Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost

by Richard Rushfield

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’m outta here at the end of this year.”

  “Aren’t you only a third-year?”

  “Yeah, but I’ve had enough. This place is getting really lame.”

  A week later, a letter arrived from my advisor. “Don’t you think it’s time we checked in again?”

  The ground was frozen solid, the paths covered with a sheet of ice over which I scurried to meet with Leo, my advisor. In front of the Social Sciences Building people huddled close in little groups of three and four, hopping back and forth on their feet to keep their blood flowing. A class had just ended, and the emerging students raced to get out of the cold. I drew back, horrified at the specter of people bursting from class, diligence furrowing their brows, like a rabid phantom army I’d managed to hide out from for so long I thought they must’ve died off. But here they were, still alive and flourishing.

  I had spent the night before fretting about how I would wake up in time to get to my eleven A.M. appointment. I ransacked 21 and the neighboring hippie mod searching for an alarm clock, but the only timepieces available were an antique grandfather clock in Susie’s room and Jerome’s Casio digital watch, both of which, it turned out, hadn’t worked for years. I canvassed the house to find someone who would be up the next morning but was met with blank stares. Finally, I just stayed awake all night.

  Behind his beard, nestled in corduroy, Leo managed to look both amused and concerned. “So I understand you’ve made some interesting friends.”

  I slumped into the metal folding chair reserved for students. “I guess so. . . . Can I ask, how did you know who I hang out with?”

  “Small campus, Richard.” He tilted his head and looked at me over his glasses. “Very, very small. So how are your classes coming?”

  “Classes? I mean, good.”

  “And are you going to complete all four that you signed up for?”

  “Well, yeah, I mean . . .” I gaped at him, dumfounded. “But I thought we agreed, you said to focus on finding myself. That was kinda the plan we discussed.”

  “It looks like you’ve done a bit too much of that, haven’t you?”

  I stared at the floor.

  “Richard, I’m not going to tell you who you can and can’t be friends with. But I have to warn you, the choices you make have a big impact on the community.”

  “The community cares who I’m friends with?”

  “The community cares that people can feel comfortable here. And you have to accept your responsibility for your part of that. I don’t need to tell you, things are going to be changing around here.”

  “Um, really?”

  “So how is it coming with your classes?”

  In the remaining two weeks of the semester, I returned to class on a nearly regular basis. Waking up obscenely early, I’d sneak out of 21, muttering excuses about going to visit Zach and Nathan. My European Fascism professor did a slight double take the first time he saw me in his classroom, trying to figure out where he knew me from, but continued without questioning me, no doubt thinking that if someone wanted to sit through a discussion of Mussolini’s relationship with the Italian peasant class, who was he to stop him?

  By my second visit, however, I learned that since I had turned in a couple short papers at the beginning of the semester, I was, in fact, amazingly still in the running to complete the class. All I needed to write was one giant ten-page paper on “the ways the fascist mind-set enters the consciousness of the masses.” One night, I locked myself away from the junta in the living room and madly skimmed a copy of Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism that Steve Shavel had left behind.

  Three nights later, the night before I was to fly back home for break, I tore myself away from the group again, sat down on the floor, and put my typewriter on a milk carton and wrote the following: “Studying the economic and political factors which lead to the rise of a fascist regime can only take us so far. To truly understand what turns a mass of people to fascism we must look at the deeper subconscious conditions of their lives.” At four A.M., having waxed poetic about the subconscious repressed sexuality of the German people, by way of Reich, I paper-clipped ten sheets together and attached a note to the professor reading, “Sorry to be so late. Had trouble finding a new typewriter cartridge. Hope you enjoy!”

  Completing my Emerson and Nietzsche class was a bit more challenging. Returning, I found that I had missed eight of the weekly papers—and done none of the reading. The ancient white-bearded professor showed no sign of recognizing me, but then it didn’t seem he had ever recognized anyone. The class was deep in a discussion of The Gay Science, on Nietzsche’s views of man’s instinct for self-preservation. After class, he stopped in front of my desk and said, “Andre, I appreciated your thoughts on the Über mensch very much. It is a parallel to hermeneutics after all!” He chuckled heartily.

  “Who would’ve thought?” I joined in, laughing.

  I decided not to go back to Emerson and Nietzsche. When my evaluations arrived in Los Angeles three weeks later, my evaluation read, “Richard’s class participation was pointed and inspiring . . . his papers articulate and profound.” I gasped, wondering if at that moment there was an Andre in the class who was in tears reading the most blistering evaluations of his life. Grinning madly, I brought the envelope to my parents, eager to share my two glowing reports (or one glowing report and one so-so one, to be precise). I hadn’t expected that the quantity of my evaluations rather than the quality would catch their eyes.

  After spending December in the eternal night of Mod 21, I felt like a vampire facing the sun for the first time since the Middle Ages. The neon hum of Los Angeles’s shopping streets, ominously balmy even at eleven at night, the manicured housefronts, the quiet, order, and cleanliness of my parents’ house, all seemed to point an accusing finger my way.

  My first day back my parents tried to hide their anxiety when I slept until five. The second day, I slumbered past six, awakening as my father came home from work. They shared their concerns.

  “It’s the time change,” I explained.

  “You sleep until three at school?”

  “How do you get to class?”

  The Hampshire system, I wearily explained once more. You can’t judge it by your hidebound, Old World notions.

  The next day I woke up at two and sat in front of the TV, flipping between F Troop reruns, Donahue, and soap operas, fixating on Stacey Q’s midriff in the “Two of Hearts” video. On my parents’ wall calendar I counted forty-three days until I was to return to school on January 30. I called Northwest Airlines and learned that for a mere twenty-five dollars I could move up my return to January 3.

  Between fall and spring semesters, Hampshire held a special month-long session known as January Term, during which students could take classes and workshops taught by other students. Whether motivated by pity for the students who would otherwise have to endure the below-zero temperatures or, as more commonly rumored, by a desire to save money on the school’s heating bill, attendance at Jan Term was not only optional but tacitly discouraged. At the time it was estimated that only two to three hundred of Hampshire’s twelve hundred students showed up each year. Still stuck in some of my pre-Hampshire thought processes, I cringed at the notion of “extra school” and so hadn’t given any thought to returning—until the day before I left for L.A., when I heard the crowd in 21 speaking of Jan Term in ways that fired my imagination.

  “Really weird things happen,” Susie told me.

  “Like what?”

  “Campus is empty. It’s so cold that you can’t go outside. It’s when people go crazy, they just lose it,” she said, her eyes lighting up at the memory.

  The room nodded and seemed shocked that I wasn’t planning to return.

  Three weeks later, I flew back into Hartford at five o’clock on a Tuesday evening. As I stepped out of the airport, I gasped at the cold. Three weeks in L.A., and had I forgotten this? I jumped up
and down, duffel bag on my back, waiting for the Peter Pan bus. Even on the bus, where the heat blasted in blazing gusts, I still felt cold. Cold lodged itself between my toes and under my legs like a parasite. I shivered violently in my seat on the empty bus, peering into the darkness, trying to make out traces of the Connecticut River. In the seat across from me, a metalhead in a puffy blue windbreaker air-drummed to the Poison album he was listening to on his Walkman, which I could hear clearly where I sat. When he caught me glancing at him, he stopped the tape.

  “What’s up, man?”

  I shook my head.

  “Wanna score some wicked crystal?” Tempted for a moment, I nonetheless declined.

  The rest of the buses I had to take were nearly empty along my route. Even the normally humming Springfield Peter Pan station was abandoned but for a few homeless people shivering on the benches, wrapped in layers of blankets. In Amherst, I waited on the deserted main street for the Five College bus, which the schedule informed me came only every two hours in January. Arriving on campus just after ten, I didn’t pass a single person as I shuffled down the icy trail, past the looming concrete library and campus center, into the Greenwich woods.

  I stopped and stood still as I entered the cluster of wooden doughnuts. I didn’t hear a sound anywhere in the world. Greenwich sat deserted, as though it had been evacuated ahead of a marauding army. The lights were out in every window. The tree branches were bare and coated with ice.

  Outside 21, slivers of light peeked from behind the black sheets on the doorway and reflected off the snow. From Susie’s window upstairs, Bessie Smith warbled out into the night. I climbed onto the porch, trod over the snow-covered broken bottles, the ventriloquist’s dummy, and the car transmission, and, taking a deep, frigid breath, opened the door.

  In the living room, Meg, Tim, Ox, Jon, Sa’ad, Marilyn, Michael the Krishna, Monica, Jerome, Susie, and a dozen others sat talking. Meg was saying, “I can’t believe you don’t like the Butthole Surfers. You’re such a fucking hypocrite.”

  Jon giggled and said, “Just another Supreme Dick cover band, if you ask me. Rich, what do you think?”

  Everyone looked up at me, waiting for an answer. I put down my duffel bag. “I guess I kinda like them.”

  Meg and Sa’ad hooted at Jon. “You see!”

  “Rich, I can’t believe you’re saying that.” They dove back into their fight. I stood in the middle of the room. No one gave a hint of recognizing that I had just returned, or that I had been gone. In fact, looking at them, sitting in the same places in the same outfits, I realized there was no evidence that anyone had even left the living room or been off the couch in the three weeks since I’d been to California and back. There was nothing, in fact, to indicate that the last three weeks had actually happened and weren’t a hallucination of mine.

  My room was freezing cold and smelled more than ever of cat urine. Someone had opened a window to smoke, which I gathered from the heap of cigarette butts stubbed out on the sill. I pulled out a Camel, lit it, and sat down on my bed. On my Sid and Nancy poster someone had drawn X’s over the protagonists’ genital regions and written SEX KILLS. FUCKING IS FOR FUCKERS. I pulled a blanket around my shoulders over my overcoat and listened to the chatter from the living room. I looked out the window into the dead night. Somewhere out there, Zach and Nathan were still warm in Los Angeles. I shuddered and went back out to join the crowd.

  During Jan Term the whole campus seemed to give in to our way of life. It wasn’t even a question of our being unmotivated to move—there was no place to move to. In the few hours of thin daylight, we wandered shivering through the arctic cold across a deserted landscape. The library was open only for a couple hours a day. The snack bar and Tavern were closed. In the dining hall the few people who dotted the back room in little islands spoke in whispers, afraid to disturb the hush. Even security couldn’t be aroused when the band set up in a Merrill House hallway. During our two-hour recital, three students wandered by, encased in dozens of layers. They peeked out under the brims of their hats, and wandered past without a word.

  At night, the group, or breakaway clusters of three to six of us, ventured up to Prescott House, where every evening the hundred or so people on campus packed into a mod and shivered together. The drink of choice at these gatherings switched from beer to bottles of Jack Daniel’s and Maker’s Mark, which passed freely through the crowd. By eleven o’clock several people would be vomiting off the fire escape, the Joy Division album skipping unattended on the turntable. Some hippie girl would be making out with a Mohawked punk in a corner while the hippie boy she came with stood up on the counter and wept that our souls had been destroyed by the Reagan War Machine and we were too blind to see how fucked we all were.

  After a few of these parties, I noticed that between the gazes of emptiness and dread, under the looks of longing that people stared each other down with, there was another element flying between people’s eyes. I caught it first when I saw a guy named Carl, in a leather jacket, emerge from a bedroom in the back of one of those mods. Around the room, I caught a dozen sets of eyes fix on him with a slightly terrifying intensity. While most of the room was stretched on the floor, singing along, or bellowing at the top of their lungs, with “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” which creaked out of a boom box, Carl adjusted his motorcycle jacket and strolled into the midst of the room, feigning nonchalance while twitching almost imperceptibly. He caught the eye of one girl who had been staring at him, nodded to her, and she sprang up, and together they scampered back to one of the bedrooms. I noticed the little tableau soon repeat itself, in other mods, with other people emerging from the back rooms.

  A couple nights later I pointed this out to Susie and asked her what was going on. “They’re buying coke. Everyone here is completely buzzed. It’s really gross.”

  I looked around and noticed a more than average number of people talking to themselves beneath the music and pacing in corners. Even the few people pogoing in the center of the room to a Cramps song seemed, now that she mentioned it, a little too anxious about it.

  “Coke makes people so boring, don’t you think?”

  I agreed it did. “But not like pot, I guess.”

  “Nothing is as boring as pot. Last Jan Term was all about Quaaludes. That was so much better. Well, I’m sick of watching this. Did you want to try some?”

  “Oh, really?” I shook my head. I hadn’t done any since my interview that first night at 21. “I mean, maybe.” Susie smiled, got up, and beckoned me to follow. She walked us around a corner to the double room, outside of which six people stood shivering in a line. Susie vamped her way past them, shooting them shriveling looks, and pushed open the door. A deep voice yelled from within—“GET! THE! FUCK! Oh, hi, Susie.”

  Kneeling on the floor, Carl was measuring out tiny Ziploc baggies from a heap of white powder for a club kid dressed in black with a blue streak in his hair. In the back corner, three girls sat on a futon, focused intensely on a mirror coated with white dust and finger trails that lay on the floor beside them.

  “Carl,” Susie beckoned. “Rich here has lived too sheltered a life with us. He needs some coke.”

  “All right, but I gotta charge a hundred fifty a gram. It was a huge hassle to get it this time of year.”

  “A hundred fifty? You know we don’t have money.”

  “But, Susie”—Carl looked at her as though he’d been dreaming of throttling her for ages but was unable to make his body respond to his wishes, so instead he went from threatening to whiny—“Susie, this is, like, my job!!”

  “Don’t be silly. We hardly need any at all. Why do you bother selling coke if you’re going to be such a pain about it?” She snatched the baggie out of his hand. The club kid across the table whimpered in protest. We plopped down on the futon with the three girls.

  “Hi, Malaria,” Susie said. “Do you want some?” I looked up and noticed to my horror that the girl by the mirror was the girl I’d danced with as a prospective st
udent. Her jet-black hair was now orange. Then she had looked impossibly grown-up and adult; now she looked understandably grown-up, sitting on the futon, resting on the shoulders of two death rock girls, her heavy makeup smearing her face as she wiped away the trails of snot seeping from her nose—still, to my eyes, the picture of glamour and mystique.

  “Malaria . . . ,” I whispered as Susie beckoned me to a narrow white line of powder on the mirror. I put the rolled twenty Susie handed me into my right nostril and leaned forward. I felt an explosion of blood to my head and wanted badly to laugh, or at least giggle.

  “Rub some on your gums,” Susie ordered.

  The metallic taste numbed my mouth in a surprisingly pleasant way and I ran my finger over the mirror, searching for more. “Malaria,” I said, “you’re the reason I came to this school.”

  Conversation stopped. The two death rock girls whispered something to each other. Malaria looked at me, eyes wide, as though she were about to make a run for it. “You’re not going to hit on me, are you?”

  I convulsed. “What? I mean, no. I mean, what I’m trying to say is, you danced with me.”

  “I do that sometimes.”

  “When I was a prospective student. I was taking the tour, from my friend Drake. And we went to a party and you danced with me and you really wanted to talk and I thought you were the coolest, like, grown-up woman who had ever talked to me.” I heard the words flooding out and tried to stop them, but the tide would not be held back, my brain now spinning too wildly to have any influence on my tongue. I considered throwing my hands over my mouth to shut myself up, but my hands were waving in the air and couldn’t be reined in and the horrifying words were coming still. “And then you left with some guy and I came back to school here to find you.” Susie, Malaria, Carl the drug dealer, his client, and the two death rock girls stared at me, I thought, not completely unkindly.