A week later, a fire alarm awoke Dakin House in the middle of the night. Standing outside in my T-shirt and sweatpants, I was for the first time in my life seriously cold, and I wondered how much worse this was going to get. The temperature, I thought, might be in the forties. Had I ever felt the forties before?
A group of hippies had started a sing-along, and soon the whole dorm joined in bellowing “Joy to the World.” I slunk away and sat on a ledge, watching a dance circle form in the middle of the quad. I braced myself. Soon the drumming would begin. Across the way, I saw Sydney and Ace crooning to each other, Dana watching them benignly.
Next to me on the ledge I noticed two also sitting out the festivities. One was tall and lanky with a mop of unruly black hair, in blue jeans and a droopy sweater. The other wore a flannel bathrobe and was shorter than I was, with an impossibly boyish face and round glasses. They both gazed upon the carnival with heart-warming looks and malice. Then I heard the short one say to the taller one, “Do you think the mall is still open this late?”
As the taller one shook his head I stood and stuck out my hand. “You guys wouldn’t by any chance be from L.A.?”
They looked at me in shock, like explorers in a distant land might have if, upon prying open an ancient Mayan pyramid, they looked down into a sacred sarcophagus and found their elementary-school class picture inside.
“What are you doing here?” the one in glasses asked me, as prisoners might ask, “What are you in for?”
“Single rooms, you know . . .”
They nodded. “It had the shortest application,” the tall one said.
We all stared at the ground, reflecting for a moment on where our paths had led us.
“Is there anyplace to watch Letterman around here?” I asked.
“I have a TV in my room,” the one in glasses said. My eyes widened and I offered him my hand.
Three weeks later, we loafed in Nathan’s room as he made a phone call. “I’m sorry to bother you at this hour. Is Anthony in?” Nathan removed his round wire-framed glasses, wiped them, and sighed. Even making a prank call he radiated seriousness of purpose, quietly demanding respect. “Yes, it is after midnight, but I thought you’d want to know, your cat is in our tree.”
Nathan patiently nodded as a voice whined on the other end, before saying indignantly, “You don’t have a cat? Well, we don’t have a tree!!!” Nathan held up the phone to pick up the sound of Zach and I laughing hysterically, as we heard the voice on the other end shriek, “FUCK YOU!!!! ASSHOLES!!”
“He took that pretty well,” Zach said after we hung up.
“Add him to the list. We need to call him again sometime.” Nathan marked a red star next to Anthony’s picture in the freshman face book (known as the Frog Book, its cover decorated each year with images of the school’s amphibious mascot).
We fell quiet and stared at the snowy image of David Letterman on Nathan’s twelve-inch black-and-white. The sound came and went until finally it was overcome by static. Nathan sat on a folding chair next to the set and played with the coat-hanger antenna, trying to restore reception. Sitting on the floor, I picked at the hardening remnants of cheese stuck to the cardboard delivery box of the pizza we’d finished an hour before. Sprawled on Nathan’s bed, Zach leafed through a copy of Spin. “Fuck it,” Zach said. “Chris Elliott’s off this week anyway.”
“Should we try my hall again?” I asked.
Nathan glanced out the window across the Dakin Quad. “Looks like Lonnie’s light just went out again. I guess we’d better.”
He dialed the extension of the J-3 hall phone. Across the quad, we watched Lonnie’s light pop on and then Lonnie himself grab a robe and leap for the door. “Three—two—one.” Nathan counted down, and hung up just as we heard Lonnie pant “Hello” into the phone.
“Do you think he’s expecting someone? Why’s he so worked up about answering that phone?”
“He needs to keep his ducks in a row,” I said, imitating Lonnie’s prim voice. “Business conducted on the hall phone is hall business.” Across the quad Lonnie slammed his door and threw his purple robe to the floor in rage.
“Who’s next?” I asked.
“I dunno. Maybe we need a break. I feel like we’re recycling our material,” Zach said.
“You guys going to class tomorrow?” Like myself, Zach had discovered the miracle of life without attendance slips. Nathan, however, amazingly, no matter how late we stayed up, even after the night he passed out drunk on a rock beside the school’s driveway, never missed a class.
“I might,” Zach said. “There’s supposed to be a slide show in my South American poetry class. Someone’s summer trip to Chile.”
“A slide show?” I stroked my chin. “Maybe I’ll check that out.”
The next evening in the SAGA back room we considered the evening’s options. The school had been blanketed with flyers for an “All Campus Drum Circle (for the populación salvadoreño).”
“They might have free beer. Or food,” I suggested.
“Hippies don’t drink beer. Or eat real food.” Nathan sighed.
“What if we turned off the power on the amps?”
“Amps?” Zach sneered. “It’s a drum circle.” I stared at him. “Amps are what you plug guitars into.”
I reddened. “That’s what I meant. Guitar amps . . .”
In the past week, we had seen every movie playing at both neighboring malls (not excluding Space Camp and Jumpin’ Jack Flash), had crank-called approaching two-thirds of the Frog Book, sprinkled itching powder on our hallmates’ towels, dropped water balloons off the library roof, and spiked the punch at a hippie party with Tabasco sauce.
But now we were in a rut. Even the slide show in Zach’s class had been a disappointment. The poet/professor only had one slide of South America and it was of himself speaking to a classroom of ten-year-olds at an elementary school where he had somehow passed himself off as a visiting dignitary. While he displayed his one slide on the screen, he repeated his presentation to the young students—essentially a recitation of his own poetry followed by a brief call to arms against commercialism.
Several of the students in the slide appeared to be asleep. The rest looked politely confused. When he concluded his presentation, asking if there were any questions, Zach had raised his hand and asked in a voice burning with indignation, “How is one slide a show?” The poet asked us to leave.
Sitting with Zach and Nathan in the dining hall, I noticed Gideon, a quasi hippie from Connecticut who lived on Nathan’s hall, carrying his tray on the lookout for an empty table, and alerted the others. The precise term for quasi hippie was “Preppy Deadhead,” which described New England boarding-school students who had adopted the trappings of hippiedom—jumbo-sized knit sweaters, dancing-bear stickers on the rear windows of their Saabs or Volvos, patchouli scentings—without committing to hippies’ scorched-earth policy toward hygiene and mental health ad vocated by Hampshire’s “real” hippies. For that reason the Preppy Deadheads—or Frisbee elite, as they were also known—were equally despised by the school’s punk and hippie populations.
A week earlier, Gideon had walked by Nathan’s open door and heard us playing David Lee Roth’s Crazy from the Heat album. “Dudes,” he had said, “either buy some taste or transfer to UMASS.”
In response, we’d phoned every girl in the Frog Book pretending to be Gideon, said we had noticed them in SAGA and asked them each if they wanted to go to dinner with him and his parents “up from Greenwich” that night. (Three had said yes.)
Back in the dining hall, Gideon was searching in vain for the rest of his clan, likely in their rooms practicing on their desktops for the impending drum circle. I watched him with Zach and Nathan.
“Check out Valerie.” Zach pointed to an intense beaky-faced first-year immersed in a textbook, sitting alone at one of the giant center tables. She lived on Nathan’s hall and had yelled at us for making too much noise at least twice. “He called her, didn’t he?
”
I nodded. “She threatened to file a harassment complaint.” We watched while, as though guided by fate, Gideon placed his tray on her table.
Agonizingly for us, she failed to look up and take notice of who had joined her, until finally, as he was shoveling the final bite of damp pizza into his mouth, she glanced at him, executed a flawless double take, and then glared as though she actually believed her eyeballs were equipped with machine gun turrets. We watched Gideon’s shock but were sadly too far across the room to hear the exchange that followed. When the gale finally blew itself out, Gideon silently stood from the table and picked up his tray. He stumbled past us, pale and shaking, a shell of the Preppy Deadhead we once knew.
“That was the best thing that’s happened to me since I got to this place,” Nathan said.
“Maybe there’s hope after all,” Zach agreed.
With renewed vigor we debated between going to see Space Camp at the mall for a third time (Zach and I were convinced Nathan was in love with Lea Thompson) or bothering the D-2 girls’ hall, where I’d heard there was a girl named Daphne who had decorated her entire room as a Billy Idol shrine.
“I’m up for that,” Zach said after some thought.
My vote tipped the balance toward D-2, made especially vehement by the fact that since last night, the weather had become truly cold in a way that I hadn’t thought the world could get. The one cotton sweater I was so proud of myself for having had the foresight to pack had become a laughable mockery of protection against the elements. I crumbled before the thought of waiting outside for the two buses it took to reach the Hampshire Mall, but I didn’t want to ask Zach or Nathan if they had brought an extra sweater I might borrow.
“We have to go to D-2,” I said. “They need our support.” And so the motion carried.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Interview
One month later, Deb, the Dakin House master, leaned across her desk. Her tiny eyes clenched mine. The room was nearly dark; a tiny lamp flickered on her desk. She spoke very slowly, softly hammering each word for emphasis. “We just need you to tell us, why did you write that on Heidi’s door?”
I stammered, “I—I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But you admit you wrote something?”
“Um, no, actually.”
“Richard”—she took a deep breath—“her entire hall saw you. Ten of them ID’d your photo in the Frog Book.”
I shook my head. “That’s so weird. . . .”
Deb struggled to control herself. Over her shoulder, Lonnie leaned against the back wall, veiled in darkness, and sputtered, “This is ridiculous. Just have Adele expel him and be done with it.”
Deb shot him a glance and then bored back into me with her beady gaze. She tried to smile, something that clearly didn’t come easy. “We know you wrote on her door. We have witnesses. I just want to help you clear up this misunderstanding. Heidi says that you’re out to get her. But that isn’t true, is it? You were just trying to be . . . funny. . . .”
I thought hard. To tell the truth, I wasn’t quite sure who this Heidi person was. I thought she might be a round-faced blond girl from Ohio in my Emerson class; I tried to remember if I had ever spoken to her, let alone threatened her.
Then I thought back to a night weeks before. Zach, Nathan, and I had been stampeding through the Dakin halls, falling down drunk, when I had noticed a Bob Marley poster on a door, and paused for a moment to pull out my Magic Marker to scribble a witty commentary on it. After intense thought the words UMASS FOOTBALL KICKS HAMPSHIRE BUTT, followed perhaps by HIPPIE DEADBEATS, YOUR ASS IS OURS, were all that came to me. Peering deeper through the haze of my memory, I recalled capping the marker, looking down, and seeing a group of people sitting on the hall’s floor, staring at me, mouths agape. I recalled smiling at them, shrugging, and stumbling away. And thinking back to that group, yes, Heidi had been one of them. But was that her door? Did she really like Bob Marley? Or had I been back there with my marker again later?
I looked Deb in the eye and shook my head. “That is the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard. I can’t believe someone would do that.”
Deb’s nostrils flared and Lonnie looked as though he might wrap up the debate by wrenching every last inch of breath out of me with his tasseled-mittened hands. “And I suppose that’s not the same Magic Marker that has defaced every poster, sign, door, and message board on our hall?”
“Our hall? That’s my home! I would never!”
Deb leaned in farther, the smile gone. “We’ve had a major problem with graffiti this semester. With one person’s graffiti. Walls and doors have been defaced all over the House.”
“Terrible . . . ,” I muttered, nodding sympathetically.
“The phys plant just gave us an estimate on how much it will cost to restore everything. Do you know how much it is?”
“Seventy dollars?” I guessed.
“Eighteen thousand. It’s going to cost eighteen thousand dollars to undo this damage.”
I gulped. “That’s expensive paint.”
“So why don’t you just work with us? I’m sure we can figure out a plan, so we don’t have to send your parents this entire bill all at once. . . . Maybe you can work off some of the bill.”
“Or we can expel you today!” Lonnie added lustily.
I remembered how on the first week of school, on a whim in the student store, I had bought a thick black marker that I had carried in my pocket ever since. That marker was, in fact, in my pocket at that very moment. I thought of all the doors and posters I had written on through the semester. Commentary, I had thought in my egomaniacally delusional seventeen-year-old way; commentary and political expression. You might even label it guerrilla theater, just like the hundreds of crank calls Zach, Nathan, and I had made. Or like on Halloween when, wearing ghost sheets, we chased those tripping hippies into the woods. Wasn’t this all protected as free speech? Shouldn’t I be getting academic credits instead of being treated like a monster?
And how could a few splotches of paint on a few dozen doors cost eighteen thousand dollars? Could it really take more than one can of paint to cover up all the damage I’d done? Couldn’t I just paint it myself? I thought of how my parents would react if given a bill for eighteen thousand dollars, along with what was increasingly shaping up like a fairly catastrophic report card. Surviving that conversation was unthinkable. My course remained clear.
“You guys, I am so, so sorry. I want to help you but I don’t know anything about this.”
“Richard,” Deb fumed, “we have ten witnesses. Ten. Who saw you do it.”
“That is really, really weird.”
Deb stood and glared at Lonnie. Lonnie glared back at her. Then they both turned and glared at me. I smiled and sheepishly waved. They turned and left the room.
In the years to come, I would learn more about the nuts and bolts of collegiate discipline. I would discover that in the lawsuit era, if a school wants to do something really vicious to a student, like expel him or sentence him to humiliation and hard labor, the school needs the student’s cooperation in his or her punishment. Lacking real courts, attorneys, or due process, et cetera, Deb needed me to admit I was deserving of punishment. Unwittingly, I was protected by a loophole of college discipline that would keep me and my friends out of truly serious trouble for a good while, until things took a much more serious turn at Hampshire.
Deb and Lonnie came back into the room. Deb once again leaned across the desk toward me, the caring smile all gone. “Look. We know you did this. We will get you for it. But right now, we just want you out of here.”
“Out of here?”
“Find yourself a new place to live immediately.” Lonnie smirked.
“Where am I supposed to go?”
“That’s not our problem.”
“But are there forms I fill out or something?”
“You figure it out, genius,” Lonnie said.
Deb sighed. “It j
ust makes me so sad that some students feel they can’t trust us. . . .”
I threw myself on my bed and began to review my options, seeking inspiration in the bedlam on my Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle poster. The wisdom of Johnny Rotten had seemed especially profound on the nights of the past few weeks when Zach, Nathan, and I careened across campus like exhaling balloons. But now that the question was “How do I find a place to live when I hardly know my way around campus?” Rotten’s bleating cartoon image offered little guidance.
I went to the hall phone and called Drake, whom I hadn’t seen since our sauna.
“Wow, Rich, that sucks. Where you gonna go?”
“I don’t know. How do you get a room in one of the mods?” Hampshire College was divided into two types of living quarters—the two four-story brick institutional dorms, occupied mostly by freshmen and social misfits who, like my current hallmates, had never left the Lysol-scented nest, and the mods—three houses of shared condolike apartments, each containing groups of four to ten. I knew moving into a mod involved some sort of interview /selection process, but how that worked was still shrouded in mystery. Drake, unfortunately, was able to shed little light.
“A room in the mods? Well, that’s tough. You know, you’ve gotta like interview and work it out, you know?”
“Is there a form I fill out?”
“Nooo . . . It’s more like something that just happens.”
“There’s nothing I can do to, like, make it happen?”
“In the middle of the semester . . . do you know anyone who has an open room in their mod?”
I tried to think if I knew anyone who had a mod. Drake’s was the only mod I’d even stepped foot in. He broke in. “Rich, Tanya is calling. We’re going go take an ice bath. Freezes and refreshes both. Amazing for the pores. But let me know what happens, man.”
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