by Rob Spillman
I learned as much from all of them as I did from the Johansons at the Kelmscott, not about theoretical concerns, but about the real world of the lower and middle classes, a reality I had not been exposed to at Boys’ Latin or Aspen or in the rarefied world of classical music. My teammates’ uncomplicated dreams—of stability through marriage and finding decent jobs with benefits—were otherworldly to me, as unlikely for me as living in a Parisian garret writing novels.
My collegiate focus quickly turned toward the track and cross-country teams, where it stayed for the next four years. For 1,622 days, I ran every day. And on many of those 1,622 days, I ran twice a day. I averaged thirteen miles a day, ninety miles a week, week after week, month after month, year after year. Though I ate pasta constantly, my weight never deviated from the 138-to-140-pound range, my body fat dangerously low.
With my teammates I ran every day in whatever weather, then drank cheap National Bohemian beer afterward, in the van on the way back from meets in dour mid-Atlantic backwaters like Lehigh, Pennsylvania, and Seaford, Delaware, home to numerous chicken-processing plants, which smelled like the Kelmscott’s back room before I cleaned it out. Besides the times when I was reading, these were my happiest moments, these moments of belonging.
My new life slowly wrapped itself around me. I told myself that I was catching my breath and trying to come up with what to do next and where to do it, but in reality I was falling into a yearly cycle of summers in Aspen and school years in Baltimore, where I would go through the motions of being a college student. When I’d been admitted to Towson, the regular day college, I signed up for as many liberal arts classes as I could—sociology, psychology, women’s studies, and literature courses. When I got a 4.0 on my first transcript, I proudly showed it to my mother. “Must have been easy classes,” she said.
I had no reply. As I pushed myself through a workout of mile repeats on the track, the repetitions increasingly painful as my body became starved of oxygen and glycogen, I replayed “Must have been easy,” thinking that my mother had felt betrayed by my failure, by her faith in my abilities having been misplaced. Somewhere in her tone was I know that you can do anything you set your mind to, but never again would I discuss school with her.
My real education continued at the Kelmscott, where I fully invested myself in Castorp’s journey up the Swiss mountain and Gustav’s unrequited yearning in Venice. Classes only existed so I could run competitively. Running wasn’t a routine; it was discipline. When I pushed myself to the maximum, it was blessed erasure. My nonrunning friends wondered how I could get it up to run every day. “Running isn’t hard,” I would say. “It’s the stopping that’s hard.”
Drinking also didn’t feel like a routine, even though I did it with a passion almost equal to the one I brought to running. Hard-alcohol hangover runs were brutal, so I tried to stick to beer, but would sometimes take whatever was being poured at a party, invariably swearing off the harder stuff for a while after an evening like the Windex incident—blue Curacao, vodka, and pineapple juice turning my vomit blue. Even though there were always women, they were also not routine. I wanted them all and I wanted them all to love me, or at least sleep with me. Every time I saw a woman I desired with another man, it felt like a rejection. Yet at the same time I was always surprised when any woman wanted me and was also mystified as to why I was rarely without a girlfriend.
My mutability made it easy for me to meet all sorts of Baltimore’s substratum—drunks, heroin addicts, anarchists, punks, closeted gays, open queens, girls who thought they were witches, boys who called themselves poets and were beaten up by football players, kids who hung out at Edith Massey’s thrift store in Fell’s Point and wanted to be Divine, or any of the kids who hung around wherever John Waters was hanging out. It helped that I had one of the few cars among these losers, even if it was a piece-of-crap hand-me-down 1976 Corolla from my mother.
The car wasn’t necessary when we went to see punk shows at the Marble Bar, but there were a lot better bands playing down in Washington, where the D.C. hardcore scene was emerging around Ian MacKaye, first with his band Minor Threat, then with Fugazi. We’d pile in my car and drive down to sketchy F Street and the newly opened 9:30 Club, one of us calling out “Fucked up” even though we all knew that the name “Fugazi” came from Vietnam soldier slang for “fucked up” when the action got intense; but this knowledge was a badge of belonging, a barrier between the initiated and the poor squares who didn’t know any better. We’d drive down to see any of the bands on MacKaye’s Dischord Record label and other local bands like The Slickee Boys and Bad Brains, and a few months after the bar’s opening, national punk bands like Hüsker Dü, X, and the Butthole Surfers.
When there were no bands playing, I turned to assemblage. With the success of my small-scale Aspen experiments of radical intent, I fashioned ambitious, advanced critical mass experiments with my ever-expanding assemblage of oddballs. I would gather as many freak friends as I could, add drugs and alcohol, then go out on the town to see how the mixture would withstand the elements. We would gain momentum at the Club Charles, a glorified downtown dive bar across the street from the one art movie theater in town; then, emboldened, we’d venture to the land of the squares, maybe even out to the suburban Towson bars where the ultrapreppies gathered under crossed lacrosse sticks mounted on peach-colored walls. Who would be the first to be called a creep or fag by some uptight Baltimoron, perhaps even by one of my old Boys’ Latin classmates? My money was usually on my high school friend Jack, who had stayed in town to attend Johns Hopkins and was now flying the “fuck you” flag of disdain for anything square. If it wasn’t Jack, it was always one of us who was pushed, or hit, or spit on, and then bouncers materialized and started pummeling the combatants.
Casually dressed in black jeans and a T-shirt, looking neither preppy nor punk, I was safely tucked within the group, vicariously enjoying it, never instigating or throwing punches. My friends acted out all of my most extreme impulses. And then, on the sidewalk, bloodied and exhilarated, they’d hug me as if I had been right in the middle of the action, mixing it up just like they had.
My friends were my collective alter ego. And one of them, Sean, could have been my doppelgänger or evil twin. Sean and I were born on the exact same day, same year, the fourth darkest day of the year, mid-December. But while I was being a good boy, sliding through life unobserved, Sean dropped out of high school and was busted for heroin possession. Despite being a junkie dropout, Sean was surprisingly well-read, and I undercharged him when he came into the Kelmscott looking for Russian classics. After his bust, Sean was put on probation and a methadone program, which he found intolerable, so he supplemented his methadone with speed and/or cocaine.
A few days into the modified program, Sean and I crashed a Johns Hopkins frat party. We were without our usual posse, and Sean was unusually tweaked out, sweating profusely as he talked about Marx to the guys around the keg. He could usually pull off a good Marxist rant, but his brain was racing ahead of his tongue and he sounded like Lucky in Waiting for Godot, a mostly senseless frothing rant punctuated with moments of profound clarity. Mid-sentence, Sean froze, his brain seizing, and he bolted from the downstairs parlor toward the bathroom at the top of the stairs. I ran after him and was right behind him as we entered the bathroom. I could hear brothers sprinting up the stairs, yelling. Sean slammed the door behind us with both hands with so much force that half the ceiling fell down, a huge plaster chunk splitting on top of Sean’s head, opening a jagged gash across his plaster-coated forehead. When the frat boys started pounding on the door, Sean turned and dove through the open window.
I was all for throwing myself into the void, but I wanted a decent chance of survival. I dashed to the window, expecting to see a horrible splat of Sean on pavement, but there was grass below, two stories down, and somehow Sean had landed safely and was now running across the lawn toward the woods. No way was I making that le
ap, so I opened the door and faced a dozen angry brothers, half-hoping that they would beat me up. I was laughing as I said, “That crazy fuck jumped out the window.” They asked me if I knew who he was, and I said, “No clue, but I think he’s a chemistry major.”
A part of me wanted to be like Sean, to live out loud, to be seen. But the anonymity of the chameleon life fit much more comfortably. I could pass almost anywhere—except when I was behind the wheel of my car. My friends, under the influence of many legal and illegal substances, had declared the Corolla’s maroon color “profoundly dull, a crime against humanity.” They’d endeavored to bring justice with twenty-seven cans of spray paint, covering it with unrecognizable shapes and blotches, our handprints . . . whatever felt right at the moment. For two years I parked the psychedelic mess many blocks away from my mother’s house, successfully concealing it from her until college graduation. I was able to hide it from her, but not from the police, who stopped me on any pretext and then searched the car for drugs. I racked up so many tickets, my license was suspended.
Four years of passing as a college student yielded a whippetlike body and a psychology degree, which might’ve been enough to land a fry cook job. Along the way I had taken enough straight science classes, including a half dozen premed, to get into graduate schools for sports psychology; these included the University of Arizona, which I signed up for. Maybe I’d be a coach, or an academic researcher, or maybe by going to the desert I’d figure out why I was in a spiritual desert.
My plan was to fill my car with books from the Kelmscott and then, after yet another blissful summer in Aspen, drive to Tucson, where the wide-open, dry landscape was an ideal place to run. I assumed there would be plenty of women to choose from, and as long as I could keep reading and keep running, that would approximate a life.
To celebrate my last Baltimore night, I planned to get good and drunk with my friend Jack. In a warm drizzle, I drove to a Fell’s Point dive bar full of dockworkers knocking back beer and shots in their well-worn coveralls.
“You ever leaving this place?” I asked Jack.
“Don’t have a reason to,” Jack said, and we clinked whiskey shots. I envied his combination of wildness and stability. He’d always lived in Hampden, had persevered at Boys’ Latin, had thrived as a double English and chemistry major at Hopkins, and now had gotten a scholarship to stay for graduate school in their prestigious science-writing program. He was working Orioles home games selling popcorn, taking home trash bags full of leftover popcorn to subsist on.
“Take care of Sean,” I said.
“I’ll try,” Jack said. “But you know him. . . .”
“Think of me when you guys are getting thrown out of Poor Richard’s,” I said, weirdly future nostalgic for a place I loathed.
By closing we had succeeded in our mission. Jack was a degree less good, so I gave him my keys, which was like putting a bullet in one of a revolver’s six empty cylinders and spinning the chamber. As he peeled out of the gravel parking lot, I recalculated the odds from 16-percent to 100-percent certain that we were going to crash. It was only a matter of how hard and where. I hoped it would be a memorable crash, or at least one that would make me feel deeply again, even for a split second.
Jack accelerated along the old, cobbled street, the tires rising off the stones, one at a time, up and down, bouncing, the car sagging and then bobbing as we dipped and rose. We were flying forward, skipping like a flat rock on a rippled lake. But then the car skidded slightly to the left, then a little to the right, then violently to the left, the tail whipping around, spinning the car across the cobbles toward the side of a brick building. I would like to say that I was scared, but I wasn’t. I knew the drill. Almost exactly four years after the near head-on outside of Rochester, I welcomed this onrushing crash like an old, reckless friend who at least makes you feel alive even as he is putting you back in mortal danger. With each high-speed revolution I thought, Jack’s side, my side, Jack’s side, my side. If the car spun into the wall on Jack’s side, he would die. If the car spun into the wall on my side, I would die. Russian roulette, car-crash style. Now the odds were fifty-fifty that the last day of college would also be the last day of my life.
As the wall kept flashing closer and closer, I had to laugh that I’d succeeded in hiding my car till my very last night in Baltimore, and now I was going to total it.
Steel crunching into brick. A joyous sound. The satisfying sound of reality.
Jack’s side.
I rolled away from the car and looked back. Where the hell was he? The whole driver’s side of the car was caved in and the steering wheel was jammed a foot to the right. I got up and walked around to the other side, where Jack was standing in the gap between the building and the car. Apparently we had bounced off the wall. Jack was staring at the crushed car, dumbfounded.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?” he said, still staring.
“How the hell did you get out?”
“Don’t know,” Jack said, then turned to me.
“You okay?” I asked.
“My head hurts.”
“Me too,” I said, and grabbed Jack’s arm to move us away from the crumpled car, which was hissing like a pissed-off snake. We brushed away safety glass, then flexed our arms, disbelieving that we weren’t broken and bloodied.
We silently agreed to move farther away from the car. Jack didn’t talk. I didn’t talk. We walked five blocks, stopped, but neither of us had anything to say so we kept walking, silent as we navigated the five miles back to our neighborhood. A block from my house I said, “We’ll report it stolen.” Jack nodded. We nodded goodbye, then I was in bed. I thought that I should try to stay awake in case I had a concussion. But my eyelids were like slabs of concrete.
55
“History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created.”
—William Morris
Soundtrack: Thelonious Monk, “Who Knows,” 1947
“THERE IS THE SOUP KITCHEN,” Ralf said.
“Soup kitchen?” I said. Near midnight at the CV, I was turning into a pumpkin. Or crashing, my blood sugar flatlining. I hadn’t eaten since a little bit of bread for breakfast.
“Yes,” Ralf said, “it is now a bar, of course, but it has some food. It is, how you say, harder than this place.”
“You mean rougher?”
“Yes, yes, that’s it. Under the GDR the soup kitchen was hidden, so it is not easy to find, and it still attracts a rougher type.”
“Charming, I’m sure,” Elissa said, and Hank shrugged. He was hardly eating, was thin even for him, but he was still getting up every morning at dawn to sketch at the Wall. We followed Ralf across the park opposite the wine bar, then two more blocks past older mismatched buildings that were all slightly off-kilter, as if they’d been drawn by a child. Halfway down the block we turned into a lightless alley, a narrow corridor of strewn paving stones with a five-foot-wide brackish river coursing down the right side, leaving a foot-wide walkway. A plank stretched over the river and into a bright doorway. As we approached, two men danced across the plank, and one with a huge black beard, on seeing us, slipped and plopped feet-first into the foot-deep muck. The man grabbed Ralf’s hand and let himself be tugged onto dry land.
“Danke.”
“Bitte,” Ralf said.
We all skipped up the plank and were met by a thick cloud of smoke, blue and bitter, from Russian and Cuban and East German cigarettes. Long black picnic tables were scattered around the large square room, and along the back wall was an eight-inch-tall slot where, I guessed, the soup was once sloshed.
A single word was hand-drawn on a paper plate and taped over the slot: “PIZZA.”
“Pizza,” Ralf affirmed, pointing to the sign.
“Hallelujah, Jesus,” Elissa said. “See, I knew this place would be
charming.”
“Amen,” I seconded. Pizza would cure Elissa’s homesickness, I thought, and for some reason I was hearing this thought as the Wicked Witch of the West saying, “Poppies will put them to sleep.”
“Find a seat and I will bring the pizza,” Ralf said.
“I’ll get the beers,” Hank said. I slid him a few extra marks without Elissa’s noticing. I knew I shouldn’t feel sorry for him, but he was suffering in order to render this world through his art.
Hank cut through the crowd of smaller Germans while Elissa and I found space in the middle of a table near the back, next to a couple of guys playing chess. Despite the chess set, the crowd was, as Ralf had promised, rougher than at the CV, with a lot more facial hair, and a few facial piercings, along with the musky smell of too many manly men in one room. The four or five women were equally tough-looking. If the CV was like a groovy bohemian bar, the soup kitchen was more like a biker bar. But no one took much notice of us.
Ralf cut right through the room, thick with bodies, back to our picnic table, where he proudly presented the pizza. It was about six inches in diameter. The white dough was crossed by two half-inch stripes of plastic-looking white cheese. In the quadrants were, counterclockwise, one dollop of tomato puree, a small pile of corn, what appeared to be two withered mushrooms, and lastly, one canned, color-leached peach.
“Pizza?” Elissa said. I could feel her homesickness returning full force. How many late nights had we had a soul-saving slice from Ray’s on the corner of St. Mark’s Place and Second Avenue? This was the food of our courtship, the fuel to get us through four bands at CBGB’s, the sponge to sop up the mess at the end of another sloppy night at Joe’s, Downtown Beirut, the Village Idiot.
“Yes, pizza,” Ralf stated, confused by Elissa’s doubt in the face of the irrefutable evidence. She took a hopeful bite of the tomato quarter, and her look of abject disappointment should have been enough for me to spirit her back to the East Village. I bit off the tip of the mushroom slice, the surprising taste of hot plastic and grassy mud like getting hit in the mouth with a dirty, errant Frisbee.
