Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost

by Richard Rushfield

  “Will we all get thrown out?”

  “I don’t know. I think we all need to get away from this place, frankly.”

  I gulped, then looked around the room at the sprawling books strewn everywhere.

  “How’s the paper coming?”

  “Oh, Zelda, Zelda, Zelda. So impossible. But I would say, at last, that it’s almost done.”

  “You’ve written it?”

  “I’m up to the point where I’ve done just about everything except write it.”

  In the meantime, the empty campus gave us an opportunity to pursue one of the Dicks’ most precious goals, a Holy Grail upon which we had sat up many nights dreaming; a mission the Dicks had trained for, planned, and debated for years, but somehow had never gotten around to actually executing. This mission had become such a cornerstone of Dick lore that fulfilling it had taken on impossible dimensions—akin to restoring the Ark of the Covenant to a rebuilt Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. One day while we were lounging outside the library, Steve Shavel announced that it was time we stole back the orgone accumulator from the Cole Science Center.

  Reich had conceived of the accumulator, one of the great scientist’s cornerstone inventions, as an artificial means to stimulate orgone flow. He had, in his writings, specified a number of possible designs; Steve Shavel and a few others had built one of them for their joint Natural Sciences Div I that was roughly the size of a small outhouse—a wooden box on the outside, encasing “alternating layers of organic and inorganic materials”; in this case a layer of steel wool lined a space between the wooden outer and inner walls. Inside was a small bench, barely large enough for one person to sit on.

  I had asked Steve how it felt to sit inside the accumulator. “Invigorating,” he insisted, although others said it didn’t feel like anything at all except sitting in a wooden sweatbox. The accumulator had already claimed one victim, however. Steve recounted how after building it he had moved it to the Art Barn so he could decorate the exterior. One night, still up working at three in the morning, he had decided he could use a little orgone boost and had taken a seat inside. Minutes later, he saw through the crack between the top of the accumulator’s door and its roof Hampshire’s art professor, the celebrated sculptor Geoffrey Robbins, walk into the barn and start inspecting his students’ works in progress, bottle of whiskey in hand. As Steve watched through the open slat, Robbins looked at one painting and suddenly unleashed a tirade of hate, waving his hands while spewing profanities at the work as though he were attempting to subdue a runaway crocodile. When his rage was spent, he moved on to the next piece, a wire mobile. Robbins stopped, cocked one eye at the piece, and erupted again, pummeling it with odium. Steve became increasingly terrified for his safety and tried to quiet his breathing as Robbins worked his way closer to the accumulator. Finally, the moment came and he stood directly in front of the box. Quaking with fear, through the crack Steve saw Robbins raise an eyebrow, look at the accumulator, and then mutter, “Well, this isn’t bad.” He moved out of Steve’s range of vision to inspect it on all sides, murmuring, “I rather like this,” until he came back to the front and, his face pressed close, peered right inside through the open slat and made eye contact with Steve.

  Steve claimed that at that moment he wanted to say something reassuring, but no appropriate words came to him. Robbins froze, eyes wide as dirigibles, as Steve stared back. He fell backward, knocking into the mobile, and, letting out a shriek of horror, he ran from the building. According to Steve, he didn’t return to teaching until the next semester.

  Whatever its decorative merits, the professors who reviewed the project were less than overwhelmed by the accumulator’s scientific strengths. As often seemed to happen when Steve was involved, the dispute grew heated; he accused the professors of being part of a science establishment cabal to cover up the truth about orgone energy, which, if it were known, would put all of them out of business. By the end of the discussion, the accumulator had been impounded by the School of Natural Sciences and shoved away in a back corner of the third-floor lab, and Steve was forbidden to remove it.

  “It wouldn’t be such a crime,” Steve explained, “but they keep it under fluorescent lights,” which apparently poisoned an accumulator’s effectiveness.

  When night came, the plan to reclaim the accumulator rallied the extended family of 21, carrying everyone back to the glory days of the bell theft two years before. It didn’t occur to any of us gathered for the great heist that this was the absolute wrong time for us to be doing something like this. Around three A.M. we crept out of 21, giggling through the woods and around the back way to the side door of the Cole Science Center.

  Unfortunately, inevitably, everything immediately went wrong. The twenty of us scampering through the dead quiet night were about as discreet as the UMASS marching band might have been if they suddenly decided to hold tryouts on the main lawn. (Why our plan required twenty people instead of say, two, was a tactical flaw no one addressed.) The noise of our mass shuffling and guffawing drew the attention of two security guards walking in front of the library. As they yelled out, “Hey!” and raced over, most of us fled careening in every direction. Only Steve and two others ducked inside and raced up the stairwell they knew would be open. Getting to the top floor, they found the accumulator and lifted it and lugged it to the stairwell. They managed to get it down half a flight, but when they heard the door on the ground floor open, they dropped the box and it tumbled down some stairs while they raced back to the top floor and hid out in various supply closets, where they crouched until morning, when they quietly slipped out of the building.

  While they sat in hiding, however, Meg, Angela, and I were creeping back across campus toward 21. Just as we passed beneath the library bridge, a security officer stepped out and shone a flashlight in our faces.

  “Mind telling me where you’re going?” he asked.

  “Home,” I stammered. “Twenty-one.”

  “Yeah, I know that. So how about telling me what you lot were up to over there?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re coming from the tavern.”

  “The one that closed two hours ago?”

  “We took the long way.”

  “So what’s so big going on in Cole? You trying to get at the dean’s records?”

  “Honestly . . .”

  “Well, it won’t do you any good. Everyone knows it’s all over for you kids.”

  “Ummm . . . so you want to copy down our ID info?”

  “That’s fine. We don’t need that anymore.”

  We walked back to the mod in silence. I realized he hadn’t even asked our names. Back at the house, alternate plans to liberate the accumulator were immediately offered. Four years later, when I finally left Hampshire, it still sat tucked away in the back corner of a classroom on the third floor of the Cole Science Center, stacks of books heaped on its meticulously decorated roof.

  In the final days before Spring Jam, the question of the Dicks’ performance became the consuming obsession, and the more it was debated, the more hopeless it seemed that we would find a solution that was both adequately grandiose and dismissive of the entire Spring Jam enterprise. After Spring Break, Jon checked out of the conversation entirely. “I don’t even think I’ll play,” he said. “You guys just do whatever you want.”

  I bounced the dilemma off Tasha one afternoon at Clase. “I’ve heard that concert is pretty cool,” she said. “Dinosaur might do a set this year.”

  I stammered a bit. “It’s not cool. It’s like, you know, the fascist hierarchy.”

  She stared blankly at me.

  “They are trying to destroy the real power of liberation, Dick music, beneath this—this veneer of rebellion. Orgone energy, it’s like, a million times more powerful than a bunch of guys in leather jackets flailing at guitars.”

  She looked at me for an agonizing moment more. “Why don’t you guys just do a show?”

  I sputtered. “Because it w
ould be just upholding the deadly-orgone-radiation paradigm.”

  Ramona, visiting from Boston, rolled her eyes and said, dangling a solitary French fry between two fingers, “What is it about your school that makes everyone so boring?”

  I sank into my seat. A few minutes later, Tasha got up to leave.

  “So do you want to talk on the phone later?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, maybe, no. I’m going to be out until later.”

  “Oh, really. Out?” I looked over to Christie, to my knowledge the only person she would be out with. Christie gave no reaction to Tasha’s statement.

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “Probably me too.”

  Sensing my gloom, Ramona leaned a little toward me and murmured, “Don’t worry. Someday soon this kinda stuff will happen and you won’t feel anything at all.”

  The day of Spring Jam everyone was miraculously awake by noon, even though we were not scheduled to go on until six. Nothing had been resolved about the show; it hadn’t even been definitively decided that we would play, although Luntz had grudgingly sent word through his girlfriend that the Dicks would indeed be allowed to go on.

  As the hubbub built in the living room, Jon sat picking at an unplugged electric guitar. The debate over what we should play gathered steam and grew into a roar before petering out for lack of any consensus. As usual, the room turned to Jon for instruction.

  “I dunno,” he said, not looking up. “Do you guys really want to play this show?”

  We groaned.

  “I guess we could do the vegetable song. What’s the big deal?”

  The show that year would long be remembered as the apex of Spring Jams. The bands included swinging sixties pop collective the Malarians, the country/western Jersey Slim and the Prescott Playboys, a punk group the Lonely Moans, girl rockers the Five Dumb Broads, funksters known as Jambone, and underground sensation the Loneliest Christmas Tree—each of whom drew a huge following on campus and in the area. The long winter was finally behind us—the day was perfect New England spring and a crowd of a thousand or so sprawled on the vast lawn, eating tempeh burgers from the snack bar, hacky-sacking, and enjoying the assemblage of musical giants that Hampshire had produced.

  I found Tasha sitting with Susie and some of the other Amherst punks. “So what are you guys gonna do?” she asked.

  “I dunno. I guess just play.”

  The little group looked at me, incredulous. They believed that a historic disaster had been promised.

  “That’s cool,” Tasha said, turning back to the group.

  I looked across the vast lawn and surveyed the scene. For the first time since I had been at Hampshire, the hippies, punks, hard-core feminists, art scenesters, NYC nightclubbers, Preppy Deadheads, and machine shoppers had all come together in one happy, contented day at the park. It looked like a finale scene of contentment and celebration from some postapocalyptic underground film, the ending of 8½ cast with the extras from The Road Warrior.

  And then it was our turn to go on.

  As the Dicks climbed onstage, one could feel the peaceful idyll become tense and jittery. A few rose to leave. Scattered boos were heard. The show started uneventfully enough, just as the sun was setting. For this show, some ten guitarists stepped forward to join the group, along with Steve Shavel on slide guitar and Mark on drums. As usual, the set started with no clear delineation between tuning the instruments and actual music, no clear indication that the set proper had begun and we were now actually in a song.

  At some point the random chords resolved themselves into something resembling a steady drone, driven on by something approximating rhythm. At some point Steve Shavel took a microphone and, in a deep sonorous voice, began what sounded like a medieval monk’s chant. The audience sat mildly annoyed for a few minutes but as ten and then fifteen minutes passed of the same, more boos were heard, barely, over the drone. The boos grew louder and louder and soon were equal in volume with the music itself. I looked around the lawn, and half of the people were on their feet yelling. The other half seemed to be leaving. I saw campus security look for guidance to Luntz, who shrugged and yelled something at the stage.

  Jon and Tim moved toward each other and began playing their guitars directly in each other’s faces, in fumbling mockery of two arena rock band members sharing a jam, except instead of the gleeful expressions one might find on Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora’s faces at such a moment, Jon and Tim were blank and emotionless, absorbed in their own drone. Then, with a sudden burst of aggression, Jon shoved his guitar at Tim, who, showing no surprise at all, violently shoved back. The necks of their guitars met, and in what looked like a sword fight with their instruments, the meeting of the twain created such a god-awful noise that most of the crowd at once covered their ears. As the howls of protest from the crowd grew louder, Jon and Tim’s fight looked intensely real; Jon’s normally goofy expression seemed twisted in a determined and hate-filled grin. Security moved toward the stage.

  Just as the fight seemed at a stalemate, their guitars locked together, splinters flew out of the instruments, and a huge one shot directly into Jon’s forehead. Within moments his face was covered with blood. The others continued playing as though nothing had happened. The boos of revulsion from the crowd became overwhelming. Luntz moved to turn off the sound and security rushed onto the stage.

  It was at this point that I looked back toward the mixing table and saw Dennis, Luntz’s first-year protégé, a laughably self-serious punk-nerd whom Zach, Nathan, and I had routinely mocked—kissing Tasha. I gasped for air as the mysteries of the past month unraveled in an instant. Onstage, the ten Dicks outnumbered the six security officers chasing them around the platform. The officers would shove one off the stage and go after another and the one shoved off would jump back on. I looked to Liz and Marilyn, who stood beside me. We shrugged our shoulders and jumped onstage, too, joining in the standing sit-in. For the next half hour, security played Whac-a-Mole with us until we all tired out and the lawn completely emptied. With Spring Jam over, we called it a day.

  The first announcement informed us that 21 was officially disbanded. A little note, sealed in the dreaded Hampshire stationery, was delivered to each of our boxes, saying that we had each lost our residential privileges for Greenwich and Enfield Houses for the following year and that Mod 21 would be reassigned to incoming students in the fall. This meant, it occurred to me, that should I be allowed to return the following year, I would be banned from three of Hampshire’s five houses. I asked Steve Shavel whether this was a record for a first-year. He suspected that it was a first in the eighties, but he recalled hearing stories that a decade before there had been a hippie girl who, during a four-month acid trip, had been thrown out of all five houses in her first semester. But still, he consoled me, it was a considerable achievement.

  Returning to 21, eviction notice in hand, I expected to find a sullen room of defeated faces, but to all appearances, no one was taking any notice. A tape blared while Arthur and Tim played their guitars. A few more quarreled in a corner. A bunch of people were getting ready to go to the quad, where one of the NYC club crowd had summoned the whole campus to lie on the ground in the shape of a peace sign. She had rented a helicopter and was going to fly overhead and film the spectacle for her Div III—a music video.

  Meg read a music magazine in the middle of the floor. Half-eaten sandwiches lay stuffed between cushions on the couch just like every other day, as though nothing in the world had happened. The cockroaches—whose population had exploded since spring began—strode up and down the walls with unusual energy and swagger in their step. For a moment I wondered if the news had made it back; then I saw a copy of the same note I’d received tacked to the wall between the illuminated portrait of the Apollo 11 astronauts and a Bob Weiner for Congress poster.

  “So I guess it’s over,” I said, to no one in particular.

  “Yeah, sucks,” Meg said without looking up.

  “Oh, wow. Where do you think you’re goi
ng to live, Rich?” Ox asked, concerned.

  “I guess I still don’t know if I’ll be back.”

  Ox nodded. “That’s true.”

  Upstairs, Susie was trying on a springy dress she’d bought at a thrift store in Northampton. (“Isn’t it weird that all our clothes come from dead people?” Ox had asked on the trip.) I noticed her Zelda Fitzgerald library had disappeared from her room.

  “Did you finish?” I asked.

  Susie made a face. “Ach, no. Milton is being ridiculous. I don’t think he understands Zelda at all. I really don’t feel like dealing with him anymore.”

  “So you’re not upset about the mod, then?”

  “It’s really not healthy, all of us being cooped up here all the time. I’ve got to tell you, I’m getting sick of these people. They’re just lazy.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “Go to New York, I suppose. Be beautiful. Become a star.” She turned to inspect her dress from another angle in the mirror.

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “I would get out of here, too, if I were you. Really, Hampshire has gone completely downhill. If it had been like this three years ago, I never would’ve come.”

  In desperation, I decided to go to class. I recalled that my Tolstoy class started in ten minutes. On the brief walk over, I wondered if it wouldn’t be awkward to show up to a class after a two-month absence, but none of the twenty or so other students or the professor seemed to notice or care that I hadn’t been there before or that I was there now.

  The professor was actually one of Hampshire’s most exciting, and seeing her gave me pangs of regret that I hadn’t come to class more often. Ninotchka was a dead ringer for Morticia Addams, down to the long, slinky dresses she wore in black, gray, or red. She sat down and apologized to the class that she might have to cut things short today, since she was suffering from walking pneumonia.

  Since I hadn’t read Anna Karenina, the lecture and discussion were fairly obscure, but Ninotchka’s musings on Anna’s suicide were absolutely captivating. At the end of the class, Ninotchka reminded everyone that final papers were due the following week. In a whisper I asked the guy sitting next to me how many papers they had written so far. He shot me a dirty look and said, “This is the first.”