“Well, here I am. But you know, I’m a dyke now.”
“Yeah, I know, I mean I didn’t know. But that’s not what it’s about. Do you ever just feel like you’re talking and you want to know somebody but it’s like you’re talking to somebody else and it’s not really them listening?” Shut up, please shut up, I pleaded with myself.
Malaria inhaled a line and nodded. “It’s the mind/body problem. We want to talk to people’s bodies but only their minds can hear us.”
“Exactly! The mind/body problem!”
“Yeah, universal incomprehension is a drag.”
“You’re the first person who understands!”
“And it’s like that Cure song. You know, ‘I’m alive. I’m dead. I’m the stranger.’ We’re all of that. Totally just ripping off Camus, but it’s so true.”
The death rock girls—Elizabeth and Lucy were their names—perked up at the mention of the Cure and offered that Robert Smith was the only artist who understood that love is the harshest form of murder.
It was after seven A.M. when I finally shivered my way back across campus, grinding my teeth and trying to manage the explosions that reverberated through my skull with every step. Rays of sun poked through the darkness and slammed into me like rubber bullets. The pasty yellowish sky over the Farm Center made me want to cry. I realized I didn’t feel anything for Malaria anymore and it occurred to me that, in fact, I would never love anyone ever again.
A week after my return, Monica announced that the air in Mod 21 was becoming dangerously unhealthy. Indeed, even as she mentioned it, half the room was too absorbed in coughing fits to hear her. The normally vigorous fog of cigarette smoke, sweat, rotting food, unwashed clothes, incense, and Susie’s perfumes no longer merely hung over the room but clung to every pore. No one could recall the last time the windows had been opened. Whenever a new arrival entered, he or she spent a half hour or so doubled over wheezing, while acclimating to the environment.
Monica suggested we open the windows and doors and air the place out, “just for five minutes.” “And maybe take out some of this trash,” she added.
We glanced nervously at each other. The temperature outside was right around zero. If she opened the windows, we’d have to leave the room, at least to get our jackets.
“Maybe we should focus our orgone on purifying the air,” Ox suggested.
“I’m serious. I can’t breathe in here.”
“Are you sure this is about the air?” Jon asked. “Or is it that you’re sexually frustrated?”
Monica screamed at Jon and a fight broke out, which, we all happily realized, eliminated any immediate threat of a window-opening upheaval.
Taking advantage of the commotion to change the subject, Sharon, a pint-sized rocker, the lead singer of the Dick-friendly group Five Dumb Broads, said, “Flavio told me he talked to Steve Shavel in Northampton last night.”
“No way.” “What’s he doing?”
“He said he’s living in some dorm at Smith. They have a guest room.”
“Why doesn’t he come back here?”
“He said he’s planning a production of The Tempest on the island in Paradise Pond.” This sounded credible to most. The Tempest was, I was informed, one of Steve’s favorite plays and in the winter, when Smith College’s great pond froze, he was known to stroll out to that island with whatever Smithie he could lure and hold impromptu philosophy seminars.
“What if he comes back?” Meg, sitting next to me, said. “What will you do, Rich?” She looked at me and I shrugged, suppressing a flash of panic.
Much later that night, after most of the crowd had moved into various rooms and I sat on the couch reading and trying hard to like a Kathy Acker novel Meg had recommended, the front door creaked open and I looked up to find Elizabeth and Lucy, the death rock girls I’d met in the back room at the party. They glanced around and nodded in approval. Amazingly, both seemed impervious to the smoke, breathing freely.
“So this is the Supreme Dick mod,” Elizabeth, the red-haired taller of the two, said.
“How’s it going?”
They looked at me, or glared in suspicion. “You live here?” Elizabeth asked.
“I guess so. You didn’t know that?”
“We didn’t know who you were,” Lucy said.
“We thought you were from the library.” They walked in and nodded some more at the plates of food on the floor, the backlit photo of three Gemini astronauts, the Velvet Underground album playing, the cockroaches strolling the walls.
“This place is cool,” Lucy, the shorter, blond one, said. They both plopped down in the armchairs across the room and stared at me. I looked back in silence. They waited for me to say something.
“So you’re first-years too?”
They nodded in unison. “Yes, we’re first-years.” They looked at each other and both burst out laughing.
“I guess I didn’t see you around the dorms. When I was living there . . .”
Elizabeth leaned forward and said slowly, pausing significantly after each word, “We don’t socialize much.”
“No. I mean, me neither. I just mostly hang out.”
“So do you have any more coke?” Elizabeth asked, staring deep into my eyes.
“No. . . . No. Just what we did there.”
“Maybe we should go get some more.” Elizabeth looked at me so intensely, I dared not refuse. A few minutes later, bundled up in a couple hundred layers, we stomped across campus. Elizabeth and Lucy explained they were from a small town in Ohio, had been best friends since they were born. I asked them how they’d ended up at Hampshire. I had begun to notice that every Hampshire student had a funny story explaining how they got here. Flunking out of another college, expulsion from high school, bizarre dedication to some obscure corner of the curriculum like animal husbandry; it was like asking prison inmates how they’d ended up behind bars and hearing the convoluted tales of mistaken identity and oppression at the hands of corrupt authorities. Elizabeth and Lucy, I learned, had come to Hampshire after a high school senior year road trip in search of affordable LSD, which had inevitably led them to an Enfield House mod.
“So do you guys, like, go to class?” I asked.
They looked at me. Elizabeth said, “Why, do you?” Lucy, I noticed, seemed not really to speak.
“Not much. I mean, I’ve been.”
At the Prescott Mod, where the party had happened, ten or so nervous-looking people sat or paced around the living room. We started to walk back to Carl’s room but the assembly erupted at once. “You’ve gotta wait your turn!” Carl stomped out moments later and beckoned someone back into his room. We waited our turn, while the girl with blond dreadlocks, who had previously been back of the line, took hers. I tried to make chatter with Elizabeth, who was busy whispering something to Lucy, who seemed angry at her and turned her head away every time Elizabeth neared.
We were finally summoned into Carl’s room. Between us we had forty dollars, for which he measured a very small bag of white powder. He looked me in the eyes as he handed it to me. “You better stay away from that Susie, bra. She’ll ruin your life.”
He looked very, very serious about what he was saying.
“I live with her.”
“Oh, man. You are so screwed.”
“She’s been really cool.”
“Right. Totally cool. Just don’t let her know you think so.” As we left, Elizabeth asked me, “What did he mean about Susie? Is she dangerous?” Her eyes widened.
“I guess so.”
“Susie is amazing.” Elizabeth clutched her arms around herself.
We approached the Greenwich woods. Lucy, opening her mouth for the first time in over an hour, suddenly yelled, “I’m going home,” turned around, and stomped off back toward the dorms.
“Lucy, no!” Elizabeth yelled and ran after her a little ways. When Lucy kept going, she stopped and we both watched her small shape, flowing in black overcoat, scarf, and boots, pound down the p
ath into the night.
Elizabeth rejoined me and we continued walking back toward Greenwich. “What’s wrong with her?” I asked
“She’s just really difficult sometimes.” I saw Elizabeth was crying. We didn’t speak until we got back to 21.
We set up on the floor of my room. I didn’t have a mirror, so Elizabeth expertly cut some lines on the cover of a cassette tape. At first she still didn’t want to talk.
“Did I do something to upset Lucy?” I asked.
“Not exactly. She’s just—grrrrr! Why is she being like this?!” She told me about her friendship with Lucy, a saga that had involved frequent periods of nonfriendship from the time they were children together. Elizabeth swore that she was through with putting up with this behavior, but “isn’t she just perfect? Isn’t she the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”
I thought to say, “No, you are,” but wasn’t sure whether she would storm out of my room, so instead I said, “Yeah, she’s cool.”
When the coke took hold, I summoned the courage to ask, “Is Lucy upset that you’re hanging out with me?”
“What?” Elizabeth scrunched her face. “No, not you. Susie.”
“Susie?”
“She can tell I’m in love with Susie.”
“Really?”
“I mean, of course. She’s amazing, isn’t she?”
We lay on my bed together, dressed in our overcoats and snow boots. “You know, everyone says you guys are all going to be expelled,” she told me.
“Do you think they can do that?”
“I dunno, but that’s what people say. Are you scared?”
I thought about it for a moment, tried to picture being expelled. “It’s kinda abstract, you know?”
We turned out the lights so we could listen to the instrumental side of David Bowie’s Low album. We listened to it once and then rewound the tape and played it again. “If you don’t understand this album, you don’t understand Bowie,” Elizabeth said. I listened intently to the lyrics:Don’t look at the carpet,
I drew something awful on it
See
You’re such a wonderful person
But you got problems oh-oh-oh-oh
I’ll never touch you
I looked at Elizabeth to see if she saw the significance of them. She looked at me and nodded, as though, it seemed to me, she had heard my thoughts. I watched her round deep eyes focus on a sputtering candle; her brow furrowed intensely, and her full lips pursed. I realized I was staring at her and tried not to, but found myself unable to stop.
“He’s saying,” I took a deep breath, “that we are vandals to art, and beauty. We dessicate it when we touch it.”
“Maybe,” she nodded and stared at me with a look I filled with horrible meaning.
“And he means, we do that when we touch people?” Elizabeth smiled at me, what seemed a malicious mocking, and turned away. We focused hard on the instrumental tracks.
When the album ended the second time I said, “He’s saying, if music can come from machines, then what makes us real?”
Elizabeth didn’t respond. I propped myself up and looked down at her, through the darkness. She had fallen asleep, her lips curled in a menacing sneer. The urge to kiss or touch her was overwhelming, so I lay back down and stared at the ceiling, spending the next few hours listening to my heart beat as I came down from the coke. I wondered if it should be beating this fast. That can’t be right, I thought, taking short gulps of breath. Outside, a bird started to chirp, the loudest bird I’d ever heard. I tried for hours to sleep, but the combination of the excitement created by Elizabeth’s body next to me, and the very real possibility that I was going into cardiac arrest from the drugs, kept me wide awake.
Hours later, sleep had just begun to touch me when I heard a noise from the window. Someone was trying to force it open. I sat up in bed, too terrified to move or speak. The person on the other side seemed to have grabbed a trick tree branch with which he’d pried open the window a tiny bit and was forcing it to yield further. Finally there was one great shove and a grunt and the window sprang open entirely, its hinge snapped. I gasped and rose up in bed. A small canvas knapsack flew in through the window, followed by a figure who leapt in, crashing to the floor and yelling in pain. He lay cringing and grabbing his ankle. Poking out from a camel overcoat, I saw a pair of red Converse high-tops.
“Steve Shavel?”
He jumped to his feet. “I am. And who are you and what are you doing in my room? With a woman, no less!”
Elizabeth snoozed in oblivion. “We’re just sleeping. See, we’re fully dressed. Our shoes on, even.”
Steve stood over the bed and looked at us. “Ah, so you are.”
“We’re problematizing our celibacy . . . ,” I said, recalling the term.
Steve nodded. “Very admirable. Well done, then.”
“Thank you.”
“But what are you doing in my bed? Are you Susie’s Krishna?”
“No. I’m Richard. I’m a first-year. I was thrown out of the dorms.”
“Sorry to hear that but all the same, I’m not running a boardinghouse here. This is completely unacceptable.”
“No one knew if you were coming back. Or even if you’re enrolled. . . .”
“No one knew? Why wouldn’t I come back? This is a travesty. Sasha!” he bellowed. As he threw open the door and marched up to Susie’s room the entire house awoke, stirred from their futons and crevices on the living room floor, shook themselves off, and followed him up to Susie’s room.
“Sasha!” Steve yelled, throwing open her door. “This is an outrage. What’s the idea of giving away my room?”
Susie rubbed her eyes and sat up. “Calm down, Steve. No one knew where you were.”
“Well, where did you think I was? I went down to talk to a Tractatus expert in North Carolina, then by amazing luck I stumbled into an estate auction and won a humidor of pre-Castro Cuban cigars for two hundred dollars. So I had to just pop down to Florida to smoke them. And then I came straight back here, just going for a few weeks to the transcendental workshop in Vermont, and I find you’ve given my room away and allowed this interloper to problematize on my bed.”
“Oh, and maybe you stopped for a month or two at Smith?” Ox asked.
Steve shot up, straightening his spine. “Where did you hear that?”
Everyone laughed.
“That is not true. I just visited a friend who had a first edition I needed to see in her room, and it got late and so I needed a place to stay.”
“It got late for a month?”
The bickering continued as the gray dawn filled the house. Steve eventually admitted that he had been “working with some girls in Comstock House on their orgone issues” and he had been persuaded to stay there, for the moment, as he “probably should do a bit more work before I let them loose on their own.” The fact that he hadn’t been, and didn’t seem to have any intention of becoming, an enrolled student didn’t enter into the discussion on whether or not the room was still rightfully his.
I was struck, never having had a nonofficial conversation with a thirty-year-old, by how young he looked. With his spiked hair, skinny tie, and buoyant energy, he actually seemed ten years younger than most of the lethargic inmates of the house.
While he brought a new effervescence to the mod just as we’d seemed on the brink of descending into the mold, his presence also added a new wrinkle to life in 21. Every afternoon, Steve strolled in from wherever he was staying at Smith and proceeded directly to the downstairs bathroom, where he would stay for two, three, and one day even five, hours, causing havoc as the other thirty of us had to share the one remaining tiny bathroom upstairs.
What Steve did in the bathroom was a constant topic of speculation. Autoerotic activities were, of course, suggested but always refuted by the fact that “it doesn’t take four hours to masturbate.” Spiking the hair with his Brylcreem certainly could account for as much as fifteen minutes of the time, a
bowel movement another fifteen to twenty. But this still left hours unaccounted for. It was a mystery we would debate until the end of my Hampshire days, without ever coming close to solving it.
My life, however, also took on a new wrinkle as I started to pay nightly calls on Elizabeth. Together we rounded up what money we could gather and dropped in on Carl for our baggies of white powder. Often we would end up passing out together around dawn, but the sleepovers remained, to my deepening confusion and frustration, fully dressed and entirely chaste.
Elizabeth spent much of our time together puzzling over the unconscionable behavior of Lucy, who continued to blow hot and cold, and listening to the Cramps, the Cure, and Christian Death and debating their meaning while I privately fantasized about her.
These fantasies remained tightly sealed away despite the fact that one night, Elizabeth initiated a conversation about our relationship.
Five lines of coke into an evening she suddenly said, “Do you think we should sleep together?”
I nearly choked on the Jack Daniel’s I was gulping and stammered, “We, I mean, we do sleep together. Like every night.”
She smiled wryly and condescendingly at me. “I mean have sex.”
“Oh, right.” I tried to break free from her gaze. “Right, I mean. Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I guess it’s not that important to me either way. Do you think about it?”
I broke down coughing. “I think,” I said, finally pulling myself together, “I think about everything. But, you know, I try not to, I mean, we’re celibate.”
“Right, celibate.” She looked me deep in the eyes and smiled. “So you’re saying you don’t want to?”
“No, no. I mean, I’m not saying anything. I mean, you’re my friend, right? So you can do things with friends?”
“I think it might be interesting. But it might be weird.”
“Yeah . . . I can see that. Totally. But it might be like a bonding experience.”
Elizabeth inhaled another line off the mirror. “Do you want to go and score some more?”
We didn’t have sex that night, nor on any of the following nights of Jan Term, although we sporadically discussed the matter. Our actual celibacy did not, however, stop the chatter in 21 about my whereabouts.
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