The mod itself was a dark, low-ceilinged room, maybe twice the size of the 21 living room but cramped and airless with a hundred or so people packed in, the only light coming from the open refrigerator. After the bitter chill outside, the party felt almost fur nacelike, the room stuffed with people like a cattle car. On one side of the room, a cl.u.s.ter swayed back and forth to a Replacements song playing from a stereo that was perched dangerously on a much-jostled stool in the corner.
Like a rugby scrum pushing against a rival ma.s.s, we surged with the instruments through the crowd into the far corner of the room. Jon, Ox, Tim, Arthur, and others took out their instruments, plugged into various outlets, and began, very slowly, to play. At a glance, I counted nine guitars in the ensemble.
The concert sounded, to my untrained ears, more or less like the band was tuning up. The rest of the room seemed totally unaware that a concert was beginning. A couple of people shot disturbed looks at the band. But slowly the discordant, random chords held for painfully long moments evolved into something else-much louder discordant, random chords held painfully long. Jon and the others stared intensely down at their instruments and strummed in almost slow motion. The sounds soon overwhelmed the music from the stereo as, around the room, people looked up with confusion and then horrified grimaces of recognition.
"Get the h.e.l.l out of here, you a.s.sholes!" Boos resounded from across the room but they were soon drowned out by the strumming of the guitars, somehow increasing in volume while still preserving a sense of lethargy, as though a negative intensity were swallowing the room. Cold air flooded s.p.a.ce as people fled out into the night, their faces twisted in anger.
The din of the instruments surged into something that at moments was almost melodic-like an orchestra tuning up occasionally in unison. Jon, Ox, Tim, and the others stared at their guitars with a focus I"d never seen from them in weeks of loafing on the 21 couch. While their collective strumming didn"t cohere into anything identifiable as music, the growing intensity had a power that was almost beautiful.
The fleeing crowd, however, clearly did not hear the hidden charms. The party"s hosts were soon standing in front of the band screaming at them in vain, their voices swallowed by the music. One of them, in parachute pants with a safety pin through his ear, crawled down at the base of the wall and unplugged Jon"s and Tim"s instruments. When he crossed the room to pull the plug on Ox and Arthur, Jon and Tim broke out of their trances and nonchalantly leaned over and plugged themselves back in. He raced back to pull them out again and Ox and Arthur revived their guitars. Minutes later, the mod pushed and shoved the group of us out the door and all the way down the stairwell. We stumbled on the icy steps, grappling with our armfuls of amps, guitars, and drums. The crowd from the party lined up on the fire escape, booing and shoving us as we went down.
"You d.i.c.k sc.u.m are destroying this school!" one young man shouted in my face.
At the bottom of the stairs, faces flushed from excitement and shivering in the cold, we all stopped and looked at each other. "I think that was our best show ever," Ox said.
The next morning I was awakened by what sounded like the clacking of an electric typewriter in the room. I glanced around. It was hard to make out the room in the weak dawn light streaming through the trees outside my window. I noticed two people-Meg and Sa"ad, I thought-sleeping on the floor, half-buried under old clothes and magazines. Nothing moved in the room, other than a few odd bugs traveling up and down the wall, but the sound of the typing seemed to echo in my head. Then I realized the sound was coming from inside my head, that it was the sound of my teeth chattering.
It was cold in this room. Very cold. Even when I wrapped the wool blanket around me it was laughably, hilariously cold.
And the room smelled even more violently of cat urine.
But on my floor, the two shapes slept soundly. From the living room, I heard someone playing "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" on an electric guitar.
The pale-yellow light streamed in. I wrapped the blanket tighter around me and, teeth chattering, drifted contentedly back to sleep.
The night after Thanksgiving I had met Zach and Nathan for coffee at Dolores, a twenty-four-hour coffee shop in West L.A. The macabre waiter with long fingernails who"d served me many times before seemed to have forgotten me in the three months I"d been away. I gave him intense, meaningful looks, digging for a burst of recognition, but he took our orders with a deadpan stare. I had been erased from the Dolores"s family.
"So are you guys going back?" Nathan asked.
Zach and I picked at our chili fries. "Do you think there"s any way to get a refund on our plane tickets?" Zach asked.
"No, I already checked. You have to request a refund two weeks in advance."
"Terrific." They both looked glum. I thought back to the mod. Three days earlier, on the Tuesday afternoon before Thanksgiving, duffel bag over my shoulder, I had set off for the three buses and one taxi ride that would take me to Bradley Airport outside Hartford. As I left, the crowd was flopped around the 21 living room, listening to Jon play a tape of what sounded like a single note on a guitar held forever.
"That"s brilliant," Monica, a girl incongruously in pearls, said. "It"s like, a call to something."
"You guys aren"t fooling anyone." Sa"ad snorted. "It"s a game to you. Not music."
Ox blurted out, "To me, it sounds like a beautiful lullaby."
Everyone cracked up and Sa"ad fumed until Jon broke in, "Rich, where are you going?"
"Oh," I stammered, "I mean, aren"t people going home for break?"
The room looked up. "What break is it?" Monica asked.
"I think, maybe Thanksgiving."
"Oh, really?" Ox nodded. "Wow. Really. So you"re going someplace for that?"
"I guess, like, home pretty much." I stumbled for some way to make it sound less pathetic. "I guess there"ll be a lot of food."
"Oh, wow," Jon said. "Amazing, Rich. That sounds really cool."
"Really?"
"Yeah, totally. Food is awesome."
"Supreme d.i.c.k Rule Number One," Ox said. "Never turn down a free meal."
"Okay, then. I guess I"ll see you all. So it"s okay to just leave my room?"
"Yeah, Steve"s room. It will be fine," Monica answered. "You didn"t lock it, did you?" She looked suddenly alarmed.
"I don"t have a key."
"Oh, good. No, it"s cool, then."
At Dolores"s Zach and Nathan stared down glumly, contemplating their return. Zach picked up a chili fry and studied it. "Do you think it"s really so hard that the whole East Coast can"t make one of these? Three months back there without a d.a.m.n chili fry."
I looked around the diner. The few patrons mostly sat alone, and under the fluorescent lights they seemed to be eating in slow motion.
"I guess it might be fun when we get back," I said.
Nathan gaped at me.
"Whaaa . . ." Zach asked.
"At Twenty-one. You guys should hang out. I think it"ll be okay. Maybe . . ."
CHAPTER SIX.
Mohair Days, Lithium Nights.
The tension settled over the 21 living room like the damp mist that clung to the campus and seeped into your bones each day until well into the afternoon. Everyone was aware of it; I could feel it lapping at the edges of our conversation in furtive glances and terse replies. But no one was going to say anything about it. I certainly wasn"t. After a week back at 21, I had learned one thing well: Never, ever, be the person to bring up a problem.
We chattered about our outrage that the d.i.c.ks were the only major campus band not asked to play the upcoming show at SAGA, but the conversation grew stilted; the knowing looks deepened. I glanced at Meg and she glanced back at me; she seemed to be outraged that I wasn"t saying anything. Even the c.o.c.kroach walking across my foot seemed unusually tense in his gait.
Predictably, it was Sa"ad who at last spoke up and laid the whole matter on the table. "You guys," he said, "I"m f.u.c.king hungry."
Several people sat up straight in antic.i.p.ation. Jon looked at Sa"ad and tilted his head from side to side as though the comment had gotten stuck in a pocket of water in his ear. Finally he said, "Really, Sa"ad? Wow, that"s crazy."
Sa"ad glared back indignantly, his minidreadlocks quaking. "We"ve been sitting here all day. There"s no food in the house. It"s dinnertime. Let"s eat."
"Dinnertime," Jon repeated, taking that in. "Like sitting with your family?"
Tim said, "I didn"t realize you were so into traditions, Sa"ad."
Charles, one of the punks, jumped in. "I think dinnertime means it"s time to be dinner."
Chortles erupted around the room and then Ox said, "I think Luntz banned us from the jam because he was afraid our orgone levels would upset his equipment." Meg agreed with the non se quitur and offered that Luntz, the head of the campus"s Alternative Music Collective and thus one of the d.i.c.ks" mortal foes, was now in a state of all-out warfare against us, since the last show when the d.i.c.ks had refused to relinquish the stage. The punk band from Marblehead Luntz had booked had apparently stormed out in disgust.
The conversation again heated up, speculations as to Luntz"s motives flying. Sa"ad slumped in a corner, started to cry, and threw a boot at Jon, who ignored it and played with his unplugged guitar.
Months later, Steve Shavel would explain that Supreme d.i.c.k conversation was based on the Buddhist allegory: Q: Does the dog have the Buddhist nature?
A: Mu.
That is, all our conversation was diabolically nonsensical to outsiders but to those initiated in the secrets of our world, completely transparent. For myself, I had discovered that asking direct questions or suggesting action would only bring frustration, or worse, make you look anxious and thus uncool.
The conversation drifted from the evils of the Alternative Music Collective to a warning Susie had received from the Greenwich House office, where she held a part-time job, that apparently the college president had pa.s.sed down an edict that this was to be the Supreme d.i.c.ks" last year at Hampshire.
"Good," said Tim Fall, a tall, red-bearded ringer for s.h.a.ggy. "I"m sick of this place. I"ve been stuck here six years already." Tim was at work on what was considered around the house to be the most monumental project ever undertaken by a Hampshire student-a pixilated film history of Hampshire parties, 1980 to the present. Anytime more than five people gathered on Hampshire soil, Tim appeared and, with his antique Super 8 Bolex camera, snapped half a dozen shots of the festivities. It was said that his Division III (the Hampshire equivalent of a senior thesis-the one final ma.s.sive project that students spent their last year or so working on before they could graduate) committee had seen the work, p.r.o.nounced it brilliant, and offered him a diploma several years earlier, but out of a perfectionistic sense of duty to the project he had declined and stayed on to see it through, presumably to the party"s end.
Michael, however, who sprawled in a corner in his ochre Krishna robes, was not so sanguine. "Easy for you to say but if we get thrown out, where am I going to go?"
"You"re not even a student here," said Monica, the preppy Radcliffe transfer.
"It"s my house as much as it is yours! It"s not like you go to cla.s.s!" The previous year, Michael had fled a Boston Hare Krishna tribe and hopped the bus out west to Northampton. He had met Susie in a coffee shop and she had invited him to come live with us.
"Maybe we should stop using the phone," Ox offered. Although almost certainly untrue, it was common legend that our phone was bugged, supposedly confirmed by a late-night visit Jeanie had made to the Security Office, where she claimed to have heard them laughing at one of Ox"s calls home.
The topic of the d.i.c.ks" enemies" closing in was so huge and multifaceted we could only scratch its surface in any one conversation. Hunger pains soon enough rea.s.serted themselves and private anguished looks were traded around the room.
Eventually, it was Jon who, after pushing the eating topic off the table earlier and letting it sit there on the floor until the room had been driven mad trying not to touch it, gently, obliquely, brought it up again. "Have you guys heard about that Denny"s?" he asked. No one had. "Yeah, they opened one in Chicopee." The words hung in the air. Chicopee, many calculated, was down the road past Mount Holyoke, forty-five minutes away.
"Wow." "Cool." "Denny"s." "I wonder what that"s like?" Expressions of vague interest wafted through the room as we contemplated the distant specter of Denny"s. No one, however, dared taking the thought beyond the theoretical, since suggesting action would open you up for ridicule.
"Do you think we should go there sometime?" Ox finally asked.
"Really?" Jon sounded stunned by the notion but let it sink in. "Yeah, maybe. I guess it would be cool to check that out." The room lapsed into reflection again. Jon plucked on his guitar. Several long minutes later, he looked up. "Did you mean, like, tonight?"
A shiver ran through the room. All eyes turned back to Ox. "Wow, tonight . . . I don"t know. I mean, I guess so. Really? Okay. Could we do that?"
Somehow, many murmurs later, we finally arrived at an articulated agreement. It would be cool sometime to check out the new Denny"s and if there wasn"t anything else happening and no one cared what we were doing tonight it wasn"t really any different to be at Denny"s than it was to be here so if we had to be somewhere, we might as well maybe at some point go.
Once we crossed that bridge, however, another issue loomed like a hostile and heavily fortified army on the far sh.o.r.e-how in the h.e.l.l could we get to Denny"s, twenty miles away into the neighboring county beyond the reach of the five-campus bus system on a bone-chillingly cold night? Enthusiastic murmurs of agreement with the scheme dissipated into another thoughtful silence until Jon volunteered, "I guess we could take my car."
Jubilation again; again dissipating into silence. "The d.i.c.kmo bile" was a two-seater-an early-seventies Volkswagen Bug convertible with a tiny crawl s.p.a.ce in the rear. On drives into Amherst I had squeezed in with three other people. It was plausible that someone could also sit on the lap of the pa.s.senger in the shotgun seat and another very, very small person could sprawl across the backseat, which would in theory cram six people in. A quick count of the room showed somewhere upwards of thirty present, all of whom stared expectantly at Jon, awaiting a solution to this riddle.
Instead he returned his attention to his guitar and said quietly, almost whispering to himself, "I guess we"ll have to figure out who should go, then." Around the room we looked at each other with now barely concealed animosity, wondering whom we should throw off the lifeboat first. I looked at Angela, the girl perched on the arm of the sofa next to me. "Are you going to go?" I asked her softly.
"Yeah, I guess. I mean, it"s Denny"s?" she said, as though asking a question.
"Yeah, I guess I will too. You know, just to see what it"s about. Maybe we could share the front seat?"
She shot me an are-you-crazy? look and, without a word, got up and walked upstairs to Susie"s room. It"s hard to believe, I thought, watching her leave, that just a few hours ago I lost my virginity to that girl.
The earth had shaken for me the night before when around ten o"clock, aching from hunger and with no sign of an impending food run, I had, for the first time since I"d moved in, done the unthinkable; I left the group. Without explanation, I had walked out of the mod. I thought about asking whether anyone wanted to come, but rehearsing the question in my head, I couldn"t find any way to phrase it without sounding hopelessly pushy and lame.
I ended up back in Dakin watching Letterman and eating pizza in Nathan"s room. Slipping back into the dorms now that I was a disgraced ex-resident, I felt a chill of danger and skulked the halls like a secret agent. After Letterman ended at one-thirty, I urged Zach and Nathan to come back to 21, promising that people would still be hanging out. But, still on dorm time, they began drifting off to sleep.
"Why would I want to stay awake any more than I have to at this place?" Zach asked, although soon he and Nathan could be drawn in and find themselves spending many early morning hours still loafing on the 21 couches.
When I returned to 21 I was amazed to find the living room empty. I searched the bedrooms, but not even Susie was around. There was not even anyone pa.s.sed out on the couch. I grew alarmed and plopped down in the living room, taking in the unnatural quiet, all still but for the c.o.c.kroaches, who seemed to enjoy having the place to themselves.
A few minutes of silence and the door flew open. In stormed Angela, in a black leather jacket, miniskirt, and black combat boots. Her thick brown hair flew in every direction and she glanced wildly about the room.
"Are they here?"
"Everybody"s gone."
"But Michael and Susie? Are they here?" I could barely understand what Angela was saying as she stumbled over herself to tell what had happened. She explained that they had gotten a call a couple hours earlier about a hippie gathering in the woods and everyone had gone up to it. They had fought their way through the muddy paths to find a little tribe of hippies ("Not actually hippies, though, those f.u.c.king Frisbee a.s.sholes," she explained, meaning the more hateful quasi-hippie tribe of the Preppy Deadheads, aka the Frisbee Team) huddled around a little campfire and, it seemed, tripping. Seeing them from a distance, someone had the idea to break into a war cry and rush out of the woods at them. The whole group had followed, and the gang around the campfire, no doubt overcome by drug hallucinations, fled. The d.i.c.ks settled in and, despite the cold and drizzle, rather enjoyed the campfire, and the food and bourbon the Frisbee people had abandoned. Twenty minutes later, however, a few of them returned and started pelting the d.i.c.ks with clumps of mud.
At that point, bedlam broke out. Angela had fled back into the woods with Susie and Michael (the Krishna escapee), who, as best as I could understand, started trying to make out with her (Angela) against a tree. That"s what I thought she was saying, but as the story progressed and whatever she had consumed kicked in, her words became more scrambled and impossible to make sense of. I was able to gather that she had torn herself free of the make-out attempt and run away, which caused Susie and Michael to violently mock her as she fled.
"They said those things! Why did they say them?" she asked me.
"What did they say?"
She looked directly at me in a way that made me shudder. "You are so sweet to pretend you don"t know."
"Okay."
She kept looking at me. I felt myself becoming intensely uncomfortable, like something I had eaten hours before was just going wrong in my stomach. "You"re the only person here who actually listens," she said. "You"re not a freak like the rest of this crowd."
I am too! I wanted to protest, but I noticed her face moving closer to mine. I had never seen a face up so close before, like the face was blocking the sun, eclipsing the world. The quiet of the room became a roar of silence, an intensity of antisound. I thought I heard the footsteps of a c.o.c.kroach stopping to scratch himself on the opposite wall. And suddenly, there she was. And the walls that had seemed impregnable, looming over my life for so many years, came tumbling down.
At some point just before dawn, while Angela slept in my bed, I heard people shuffle into the living room. They murmured to each other, like a weary defeated army, and collapsed in piles around the house. I braced myself for someone to barge in and catch us there, but mercifully, on this night, no one did.
I lay awake all night, in the hours following the brief bustle of activity. Did I feel different? I examined myself and thought, on the whole, my spirit did seem a bit lighter. I had stepped through a door that I had given up hope of ever stepping through, but on the other side found a world that looked almost identical to the world I had left behind.
Would Angela have expectations of me now? Watching her sleep, I a.s.sumed she would, but what could they be? And how would this be explained to Susie? Angela was one of her best friends. Would she be angry? Were we supposed to get permission? And what of the rest of the group-the Supreme d.i.c.ks" code of celibacy was often invoked (although still unexplained), and as best I could tell it was actually followed.
The words boyfriend, girlfriend, and relationship, if invoked at all in 21, were seen as some distant-and laughable-phenomena, like the fox-trot or the SALT II Treaty. "Dates" and "dating" were artifacts of some lost culture, as close to our lives as sock hops and village yentas.
There were, here and there within our group, examples of various forms of attachment, but if explained at all, they were termed "hanging out." Jerome generally crashed in Monica"s room, but Jerome wasn"t, as he often said, a d.i.c.k; he was in the band that was the most closely allied with the d.i.c.ks, the Loneliest Christmas Tree. Tim Fall, it was said, hung out with a girl who lived in Prescott House, but Tim, with his doc.u.mentary missions, was very much an iconoclast within the house and in any case, whoever the girl was, no one ever saw her. Arthur, the angry punk, lived with a woman in a house off-campus, but he was too much of a raw force to be affected by philosophy, whatever the philosophy behind celibacy was.
As I started to panic about how I would break the news that Angela and I were now-what? Going out? Hanging out? Friends?-the person in question stirred. Through the dawn light she looked up at me and said, "Hey, do you mind? I sleep alone."
"Oh, right. I wasn"t really sleeping. . . ."