I told her about Tyler and the demonstrations. Some of her friends nodded, indicating they had heard about this, although I wondered how, because the lot of them looked like they hadn’t left this room in months.
“Yeah, I guess racism has gotten really bad,” Elizabeth said.
“Do you really think so?” I asked, confused.
Elizabeth looked back at the rest of the girls. “I don’t know,” she said to them. “Do we really think so?” They exploded in giggles. With nowhere else to go that night, I determined to wait out the group and sat in a corner leafing through Elizabeth’s copy of Story of the Eye while they babbled to each other in a tongue I did not possess. After giving me a dirty look when I declined to inhale from the hash coil, the girls ignored me sitting in their corner. As I looked up from the book to watch them, it occurred to me that I hadn’t laid eyes on Elizabeth and Lucy for weeks and since our last meeting, they had taken on a rather alarming appearance. While they always had looked fairly sinister, they now seemed to have cultivated that demeanor in a very coherent, even organized, way, with layered clothing, dramatic makeup, and the like. Now, there was a wildness to their look—Elizabeth’s long hair knotted and unwashed, her long skirts torn and dotted with strange substances. In their eyes, too, there was something beyond the standard disdain for humanity; no longer did they seem to be choosing to ignore the world about them. Their furtive glances had an absent quality—as though Elizabeth and Lucy had retreated far inside themselves and could not be reached through the normal channels. I had heard talk that there had been tumultuous times in their group—an overdose or two, perhaps a breakdown. I knew one of their circle had recently left them, after which they had all been driven almost completely underground. I saw now that, as intense as what I’d been experiencing seemed to me, Elizabeth had become alienated from the school on a whole other level.
Sometime after three, the girls around the circle began to stand up and drift away or pass out where they were. Finally, Elizabeth climbed onto her bed and clonked down. I climbed in beside her and hovered above, watching her sleep for a moment, her face still as beautiful to me as it ever had been. I shook her and she opened her eyes.
“Oh, hi.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Mmmmm . . . Are you coming to sleep? I’m tired.”
“Elizabeth,” I said, “I think we should get out of here.”
“I’m sooooo tired.”
“I mean, like leave school or something. Go away. I think if we stay here, terrible things will happen.”
Elizabeth smiled, eyes half-closed. “You want me to ride away on a horse with you. . . .” She reached her hand up, tousled my hair for a moment, and then passed out asleep. I lay beside her for an hour or so, not sleeping, and then got up as the sun was rising and walked back across campus in the painful dawn light.
During this time, Zach and I did, however, manage to achieve a real victory of our own—one we had long dreamed of but whose fruit proved surprisingly bitter: We fought our way to the end of Double Dragon. Since our first year, we had been regulars at the Tuesday Night Special at the neighboring Dead Mall video arcade, so called because the mall was empty of all stores except the arcade and a movie theater. Legend had it that years before, the mall had been a thriving hot spot, but that suddenly all the pets in the pet store had died of unexplained causes, leading the tenants to stampede away to the newer mall across the road.
Each Tuesday night, the arcade management filled each game with unlimited credits and for a four-dollar flat fee, one could play for three straight hours. Since the beginning of our second year, we had worked on Double Dragon, but had yet to make a significant dent in it. Finally in February, we felt ready to conquer the Dragon. Our skills and patience had developed; we had acquired formidable punching and kicking games both, as well functional knowledge of the array of jump/kick, jump/punch, elbow/punch moves available. With the Hampshire campus in flames around us, it was time to find what glory could still be had in this world.
Our first Dragon run was a miserable failure; after an hour our hands ached and we collapsed, walking away from the machine somewhere in the middle of the factory stage.
Two weeks later, we returned rested and prepared. Side by side for three full hours, we battled minotaurs, defeated each of the four underlings, and fought our way over conveyor belts and collapsed bridges. For three hours we bucked each other up when our strength flagged, covered for the other, battling alone when the other needed to massage the cramps out of his hand, carving our way ever onward with our fists, elbows, and boots. After three long hours of battling death, as the arcade prepared to close, we were deep in the hideout of the Black Warriors and at last encountered Willy, the Boss. After a grueling showdown, we took him down. We were informed that we had won the game.
However, we barely had a moment to celebrate when, to our horror, we looked at the screen and saw the words Now Fight Each Other. After three hours of camaraderie sown under fire, we were forced to battle each other to the death. Zach destroyed me easily. At the end of the journey, our victory had torn us apart as the fight itself never could have.
We walked silently out into the frigid night, our hands and eyes aching. “That was like a metaphor,” I said.
“It certainly was.” Zach nodded.
The Ayatollah was by now a virtual shut-in in our mod. But even in the squalid tranquillity of our linoleum-tiled home, the campus’s fury seeped in. Luke, our quietest modmate, had always been a reserved but welcome presence, loafing around the living room or occasionally party-hopping with us. An upsettingly studious preppy, Luke hailed from a different tribe than the rest of the house, but his low-key affability had made him a welcome presence nonetheless. However, Luke had a girlfriend, Suzanne, a Preppy Deadhead who became very visible in the front lines around the occupation. As the uprising continued, Luke spent less and less time at 89, eventually only appearing long enough to race into his room, fill up a duffel bag, and race out again. One day we stopped him as he charged past and demanded to know, “Are you avoiding us?” He wouldn’t look us in the eyes, only shaking his head and muttering, “I’m sorry, guys,” as he bolted out.
In due time, the occupiers presented their complete set of demands. The list was the standard stuff (more multicultural professors and staff, funding for a multicultural center). A massive rally at SAGA was planned—a night when “everyone” had to come together to support the movement. Once again, a good cop was sent our way. Zach, Frank, and I received a surprise visit from an ambassador from the movement. Kathie had been a friendly and pleasant RA in Merrill when I lived there, and whatever her leanings were among the RAs she didn’t seem to despise the earth for creating me. I had stayed on good terms with her despite the tension between myself and the rest of Merrill House. As the preparations mounted for the rally, she stopped Frank, Zach, and me outside SAGA, saying she needed to speak with us.
We went into her room in Merrill and sat on the throw pillows. There was silence for a moment as Kathie beamed at us. “So, you guys, I think I have something you’re going to be really excited about.”
We waited.
“I think I could have the chance for you to get yourselves back in good graces with the school.”
We waited some more.
“I talked to the committee. Listen. I’m sure you understand there’s a lot of hostility toward you guys.” She waited for us to agree. We said nothing.
“Well, anyway, time has passed. I made the case that you’re not evil people, and that after all you’ve been through, I’m sure you’ve grown from learning how much people are suffering here. Soooo . . . the Council has said they would be willing to give you time at the rally to stand up and offer your support of the movement.”
We looked at each other. “Excuse me?” I asked.
“This is your chance to show that you share our values. To rejoin the community. It’s such an opportunity they’re giving you. You don’t even know
how people are fighting to get speaking spots.”
“But what,” Zach asked, “what if we don’t support the movement?”
Kathie sat up straight and made a face like she had just inhaled an onion. “Why wouldn’t you support it?”
“Well,” I said, “these demands. I mean, I don’t know if I want any of this stuff.”
“But, you guys have to see that conditions here, they have to change.”
“Well, I dunno. . . .”
“Don’t you understand what people are going through here? The fear people feel being at a place like this. I would’ve thought, after all you guys heard when you were in the spotlight, that there was no way you’d still be blind to what’s happening.”
I nodded. “I’m not sure we see eye to eye on this one.”
Kathie shook her head. “I’m just really shocked.”
Frank stood up. “Well, we’re just fulla surprises, ain’t we? Let’s go, boys.” We left, knowing that our refusal to speak at the rally would be seen as the moral equivalent of burning a cross on the campus lawn. If there was any room left on our coffins to hammer more nails, we had just added another fistful.
And with that bridge burned, we made a decision that was stupid on such an epic scale that, decades later, it is still difficult to understand what the hell we were thinking. With the campus increasingly hostile, with Elizabeth lost in her drugged stupor, with the Ayatollah’s fate hanging in the balance, we fled campus and headed for Spring Break in Daytona Beach, Florida.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Last Spring Break
In early April, five of us squished into the Ayatollah’s 1967 Volvo and drove from western Massachusetts to Daytona Beach, the Spring Break capital of the world. For the passengers in that Volvo, the consequences of that vacation would echo down the corridors of history for the rest of our lives.
Before that trip, I had stumbled and snoozed through my education, blithely oblivious to any expectations of the school, my parents, or society, and indifferent to the gazillions being squandered on bettering me. I had survived three semesters with only the most token nods toward schoolwork. And through the haze of it all, through all the probations, the demonstrations, the meetings with the administration, the expulsions, the housing bans, nothing seemed more far-fetched than a suggestion that there could be consequences to my behavior; that my choices and actions would have any lasting effect on me or anyone else. As depressing as it had gotten, somehow it was still only Hampshire.
I think back to one night when, emerging from Clase Café, Zach and I stumbled into an Amherst party. The soirée was at one of the school’s vestigial fraternities, and we were quickly accosted by the icy wind of condescension the fine students of Amherst cast out whenever they met their brethren from down the road, “Hippie Harvard,” though we may have considered ourselves. After several minutes spent absorbing their snide comments, the sight of the house’s fire alarm was too tempting to ignore and we dutifully pulled it, racing out into the freezing rain with half the house on our tail.
Eluding our pursuers, we found ourselves in the town commons, dripping wet, shuddering with chills, and stung by a sudden awareness that we had missed the last bus back to campus. We hid by the side of the road in an ankle-deep slush puddle, and tried to hitch a ride from the very rare passing cars. Just as we were a breath away from hypothermia and wondering which of our limbs would be amputated first, a pickup truck hauling a load of sod took pity and swerved to a muddy stop. The driver offered us swigs from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he was chugging, which we accepted gladly. He sped down the iced-over two-lane road through the country, visions of death by frostbite alternating with images of dismemberment as we skidded through each turn—the skids causing our driver to whoop with delight and speed faster. Finally, at the gate of our campus, he slammed the brakes, sending the truck sliding off the road and spinning out in a series of 360s before coming to rest in a ditch. The driver high-fived us and we shuddered our way back to the dorms, bursting with excitement to tell our friends about the night. It was perhaps the greatest night we’d ever had at Hampshire. And if there had been any doubt beforehand that we were indestructible and that life’s pageant would always lead us safe and warm back to our dorm room, it was erased. Until Florida.
Of the many half-baked ideas behind the trip, perhaps none was more glaring than the notion at its very core, that we five postpunk antisocial misfits should go to Florida for Spring Break. But in the spring of 1988, as the movement had taken over the campus, the only sensible place for us to strike back against it seemed to be the massive weeklong wet T-shirt contest in Daytona Beach, Florida. We may have been banned from throwing a wet T-shirt contest at Hampshire (even if we didn’t actually want to throw one), but we were going to attend the biggest wet T-shirt contest on the planet and all the power of every protestor and every administration official couldn’t stop us.
Somehow, as April rolled in, we shook ourselves off and realized we had survived the inquisitions, the probations, the demonstrations. The campus had hit us with its best shot and we were in many ways bloodied and broken men, but we were still standing. For now.
The Ayatollah was the only one of our circle with a car, and insanely, he volunteered to drive. His badly rusting late-sixties Volvo sedan looked as though it might disintegrate in a moderate breeze, but of course, the dilapidated state only added to the romance of this grand adventure. We discussed whether we should have the car looked at before the long trip, but we all agreed that if we kept the gas tank filled and we didn’t drive it into a wall, the car would run just fine. The Volvo’s age only reassured us. It had been running longer than we’d been alive, and nothing bad had happened to us in all this time. So what could happen to it now?
Joining Frank, Zach, Tolla, and me was Carmella, better known to us as our Strange but Interesting Friend from Italy, or “Italian.” Carmella had come from Milan to study animals at Hampshire’s Farm Center. To the rest of us, the idea that anyone would travel so far to come to Hampshire to study defied every known law of nature. Thanks, however, to Carmella’s indecipherable dialect, we could make out little about what it was she actually did in her long hours at the school’s on-campus farm. One of the few stories that she successfully communicated through pantomime involved her sticking her arm inside living cows to inspect their uteruses, at least that’s what we thought she said. Equally incomprehensible was what she was doing, or what she thought she was doing, hanging around with us. In Italian, we wondered, did Zach, Frank, the Ayatollah, and I translate into something glamorous and interesting? It also was not at all clear that Carmella had any understanding about what a Spring Break was or why we were going to Florida. But whatever her translation, she seemed to enjoy hanging around with us and was more excited than any of us to drive to Florida. “Spring Break, it’s the season of the salty dogs” was the mantra she repeated with barely contained excitement.
And so one fateful blustery New England morning, we climbed into Tolla’s Volvo and pointed it south, sneering farewell to the campus as we puttered out the front entrance onto the highway. We licked our chops with excitement at how enraged our enemies would be by our tales from Florida when they learned we had survived their attempts to have us burned at the stake and lived to “party” once more.
Our first stop was Frank’s house in mid-Connecticut. Frank had gone home a few days before to take care of some family business and we promised to swing by and pick him up. We all prepared our polite responses to what we pictured would be Frank’s trailer-park family home. In our group of overindulged, spoiled indigents, Frank was the only one from a working-class background, a fact he reminded us of hourly. Alone in our clan, Frank held a campus job, and the most unglamorous job imaginable, no less—in the cafeteria’s dishwashing room. Given his dirt-under-the-fingernails credentials, Frank fashioned himself a working-class poet, writing songs of urban wastes. His favorite, “Life on the Road,” had been much invoked as we prepared
for the trip: Life on the road,
No cup of tea.
Life on the road,
It’s home for me.
When the rest of us would sing it back to him, mockingly, Frank would shake his head in rage. “You guys don’t understand how it is.”
So it was with no small amount of I’ll-be-durned head-scratching that we drove up to Frank’s family’s house, or rather drove onto the grounds of his estate. We stared at the stables, the guesthouse, and the perfectly coiffed hedgerows. One thing immediately became clear: how ridiculously hokey his Man of the Road routine was and what suckers we’d been to buy it.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I said to Frank as he greeted us.
“Don’t you start,” he warned back, clearly prepared for our feedback.
“I’ve gotta hand it to you, Frank. You’ve had it bad,” Zach said, glancing around.
“You guys.” He shook his head. “It’s not about that.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me I could breed with your horses here,” Carmella shouted with indignation.
We barged inside and gave ourselves a tour of the three-story colonial manse, Frank nipping at our heels saying, “You don’t wanna see this shit. Let’s get out of this joint.” Before we left, I realized in a sudden panic that I hadn’t brought anything to read and grabbed a paperback off Frank’s sister’s shelf, California Dreamin’: The True Story of the Mamas and the Papas by “Mama” Michelle Phillips.
By the time we reached New Jersey around nightfall, Frank was so furious with the nonstop ribbing that he sat silent, arms crossed, staring out the window, red-faced and humming to himself, trying to shut us out. We stopped at our first motel that night, somewhere in suburban Maryland, and he grumbled with extra vigor about the phoniness of the in-room movie selection, the individually wrapped soaps, the patterned bedcovers. “How can you people just live around this crap? It’s like being in a prison.”
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