around the living room. We started to walk back to Carl's room but the a.s.sembly erupted at once. "You've gotta wait your turn!" Carl stomped out moments later and beckoned someone back into his room. We waited our turn, while the girl with blond dreadlocks, who had previously been back of the line, took hers. I tried to make chatter with Elizabeth, who was busy whispering something to Lucy, who seemed angry at her and turned her head away every time Elizabeth neared.

We were finally summoned into Carl's room. Between us we had forty dollars, for which he measured a very small bag of white powder. He looked me in the eyes as he handed it to me. "You better stay away from that Susie, bra. She'll ruin your life."

He looked very, very serious about what he was saying.

"I live with her."

"Oh, man. You are so screwed."

"She's been really cool."

"Right. Totally cool. Just don't let her know you think so." As we left, Elizabeth asked me, "What did he mean about Susie? Is she dangerous?" Her eyes widened.

"I guess so."

"Susie is amazing." Elizabeth clutched her arms around herself.