Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost

by Richard Rushfield

“Do you want to hear what he wants? Is there a chance he wants to give you a merit badge for outstanding campus citizenship?”

  “But if I don’t show up, can’t he just expel me?”

  “He can’t expel you if he can’t find you.”

  Sensing my unease with simply sweeping the matter under the rug, Steve laid out an alternate plan. The next day I sent back a note reading,Leo,

  Thank you for the recommendations. I can’t wait to

  check those out.

  See you soon,

  Richard

  A week later, fortifying myself from the flask-sized bottle of Jack Daniel’s in my overcoat pocket, I returned to my box. The expected envelope was there, and after taking a deep swig from the bottle, I cavalierly snatched it out of my mailbox and tore it open with the dashing aplomb of a buccaneer. It read:Richard,

  I must have made a mistake in my last letter. Please

  come see me right away. We need to talk. But I’m

  glad you liked the books.

  On Steve’s instructions I wrote back:Are you sure you didn’t get that information about the financial instructions? I am really certain I sent it a week ago.

  Two weeks and four notes later, as Leo’s temperature rose and the notes began to allude to higher authorities, Steve finally conceded, “It might be time for you to see him.”

  The meeting when it came was mercifully brief. After apologizing about the mix-up with the notes, he asked me what classes I was taking that semester. I was able to tell him truthfully that I had enrolled in three, although I didn’t mention that it had been weeks since I had poked my head into any. Leo nodded sternly, stroking his beard, and said he thought it might be a good idea to place me on academic probation. The terms, he said, required me once again to finish two classes this semester.

  I nodded grimly and we glanced at each other in quiet resignation, like a couple finally expressing out loud what they had each privately feared—that their faithful old Labrador who hadn’t moved from his spot by the fire in almost a month was, in fact, dead. Leo stared at me with a look of self-pity mixed with anger at my having put him in this position. Feeling sorry, I attempted to console him, suggesting, “I guess even alternative education has to have rules.”

  He exploded. “My teaching has never been about rules. You know, I’m the one who stood up when they tried to bring in grades in ’79! I fought for the pet policy! And now look, you and your friends are making me act like—like I’m one of the pigs, for crying out loud.”

  I rose and smiled as benignly as I could. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

  His white beard flapping, he asked me to leave his office immediately.

  It was the first day since winter began that the frost had given way to just a hint of warmth, the thermometer climbing into the low thirties. Steve Shavel and Ox sat perched on a low wall outside the Social Sciences Building, waiting for me. We walked into the dorms quad, where for the first time in months, people were lingering slightly in the outdoors—if not plopping down on the muddy, iceberg-dotted lawns, then at least pausing for a moment or two before they returned to shelter again.

  I told Steve and Ox what had happened. “Two classes?!” Ox looked alarmed.

  Steve, on the other hand, grew reflective. “The great experiment is over.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Hampshire College.” He waved grandly around us. “The greatest experiment in educational innovation mankind ever created has ended. Once they start telling us how many classes we should take, they may as well be telling us what classes we should take, and what we should learn from them. No, no, it’s over, the idea that you can regulate intellectual growth is against everything that we stand for here.”

  “How many years do you think intellectual growth should take?” Ox asked, poking at Steve’s decade-plus tenure at Hampshire.

  “Asking how long it should take is like asking what color your thoughts should be. There’s no answer to that. For some, enlightenment could happen five minutes after they get their dorm room key. For others, it’s an evolution that will take the rest of their lives.”

  “Oh, really, well, I hope you don’t tell your parents that,” Ox cracked.

  “So do you think I should protest?” I nervously asked.

  Steve shook his head. “You should, but the die is cast. They have decided to do away with us all.”

  I shuddered. As much as I enjoyed the drama of all this, the thought had been growing on me that I could actually be expelled. And as much as I wanted to imitate my housemates and not care one way or the other, the forbidden thought of “What would I do then?” kept picking the locks of my skull and pushing into my brain.

  As if reading my thoughts, Steve burst in. “But they’ve made a critical mistake with you, Richard. I think two classes is very manageable. We can get you through this.”

  “Really? How?”

  “Don’t worry. I can handle this. I’m going to make sure that even though they may bring down the rest of us, while you’re here the Supreme Dicks legacy will live on. Ox, what do you think?”

  “Shades of Gray. Minneapolis. Nineteen seventy-seven,” Ox replied, staring up at an open window on the top floor of Merrill House.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s having a flashback,” Steve said, and pointed out the sounds of drumming coming from an open window. “Someone’s playing a bootleg.” Although Daniel Oxenberg had long since shed the hippie trappings of his freshman year, certain stimuli could spark flashbacks and draw him back to his native state. As we trudged back to the Greenwich woods, Ox thumped out every beat to the remaining twenty-five minutes of the drum solo, drumming along on his stomach.

  It occurred to me to ask something. “How come they haven’t put you on any probations?”

  “Ah, yes. Well, they tried, actually.”

  “What happened?”

  “I told them that I’m not enrolled. They can’t put me on probation if I’m not a student.”

  Ox and I nodded. “Brilliant,” he murmured, and Steve seemed to agree.

  As the rain of probation notices drizzled down on Mod 21, Jon seemed completely uninterested. “I mean, I guess there’s not really much reason to stay here much longer.” As a film student, Jon lived in a world still isolated from the turmoil we confronted in the other branches of Hampshire academia. The Hampshire film department was in the hands of devotees of avant-garde filmmak ing who reared their pupils on the experiments of Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren. In my early days at Mod 21, I had salted my conversation with frequent references to Godard, Fellini, Anto nioni, and Fassbinder, whose names and titles I had learned to drop during my high school years spent in L.A.’s revival houses. From Jon and the others, however, I learned that these supposed icons of intellectual cool were in fact as stodgy a handful of references as if I’d thrown around the names of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. “I guess I just have a hard time buying that any amount of narrative isn’t a total cop-out,” Meg, also a film student, said to me.

  Around the mod, much whispering surrounded Jon’s own films—brief three-minute experiments that had been declared “brilliant” and “the best student films in Hampshire history” by the film program overlords. However, few of Jon’s films had ever been seen outside of his professor’s office, as Jon generally declared his work “pretty bad” and refused to show it to his friends. One film, featuring Jon as a hunchback and Susie as his wife, allegedly based on a W. B. Yeats poem, had been screened for his peers, and moments from it were still being picked over and dissected a year later like nuggets of Kabbalistic wisdom.

  In any event, Jon would occasionally slip out of the house, a Bolex camera under his arm, allegedly to the room of a fourth-year in Prescott named Michelle to shoot pieces of his coming Div III opus, which he refused to discuss with anyone, waving away inquiries with “It’s going to be really bad.”

  But it was unclear whether Jon’s ambivalence about the growing likelihood that
we were all about to be thrown out was owing to his secret confidence in the film and a certainty that he would be graduating in May; or because he so dreaded finishing the film that he would happily welcome expulsion as a way out of it; or because, as he claimed, he just didn’t particularly care one way or the other if he went to or graduated from Hampshire. Some even thought that he had been so disillusioned and shattered over what had happened to the Dicks that, like Colonel Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now, he just wanted it to end. Whatever his motivation, whenever the topic of the falling arm of the law was broached, Jon would dismiss it with a shrug, asking, “Why do you guys want to be here so bad?” And my unspoken answers, “I’d get in big trouble if I got expelled” and “I don’t know what I’d do after that,” filled me with shame.

  But as the warnings stacked up, my efforts to maintain nonchalance became more and more strained. One night, with as much bravado as I could command, I asked Steve Shavel what he thought my chances were of getting thrown out. He looked thoughtful.

  “Well, traditionally, it’s close to impossible to get expelled from Hampshire.”

  I tried not to look relieved.

  “However,” he continued, “times are clearly changing. At least for us. Now, if you had made the Triple Crown, I’d say you were doomed.”

  “The Triple Crown?”

  “The Triple Crown of probations—academic, behavioral, and housing. In Hampshire history, no one has ever earned the Triple Crown and survived to the next semester. The last person who had it, pre-Dicks, was Brian Elgar in ’81, and I believe that was the last time a non-Dick was expelled. Most of the Dicks have now made the Triple Crown. But”—he stroked his chin and polished his glasses—“you haven’t been given behavioral probation yet, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Just as I thought, somehow they let that slip through the cracks. So with only two probations, I’d put your chances of surviving at roughly forty-eight percent.”

  I nodded solemnly, unsure whether to feel reassured by the statistic or to cry out in panic. “That sounds reasonable,” I said. “Not that I want to stay here or anything.”

  “Richard,” Steve said, “forget what these fools say. You should stay here as long as you possibly can.”

  Coming from a man entering his second decade as a Hampshire student, these words carried some weight. “I’ve visited the world out there, and it’s a terrible place.” He shook his head in sadness. “Never graduate from college, believe me.”

  But my worries about the looming specter of expulsion had to compete against what for a time became an even greater obsession—round-the-clock thoughts of Elizabeth. For a couple weeks, our drug run/slumber parties settled into a cozy pattern. After our first kiss that night, the experiment was repeated on subsequent nights, generally with the same results; that is, the same results and nothing more. We’d come to a quiet moment when, the drugs failing, our chatter gave out and with “Hong Kong Garden” or Alex Chilton playing in the background, I’d kiss her and on most nights, she would kiss me back. Then, a few minutes later, she would pull away, roll over, say, “Good night,” and drift off, leaving my nerves shattered between coming down from the drugs and the excitement of the kiss. I’d lie awake beside her for the rest of the night, gazing down at her and wondering about how she could possibly look so peaceful.

  The next evening, when I showed up at her room in the Merrill House dorm, I found Lucy sitting with her. The three of us divided up the cocaine and sat together on Elizabeth’s floor, talking. Or rather the two of them talked and I twitched uncomfortably, counting the seconds until Lucy left. Exhausted from the sleepless night before, and even more rattled from the drugs, as the hours went by I listened to Elizabeth and Lucy share inside jokes largely made in a private language of squeaks and growls, and wondered if I would collapse. But grimly I dug in, determined to wait Lucy out in a battle of endurance.

  Finally around four A.M., lost in a stupor, I barely noticed as Lucy stood up and without a sound walked to the door and left. Elizabeth, watching her, sighed and stretched out on her bed. I got up and joined her, moving my face in close to Elizabeth’s.

  “How you doing?” I asked.

  “Frustrated. Why don’t we have any more coke?”

  “We could go up to Prescott. . . .”

  “It’s too cold.”

  I moved in for a kiss. Elizabeth pulled away and emitted a guttural squeal. “Unnnnhhh. Why are you doing that?”

  “Because . . . I dunno. I guess it’s fun.”

  “Lucy thinks you’re going to murder me.”

  “What?” I sat up.

  “She thinks you’re a killer. She’s got a lot of psychic energy, you know?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to kill you.”

  “Wouldn’t it be weird if you did?”

  As I thought about it, Elizabeth rolled over and faded to sleep.

  The next night, Elizabeth again repulsed my attempt to kiss her. The night after that, she kissed me again, more deeply than the first time. The following night, she said it was weird that I kept wanting to do that. We debated why I would want to. I thought of telling her, Because I really like you, because all I do every day is count how many more minutes I have left until I can come see you. But something inside, something in her sneer, something in the looks my housemates gave me as I shuffled muttering out the front door, told me that if I said those things, I would turn to stone then and there. So instead, when she asked why I wanted to kiss her, I answered, “It’s just what I feel like doing right now?” or better still, “There’s nothing else to do.”

  Finally the inevitable night came when I could not manage to sneak away to drop by her room. On the Saturday night following our first kiss, Zach and I had to be at the Amherst radio station at four A.M., for our show. Since the buses stopped running at midnight, however, we had to take the last one into town and sit up in the station’s foyer until our show started.

  In our fourth week on WAMH, it somehow at last dawned on Zach and I that we had been played for prize fools by taking on the overnight shift. Like all college DJs, we spent a good portion of our shows begging for calls or requests. But quickly we realized that our pleas were falling on perhaps not just deaf but nonexistent ears when not a single call came in during our first two weeks. On our third week, someone named Don called and demanded that we play a Huey Lewis song. The moment it was done, the phone rang again and Don this time demanded two songs by Art of Noise and Ratt. As we rushed to get them on the air, we began to address the show entirely to him (“Don, we have a public service announcement for you. This week the Pioneer Valley Historical Society celebrates its seventy-seventh . . . ”). At first we giggled through these addresses to Don, joking to each other about how weird it would seem to others tuning in to hear the mystery listener’s name constantly invoked, assuming that someone would soon call and demand we stop it, and cut off Don’s abysmal selections. However, as the hours dragged on, and no one called, we realized we were, in fact, performing the entire show for Don alone, and our steps became leaden as we raced to find the right Boston album.

  The sun was just weakly rising as Zach and I stepped off the bus onto the sleeping campus. “Great show,” he told me, nodding.

  “Best yet. I think Don really liked it.”

  Zach started walking toward the dorms and I walked with him. “You’re not going back to Twenty-one?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve gotta, sorta, you know, like deal with something first.”

  “You’re not going to visit that Elizabeth girl?”

  “I’m celibate!”

  “Yeah, we all are.” (Zach and Nathan had signed on to Supreme Dick orthodoxy as well.) “So why are you visiting Elizabeth?”

  “I left something there I need to pick up.”

  “On another celibate visit?”

  “Exactly.”

  We walked in silence a moment. “You can make a mockery of our philosophy if you want, but that girl is
weird,” Zach said.

  The hall door slammed behind me and I thundered down her still, silent floor, not a soul alive on a Sunday morning. I tiptoed to her room and, as gently as I could manage, knocked on her door. There was no answer. I knocked again, slightly louder, calling her name. I wondered where the hell she could be and realized I was inches away from falling asleep and passing out. Was she with Lucy? Not possible. Lucy always threw her out of her room when she went to sleep. Where had she gone last night? There was supposed to have been a party in Prescott. Who would have been there? Could anyone still be going at this hour? Was it even remotely possible that she was waiting for me in 21?

  I snapped out of my reverie and looked at my hand, which was now hammering on the door without restraint, the knocks filling the hall. I also noticed I was calling out, “Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” near the top of my lungs. And then I noticed that, dressed in robes, boxer shorts, and with towels wrapped around them, her hallmates had somehow emerged and were packing around me.

  “She’s not here, man,” one said.

  “She has to be. Lucy would’ve—”

  “Then I guess she doesn’t want to get it on with you, dude,” he shot back.

  “I’m celibate, actually,” I stammered.

  I was propelled by the shoulders through the hall and down the stairs, and soon stood outside at the foot of the dorm, shaking my head and trying to make sense of what had happened through an increasingly unraveled brain. The thought entered my head, Does Elizabeth even know my name? Has she ever used it?

  I spent most of the next few days trying to think of ways not to think of Elizabeth. I had no idea how I was supposed to address what had happened. Had she been in the room listening to me? Or had she skipped our regular meeting-up time? Did we have a regular time? Did she know what it was? On what grounds did I have any right to care where she was? In the confusion, I steered clear of the dining hall, snack bar, and any other place I might run into her, but I considered it an Olympic-medal triumph every time I could get through ten straight minutes without thinking of her.