by John Barth
Does this sound like a lampoon of student life in the early twenties? It is, indeed, a thing easily lampooned, but remember that the lampoons didn’t appear out of the air: they were written mostly by men who lived through just this sort of life. It reads like a lampoon to me, too—but that’s how it was.
One thing more, which perhaps distinguished my crowd from similarly exuberant groups of undergraduates at other colleges at the time: those of us who didn’t flunk out got an education—it is difficult to remain long at Hopkins and escape education. It was we who followed the real tradition of the chapter and, to some extent, of the University: studentensleben, in the manner of the old German universities. We drank hard, caroused hard, studied hard, and slept little. We crammed for examinations, drank black coffee, chewed cigarettes, took benzedrine—and read books, quizzed each other for days, and read more books, and asked more questions. The ones who failed were not really a part of us: the goal was to drink the most whiskey, fornicate the most girls, get the least sleep, and make the highest grades. I for one am thankful that studying was part of the sport, because otherwise I shouldn’t have bothered with it, knowing I’d not live to take my bachelor’s degree. To be sure, most of us remembered nothing two days after the final examinations; but some of us did. It was the professors, the fine, independent minds of Johns Hopkins—the maturity, the absence of restrictions, the very air of Homewood, that nourished the seeds of reason in our ruined bodies; the disinterested wisdom that refused even to see our ridiculous persons in the lecture halls; that talked, as it were, to itself, and seemed scarcely to care when some of us began to listen passionately.
I lived through 1920, through 1921, through 1922, through 1923. In the summers I lived on at the fraternity house and worked as a stonemason, a brush salesman, a factory laborer, a lifeguard at one of the city pools, a tutor of history, even, and once actually a ditchdigger. To my great surprise I was alive on commencement day, if not entirely sober, and lived to walk off Oilman Terrace with my diploma—pale, weak, educated. I had lost twenty pounds, countless prejudices, much provincialism, my chastity (what had remained of it), and my religion. I had gained a capacity for liquor and work; an ability to take beatings; a familiarity with card games, high society, and whorehouses; a taste for art and Marxism; and a habit of thinking that would ultimately lead me at least beyond the latter. My college years are as interesting, to me, as my time in the Army, but no more of them than what I’ve mentioned is relevant here.
Because—at summer’s end I was still alive and had to have something to do, I went ahead with my program and began reading the law at the University of Maryland Law School, in downtown Baltimore. I no longer lived in the fraternity house—in an adolescently idealistic moment I had proposed amending the Order’s constitution to admit Jews and Negroes, and had brought the righteous wrath of Beta Alpha upon my head. Instead, I had a marvelous fourth-floor room in an ancient row house—it must once have been palatial—on Monument Street, very near Hopkins Hospital: a room suggested to me by Marvin Rose. My neighbors and companions were medical students; the atmosphere was intense, electric with work, exhausting—more deadly serious than before, perhaps (for we were no longer undergraduates), but not more sober. With Marvin I rode in ambulances on night duty, learned first aid, hardened my stomach to carnage that equaled Argonne’s, made love to certain nurses and strange female patients, and drank.
I read Justices Holmes and Cardozo, and the Spanish and Italian legal philosophers; I studied criminal law, torts, wills, legal Latin. With the medical students, achievement, competence, even brilliance, were still part of the sport: I drove myself, drank much, read much, slept little. When I was discharged from the Army I’d weighed 180 pounds; on commencement day at Hopkins I weighed 160; by the end of my first year at law school I was down to 145.
“Less work for the pallbearers,” I told myself—for no one else suspected my Damocletian heart.
One night in mid-December of 1924 (I believe it was the last night before the Christmas holiday at both the law school and the medical school), Marvin and some of his colleagues proposed going out on the town, and since I happened to have thirty dollars, I agreed. I was the more eager to drink because all that day I’d had strange, sharp pains in my lower abdomen—too low for appendicitis. Walking hadn’t soothed them, nor had lying down, and so I looked forward to a pleasant general anesthesia.
“Dinner,” Marvin announced, and six of us took two cabs to Miller Brothers’ for crab imperial I ached all through the meal.
“Drink,” he announced later, and we took a bus out to a speakeasy near the hospital, one patronized by the medical students, and got somewhat drunk. I shifted and squirmed with pain.
“Divertissement!” announced someone a few hours later—we were five, then, because Marvin had to go on duty in the outpatient department for the rest of the night—and the whole party adjourned to a house of joy that someone else had heard of on North Calvert Street, about halfway to the University.
We rode out in a cab. Someone put something in the one whiskey bottle from which most of us drank—I’m no toxicologist, and so I can’t say what it was. When we disembarked we were loud, rough, and on the verge of helplessness. Twice in the next half hour I nearly fainted, not from liquor but from the fiery pains in my abdomen. I could scarcely wait to get a woman, for apart from the blessing of lying down, I had an inebriate notion that sex might relieve the pain.
Someone must have done my selecting for me; I’m sure I neither saw nor cared which of the girls I went upstairs with.
But “Toddy!” one of my companions hollered from down a hallway, just as my girl and I were entering a bedroom. “Hol’ on!”
“No,” I called back politely.
“Hol’ on!” my colleague hollered again, and came lurching down the hall, pulling a girl behind him. “I got a lady here knows you from ’way back, boy.”
“Oh,” I said, and went into the room where my girl was waiting.
“Oh nothing!” the medical student cried, striding in behind me. “Why take a total stranger when right here’s an ol’ buddy? I’m swappin’ with you.”
The new girl was apologizing to my girl for being dragged in.
“You guys better get straightened out quick,” my girl snapped, “or I’m callin’ Cozy to bounce you.”
I fell on the bed, dizzy almost to vomiting. I felt as though a hot needle, a hot bayonet, were piercing—my liver? My spleen?
Then I was standing in the center of the room, holding onto a bedpost for support, and Betty June Gunter, not a day older than she had been in 1917, was sitting on the bed, holding a cigarette in her hand, dangling a slipper from one foot, smiling mockingly at me.
I could see now; in fact I felt much more sober, but I was certainly suffering to the point of delirium.
“Glad to see you, Toddy,” Betty June said sarcastically.
“I’m not going to talk, if you don’t mind,” I said carefully. “We’d never get it all said, and if it’s all the same to you, I—”
What happened was that I collapsed then. After that Betty June had slipped off her one-piece whore’s dress and I was holding her. If six years of prostitution had changed her at all, I couldn’t see how. I remember wishing I were entirely sober and painless so that I could appreciate the grotesque coincidence of my meeting her, and also talk to her coherently. As far as I can tell, I was passing out every few minutes from my pain. At one point she asked me, “Do you hurt, Toddy boy?”
“I’m damn near dead,” I admitted.
Then she was leaning over me, rubbing my chest and arms with rubbing alcohol.
“What the hell.”
“Service of the house,” she grinned.
There was a tremendous racket outside in the hall and downstairs. I believe my medical colleagues were destroying the whorehouse.
My original plan for relief occurred to me, but it was apparently out of the question: the pain unmanned me. I was perspiring.
“You know Smitty’s dead,” I remarked.
Her expression, a puckered smile, didn’t change. Her eyes followed her hands, rubbing my legs.
What I finally said—rather loudly, for the noise outside the door was incessant—was, “Damn it, honey, I owe you an apology. I wish this pain weren’t so bad, I’d do things right for you, no laughing. That time in my room back home, I swear, I—”
That was when, still without any change of expression at all, Betty June emptied the whole bottle of rubbing alcohol in the worst possible place.
I hollered and leaped from the bed; I clutched myself and rolled on the floor. Stupendous pain! The two together were inconceivable! To make things worse, Betty June fell upon me, still smiling. She struck at me with the alcohol bottle, coolly, putting all her small strength into each blow, and although I was able to parry nearly every assault, the crack of the bottle on my arm or elbow was punishment enough. I pushed and kicked her away, but to stand up was beyond my power. I felt on fire.
Betty June had got the bottle broken by this time, and came at me with the jagged neck of it. I rolled away and struck at her, but it was a losing fight. Every parry cost me a slash on the arm, across the knuckles, in the palm of my hand. When I finally got a grip on her right wrist, she kicked and bit. What I wanted to do, what I tried to do, was break her arm, if possible, to slow her up. That’s what I was attempting when the room filled with people.
“Cozy!” Betty June cried.
There was a din. I didn’t dare let go of Betty June’s arm, although I was too weak to break it. Much blood was on us both. I felt like going to sleep; I had the strongest impulse to say, “Let’s be friends,” and go to sleep on her poor thin arm, there on the floor. Why isn’t the whole thing a sailboat? I remember wondering through the pain that was crucifying me; then I could let go of everything, tiller and sheets, and the boat would luff up into the wind and hang in stays, and I could sleep.
Cozy must have been a competent bouncer. I daresay he rabbit-punched me, considering the circumstances and the additional pain in the back of my neck when I woke up next, but I didn’t even feel the blow when it fell. Cozy had stuffed me into the back seat of somebody’s parked automobile, on the floor. I had my shirt and trousers and shoes on, loosely, but no underwear, necktie, stockings, coat, or overcoat. Three-inch adhesive tape had been rolled roughly around my slashed arm—Cozy’s employer hadn’t wanted me to die near the premises—and since no major blood vessels had been severed, the bleeding had virtually stopped, but not before daubing my clothes. My neck throbbed; I still burned, though not quite so severely—horrible few minutes!—and the mysterious original pain continued undiminished.
I crawled out of the car after a while. I still had my wristwatch: it was four in the morning. What part of town was I in? I kept close to the wall of row houses along the street, both to steady myself and to shelter myself from the cold, and walked to the corner gas lamp. As is usual in the poorer neighborhoods, the street signs around the lamp were broken off. I turned the corner and walked numbly for an infinity of uninhabited city blocks, all fronted with infinities of faceless, featureless, identical row houses and nightmare lines of marble steps like snaggled teeth. Then came the second coincidence of the evening: I had been walking in a lightless alleyway, quiet and black as a far cranny of the universe; I half-fell around a corner, and was on Monument Street—civilized, brightly lighted, filled with automobiles and streetcars even at four o’clock. The brown Victorian pile of Hopkins Hospital stood just across the street, disgorging frequent ambulances into the city and swallowing others. A flurry of lights and a succession of strong smells, and presently I was sitting in a hard chair in a corridor of the hospital. There was much glare; soft hustlings of cars, stretchers, nurses, orderlies; muffled clinkings of instruments and glass; laughter in the distance; activity, busyness, all around my hard chair where I sat holding my head tightly. Everybody was awake in the hospital; I felt so safe I wanted to vomit.
Marvin Rose was saying, “Stay here for a few days, Toddy.”
Then I was in the ward—had slept for a long time and was in little pain—and when I opened my eyes a lean nurse was holding my left arm. Before I could explain to her whatever it was that I felt explosively needed explaining, her needle had made quite the wrong small popping puncture (more felt than heard, to be sure) in the white underskin of my forearm, and I fainted another time.
Few things, I venture, are more uncomfortable to a man than a needle biopsy. The horrid instrument opened the secret of my pain to the doctor who attended me. A severely infected prostate—most unusual in a twenty-four-year-old man. And my health was generally broken down. I remained in the ward for a month, with little to do but think.
Here are the things I thought about, lying long hours immobile with closed eyes: my imminent, instant death; the futility, for me, of plans and goals; the tight smile on Betty June’s lips (she hadn’t laughed); the sound of punctured skin. I thought at times coherently, at times dizzily, moving from one subject to the next and starting over again. I would not attempt to sort the causes from the effects in my month’s thinking, but when I was finally discharged I had decided with my whole being that I was “out of it”; that the pursuits, the goals, the enthusiasms of the world of men were not mine. My stance had been wrong, I concluded: the fact with which I had to live was not to be escaped in whiskey and violence, not even in work. What I must do, I reasoned, is keep it squarely before me all the time; live with it soberly, looking it straight in the eye. There was more to my new attitude, but it was a matter of the rearrangement of abstractions, not important here. The visible effects on my behavior were primarily these: I still drank, but no longer got drunk. I smoked, but not nervously. I took women to bed only in the rare cases when it was they who assumed the initiative, and then I was thorough but dispassionate. I studied and worked hard and steadily, but no longer intensely. I talked less. I began in earnest what was to be a long process of assuming hard control over myself: the substitution of small, specific strengths for small, specific weaknesses, regarding the latter with the same unresentful disfavor with which one regards a speck of dust on one’s coat sleeve, before plucking it quietly off. I unconsciously began to regard my fellow men variously as more or less pacific animals among whom it was generally safe to walk (so long as one observed certain tacitly assumed rules), or as a colony of more or less quiet lunatics among whom it was generally safe to live (so long as one humored, at least outwardly, certain aspects of their madness).
There have been other changes in my attitude during my life, but none altered my outward behavior and manner so markedly as this one. I was uninvolved; I was unmoved; I was a saint. I was, so I believed then, in the position of those South American butterflies who, themselves defenseless, mimic outwardly the more numerous species among which they live: appropriately, the so-called “nauseous” Danais, whose bad taste and smell render them relatively safe. At least when walking their streets, I had to pretend to be like all the other butterflies—but at heart I knew I was of another species, perhaps a less nauseous one.
I continued, therefore, my study of law, as part of the mimicry; at Marvin’s prescription I began taking a capsule of diethylstilbestrol every day; and I awaited more quietly the moment of death. In my good time I meditated, disinterestedly, that tight, puckered smile on the face of the female human being who had intended to kill me. And, for the next thirteen years, though the prostate continued to give me frequent pain, I ceased to share that pain with physicians. Who ever heard of a saint’s crying for a doctor?
“Well, well, well!” Marvin shoute
d (in 1937) when I stepped into his office. He rubbed his hands gleefully. “Coming home to die, are you? What’ll it be, Todd? What the hell, you pregnant?”
“A plain old physical examination, Marv,” I said.
“Going to buy some insurance, man? I’ll lie for you. Hell, boy, I’ll euthanaze you.”
“None of your business. Come on, examine.”
But we smoked a cigar first, and Marvin reminisced about Baltimore. When he got around to examining me, I said:
“Will you go along with me on something, Marvin?”
“Where’s the body? What’d you do, Todd?”
“Examine me to your heart’s content,” I said, “but I don’t want you to say a word about anything you see or find; don’t even change expression.”
“I won’t even examine you if you say so, you big sissy. I’ll call Shirley in here and let her look at you.”
“Just write it all down,” I smiled, “and either mail it to me or drop it off at the hotel. The point is that I don’t want to know anything at all, at least until tomorrow. Okay?”
Marvin grinned: “You’re the doctor.”
He then went through the examining routine, talking all the while he checked my height, weight, eyes, ears, nose, throat, and teeth. Then I stripped to the waist, and with stethoscope, watch and sphygmomanometer he checked my heart, my pulse, and my blood pressure, keeping the expressionless face I’d asked for. Then he tapped my chest and back, listening for congestion, and felt my vertebrae. Finally I removed trousers and underwear, and he tapped my knee, testing for locomotor ataxia, felt for hernias, and looked for hemorrhoids and flat feet, all without any alteration of expression.
