The Collective: A Novel

by Don Lee

  When we got out of the van near the club, Joshua pulled me (and I pulled Didi) into an alleyway. “We’ve got to get in the proper mood for this,” he said, and produced a pipe and a lighter from his jacket pocket. Mac was known as a haven for potheads, so I wasn’t surprised that Joshua had gotten hold of some weed. “This is primo Buddha,” he said. “Thai stick. Phoebe, ladies get the honors.”

  “It’s Didi,” I said.

  Didi seemed somewhat hesitant, but gamely fired up the lighter and took a toke, then promptly gagged and hacked.

  “Yeah, it’s righteous strong shit,” Joshua said. “It might have some opium laced in it.”

  Between the three of us, we smoked two bowls, and then went in for the show. An all-girl punk band did an opening set that was shrieky and uninteresting, but I was enthralled just being inside the club. Until then, my only concert experiences had been at the Hollywood Bowl and the Forum in L.A.

  Sonic Youth took the stage with “Teen Age Riot,” which commenced slowly, quietly, but once the band started lashing into the main part of the song, the crowd came alive, everyone raising their arms and headbanging and pogoing, and it didn’t stop for an hour and a half, the energy overwhelming and exhilarating.

  “I’m going in!” Joshua said after a few songs, and he waded toward the mosh pit that had formed in front of the stage.

  He disappeared for the rest of the show. Only occasionally would we glimpse him bouncing in the mob. Near the end, I had to pee. I didn’t want to miss anything, but I had to go. “Stay here,” I yelled to Didi.

  When I returned from the bathroom—a forever ordeal—I couldn’t find Didi at first, but then caught sight of her on the far side of the floor.

  “You missed Joni Mitchell!” she told me.

  “What?”

  “Joni Mitchell came out and played a song with them!”

  This sounded odd. Joshua had said one of the songs, “Hey Joni,” was partially a tribute to Joni Mitchell, but it seemed improbable she would appear with Sonic Youth. “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Yes!” she said. She blinked. “I think.” Confused now, she rolled her tongue around her lips. “Wait, maybe it wasn’t Joni Mitchell?” The Buddha had gotten to her.

  I turned toward the mosh pit. People were flailing and slam-dancing and stage-diving, and in the midst of it all was Joshua, who had been lifted into the air and was being passed overhead from hand to hand while lying stiffly supine, arms akimbo in crucifixion, a smug grin on his face. Then he vanished. Someone had dropped him. A ruckus broke out. Bouncers converged.

  In the van to campus, Joshua told us what had transpired. “Racist skinhead dickwad,” he said, elated. His eye was welting, his cheek and neck were scratched, his knuckles were cratered and bleeding. “Cracker called me a chink and told me to get back on the boat. I clocked the motherfucker. I put him down.”

  When we returned to Mac, we made our way to Wallace, the party dorm, where there were several rooms hosting festivities, everyone sweating in the close quarters. We flitted from room to room, toking and drinking, until Didi passed out. I half carried her to Turck. “Not the bed, not the bed,” she kept saying when we got to her floor, so I took her into the women’s bathroom, where there was a tub. I set her down inside of it. She was already snoring away, drooling. I could have sold tickets: Yeah, five dollars, grow your vegetables here.

  The following afternoon, I sat with Joshua in the library, trying to finish the rest of The Quiet American. His eye was puffed and bruised black, the lid half closed.

  “That guy really called you a chink?” I asked.

  “You think I’d lie about something like that?”

  In my entire life, I had never been on the receiving end of such a slur. I could not deny that there were ethnic tensions in Southern California, but I’d never been affected by anything directly. In this respect, there was comfort in numbers: there were so many Asian Americans in the L.A. area, I could throw a stick in any direction and hit six of them. “I’m just surprised, that’s all,” I said to Joshua. “Everyone’s been so friendly here. I thought maybe people might look at me funny once in a while, but it’s never happened. Not that I’ve noticed, anyway.”

  “Don’t buy the whole ‘Minnesota nice’ thing,” he said. “This place is as racist as anywhere else. It’s because of all the Hmong refugees. They think we’re boat people, man. It’s as bad as Boston. Over there, you’ve got the ofays in Southie, the yokels in Dorchester—you know exactly what to expect from them—but the more sinister, corrosive, subtle shit comes from people like your chickadee, what’s her name, Didi.”

  “What about her?”

  “Were you purposely looking for WASP City?”

  “She’s Catholic.”

  “You know what I mean. She’s so white-bread. She’s, like, the apotheosis of white-bread. She’s sourdough, man. She has no soul. She’s never suffered or wanted for anything a day in her life.”

  “I like her.”

  “Do you, or you just on bush patrol? The story about the bell get to you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Yeah, right. Listen, she’s a lemon sucker.”

  “What?”

  “A yellow dipper, a paddy melt, a Chiquita muncher. California slang for white chicks who want a taste of Asian.”

  “How come I’m from California and I’ve never heard of any of these terms?”

  “I can’t account for your ignorance,” Joshua said. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Sourdough is just slumming, man. It’s a phase, like every chick in college needing to go girl-on-girl at some point. Chicks like Sourdough like to think they’re pluralistic, but when it gets down to it, they’ll stick to their own kind.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning Sourdough would never get serious about you.”

  “Jesus,” I said, “we’re just hanging out. Who said anything about getting serious?”

  “Just so you understand. Have fun, wet your wick, but don’t expect it could ever go beyond that.”

  I didn’t believe Joshua, not really, but I kept thinking about what he had told me, and, against my better judgment, I started scrutinizing everything Didi said and did, as if searching for incriminating evidence. Was it significant, for example, that she bought a silk happi coat (Exhibit A) and began wearing it around campus? Was there something to her having a late-night craving for moo shu pork (Exhibit B) and making us take the bus up Snelling to the House of Dynasty on University Avenue? Should I have been perturbed that she once sang the chorus to the song “Turning Japanese” (Exhibit C) apropos of nothing? What about the fact that she wanted to learn tai chi (Exhibit D), or the time she uncupped her hands to give me an origami (Exhibit E) of a tiny blue bird?

  Then there was the night she wanted to cook me dinner, an odd whim, because she couldn’t cook—at all. Turck had a lounge on every floor with a stove, sink, and microwave, and there she whipped up an unholy concoction of frozen vegetables, shredded day-old chicken-salad sandwiches from the snack bar with the bread (which was sourdough!), a sprinkling of cashew nuts, and an entire jar of plum sauce (Exhibit F), all mashed together and sautéed in a wok (Exhibit G) and served in rice bowls (Exhibit H) with chopsticks (Exhibit I).

  “It’s good!” I told her, naturally.

  And then there was this conversation:

  “Your hair is so straight,” she said. “Is it this straight all over?” (Exhibit J.)

  “All over? Well, not completely straight. A little wavier, maybe.”

  “Let me see.” She lifted my left arm and peered through the sleeve at my armpit. Then she said, “What about down there?”

  “Where? You mean . . . my pubes?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The same, I guess.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to check it out sometime for myself.”

  Things like that last statement made me ignore the strong circumstantial case that was building up against Sourdough, the sobriquet becomin
g more apt by the minute. I told myself I was being paranoid. So what if she was going a little Asian on me, so what if she’d contracted a bit of yellow fever? Maybe all the evidentiary pieces were merely coincidental, or just gestures of attraction, misguided as they were. She was simply trying to tell me she liked me. Anyway, I was being unduly influenced by our increasingly avid make-out sessions, by all the smooching, sucking, and licking, the groping, stroking, and grinding—they were turning me Japanese, making my testicularity bluer than origami.

  Finally, one night in my dorm room, after hours of spit-swapping on the floor, Didi whispered, “Do you have a condom?”

  Did I have a condom? Was she kidding? Did I have a condom? I had at least eight dozen condoms. I had condoms of every shape, color, size, material, texture, thickness, and flavor. I had condoms that were ribbed and studded, that tickled and tingled, that were lubed and edible, that heated up and glowed in the dark. For a month, I had been hoarding condoms—buying variety packs at the drugstore, palming them from the bowl in the health clinic, grabbing multiple free handouts during Safe Sex Week.

  “I think I might have one,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said, “let’s do it.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, then regretted asking. I’d had a feeling that tonight might be the night, and had even leaked the premonition to Joshua, yet everything felt as if it were tottering in suspension. I didn’t dare do anything that might make Didi change her mind.

  “Turn off the lights,” she said.

  I did.

  “Take off your clothes and get into bed.”

  I did.

  “Put on the condom.”

  I did.

  I waited. I lay on my tiny bed on its stilts, sheathed by the condom, and I waited. “Didi?”

  She was still standing below me. “Wait, what time is it?” she asked.

  “The time?”

  “It’s eleven-seventeen! I totally forgot. I have another date!” she said, and chortled weirdly. “I’m late!” Then she ran out the door.

  What the hell?

  I glanced down at my sensi-dotted, ultra-invigro, xtra-stimulation condom (orange, mint). Didi was not a virgin, but she was as inexperienced as I was and somewhat priggish—the residual Catholic schoolgirl. Or so I had assumed. I had never imagined she might be dating someone else simultaneously. If anything, I had worried she might be attaching too much significance to our dalliances. But now I had to recalibrate. Had I been completely mistaken about her? Was Didi, in fact, a closet hussy?

  I snapped off the condom. I was miffed and angry, but eventually I fell asleep, only to be awoken at around one in the morning by a knock on the door.

  In the hallway was Didi, holding a pint of Ben & Jerry’s White Russian ice cream and a bottle of vodka. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I lied. I didn’t have another date. I don’t know why I said that. I freaked out a little. Okay, a lot. Do you like White Russians? Do you have a couple of glasses and a spoon and maybe another condom?”

  All was forgiven.

  An hour later, I dragged Didi out of my room, both of us buzzed on vodka and post-copulatory euphoria. It was relatively warm outside still. Thick clouds stretched out across the sky, peeks of a few stars in between. I’d often wondered why the sky seemed so low in the Midwest, as if the firmament were balefully compressing against the plains, and then had learned it wasn’t the sky that was lower, it was the earth that was higher—the elevation was almost a thousand feet here, flat as everything was—and for once, instead of feeling landlocked and claustrophobic, I perceived myself as being closer to the heavens. I was young. I knew nothing about the world. Already I was half in love with Didi.

  “I’m so sleepy,” she said. “Do we really have to do this now? Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  “Tonight!” I said.

  We were crossing Grand Avenue when, by happenstance, we heard the Weyerhaeuser bell tolling, and as we rounded the chapel, we saw, in the shadows, a couple walking away from the gazebo toward us. Compadres! I wanted to shout out. Brother and sister! Another pair of lovers following their biological imperative! O life, love, joy! I had to embrace this couple, I thought, have them witness our own induction into the hallowed circle of campus fornicators.

  The guy was wearing a brown three-piece suit, the girl a blue halter dress with a shawl covering her shoulders, her arm hooked into his. As they came closer, I realized it was Joshua, and with him was not a girl but a woman, late twenties or early thirties, Asian, with long hair, made up rather heavily but quite beautiful, and something in the way she walked or carried herself made it obvious to me that she was, without question, a high-class hooker.

  “Hello, kiddies,” Joshua said, and he and the woman kept going, strolling past us into the darkness, leaving our faces slack with astonishment.

  He had called an escort service, insisting that the woman be Asian. He had met her at the Saint Paul Hotel downtown, knowing she probably wouldn’t show up if he had specified Mac as a rendezvous, and then, after offering her an extra fifty bucks, got her to take a cab with him back to Dupre. She rather enjoyed herself, he would tell me. She thought it was cute, fucking in the dorm.

  I’d wonder about it later. It was too much of a coincidence. Yes, I had told Joshua this likely would be the night, but how had he timed it so he’d be at the gazebo just before we came along? Was he clairvoyant? Had he been monitoring us from down the hall? Planted some sort of listening device in my room? It would remain a mystery.

  Whatever the case, Joshua had demonstrated, for the first of what would be many times during our lives and careers, that no matter how desperately I tried, he could, and would, beat me to every momentous bell.

  5

  One day I walked outside, and it was twelve degrees. The weather had turned. Up to that point, I had been thinking it wasn’t too bad in Minnesota, not as dire as everyone had warned. In late August, when I’d arrived in the Twin Cities, it had been hot and humid—disagreeable but not extreme. The only unsettling thing had been the thunderstorms that would trundle through the area in the middle of the night. It had seemed so strange, to be awoken by riotous rumble at two, three a.m., the thunder clapping for hours, instead of during the dewy peak of late afternoon. Once, alarms had blared a tornado warning. (Perhaps constructing a hurricane-proof dormitory had not been a bad idea, after all.)

  Yet when the humidity waned, the fall became sunny and pleasant, and although the nights dipped into the low thirties, it was entirely tolerable. I had felt confident the winter wouldn’t bother me. Contrary to people’s assumptions, it got cold in California. I wasn’t a pussy to cold, I’d told myself.

  This kind of cold, though, was different. It was bone-penetrating, teeth-shuddering cold. Blood-constricting, testicle-shrinking cold. We began layering. We doubled up on T-shirts and then sweaters. We bought long underwear. The first snow—the only time I’d seen snow beyond a family ski trip to Big Bear Mountain—we joyously ran outside and, per Mac tradition, had a snowball fight across Grand Avenue, played pushball, and feasted on a lamb roast. What we didn’t know then was that it would not rise above thirty-two degrees for the duration of the winter, and that this snow would never melt, it’d remain on the ground, getting packed down and frozen and dirtied as it accumulated, until April. Everywhere there was ice, and everywhere white smoke billowed, from vents and chimneys and manholes and tailpipes. We breathed out plumes as we shivered across the quad, bundled in parkas, scarves, hats, gloves, and boots, and then peeled off the clothes—mounds heaped upon the backs of chairs and on the floors—once ensconced in the blister of heated rooms. With the first subzero day, we stopped venturing outside if it could be helped. We retreated into hibernation.

  Mainly I stayed in bed—with Didi. She had a roommate and I didn’t, so we spent most of the time in my room in Dupre. To reduce the number of trips back and forth, Didi brought over some of her clothes and toiletries, then her books, boom box, and CDs, and in short order my closet a
nd bureau were subsumed by her things. She essentially moved in with me. The RA’s attitude toward this was surprisingly lax. Students were written up for lighting candles or incense, and if you were caught with alcohol you had to pour it out, but no one seemed to care about new arrangements of cohabitation. You could sleep with anyone you wanted, it seemed, as long as you didn’t burn the place down.

  Didi and I were constrained only by my tiny bed. I began to suspect that, for the original designers, putting the twin mattresses on stilts had not been so much a space-saving measure as an underhanded way of discouraging conjugal overnights. It was a wonder neither one of us ever rolled over and plummeted to the floor as we slept. Not that we slept that much, although Didi did everything possible to make the bunk bed comfortable. She replaced my bedding with hers—four-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, feather-down pillows and a mattress pad, a comforter and a duvet. It was the softest, plushiest material I had ever lain on. I had never thought about thread counts before; it was possible I had never heard of the term. My mother had always bought generic sheets on sale for us at Sears.

  Nonetheless, Didi and I did not take advantage of the luxurious linen, at least for slumber. We were constantly mucking it up, fucking. If we weren’t in the midst of carnality, we were in the faux-tristesse of post-carnality, moonily staring at each other, limbs and fingers entwined. Occasionally we’d catnap, then one would rouse the other and we’d begin anew. We spent more hours naked than clothed. When we were forced to get out of bed and stand, we’d nearly keel, verticality having become so unfamiliar to us. We lost weight, unable to make it to the dining hall for meals, and we were forever woozy from hunger and dehydration. We clung to each other as if our lives depended on it.

  What dawned on me was that no one had ever described sex properly in literature, the sheer sloppiness of it, the excretions and stickiness and sweat, the pungent smells and tastes, the slurps and smacks and pickled inelegance of daily congress. We soon used up my stockpile of condoms, and decided to go without. We wanted to feel each other, and there was something much more arousing about the perils of relying on me to pull out in time. Didi sometimes would not let me withdraw when I felt I would rupture. “Not yet, not yet,” she’d whisper.