The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  Harry shrugged. “Drop it, Val. I don’t feel like discussing it.”

  “It’s better to discuss it than drink yourself to death. Do you think that’s sensible? We are supposed to be a superior group. You are acting like television’s idea of a spurned lover.”

  “What am I supposed to do? Jump for joy?”

  “No ... if Beth likes Stanley, find some other girL There’s Sheila. Why don’t you two switch roommates?”

  “Valerie,” I said, “you better get off the subject. I like Harry, but I’m not providing a haven for Beth Hillyer’s wounded lovers.”

  “What’s so wrong with loving Harry and providing a haven just because he is Harry, and he’s wounded?”

  “You cuddle him on your breasts and pat his head,” I said nastily. “If you’re so concerned, why don’t you invite him to room with you and Peter. You can love them both. You’re big enough.”

  Valerie just laughed. “Boy, that’s a grouping the Tenhausens haven’t considered. Maybe we should try it Peter? Would you be agreeable?”

  Peter looked at her sourly. “Val, you’ve had too much to drink.”

  “Damn it, Peter, I asked you a question. I am not drunk. I would never drink to excess. I like to have a clear mind. Now, I can see clearly that we don’t really have a fluid situation at Harrad at all. We are stuck just as firmly as if we were going steady at some regular co-ed college. Maybe worse. We have an irrevocable commitment to the roommate we started with.”

  “That’s the truth,” Jack Dawes said enthusiastically, “I agree with you, Val. Only you are really missing the point. The Tenhausens are pussyfooting around. I think we should get this sex business right down to essentials. All this romantic stuff is just a cover-up. I don’t know how the girls feel, but I’ll bet there isn’t a boy here wouldn’t like to swive ...” Jack paused, chuckling. “Hey, that’s a good word ... Swive every girl in this room.”

  “Jack, you are crude,” Roger Wilnor said.

  “So, I didn’t say fuck! Anyway, euphemisms aside, I’ll bet, despite the fact that the Tenhausens picked you as a soul-mate for June Atterman, that if Beth Hillyer took of her clothes and shook herself at you, you’d point right in the air and be ready to take her on.”

  “Would you, Roger?” Jane asked. I could see Beth grinning. Roger was out on a limb.

  “I’ve seen Beth naked a hundred times in the Harrad gym, Roger said weakly.

  “Sure, in the Harrad gym. But here in New York with a drink in your hand the moral climate is different. Frankly, the way I feel about it, there is only one solution, males being what they are, and maybe females for all I know, we should all just communally fornicate when-ever we feel like it. If we did that Harrad would make sense. We would get rid of sin and itchiness and be able to concentrate on learning as much as we can to survive in this unpleasant world.”

  “Wham! Bang! Thank you, mam!” Beth Hillyer laughed. “I don’t think Jack really believes it. He’s just bitter. In case you don’t know, Eleanor Rupp quit Harrad. Jack is our first ‘bachelor’.”

  “There you are, Sheila,” Valerie said triumphantly. “You don’t have to room with either Stanley or Harry. You can move in with Jack.”

  “You’re a nice kid,” Jack put his arm around me. “But, I’m not your type, Sheila. A few minutes ago I asked Beth if she would room with me. She’s thinking it over. Who wants to punch me in the nose first? You, Harry? Or, you, Stanley?”

  I looked at Stanley. He shook his head with a weak grin, but he was obviously shocked. Harry, propped against a chair, stared at the ceiling. “Beats jumping in the snow or rolling in the mud,” he said.

  Beth looked at him queerly. She poured herself a drink from one of the bottles of Scotch perched in the middle of the floor along with an ice bucket and a wastebasket filled with ice and cans of beer. “I’m sorry, Harry. I partially agree with Jack. We’ve got four years at Harrad. Maybe we are taking it too seriously. I know it sounds really crazy, but I love you alL It just makes me feel warm and good that we are all here ... talking, thinking; discussing things most people are afraid to discuss. I can’t help it if I don’t feel possessive ... and yet I do. As long as I live, I hope I feel this way ... just as if I could run around this room and kiss you all, or if my arms were big enough, give you all a big hug, I’m glad you’re alive in my world.” Beth looked at me, “You don’t feel that way do you, Sheila?”

  I wonder what would have happened if I’d said I did ... or that I was so confused that I didn’t know how I really felt. Would I have saved myself a Faustian trip through New York? Instead of trying to put my muddle of thoughts into words, I said “No, I don’t feel that way. Some things in this world are between two people ... and two people only.”

  “You sound like Eleanor Rupp.” Jack Dawes fished a letter from his pocket. “Here’s some extracts from what she wrote me: ‘I was brought up differently from you and the others at Harrad. My mother and father have always let me do what I wanted to do, but even when they agreed to let me go to Harrad they didn’t like the idea. Now I know that they were right. I guess I never believed that a boy and girl who weren’t married would actually sleep together. I know that you wanted to sleep with me, Jack. You kept telling me how all of your friends had slept with their roommates. I guess I am a puritan, but I think it is terrible. It may be all right for a girl to room with a boy and get to know him as a friend, but just to hop into bed and casually do ‘it’. That’s bad. If the Tenhausens believe, as they say, that marriage can come later they are wrong. What’s going to happen to a Harrad girl who sleeps with her roommate or several different roommates, but who never marries any of them? What happens when she goes back home and tries to find a husband? Supposing a man who never went to Harrad finds out about her? She’d be no better than a whore in his eyes!’ ”

  Jack crumbled the letter. “Ellie is a good kid. But the way I feel about it the Tenhausens are overdoing the love aspects, even more than Ellie. Sure, a guy wants a woman ... but Christ almighty, he can’t make a woman and all her petty little daisy plucking his whole life. Sure, a man and woman have to get married eventually. She thinks they vibrate together, maybe he does, too. Maybe, they want to have kids ... ego glorification or something, but the girl is always pulling the petal that says “he loves me not” ... and the guy isn’t giving it a thought one way or the other because he knows that it isn’t really basic. Somehow, he’s got to keep them and their brood from starving. Finally, what really is the biggest force in his life is not the woman and not his children but his own big desire to be somebody ... to succeed in the world. The Tenhausens are overlooking that we are all cogs in an economic machine, and we either find the place we mesh with the other cogs or we will strip the gears of the whole cotton picking mess and grind ourselves to pieces.”

  “You mean you never made love to Ellie?” Herb Snyder asked.

  “Hell, no!” Jack said. “The only time I ever saw her naked was in the gym. Isn’t that a laugh? I knew a dozen girls in New York who would hump just for the exercise ... so I spend four months at Harrad, the sex college, living like a male month.”

  “What’s all this conversation adding up to?” Stanley asked. “So far as I can see, Harry, you and I are going to move in together and commiserate with each other. Unless some guy has quit Harrad, or unless some nice girl will welcome us for room-mates, you and I are going to live a celibate existence.”

  “There’s only one solution,” Jack said. “Once a week we should all have an orgy. Come on girls what do you say? When we arrive back here tonight we all will take off our clothes and have a New Year’s Saturnalia. After a night of good clean fun, all these little worries about sex and who sleeps with whom will assume their normal perspective.”

  Jack kept returning to his idea of a rip-roaring orgy. He pictured all nineteen of us naked, running from room to room, playing swapsies all night long until we collapsed from exhaustion.

  I think you’re ugly and repulsive, Jack,” Do
rothy shuddered. “Is that all men think of ... just sex, and nothing else?”

  “Jack is obviously suffering from frustration,” Herb said. “His rutting instincts are dominating his otherwise clear mind.”

  “You’re right,” Jack said, laughing. “Seeing all the Harrad girls naked for four months, walking around with a perpetual erection, has driven me off my rocker. Won’t some girl here, please take pity on me?”

  “Why don’t you do a hundred push-ups and sublimate yourself,” Beth suggested. “Then maybe we can go out. It’s New Year’s Eve. What are we going to do?”

  Jack flopped on his belly, pushing himself rigidly up and down, while he explained to us, puffing, that we were all invited to a private party at a night club in Greenwich Village called The Last Gurgle.

  “A friend of mine, Bad Max, owns it,” he gasped. “It’s a tourist trap. Bad Max wears an uncombed beard, uncombed hair, and tight dungarees. Admission is ordinarily three dollars and fifty cents a head. For this you get folk singing, beat poetry, from-hunger ballets that Bad Max conceives on Sundays and Mondays when The Gurgle is closed. Ordinarily he uses his time more profitably investing his ill-gotten wealth in the stock market. Weekdays, Bad Max sneers at the tourists and tells them they are dirty capitalists.”

  Jack collapsed on the floor, perspiring. “You’re right, Beth. I’ve purged my sinful self. To hell with women.” Standing up, Jack undressed down to his skin, calmly flinging his clothes around the room. “After a hot and cold shower I’ll never think of pussy again!”

  All nineteen of us, yelling and offering inane advice, crowded into the bathroom and watched him take a shower. To get rid of us, he turned the place into a steaming inferno. After we got him dressed, all of us noisily invaded the lobby of the hotel, until finally the manager and several bellboys escorted us into Times Square. Not knowing what to do, or how to adjust to the fact that Beth had calmly shucked off both Stanley and Harry, and with an it-serves-you-right feeling toward Stanley, I ignored his protestations and bundled into a taxi with Harry, Roger and Jane. Harry sat in the front seat, uncommunicative, while I, in back (a fifth wheel), watched Roger and Jane snuggling together, holding hands, and ignoring me.

  In the small lobby of what had been a former off-Broadway playhouse, Bad Max greeted us and explained that tonight The Last Gurgle was closed to the public. Instead of muddy coffee, he was serving Gurgle punch made from one hundred-and-ninety proof alcohol. All of his Village friends had been invited. Entertainment was to be spontaneous, self inspired, and anyone who wanted the stage could have it.

  Proudly, Bad Max showed us the club trademark: A bathtub drain with the final water in the tub disappearing into the sewerage with an unrestrained bloop of despair. “I’m having it revised,” he said, “so that a hairy hand emerging out of the drain is clasping a naked ankle about to drag the body down, too. It’s symbolic of the state of the world.”

  Seeing me standing alone and obviously unescorted (I had repulsed Stanley so thoroughly that he made no further overtures), Bad Max took me by the arm and forced me to reveal that I was Sheila Grove.

  “You can be my girl tonight,” Bad Max said, leering at me. “I’m at least twice your age, so you are safe with me. My own true love, Frankie, a very unpleasant trollop, caught me making love to Captain Bligh ... or was it Nellie? ... She has temporarily deserted me. Truthfully, last night she got so steamed up at me that I took a pitcher of water off the table, and to the delight of the tourists, heaved it at her. Several ice cubes struck her in the face, and she entertained, unrehearsed, for ten minutes with the most fascinating and far-out cussing I’ve heard since I was Captain of a four-master rounding the Cape of Good Hope. That was in my youth, of course. Tonight, Frankie is in bed with pneumonia, a black eye, and pre-menstrual tension. As her husband wearily takes her temperature she is no doubt telling him in a wheezy voice (I’m psychic, by the way) that it all happened when she fell down skating at Rockefeller Center with two girl friends.”

  By this time we were inside the club. While he talked Bad Max had managed to feel my behind, approved the fact that I wasn’t wearing a girdle, and suggested that if I felt like doing a strip act that he had invented a new one. “You just come on ... see, in a special gold evening gown. You walk upstage, light a cigarette, and then very coolly walk back and forth smoking it. As you walk, the music is growling. The audience is licking its lips. You stare at the audience. Then you crush the cigarette out. Blackout. Get it?” he asked, patting my rump. I shook my head. He sighed. “Hell, it’s symbolic. The audience stripped you while you smoked. The dream beats the reality.”

  As we worked our way past the tables, greeting friends of Max, I discovered that fresh air had disappeared forever. The Club was lighted mostly by candles dripping into wax-covered bottles. The cigarette smoke was thick and the whole place seemed to be in motion, with silhouetted people weaving between the tables or rubbing against each other on a tiny dance floor.

  We finally located several empty tables in a far comer. Bad Max led us to a huge iron-strapped barrel and invited us to join the crowd around the spigot. He filled a coffee mug for me. It tasted like plain grapefruit juice, but I was soon aware that it could make me seriously dizzy in a very few minutes. In the dim light I had lost track of most of the Harrad kids, but noted that Beth and Jack, chaperoned by Stanley and Harry (who looked somewhat glum), were at a table next to us.

  Bad Max, proprietarily taking over, encouraged me to have another Gurgle. Waggling his beard in my face, he demanded to know if I believed his story of Frankie. “Of course, it isn’t true,” he explained. “I’m really ambi-sexual, delighting in sexual congress with both men and women. My wife, an elderly lady of sixty-four, supports me and puts up with my heinous behaviour so long as I service her regularly on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at half-past ten. Don’t laugh,” he said, “This schedule leaves me in shape for my own preference in belly bumping on Fridays and Saturdays.

  “I’m not laughing; I’m crying.” I said.

  “We are all crying,” murmured a hollow voice from the opposite side of the table.

  In the flickering candlelight I discovered that our table companion was a sunken-eyed skeleton. A curved emaciated nose protruded over the skeleton’s neatly trimmed black beard. The skeleton’s face, staring at me mournfully, sucked a cigarette which grew out of the comer of its mouth. Occasionally the skeleton emitted a stream of smoke from its nostrils.

  “Meet Warner Bondieu,” Bad Max said. “We call him Good God for short. Good God, this is Sheila Grove.”

  “Grove? Grove?” Good God asked. “An interesting name. Used in the Authorized Version of the Bible as a camouflage.”

  “Good God is a poet,” Bad Max explained. “He wears a tomb of useless knowledge between his ears.”

  “Max is correct,” Good God said, grinning. “Let me demonstrate. Grove is the translation that was given to the Hebrew word Asherah, which actually means yoni or the female sex organ, viz: First Kings, Chapter Fourteen, Verse Twenty Three. I quote: “For they also built them high places and images, and groves, on every hill and under every green tree.” It seems that our early forebears were happy worshippers of the sex organs. As time went by this was not considered a very elevating idea, so the translators of the Bible substituted grove for yoni. As you can see, re-writing history was discovered long before the Communists.”

  “Very enlightening,” Bad Max said morosely. Cautiously, he sipped some of his own punch. “The way I feel about it, we should reinstitute this useful custom. If Miss Grove has no objection, we will begin by worshipping her pussy. Salaam!”

  “In that event,” Good God chuckled, “we should go the entire way. Let me turn your companion into a sex symbol. Take Sheilah ... a name of Irish origin ... related no doubt to the Shelah-na-gig: a curious carving of a female exposing her genitals, found in the keystone arch of ancient Irish places of worship. An emasculating snatch obviously put there to scare the crap out of the devil.”<
br />
  “My middle name is Anne,” I said, fascinated in spite of myself.

  “From the Hebrew, Hannah, meaning Grace. A nice contradiction which, of course, is typical of life. Max, my brain is stimulated. I will now offer this curious assemblage of the thinking rabble a personal reading of my latest poetry.”

  Bad Max stood up and yelled to someone in the balcony. “Turn the green spot on the stage. We are about to be blessed by a rendition from Good God.”

  I can’t hope to write down Good God’s poem, or remember half of what it was about. It lasted at least a half hour and seemed to be a wordy diatribe against poets, artists, businessmen, politicians, sex, marriage, children and the world in general. During the last fifteen minutes, as Good God recited, a girl with long black hair hanging down below her behind, sat on the edge of the stage and emphasized his snarling words with dissonant chords struck on her guitar. Toward the end of the poem, Good God took off his shoes, then his stockings, then his T-shirt, and finally, in a gesture of despair, unbuttoned his dungarees, and continued to recite as they slipped around his ankles, leaving him a naked, swaying, green skeleton, bowing happily to the cheering spectators.

  Still naked, carrying his clothes, he and his guitar-playing companion rejoined us at the table. She was introduced as Petey Love.

  “Another symbolic name,” Bad Max said. “She adores diminutive peters. Put your pants on, Good God, before she demonstrates.”

  Struggling into his tight dungarees, Good God demanded to know if anyone had written down his poem. “It’s lost forever,” he said, brushing the tears out of his eyes. “All my greatest work is extemporaneous. I shall never achieve such heights again!”

  “It was derivative,” Petey said. “You have been influenced by Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. But never mind. You took off your clothes with more éclat than Allen ever did.”

  “Thank you, thank you, for that accolade,” Good God sighed happily.

  I excused myself to find the ladies room, and was followed by Petey. The only vacant stall had no doors, and worse had one of those damned female stand-up toilets. Petey watched me hoist my skirt and fumble with my panties, while I silently cursed the man who thought a woman could urinate standing better than sitting. To make matters worse, Petey watched the whole procedure with interest.