Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost

by Richard Rushfield

  “Maybe we should stop using the phone,” Ox offered. Although almost certainly untrue, it was common legend that our phone was bugged, supposedly confirmed by a late-night visit Jeanie had made to the Security Office, where she claimed to have heard them laughing at one of Ox’s calls home.

  The topic of the Dicks’ enemies’ closing in was so huge and multifaceted we could only scratch its surface in any one conversation. Hunger pains soon enough reasserted themselves and private anguished looks were traded around the room.

  Eventually, it was Jon who, after pushing the eating topic off the table earlier and letting it sit there on the floor until the room had been driven mad trying not to touch it, gently, obliquely, brought it up again. “Have you guys heard about that Denny’s?” he asked. No one had. “Yeah, they opened one in Chicopee.” The words hung in the air. Chicopee, many calculated, was down the road past Mount Holyoke, forty-five minutes away.

  “Wow.” “Cool.” “Denny’s.” “I wonder what that’s like?” Expressions of vague interest wafted through the room as we contemplated the distant specter of Denny’s. No one, however, dared taking the thought beyond the theoretical, since suggesting action would open you up for ridicule.

  “Do you think we should go there sometime?” Ox finally asked.

  “Really?” Jon sounded stunned by the notion but let it sink in. “Yeah, maybe. I guess it would be cool to check that out.” The room lapsed into reflection again. Jon plucked on his guitar. Several long minutes later, he looked up. “Did you mean, like, tonight?”

  A shiver ran through the room. All eyes turned back to Ox. “Wow, tonight . . . I don’t know. I mean, I guess so. Really? Okay. Could we do that?”

  Somehow, many murmurs later, we finally arrived at an articulated agreement. It would be cool sometime to check out the new Denny’s and if there wasn’t anything else happening and no one cared what we were doing tonight it wasn’t really any different to be at Denny’s than it was to be here so if we had to be somewhere, we might as well maybe at some point go.

  Once we crossed that bridge, however, another issue loomed like a hostile and heavily fortified army on the far shore—how in the hell could we get to Denny’s, twenty miles away into the neighboring county beyond the reach of the five-campus bus system on a bone-chillingly cold night? Enthusiastic murmurs of agreement with the scheme dissipated into another thoughtful silence until Jon volunteered, “I guess we could take my car.”

  Jubilation again; again dissipating into silence. “The Dickmo bile” was a two-seater—an early-seventies Volkswagen Bug convertible with a tiny crawl space in the rear. On drives into Amherst I had squeezed in with three other people. It was plausible that someone could also sit on the lap of the passenger in the shotgun seat and another very, very small person could sprawl across the backseat, which would in theory cram six people in. A quick count of the room showed somewhere upwards of thirty present, all of whom stared expectantly at Jon, awaiting a solution to this riddle.

  Instead he returned his attention to his guitar and said quietly, almost whispering to himself, “I guess we’ll have to figure out who should go, then.” Around the room we looked at each other with now barely concealed animosity, wondering whom we should throw off the lifeboat first. I looked at Angela, the girl perched on the arm of the sofa next to me. “Are you going to go?” I asked her softly.

  “Yeah, I guess. I mean, it’s Denny’s?” she said, as though asking a question.

  “Yeah, I guess I will too. You know, just to see what it’s about. Maybe we could share the front seat?”

  She shot me an are-you-crazy? look and, without a word, got up and walked upstairs to Susie’s room. It’s hard to believe, I thought, watching her leave, that just a few hours ago I lost my virginity to that girl.

  The earth had shaken for me the night before when around ten o’clock, aching from hunger and with no sign of an impending food run, I had, for the first time since I’d moved in, done the unthinkable; I left the group. Without explanation, I had walked out of the mod. I thought about asking whether anyone wanted to come, but rehearsing the question in my head, I couldn’t find any way to phrase it without sounding hopelessly pushy and lame.

  I ended up back in Dakin watching Letterman and eating pizza in Nathan’s room. Slipping back into the dorms now that I was a disgraced ex-resident, I felt a chill of danger and skulked the halls like a secret agent. After Letterman ended at one-thirty, I urged Zach and Nathan to come back to 21, promising that people would still be hanging out. But, still on dorm time, they began drifting off to sleep.

  “Why would I want to stay awake any more than I have to at this place?” Zach asked, although soon he and Nathan could be drawn in and find themselves spending many early morning hours still loafing on the 21 couches.

  When I returned to 21 I was amazed to find the living room empty. I searched the bedrooms, but not even Susie was around. There was not even anyone passed out on the couch. I grew alarmed and plopped down in the living room, taking in the unnatural quiet, all still but for the cockroaches, who seemed to enjoy having the place to themselves.

  A few minutes of silence and the door flew open. In stormed Angela, in a black leather jacket, miniskirt, and black combat boots. Her thick brown hair flew in every direction and she glanced wildly about the room.

  “Are they here?”

  “Everybody’s gone.”

  “But Michael and Susie? Are they here?” I could barely understand what Angela was saying as she stumbled over herself to tell what had happened. She explained that they had gotten a call a couple hours earlier about a hippie gathering in the woods and everyone had gone up to it. They had fought their way through the muddy paths to find a little tribe of hippies (“Not actually hippies, though, those fucking Frisbee assholes,” she explained, meaning the more hateful quasi-hippie tribe of the Preppy Deadheads, aka the Frisbee Team) huddled around a little campfire and, it seemed, tripping. Seeing them from a distance, someone had the idea to break into a war cry and rush out of the woods at them. The whole group had followed, and the gang around the campfire, no doubt overcome by drug hallucinations, fled. The Dicks settled in and, despite the cold and drizzle, rather enjoyed the campfire, and the food and bourbon the Frisbee people had abandoned. Twenty minutes later, however, a few of them returned and started pelting the Dicks with clumps of mud.

  At that point, bedlam broke out. Angela had fled back into the woods with Susie and Michael (the Krishna escapee), who, as best as I could understand, started trying to make out with her (Angela) against a tree. That’s what I thought she was saying, but as the story progressed and whatever she had consumed kicked in, her words became more scrambled and impossible to make sense of. I was able to gather that she had torn herself free of the make-out attempt and run away, which caused Susie and Michael to violently mock her as she fled.

  “They said those things! Why did they say them?” she asked me.

  “What did they say?”

  She looked directly at me in a way that made me shudder. “You are so sweet to pretend you don’t know.”

  “Okay.”

  She kept looking at me. I felt myself becoming intensely uncomfortable, like something I had eaten hours before was just going wrong in my stomach. “You’re the only person here who actually listens,” she said. “You’re not a freak like the rest of this crowd.”

  I am too! I wanted to protest, but I noticed her face moving closer to mine. I had never seen a face up so close before, like the face was blocking the sun, eclipsing the world. The quiet of the room became a roar of silence, an intensity of antisound. I thought I heard the footsteps of a cockroach stopping to scratch himself on the opposite wall. And suddenly, there she was. And the walls that had seemed impregnable, looming over my life for so many years, came tumbling down.

  At some point just before dawn, while Angela slept in my bed, I heard people shuffle into the living room. They murmured to each other, like a weary defeated army, an
d collapsed in piles around the house. I braced myself for someone to barge in and catch us there, but mercifully, on this night, no one did.

  I lay awake all night, in the hours following the brief bustle of activity. Did I feel different? I examined myself and thought, on the whole, my spirit did seem a bit lighter. I had stepped through a door that I had given up hope of ever stepping through, but on the other side found a world that looked almost identical to the world I had left behind.

  Would Angela have expectations of me now? Watching her sleep, I assumed she would, but what could they be? And how would this be explained to Susie? Angela was one of her best friends. Would she be angry? Were we supposed to get permission? And what of the rest of the group—the Supreme Dicks’ code of celibacy was often invoked (although still unexplained), and as best I could tell it was actually followed.

  The words boyfriend, girlfriend, and relationship, if invoked at all in 21, were seen as some distant—and laughable—phenomena, like the fox-trot or the SALT II Treaty. “Dates” and “dating” were artifacts of some lost culture, as close to our lives as sock hops and village yentas.

  There were, here and there within our group, examples of various forms of attachment, but if explained at all, they were termed “hanging out.” Jerome generally crashed in Monica’s room, but Jerome wasn’t, as he often said, a Dick; he was in the band that was the most closely allied with the Dicks, the Loneliest Christmas Tree. Tim Fall, it was said, hung out with a girl who lived in Prescott House, but Tim, with his documentary missions, was very much an iconoclast within the house and in any case, whoever the girl was, no one ever saw her. Arthur, the angry punk, lived with a woman in a house off-campus, but he was too much of a raw force to be affected by philosophy, whatever the philosophy behind celibacy was.

  As I started to panic about how I would break the news that Angela and I were now—what? Going out? Hanging out? Friends?—the person in question stirred. Through the dawn light she looked up at me and said, “Hey, do you mind? I sleep alone.”

  “Oh, right. I wasn’t really sleeping. . . .”

  She sat up. “I need the bed,” she snapped.

  “Oh, sure.” I backed out onto the floor. “Right, I’ll just, I guess, see what’s going on.”

  “Cool.” She instantly fell back asleep. I quietly dressed and crept out of the room, and stepping over a few sleeping figures on the living room floor, I slipped out of the mod. Outside the ground crackled from the morning dew frozen on the sidewalk. The campus was still bitter cold. I wandered around, wondering how many hours it would be before Zach and Nathan awoke and I could tell them what had happened. I ended up sitting in the Bridge Café, trying to make sense of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and reflecting that all in all, I did, in fact, feel very much a different person, although I couldn’t quite say how.

  When I returned later that morning, my bed was empty. I went up to Susie’s room to see if Angela might be there, but the second floor was still. I didn’t see her again until five that night when Angela slunk into the living room and flung herself down in the only unoccupied spot available, on the arm of the couch next to me, without a glance my way. As she slumped against the wall behind me, saying nothing, I studied the faces around me for any glimmer that someone else noticed that the fabric of my universe had been torn open, but no one registered a thing.

  Later, as Angela stomped up to Susie’s room, the journey to Denny’s still hung in the air, resisting all of our attempts to change the subject and remaining at the front of our minds. But even as Denny’s seemed the only solution to our growing hunger pangs, the fact loomed that there were only five seats in Jon’s car and there were twenty-nine of us. The thought must have occurred to many that we would need another plan, but having put an idea on the table we were powerless to alter or even abandon it. Suggesting a solution to the problem would have made one appear all horrible things at once—anxious, nervous, practical, out of sync. So the wet clay of the Denny’s trip hardened, its impossibility paradoxically sealing its dominance.

  Finally, it was Ox who offered a solution. “I think only people with pure blue orgone should be allowed to go.”

  There were ahhhhhs and nods around the room. “Totally.” “That makes sense.”

  “But how”—a brazen fit of curiosity impelled me to open my mouth—“how do we know what color everyone’s orgone is?”

  Ox nodded and stared at me. “Right. Right. Really. Well, everyone who has been militant in their celibacy and vegetarianism should be blue, or mostly blue.”

  I gulped, wondering if that had been directed at me. But Liz broke in, “Well, Tom can’t go, then!”

  “And Angela’s door was locked last night!”

  Accusations flew of failed celibacy and hamburger sightings. As the conversation grew heated and fingers were pointed, several stomped out in anger. Susie sneered that celibacy was just some joke Jon had thought up because he was afraid of girls. Friar Tom announced that he had never claimed to be celibate and none of us understood anything, that “Reich was about love,” and much more importantly, Brooke from the Black Light mod was having a photo show in the library and he was going to check it out all by himself and if he ended up in anyone’s bed, we’d see whose orgone was stronger tomorrow.

  As Friar Tom left the mod in a swirl of scarves and sequins, I counted the number of people remaining; we were down to twenty-five. So I had a one-in-five chance of getting a ride to Denny’s. But could I go without Angela? I still wondered.

  While I contemplated, a hush had fallen over the room. Next to me on the couch, Meg muttered, “I didn’t know Brooke Jen nings was having a show. . . .”

  “Is she good?” I whispered.

  “The Black Light mod, they are all these really rich New York club kids.”

  “Ahhh . . .”

  “So they always have really good hors d’oeuvres.”

  I looked around the room. Everyone seemed lost in contemplation. “I mean, really good,” Liz said. “Like this artichoke dip with baked Brie on top. . . .”

  One by one, people silently rose and began the long work of layering on sweaters, jackets, scarves, hats, gloves, overcoats, leg warmers, boots, and face masks. By this time, and after a few trips with Jon and Ox to the Salvation Army store in Northampton, I, too, was wrapping myself up like a middle-aged vagrant in Depression-era New York.

  Looking like a runaway breadline, two dozen of us staggered and slid over the frosted path. We spilled into the library building’s downstairs gallery and found the party well past its height. A few disdainful double takes greeted us as we drifted among the crowd dressed uniformly in black miniskirts, black jeans, black scarves, black tights, black leather jackets, and black leather shoes, quietly chattering, sipping white wine, and studying the black-and-white photos of what appeared to be body parts—knees, earlobes, and I thought I made out a tongue, blurry in intense close-up.

  Our group marched directly through the room straight to the hors d’oeuvre table. As we climbed over each other to grope at the remaining vestiges, conversation halted completely, the only sounds coming from the New Order album playing on a boom box in the corner. Locustlike we quickly demolished every bit of food left from a spread that, to our disgust, turned out to be only carrot and celery sticks and cheese cubes.

  The hush was broken as Tim Fall finally called out, “Brooke, where’s the baked Brie? This show sucks!”

  A nervous titter ruffled the room. I tried to ignore the stares of annoyance, but my friends seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. “If you can’t afford a decent spread, you shouldn’t be showing your work,” Arthur barked, his mouth full of carrots.

  Brooke, the artist, slinked her way over to Jon. Petite and elegant in a black microminiskirt, leggings, a baggy black sweater, and pixieish asymmetrical blond hair, she had poise that made her seem like a creature from another planet, or another generation at least.

  “Jon,” she said. “So lovely to see you.”

&nb
sp; “Hi. Great art, Brooke.”

  “Tell me, Jon, darling, haven’t I always stuck up for you guys?”

  “Totally. We just wanted to support your opening!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Yeah, we love art.”

  Brooke looked exasperated and stared at him. Jon smiled and reached for a handful of celery.

  Struggling to maintain her air of nonchalance, she smiled up at Jon, holding his gaze. He smiled back, his hulking frame, bound in an overcoat and several sweaters, towering over her.

  “Enjoy the party. Thanks for coming, really. Really, I mean it,” she finally said.

  “Oh, really? Thanks, Brooke. Oh, actually we were just about to leave. I guess you don’t really have much food here.” Jon giggled.

  “Oh, no. Please, stay. Come, let me show you around.” She proceeded to give us all a tour of her work, describing, one by one, the motivation behind each piece. “In this one, I wanted to decontextualize Man Ray. To be Man Ray’s gaze, without being Man Ray, if you follow me. To show that the ownership of the gaze, separated from its artistic pretensions, derives from a fascist impulse to colonize that which it beholds. Do you love it?”

  Five minutes later we filed upstairs into the Airport Lounge, which in the winter was the school’s central (and only) common area. Located just outside the library and snack bar, the Lounge was so named because it resembled a circa-1973 TWA waiting area one might find in the Evansville, Indiana, airport. The lounge was built around a conversation circle of orange foam couches, which we flung ourselves on, shedding layers of clothing and scaring off the half-dozen people who had been there studying.

  “Can you guys be quiet?” one girl hissed at us.

  “Who studies at nine o’clock on a Saturday?” Liz asked.

  “Who studies ever?” Arthur said.