Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost

by Richard Rushfield

  “But, Drake,” I pleaded, “I’m only a first-year! I’m not even eighteen!”

  “Hampshire College is no place for boys, son,” he barked. “Suit up.”

  We soon sat on a wooden bench, Drake stark naked, I with a towel wrapped several times around my waist, another one draped over my shoulders, another one wrapped girdle-like around my torso. Drake lay down on the upper bench and drank in the heat, describing his new fling to me. I sat at his feet, coughing violently and trying to ignore the three hippies sitting across from us. There were two boys and one girl—all even paler than myself, all completely naked. When I peeked over, my eyes locked on incredible folds of flesh—shapes I had never fathomed loomed before me like killer icebergs rising from the sea. I realized this was the first time I had seen anyone naked in person, and I thought that if this was a glimpse at what was in store, some rough and terrible decades lay ahead.

  Drake asked if I’d “gotten laid yet.”

  “Not yet, actually.”

  The hippies snickered.

  “Well, what are you waiting for, soldier? This is Hampshire. What else was the point of coming here?”

  “I guess the subject hasn’t come up yet,” I gulped out and collapsed in a coughing fit, choking on the heat. Drake seemed to be falling asleep. When I recovered I asked, “So I haven’t seen that Malaria girl around.”

  “Who?”

  “Remember that girl from the party when I was visiting? The one in the red stockings?”

  “Malaria? . . . Oh, you mean Malaria Grant.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Oh, right, she’s hot, Rich. You should get with her. But look out for Luntz.”

  “Luntz?”

  “The head of the Alternative Music Collective. The guy who brings all the punk bands to campus. Looks like a tank in a leather jacket.”

  “Ohhhh . . .”

  “Don’t pretend you didn’t know she was shacked up, Rich, you devil.”

  Lonnie, my SID, was still deep in denial about my presence. He communicated with me only in scowls and murmurs implying that the wheels for my extermination had been set in motion, and that since I would cease to exist as soon as he carved through some troublesome red tape, it would be a waste of his time to acknowledge me.

  After our first tentative hellos, the other hallmates greeted me with nervous smiles and glances at the floor when I tried to speak to them, as though they had been secretly told about some terrible fate being prepared for me. If they were in a giving mood, they’d trouble themselves to point at the QUIET! signs on the hall when I opened my mouth.

  One afternoon, I opened a letter that had been buried deep in my orientation packet folder and learned I had an advisor; Leo Raintree, a Social Sciences professor who specialized in health policy. I then saw that I had an appointment with him—three days ago. In a mild rush of panic, I hurried to the brick-and-concrete Franklin Patterson Social Sciences Hall and found him in his office, door open. A portly white-haired and -bearded Santa Claus type, he sat at his desk in a baggy white knit sweater applying Wite-Out to a yellow sheet of paper in his typewriter.

  “We just assumed you’d never showed up!” he said when I introduced myself. “Lots of Californians chicken out.”

  I assured him that I was, in fact, here.

  “So how’s your first week been?” he asked, summoning me to join him among solemn mountains of faded statistical abstracts and legal pads.

  “Well? I think. . . .” Across the room I squirmed on a metal folding chair. Leo stroked his beard and smiled, waiting for me to elaborate. “It’s going really well.”

  “That’s great. Wonderful. I knew there was no cause to worry about you.” Leo nodded. “What classes are you looking at?”

  “Classes? I’m not sure, um, do you know how that works?” I had noticed in the past couple days that the crowds were moving across campus with an ominous new sense of purpose. I’d even seen a few people hurrying. And the presence of books under arms was becoming undeniable. In the back of my mind I was aware that classes would form a part of my college experience. But I assumed that somehow or other I would be informed through proper channels that it was time the whole learning thing got rolling. Despite the evidence that academia was breaking out across campus like a prewinter flu, it didn’t seem credible that just days after arriving, when I still hadn’t even put sheets on my bed, the school was expecting me to throw myself headlong into any higher-learning rigamorole.

  Leo looked concerned. “You haven’t signed up for classes yet?”

  “Signed up?”

  “But this is the last day of shop-around!”

  “Ah, shop-around. Of course.”

  “Ha! Wonderful!” Leo slapped his knee and leaned back, laughing. I joined in, chuckling a bit, glancing up at his poster of ripples across a pond above a Robert Kennedy quote. “You know, I get more and more first-years these days coming in here obsessed with signing up for classes, figuring out their requirements. But that’s not why we came to Hampshire, is it?”

  “No, no. Definitely not.”

  He leaned in and grew serious. “Richard, this is your chance to explore YOU. It may be the only chance you ever have in your life. And you and I know you can’t do that sitting in classes.” I agreed. “So whatever they tell you, take some time, explore, make mistakes, find out what moves you. Maybe get a little crazy. . . .” He pantomimed inhaling a joint.

  “That sounds like a good idea.”

  “You bet it does. Solid.” He stood and put his hand out for me to give him five, which I did.

  “So . . . ,” I asked as he motioned me toward the door, “I should just show up at some classes?”

  “Ha, yes. You probably should!”

  “And where do I find them?”

  “Where do you find classes? In the classrooms!” He roared with laughter again. “But don’t get obsessed with that! Remember our deal. Come back and see me midsemester. I want to hear everything. Take notes! Take pictures!”

  I left Leo’s office with my swagger restored. I strutted around campus, turning my nose up at the fools racing off to class with their silly textbooks. I applied myself with new diligence to hanging my Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle poster and my collection of personalized California license plates, stolen off the cars of my high school classmates. In my spare moments, I took the time to get acquainted with a Galaga machine I discovered in the college tavern.

  Twenty-four hours later, however, having completed several circumnavigations of the campus, gotten the high score of the day on Galaga, read through another detective novel, and listened to Hüsker Dü’s two-record Zen Arcade three times in its entirety, I lay on my pale-green plastic mattress staring into Marlon Brando’s pitiless sneer on my Apocalypse Now poster. Outside the Indian summer lingered and I listened to the bits of conversation that wafted up to my window with the smell of pot. I wondered what I was going to do for the rest of the day. I wondered what I was going to do for the rest of the week. I tried to wonder what I was going to do for the next four years, but like comprehending infinity, my mind refused to grasp what seemed an impossible contradiction—limitless time with nothing to fill it. I sighed and reached for the course catalog lying on my floor.

  The next morning I trudged through a cluster of woods behind the library to the discreet white lodge labeled “Emily Dickinson Hall,” which looked like a Radisson conference facility in some leafy suburb. About thirty students drifted into a classroom and sat around a long conference table. Through the giant picture windows, five hippies tossed a Frisbee to each other, knee-deep in an overgrown field.

  From the name of the class it seemed like fate: “From Mark Twain to Miami Vice: Images of the American Male in Popular Culture.” This was where I would find my people—in the Miami Vice class!

  As my fellow Crockett and Tubbs scholars filed in, however, I checked the catalog a few dozen times to make sure I had come to the right classroom. Dressed identically to the rest of the ca
mpus in tie-dyes, knit sweaters, Birkenstocks, flowing skirts, and dreadlocks, the group bore little resemblance to any Miami Vice fans I’d ever met. These people dressed as though Miami Vice had never happened.

  And once again, they all seemed to know each other.

  The teacher entered. Helen was a tall, fiftyish, more imposing version of the girls in the class and she had the stately air of disapproval of a Margaret Dumont masquerading in hippie garb. She announced that she wanted to start the class out with one fun session before we got “down to business.” She wanted to see where we stood on the texts—how well informed we were about the issues they raised. “So just think about Miami Vice and Mark Twain,” she said, “and write whatever comes into your mind. Don’t stop and think, just write. Go ahead.”

  We took out our pens and the rest of the class, without a moment’s pause, attacked their pages like starving men set down before a plate of butterscotch cannoli. All except me. I gaped at the page and scoured my brain for a thought. It was empty, a sea of whiteness like the blank sheet before me. I looked again. The sentence flashed in my head, “I want to be Sonny Crockett.” I grabbed for my pen and I pushed harder—noting the students on either side scribbling wildly. I caught Helen looking at me. “There’s no right answer here,” she urged. “Any thoughts you have are equally valid. Just share with us.”

  Images came to me—moments from the past season. Finally, phrases dashed through my head like lightning flashes. I began to write.

  Ten minutes later, Helen coughed and said. “All right, let’s hear what you’ve got. Drew”—she motioned to the dopey-looking blond boy on her right—“would you read for us?”

  Drew cleared his throat. “When I think of Miami Vice and Mark Twain I see Huck floating on his raft, the sunlight on his face, tapping his hands on the water. On the shore, a factory churns out smoke and identical Miami police costumes, but Huck turns his raft away and with his friend aboard, the river drifts to a time from before cities and industry. Off in the distance, they can see the nuclear missiles flying, but on the river they are free and they are beautiful.”

  I stifled a laugh and shot eye-rolling glances at the kids across the table. They looked away. “Perfect,” Helen said. I glanced down at what I had written and a cold sweat broke out in every corner of my body.

  Next to him sat a petulant-looking hybrid hippie girl/aspiring librarian (a tribe I would come to know very, very well over the next five years) with a pen tucked behind her ear and a neatly pressed gray sweatshirt from “Burlington-Managua Fellowship Week: July 14-21, 1985.” She cleared her throat. “Miami Vice depicts the Meese Justice Gestapo disguised in pastel camouflage to hide their instruments of oppression under brilliant plumage.” I restrained myself from shouting, But they’ve switched to earth tones. “Underneath their colorful garbs, Crockett and Tubbs are in fact creations of the RCA corporate machine, which is com plicit in the many crimes of the Reagan regime. The war on drugs they pretend to fight is a war on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, straining for empowerment after centuries of imperialist domination.”

  “Very, very good, Laurel,” Helen gushed when she finished. “We are really going to need your perspective this semester.” In full panic I slid my page off the table and into my lap. “Now, who’s next? What’s your name?”

  “Richard,” I mumbled. “But I don’t have anything to read.”

  “What do you mean?” Helen looked down her glasses at me. “I saw you writing.”

  “I think—I think I misunderstood the assignment.”

  Helen chuckled. “There was no assignment, just to share with us. There’s no right answer here; no judgment.”

  “I just think I’d rather not.”

  “Don’t you trust us?” Helen purred. “We just want to get to know you.” I looked around the room. The other students smiled at me, vague benign stares, poised for a group hug. “Why don’t you give us the chance to show you what a safe place this can be.”

  I was on the opposite side of the room from the door. If I made a run for it, I would have to leap over a dozen sets of legs splayed from the second row. Alternately, if I sprang onto the conference table and if I flung myself hard enough, in one leap I might be able to fly over the heads of the opposite row and reach the door, all it would take was a little luck, perfect coordination, wind conditions . . . I sighed and pulled the crumpled paper off my lap, smoothed it on the table. “So this is just me, just like free-associating, right?”

  “Absolutely.” Helen nodded. “Share with us.”

  I mopped back a wash of sweat, cleared my throat, glanced tentatively around the room, looked down, and began. “Drop the bomb, exterminate them all. We’re up the river, all right, Tubbs. Never get off the raft, never, until they’re all blown away. ’Nam. Cracktown. Back with Jeff on the river. We’re all orphans when the shit comes down, Jeff, and this one is gonna be bad. Warehouse full of Colombians, no air support for forty clicks and Calderón is flying out tonight. Gotta take him down, but Zito and Switek are going to need their cut. Switek—don’t get high on your own supply, man. Remember which side of the river you’re on. First you get the drugs, then you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the girls. It’s in the air tonight, man, so don’t fuck this up or Carmen ain’t gonna have her girls waiting for us. Sheena Easton. Going to get her back. Do I want her back? Pastels made our name but earth tones, earth tones, man. On my sign, we go in four and don’t stop firing until no one is moving. Drop the bomb. Never, ever, get off the raft.”

  I finished and kept my eyes fastened on the page. Around the class, I heard a silence so complete, I wondered if anyone was still in the room with me. I wondered if perhaps the entire campus had vaporized. I waited for the deep, rich, full-bodied silence to end, but it didn’t. Eventually I looked up. Hippie faces are not made for strong emotion. Generally they alternate between dizzy, mouth-half-open smiles, and mouth-half-open vegetative gawks of sympathy—reserved for the sight of stumbling puppies and overcooked tempeh. So when I saw thirty of these faces pointed my way, contorted with sneers of disgust, eyes suddenly piercing from their soft, pale faces, my first thought was concern for them. Are they all right? I wondered.

  “Well,” Helen said finally, “you certainly do have some interesting thoughts. That’s not exactly where this class is headed, but I suppose it’s important for everyone to hear that. Where are you from, Richard?”

  “Los Angeles,” I murmured. Everyone laughed.

  “Well, that explains it all, doesn’t it?” Helen burst out laughing. My classmates howled, some doubling over their desks so heartily, even I couldn’t help but join in.

  “Yes,” I choked out, “it really does!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  What Friends Are For

  After a couple weeks stumbling in and out of classrooms, I found three professors still fishing for students who were A willing to let me into a class on fascism, a seminar on Emerson and Nietzsche, and “The Media versus the U.S. government.” The Emerson class was taught by an ancient, storybook tweeded professor, who, without a single nod or feint to the sixties, or the march of pop culture since, might as well have been a knight from King Arthur’s court teleported to the campus. He had a habit during class of galloping his trains of thought off into distant mists—driving his lectures from Emerson’s theories on nature to “that damned fool Godfried whose paper was just wrong wrong wrong. Imagine, bringing in Heidegger! Shameful!”

  Near the end of September, I sat alone one night in the distant corner of the back room of the dining hall, puzzling over my first writing assignment—a two-page paper, due the next morning, on Emerson’s quote “Faith makes us and not we it.” The quote awoke as many thoughts in me as if I were reading a recipe for duck à l’orange in Urdu. Worse was the problem that I still had not bought my books. In fact, I still wasn’t sure whether Emerson was a novelist and the professor was just reading this idea stuff into the plot or if Emerson had just jotted these big
ideas down willy-nilly. Philosophy, I understood they called it.

  In week three, it was still possible to skip merrily through college without books. No one had made an issue of it; I’d even joined in class discussion once. But with a paper due in twelve hours and the bookstore closed, a tiny panic began to curdle my edges. Even to those who had done the reading, the professor’s ruminations had been so obscure that some speculated they might have been meant for some other class he was teaching—or had taught years before. I played with my bowl of “hunter’s stew” and stared at the doodles I’d made during the lecture, hoping one of them would sprout wings and turn into a two-page essay.

  And then suddenly someone said, “Do you mind if I sit here?” I spat my Coke out into the hunter’s stew. These were not words that typically stood the universe on its head. “Do you mind if I sit here?” was no “Friends, Romans, countrymen” nor “The meek shall inherit the earth,” “Death to the tsar,” nor “The better angels of our nature.” The sentence might not even have held up to “I want my MTV,” but this was the first time in three weeks at Hampshire that those words had been spoken to me. By a girl, no less. They descended like a thunderbolt hurled from Mount Olympus.

  The young woman who faced me had medium-length brown hair, eager brown eyes, and a suspiciously broad smile that made me suspect that I was the victim of a cruel joke. She wore sweatpants and a lightweight overcoat. Stunned, I nodded nervously, and turned back to my Emerson doodles. A few seconds later, I glanced up and saw she was looking at me while chewing on a soggy slice of the dining hall pizza.

  “Is that an art assignment?” she asked, smiling bemusedly.

  “Um, no. Sort of. Maybe. This is what I took away from my Emerson lecture today.”

  “Well, at least you went. That should count for most of it, right?”

  “Yes! It should!”

  Her name, she said, was Dana; she was from Rye, New York. An aspiring photo student, I soon learned. Dana had come here because her brother had graduated from Hampshire seven years before. The school, she said, was “still kinda decent then.”