Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost

by Richard Rushfield

  Back at 21, we carried a load of blankets and my duffel bag into the living room.

  Ox asked, “Does anyone know if there’s a key to Steve’s room? I mean Rich’s room?”

  The crowd looked blank. “Rich,” Ox said, “I think you’re going to have to just card it.”

  “Oh, okay.” I nodded, and followed him down a tiny hall off the living room. At the second door, Ox stopped, took out his student ID, and ran it down the groove between the door and the jamb with a twist, forcing the knob to turn free. “It’s pretty easy, really,” he told me.

  The room smelled intensely of cat urine. The floor was carpeted with old clothes, album covers, beer bottles, papers, and candles that had burned down and melted into the floor.

  “Is Steve going to mind me stepping on his stuff?” I asked.

  “Oh, really? Is Steve back?” Ox said, looking surprised. I threw my rubble on top of the rest of the rubble and plopped on the bed, a single, monastic-looking futon with a blanket tossed over it. On the wall was tacked a quote from Bertrand Russell, “Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim,” written in dripping fountain pen on a piece of parchment paper, a print of the Munch painting The Dance of Life.

  “Welcome home,” Ox said.

  We walked out into the living room, where Ox announced, “So I guess Rich is living in Steve’s room now.” The group stirred slightly and looked up at me in befuddlement.

  “Just so long as you don’t stay in the bathroom all day,” said one with a knot of waxed hair and giant Coke-bottle glasses.

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “Steve goes in and stays forever. We timed him at over six hours one day.”

  I laughed but they all nodded back at me, straight-faced. “What does he do in there?”

  “What Steve Shavel does in the bathroom is the Supreme Dicks’ most closely guarded secret.”

  For much of that first night I sat in the living room trying to puzzle out who actually lived there and what they were talking about. The revolving cast seemed equally at home plopping down on the floor or going through the refrigerator. The talk whirled between the latest moves by the Supreme Dicks’ enemies around campus, the effects of deadly orgone radiation (DOR), which was said to be taking hold across the Pioneer Valley, and gossip about other campus and local bands, little of which made any sense to me but which I struggled to follow as if for an immersion class in a foreign language.

  Much of the conversation focused on various facets of “orgone energy,” the life force. A theory of Austrian psychoanalyst-cum-scientist Wilhelm Reich, orgone had become the cornerstone of the Supreme Dick worldview, and Reich the group’s guiding philosopher. Wilhelm Reich had been, early in his career, a protégé of Sigmund Freud’s, but he eventually took his master’s ideas in esoteric directions, theorizing that all life was fueled by a force known as orgone energy, which in its purest state was a deep blue. When individual lives were dominated by anger or went out of harmony, their orgone became blocked, poisoned, and red. Reich eventually designed a machine, an orgone accumulator, that aided the flow of orgone in individuals.

  Late in his career, Reich moved from Austria to the tiny town of Rangeley, Maine, where he founded a commune and built a massive orgone accumulator gun with which, he claimed, he created rain showers and shot down an invading alien spacecraft.

  Although Reich had insisted that orgone energy could be released by the power of the orgasm—which he defined in fifty-three stages—Supreme Dick philosophy argued that in contemporary corrupt society (suffering from “the emotional plague”), sexuality had become colonized by the state and consequently orgasm was no longer an efficient mechanism for releasing orgone energy. And thus, it was argued, celibacy was the only solution.

  Around eleven P.M., Marilyn and Arthur tumbled in the door with a paper bag filled with food, which they spread out on the coffee table for everyone to grab at; cheeses, a pasta salad, bread, olives, hummus, a half-eaten block of tofu were all quickly devoured.

  “Those fucks in Forty-three wouldn’t go out,” Arthur cursed. “And I know they made lasagna last night.”

  “Where did this all come from?” I asked Meg.

  “It’s called mod shopping. We try to keep our food supply restocked at least once a week.”

  “Other mods give it to you?”

  “Sort of. . . . They give it to us when they go to sleep and we go into their mods and try to fill our shopping list.”

  Around one A.M., a call came from Tim Fall, up at Prescott.

  “Tim thinks we should play at Mod Eighty-nine,” Jon announced, hanging up the wall phone.

  “Eighty-nine!?” some exclaimed. “Those guys are so wasted, they won’t even notice we’re playing. Will the party even be going by the time we get there?”

  Jon shrugged. “I dunno. Tim says it’s pretty happening.”

  Slowly, the room shook off the crust of stationary hours and rose to their feet, wrapping themselves in moth-eaten jackets, scarves, and hats; reaching for guitars, amps, and drums lying around the room. I knew, as I’d been told constantly, that the Supreme Dicks were not just a social collective but an actual rock band, but until now, that idea had never sunk in.

  As we filed out the hall and into the snow, I asked Ox, “So this is like a gig? This mod invited us to play?”

  “Not really. . . . We are kinda booking it ourselves.”

  “So it’s okay to just show up and do a show?”

  “Ohhh, really?” Ox nodded. “I don’t think so. Is it?”

  Wrapped up from the cold, we made our way across campus in a long line, sliding across the icy paths, each of us with an instrument in hand. This was my first return visit to Prescott House, the collection of three-story tin-lined ski chalets, since I had partied there as a prospective student. All year, the little village had loomed in my imagination as an enchanted fantasyland, a nonhippie sanctuary on the campus. But somehow I had never found my way back to Prescott. In fact, by November, I wasn’t quite sure where the tin village was, never having noticed the little path leading into another clump of trees behind the Science Center.

  Our group wandered into Prescott like a pack of refugees, schlepping our belongings in our arms. A distant XTC song filled the canyon between the buildings and we followed it to its source, a mod at the far end, at the top of a narrow red fire escape. We tripped our way up the metallic steps, slippery in the frost, struggling to hold the railing and clutch our equipment, pushing through revelers packed tightly together in the cold.

  The mod itself was a dark, low-ceilinged room, maybe twice the size of the 21 living room but cramped and airless with a hundred or so people packed in, the only light coming from the open refrigerator. After the bitter chill outside, the party felt almost fur nacelike, the room stuffed with people like a cattle car. On one side of the room, a cluster swayed back and forth to a Replacements song playing from a stereo that was perched dangerously on a much-jostled stool in the corner.

  Like a rugby scrum pushing against a rival mass, we surged with the instruments through the crowd into the far corner of the room. Jon, Ox, Tim, Arthur, and others took out their instruments, plugged into various outlets, and began, very slowly, to play. At a glance, I counted nine guitars in the ensemble.

  The concert sounded, to my untrained ears, more or less like the band was tuning up. The rest of the room seemed totally unaware that a concert was beginning. A couple of people shot disturbed looks at the band. But slowly the discordant, random chords held for painfully long moments evolved into something else—much louder discordant, random chords held painfully long. Jon and the others stared intensely down at their instruments and strummed in almost slow motion. The sounds soon overwhelmed the music from the stereo as, around the room, people looked up with confusion and then horrified grimaces of recognition.

  “Get the hell out of here, you assholes!” Boos resounded from across the room but they were soon drowned out by the strumm
ing of the guitars, somehow increasing in volume while still preserving a sense of lethargy, as though a negative intensity were swallowing the room. Cold air flooded space as people fled out into the night, their faces twisted in anger.

  The din of the instruments surged into something that at moments was almost melodic—like an orchestra tuning up occasionally in unison. Jon, Ox, Tim, and the others stared at their guitars with a focus I’d never seen from them in weeks of loafing on the 21 couch. While their collective strumming didn’t cohere into anything identifiable as music, the growing intensity had a power that was almost beautiful.

  The fleeing crowd, however, clearly did not hear the hidden charms. The party’s hosts were soon standing in front of the band screaming at them in vain, their voices swallowed by the music. One of them, in parachute pants with a safety pin through his ear, crawled down at the base of the wall and unplugged Jon’s and Tim’s instruments. When he crossed the room to pull the plug on Ox and Arthur, Jon and Tim broke out of their trances and nonchalantly leaned over and plugged themselves back in. He raced back to pull them out again and Ox and Arthur revived their guitars. Minutes later, the mod pushed and shoved the group of us out the door and all the way down the stairwell. We stumbled on the icy steps, grappling with our armfuls of amps, guitars, and drums. The crowd from the party lined up on the fire escape, booing and shoving us as we went down.

  “You Dick scum are destroying this school!” one young man shouted in my face.

  At the bottom of the stairs, faces flushed from excitement and shivering in the cold, we all stopped and looked at each other. “I think that was our best show ever,” Ox said.

  The next morning I was awakened by what sounded like the clacking of an electric typewriter in the room. I glanced around. It was hard to make out the room in the weak dawn light streaming through the trees outside my window. I noticed two people—Meg and Sa’ad, I thought—sleeping on the floor, half-buried under old clothes and magazines. Nothing moved in the room, other than a few odd bugs traveling up and down the wall, but the sound of the typing seemed to echo in my head. Then I realized the sound was coming from inside my head, that it was the sound of my teeth chattering.

  It was cold in this room. Very cold. Even when I wrapped the wool blanket around me it was laughably, hilariously cold.

  And the room smelled even more violently of cat urine.

  But on my floor, the two shapes slept soundly. From the living room, I heard someone playing “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on an electric guitar.

  The pale-yellow light streamed in. I wrapped the blanket tighter around me and, teeth chattering, drifted contentedly back to sleep.

  The night after Thanksgiving I had met Zach and Nathan for coffee at Dolores, a twenty-four-hour coffee shop in West L.A. The macabre waiter with long fingernails who’d served me many times before seemed to have forgotten me in the three months I’d been away. I gave him intense, meaningful looks, digging for a burst of recognition, but he took our orders with a deadpan stare. I had been erased from the Dolores’s family.

  “So are you guys going back?” Nathan asked.

  Zach and I picked at our chili fries. “Do you think there’s any way to get a refund on our plane tickets?” Zach asked.

  “No, I already checked. You have to request a refund two weeks in advance.”

  “Terrific.” They both looked glum. I thought back to the mod. Three days earlier, on the Tuesday afternoon before Thanksgiving, duffel bag over my shoulder, I had set off for the three buses and one taxi ride that would take me to Bradley Airport outside Hartford. As I left, the crowd was flopped around the 21 living room, listening to Jon play a tape of what sounded like a single note on a guitar held forever.

  “That’s brilliant,” Monica, a girl incongruously in pearls, said. “It’s like, a call to something.”

  “You guys aren’t fooling anyone.” Sa’ad snorted. “It’s a game to you. Not music.”

  Ox blurted out, “To me, it sounds like a beautiful lullaby.”

  Everyone cracked up and Sa’ad fumed until Jon broke in, “Rich, where are you going?”

  “Oh,” I stammered, “I mean, aren’t people going home for break?”

  The room looked up. “What break is it?” Monica asked.

  “I think, maybe Thanksgiving.”

  “Oh, really?” Ox nodded. “Wow. Really. So you’re going someplace for that?”

  “I guess, like, home pretty much.” I stumbled for some way to make it sound less pathetic. “I guess there’ll be a lot of food.”

  “Oh, wow,” Jon said. “Amazing, Rich. That sounds really cool.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, totally. Food is awesome.”

  “Supreme Dick Rule Number One,” Ox said. “Never turn down a free meal.”

  “Okay, then. I guess I’ll see you all. So it’s okay to just leave my room?”

  “Yeah, Steve’s room. It will be fine,” Monica answered. “You didn’t lock it, did you?” She looked suddenly alarmed.

  “I don’t have a key.”

  “Oh, good. No, it’s cool, then.”

  At Dolores’s Zach and Nathan stared down glumly, contemplating their return. Zach picked up a chili fry and studied it. “Do you think it’s really so hard that the whole East Coast can’t make one of these? Three months back there without a damn chili fry.”

  I looked around the diner. The few patrons mostly sat alone, and under the fluorescent lights they seemed to be eating in slow motion.

  “I guess it might be fun when we get back,” I said.

  Nathan gaped at me.

  “Whaaa . . .” Zach asked.

  “At Twenty-one. You guys should hang out. I think it’ll be okay. Maybe . . .”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mohair Days, Lithium Nights

  The tension settled over the 21 living room like the damp mist that clung to the campus and seeped into your bones each day until well into the afternoon. Everyone was aware of it; I could feel it lapping at the edges of our conversation in furtive glances and terse replies. But no one was going to say anything about it. I certainly wasn’t. After a week back at 21, I had learned one thing well: Never, ever, be the person to bring up a problem.

  We chattered about our outrage that the Dicks were the only major campus band not asked to play the upcoming show at SAGA, but the conversation grew stilted; the knowing looks deepened. I glanced at Meg and she glanced back at me; she seemed to be outraged that I wasn’t saying anything. Even the cockroach walking across my foot seemed unusually tense in his gait.

  Predictably, it was Sa’ad who at last spoke up and laid the whole matter on the table. “You guys,” he said, “I’m fucking hungry.”

  Several people sat up straight in anticipation. Jon looked at Sa’ad and tilted his head from side to side as though the comment had gotten stuck in a pocket of water in his ear. Finally he said, “Really, Sa’ad? Wow, that’s crazy.”

  Sa’ad glared back indignantly, his minidreadlocks quaking. “We’ve been sitting here all day. There’s no food in the house. It’s dinnertime. Let’s eat.”

  “Dinnertime,” Jon repeated, taking that in. “Like sitting with your family?”

  Tim said, “I didn’t realize you were so into traditions, Sa’ad.”

  Charles, one of the punks, jumped in. “I think dinnertime means it’s time to be dinner.”

  Chortles erupted around the room and then Ox said, “I think Luntz banned us from the jam because he was afraid our orgone levels would upset his equipment.” Meg agreed with the non se quitur and offered that Luntz, the head of the campus’s Alternative Music Collective and thus one of the Dicks’ mortal foes, was now in a state of all-out warfare against us, since the last show when the Dicks had refused to relinquish the stage. The punk band from Marblehead Luntz had booked had apparently stormed out in disgust.

  The conversation again heated up, speculations as to Luntz’s motives flying. Sa’ad slumped in a corner, started to cry, and threw
a boot at Jon, who ignored it and played with his unplugged guitar.

  Months later, Steve Shavel would explain that Supreme Dick conversation was based on the Buddhist allegory:

  Q: Does the dog have the Buddhist nature?

  A: Mu.

  That is, all our conversation was diabolically nonsensical to outsiders but to those initiated in the secrets of our world, completely transparent. For myself, I had discovered that asking direct questions or suggesting action would only bring frustration, or worse, make you look anxious and thus uncool.

  The conversation drifted from the evils of the Alternative Music Collective to a warning Susie had received from the Greenwich House office, where she held a part-time job, that apparently the college president had passed down an edict that this was to be the Supreme Dicks’ last year at Hampshire.

  “Good,” said Tim Fall, a tall, red-bearded ringer for Shaggy. “I’m sick of this place. I’ve been stuck here six years already.” Tim was at work on what was considered around the house to be the most monumental project ever undertaken by a Hampshire student—a pixilated film history of Hampshire parties, 1980 to the present. Anytime more than five people gathered on Hampshire soil, Tim appeared and, with his antique Super 8 Bolex camera, snapped half a dozen shots of the festivities. It was said that his Division III (the Hampshire equivalent of a senior thesis—the one final massive project that students spent their last year or so working on before they could graduate) committee had seen the work, pronounced it brilliant, and offered him a diploma several years earlier, but out of a perfectionistic sense of duty to the project he had declined and stayed on to see it through, presumably to the party’s end.

  Michael, however, who sprawled in a corner in his ochre Krishna robes, was not so sanguine. “Easy for you to say but if we get thrown out, where am I going to go?”

  “You’re not even a student here,” said Monica, the preppy Radcliffe transfer.

  “It’s my house as much as it is yours! It’s not like you go to class!” The previous year, Michael had fled a Boston Hare Krishna tribe and hopped the bus out west to Northampton. He had met Susie in a coffee shop and she had invited him to come live with us.