"No, they don"t," I said. "I guess this school doesn"t like me. You know, they broke up Twenty-one."
They nodded. "Our mod is like . . ." Elizabeth looked at Lucy to finish the thought.
"A magical harem." They both burst into giggles.
"That sounds great," I said. "Elizabeth, I"ve . . ." I tried to find my thought. Elizabeth smiled open-eyed, while little Lucy at her side glared up at me skeptically. "I guess I wondered when I"d see you."
Elizabeth smiled. "When you"d see me see you seeing me." They broke down in giggles again.
"Well, maybe I"ll stop by," I said, slinking away while they continued laughing.
Three hours, a dozen drinks, and a couple pills Frank had prescribed later, I stumbled across campus to Enfield House. Her mod was lit in the dull violet light from a batik-covered floor lamp. Elizabeth lay on a couch, staring at her hand. "h.e.l.lo," she said, not bothering to move.
Over the following months, I found myself stopping by her mod late at night on a regularly irregular basis, each time producing the same thrill of being reunited with Elizabeth and, the following day, the same confusion of not knowing what we were, or even whether Elizabeth, who barely left her mod, had any sense that this visit was not the last one and thus that there was any c.u.mulative weight to our time together. But as many times as I swore never to return, driven by my frustration with my own inability just to "be cool" about the feelings whirling inside, I kept finding myself at every party I went to scanning the room for Elizabeth, and over and over again, late at night, wandering back to Enfield, hoping to catch her alone.
Manageable though Merrill life seemed, quickly enough, a note of chaos found its way into my world. One evening, as I sat in the back room of the dining hall with Zach, Frank, Nathan, Sarah, and some others, we looked over at Duke"s table. One of the group"s traditions was that when one of them went for a beverage, he or she brought some back for everyone. As we looked over, a curly-haired boy in a black blazer pinned with minib.u.t.tons was carrying a tray of coffee cups back to the table, and he pa.s.sed them out to his friends.
"This has to stop," Zach muttered.
"I think it"s sweet," Sarah cooed.
"Zach, I think you got a point." Frank nodded. "That"s no kinda behavior for a respectable dining facility."
The next evening ten of us lined up at the front door before SAGA opened. We raced inside and took seats at Duke"s table, settling in for a siege. Within minutes, trouble started. The mod guy and a red-haired girl walked into the back room, saw us, and stopped dead in their tracks. The mod guy"s jaw fell. He whispered something to the red-haired girl, then ran back down the hall. A couple minutes later, Duke and five others of his group strode in and marched over to us, a bloodthirsty look in their eyes.
Duke leaned on the table, palms pressed down hard, and stared us in the eyes one by one, nodding at each of us to send the message that he was committing our faces to memory for his files. Finally he spoke. "Very. f.u.c.king. Funny. Guys. Very. f.u.c.king. Funny."
We sheepishly smiled up at him.
"Okay, I can deal with your little stunt. But lemme tell you, if this ever happens again, every person at this table is a dead man. A. Dead. Man."
"That sounds fair." Zach nodded.
"Shut the h.e.l.l up, freak," Duke barked. He gathered his men together and carried over a neighboring table, which they positioned so that one of its corners touched one corner of our table, preserving, technically at least, the continuity of his unbroken sitting-at-the-same-table string probably dating back to the mid-seventies. We ate uncomfortably next to each other for the entire two-and-a-half-hour SAGA dinnertime. When at last Duke got up to go, he repeated his routine of looking each of us in the eyes and reminding us, "Never again. Not if you want to live."
With that threat on the table, the decision had been taken out of our hands; we had no choice but to line up the following night at SAGA and occupy the table once more.
"So the rest of the dining hall won"t actually let him kill us, will they?" I asked the others.
"No way," Frank said. "This place has just been waiting for someone to start the revolution. Believe you me, these folks have got our backs." Looking around the room, however, I saw a great many people laughing and pointing and, if I wasn"t wrong, shaking with glee at the thought that we were about to be ma.s.s-murdered before their eyes.
When Duke arrived, on cue his face turned red and the smoke poured from his nostrils. The time for gentle warnings had pa.s.sed. He stood at the head of the table and raged at the top of his lungs, detailing the ways he was going to ma.s.sacre us, collectively and individually. Pots of boiling hydrochloric acid were mentioned; Green Beret units parachuting onto the Merrill roof were invoked. He picked up the table and knocked our trays of lasagna and SAGA"s famed "Calico Skillet" to the floor. He grabbed Zach by the shoulders and shook him. But through it all, we held our ground. I wondered how at this peace-loving school, at this peace-studying school, people could just watch idly, even contentedly, while violence and tyranny exploded in their midst. But somehow they found the resources within themselves to do just that.
Eventually, Duke and his friends finished venting and moved on, constructing the adjoining table once again. Each time they pa.s.sed behind they made sure to knock their trays against our heads. When finally they left, we let up a little cheer of victory, which the rest of the hall did not join.
The next day, three separate people told me that Duke had outlined to them the ways in which I would soon meet my doom. To one, he explained he had miniature tear gas cartridges that were small enough to slide under my door and time-fused to explode moments later. To another, he promised that he wouldn"t actually kill us but that through his connections in the FBI and CIA he would make our names disappear from all records, erasing us as though we had never existed, making life impossible-at least if ever we wanted to get credit cards. Frank and I warned the rest of our hall that someone might come in to bomb us with tear gas. Most seemed vaguely concerned and promised to keep a lookout, although I noticed the tiniest hint of a smile sneak across Sally"s face.
In the following issue of the Merrill House newsletter, a photocopied samizdat produced by the House Office and distributed to every bathroom stall in the dorm, Duke had auth.o.r.ed an article ent.i.tled "20 Ways to Kill d.i.c.kheads," which outlined the various a.s.sa.s.sination methods one could use against us. The Merrill House staff handed out copies to whoever came into the office, including to Frank and me. I marveled that September wasn"t even over and already I felt completely uncomfortable in yet another dorm.
Again, I made initial stabs at getting some academic momentum rolling. I signed up for a Tolstoy cla.s.s taught by Ninotchka, and also tried out "Ways of Un-Being: Perspectives on Madness in Modern Literature," despite an ominously dense cla.s.s description in the course catalog. On the first day, the professor a.s.signed a reading from Michel Foucault"s The Archaeology of Knowledge-"just to get us all on the same page, linguistically," she said.
That night I started reading, tearing through the pages at a breakneck pace. This is easy, I thought as I reached page ten. Then I realized I had no idea what I had just read. My eyes had walked over the pages. I had taken in the sentences but they pa.s.sed over me like a mild breeze, leaving nothing behind and no memory of the experience. I tried again and after another ten pages, I shook myself off. It was as though I had gone into some kind of trance. I had no clue what it was I had just read. I resolved to focus and looked down, going very slowly over each word. I read: Moreover, the unity of the discourses on madness would be the interplay of the rules that define the transformations of these different objects, their nonident.i.ty through time, the break produced in them, the internal discontinuity that suspends their permanence. Paradoxically, to define a group of statements in terms of its individuality would be to define the dispersion of these objects, to grasp all the interstices that separate them, to measure the distances that reign between them-in other words, to formulate their law of division.
The book fell from my hands and I gaped slack-jawed, betrayed and wounded as though Foucault had just lulled me into trusting him and then reached out and punched me in the nose. Could that have just happened? Cautiously, I picked the book up off the floor, opened it, and reread those sentences. What could this possibly mean? The professor wouldn"t have a.s.signed this to an undergraduate literature cla.s.s if it was written in a foreign tongue, I a.s.sumed, so why couldn"t I make out what the h.e.l.l was going on here? The next day I ran into a girl from my cla.s.s.
"I love Foucault," she gushed. "For me, that"s my airplane reading."
"But did you understand it? I mean, the writing . . . ?"
"That"s the best thing about him. His beautiful language. It"s just fun! Not like Barthes-just between us, although I totally respect everything he has to say."
I had better luck on a cla.s.s in Global Farming Issues, taught by a professor who, Zach had tipped me off, was Hampshire"s version of Crocodile Dundee-the head of the Farm Center and New England"s champion dogsled racer. Hal, indeed, did not disappoint on my first visit. Dressed in a plaid flannel jacket and matching cap, he gave us a slide show that depicted his trip across Haiti in the company of "one of the best monkey hunters in the whole Caribbean." In a later cla.s.s he gave us a slide tour of his farm, where he was experimenting with new mulching methods. It became increasingly obvious, as Hal began to slur his words and shout dramatically, that he might well be deeply drunk. I looked around for any sign of a bottle, hoping Zach and I might be able to grab it while Hal was lecturing.
When he came to the end of the show, he slumped into his chair. "So that"s my farm. That"s how I"ve been trying to save the world. My kids, they don"t want any part of it. They want to go off to school and become artists. The commies and the hippies, they all say, "Hal, that"s so great what you"re doing!" but when I say, "You want to come help out?" they say, "You got ten bucks an hour?" So when I"m gone, what"s going to happen to it all? Who"s going to care?" The cla.s.s was dead silent as he buried his head in his hands. "Somebody get the lights!" Hal sobbed as we all filed out.
I turned to Zach. "Finally, a decent cla.s.s at this place!"
Eventually I tracked down Jon and Steve in Northampton, where they were both living-Jon renting an apartment and Steve crashing on the couch. In his years after Hampshire, Steve would spend much of his life in residence on various couches, and he explained that this was his way of restoring civilization to a decadent age. "In ancient Greece," he said, "hospitality was the principle on which society was built. By law, any Greek citizen was ent.i.tled to demand hospitality of any other Greek citizen for two days and three nights. I am a lone knight for civilization, forcing people to live up to these ancient standards."
"But two days and three nights?" I asked. "You"ve been on Jon"s couch for over two months."
"There"s been a great deal of inflation since Greek times, if you haven"t noticed."
In Northampton, Jon and Steve"s existence rotated each day between Bonducci"s Cafe, the venerable browsing room of the Smith College library-where Steve napped on deep couches and pored over his Wittgenstein-and late nights at the Red Lion Diner.
Northampton during this era teetered between two worlds. The small town built around a four-block Main Street appeared from a distance like a miniature version of a cla.s.sic northeastern industrial town with cigar stores, a Woolworth five-and-ten, an ancient cemetery, churches, and an opera house. But another element had begun to encroach like some fatal tree fungus that would eventually spell old Northampton"s doom-between the old-timey bait-and-tackle shops, every third window featured a display of wind chimes, handcrafted candles, or a poster lauding the nutritional benefits of wheatgra.s.s juice.
Another element colored the idyllic New England experience-in those days Northampton was home to the richest collection of insane people I had ever encountered. At some point in the early 1980s, cutbacks had supposedly forced the Northampton State Mental Hospital to deinst.i.tutionalize wagonloads of patients at a time, releasing them into the community. The result was that walking down Main Street one darted between old men arguing with invisible friends and others lying on the sidewalk guffawing and pointing up the skirts of pa.s.sing girls.
Every night they all came to the Red Lion Diner, as did Jon and Steve. The little eatery occupied a refurbished red train car that sat just below the tracks of the Northampton Train Depot; strong waves of terror rocked me every time I met Jon and Steve here. On a typical evening at the Red Lion at least one patron lost his marbles and exploded in a screaming fury at the manager or at anyone close at hand. Each time I stepped inside and saw a row of G.o.d"s forgotten men spitting and muttering to themselves along the counter, I thought to myself, I have pushed my luck too far; this will be the night I will die for my scrambled eggs and wheat toast.
And remarkably, even in this company, Jon had managed to make himself despised.
The manager of the Red Lion was a bullet-headed ex-Marine named Mike, who walked the floor with a seven-inch hunting knife on his belt, sneering back at the lunatics and grumbling gargoyles. Every night we watched Mike absorb waves of abuse from his guests, saw him poised, hand on knife, and wondered if we would be here when he plunged it into some patron"s throat. But his demeanor of general contempt for all humanity was somehow pushed to the breaking point every time Jon walked in the door.
One night Jon had mentioned that "Mike hates me," but I found that hard to believe, saying, "Mike hates everyone."
"No, but he really hates Jon," Steve confirmed.
Sure enough, the moment we walked in the door, Mike threw his notepad down on the counter and bellowed, "Ruin my f.u.c.king night!"
As we ordered, Jon shook his head. "He"s going to do it." When our food arrived, Mike brought Jon"s bowl of cereal with exactly two cornflakes sitting alone at the bottom of the bowl. "I can"t believe he did it again!" Jon tried to flag Mike down to bring the matter to his attention, but Mike refused to look our way for the rest of the night.
The week before, Jon and Steve told me, it had been even worse. A gruff woman named Jesse-either Mike"s wife or mother, we weren"t sure-had been on duty. It was Jon"s habit to put as many as ten or fifteen spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee. As Jesse cleared the table, she had glanced inside Jon"s cup, noticed the residue and, apparently, cracked. "Now I have to wash the f.u.c.king cup!" she screamed, and then, deciding this was too much for a person to bear, threw the mug with all her might at the wall above Jon"s head, where it shattered, showering Jon and Steve with shards of ceramic.
It was in this atmosphere that we met at night to plot the next stage of the d.i.c.ks movement. "The Hampshire era had to end," Steve said. "Once they added the two-course option, they turned their back on experimental education and then it was only a matter of time before we were eradicated."
I nodded, thinking of the G.o.d knows how many years I still had left there. I told them about the guys who wanted to do their Div I"s in their first year. Their jaws dropped with dismay. "We got out just in time."
"d.i.c.k music is the future," Jon said. "Hampshire College is the past."
Back at Merrill House, sensing that our lives had stabilized to a manageable threat level, Duke"s bl.u.s.ter aside, Zach, Frank, and I decided it was time to do probably the single dumbest thing one could do at Hampshire College-we decided to start a fraternity. As it turned out, we already had in hand the critical cornerstone for such an inst.i.tution-the hat. The previous summer, while driving across country, my high school friend Will and I had stopped at the gift store of Slippery Rock State College, where on a whim I had bought a purple corduroy baseball cap that read "Sigma Pi." The thought behind starting a fraternity was not actually to infuriate the entire school-that was a fringe benefit-but to serve a larger good by getting money from the student activities fund to buy alcohol with.
The activities fund was one of Hampshire"s more celebrated boondoggles. For a school too perpetually short on cash to light its hallways properly, it nonetheless always nursed an endless slush fund disbursed to any person or group of people who could with a straight face describe themselves as organizing a community activity. Some of these beneficiaries received gargantuan piles of booty-the campus Women"s Center had a full-time staff and an office off the Airport Lounge. Others, such as the Alternative Music Collective, threw concerts, and still many others just sponsored parties at the dining hall, which was our intention.
Zach, Frank, and I consecrated ourselves the fraternity officers (treasurer, sergeant-at-arms, and president, respectively) and filled out and submitted the forms to the elected student council (known as the Community Council), which handed out the dough. A week later, we were duly notified that our application had been rejected.
"Where do these people get off rejecting us?" said Frank, who was new to pariah status.
"Are they allowed to reject people?" Zach wondered, listing some of the more ridiculous groups that had been funded (Frisbee fellowships, transgender dramatic societies, et cetera).
We decided that this could not be the last word on the subject, that a project as n.o.ble as our planned fraternity could not be allowed to suffocate in its cradle, its cries never heard. That night we stood outside the Tavern and browbeat every person who exited to sign a pet.i.tion demanding Community Council support for Sigma Pi. (We only asked the departing people, figuring they would be too drunk to know what they were signing.) By the end of the night we had gathered four hundred signatures, nearly a third of the school. A week later, bowing to the public outcry, Community Council allocated five hundred dollars to Sigma Pi Fraternity.
Calling Sigma Pi to order, our first task was to print our Christmas card. It was only October, but we figured if the fraternity was going to make a splash we needed to get our message of goodwill out to the ma.s.ses. Marilyn took a picture of the three chapter officers lined up, serious stolid expressions on our faces, purple corduroy cap on my head. We printed it postcard-size in grainy black-and-white, the backs reading, in block letters, MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM SIGMA FRATERNITY.
In retrospect, it is impressive, even to me, to look back upon how many idiotic moves we made that semester. Anyone taking a cursory glance at the Hampshire situation of the day could have told us that this was not the time for such shenanigans; knowing my history and near-death situation with the d.i.c.ks, knowing how dry was any reservoir of goodwill we might once have had, seeing the rise of political correctness, as around this time this phrase was first used nonironically by our campus activists to describe their program. Someone might have warned us that it was not the time for people with our ironic tendencies to be launching anything at Hampshire College; and if we must, the last thing to be launched was a fraternity, even as a joke; and if we must start a fraternity, to stay as far away from school funds as possible; and if we must take them, for G.o.d"s sake, what the h.e.l.l were we thinking putting our pictures on the front of a postcard and letting everyone know who we were?
But no one told us any of those things. So start a fraternity we did, getting school funding and sending out postcards emblazoned with our faces to the entire campus.
At about noon on the day the postcards went out, I started noticing funny looks as I walked around the school. Even scattered boos and hisses. Frank noticed it, too, but brushed it aside. "They"re just jealous," he spat.
With $460 left, we got to work planning the party.
In the spirit of the season of demonstrations, we decided a cause-oriented event would match the mood of the day. We booked the SAGA back room for what we called a Safe s.e.x Concert, promoting the message, central to Supreme d.i.c.k philosophy, that the only Safe s.e.x is no s.e.x at all. As headliners we booked Frank"s band, the b.u.t.t Buddies.
One would hardly suppose that people could get so riled up about an abstinence awareness concert, but somehow in the logic of the times, the tamer our words, the more they seemed to provoke the campus into a fury. For the following two weeks until the show, we spent our time around the clock fending off attempts to cancel our event. From the moment it was scheduled, the Women"s Center and the Safe s.e.x Education Coalition went into overdrive, pressuring the administration to cancel the show, claiming it undermined their safe s.e.x message.
In a climactic final meeting with the dean of students, our suggestion that the above groups didn"t own the term safe s.e.x was met with an icy silence. "I"m very disturbed that the sensitivities of the community mean so little to you."
We nodded. "They mean everything to me," Zach said.
The dean probed for a hole in our plan. Trying to prove that we were up to no good, he asked what our feelings were about safe s.e.x, about AIDS in general, about why we had started a fraternity and what we were going to tell the national office of Sigma Pi, and about what was on the program at the show. Finally he turned to me. "And my file says you are one of the Supreme d.i.c.ks."
I shivered. "There are no Supreme d.i.c.ks at Hampshire. They"ve been eradicated."
"But are you saying you"re not one of them?"
"I"ve never been much of a joiner," I stuttered.
"Hmmmm . . . and what about this band, the b.u.t.t Buddies?"
"They"re fantastic," Frank declared.
"I"m sure. But-but tell me, just between us, what"s their real name . . . ?"
The three of us looked at each other. "Their real name . . . ?"
"Come on, you guys know what I"m talking about."
We shook our heads.
"What do you guys really call that band?"
Another half hour back and forth on this theme and the dean broke down. "My sources tell me the real name of that band is . . . the b.u.t.t . . . f.u.c.kers."
We broke into laughter, which we were unable to suppress until we were shown the door.
On a Sat.u.r.day night the Safe s.e.x show went on. In the run-up to it, however, we had been so focused on getting beer to campus and fighting back attempts to cancel the concert, we hadn"t had time to think about the program; we all a.s.sumed that something scandalous would occur. There was no way, it was clear, this event could go off without a giant ruckus. But as it happened, nothing scandalous did occur. The bands played. Free beer was distributed to the smallish crowd that showed up. In all the commotion about keeping the event from being canceled, we had gone ahead and set a place at the table for debacle, without checking to see if debacle had RSVP"d. As the night ended, we polished off the final keg of beer, a strange aftertaste filling our mouths.
The next day we realized we had forty dollars left in the Sigma Pi account-enough for one keg of cheap beer. The following week, our friend Dave was coming back from a trip home to L.A., and so we decided to throw him a welcome-home party at the mod he and Zach shared. "We really need to get this guy laid," Frank proclaimed.
A week later, I was sitting in the Airport Lounge when Sarah rushed in. "Where are Frank and Zach?" she asked.
"I dunno. Why?"
"You guys are in so much trouble. The Community Council just voted unanimously that the three of you should be expelled."
CHAPTER TWELVE.
Wet T-Shirt Night.
Within forty-eight hours I discovered I possessed magical powers. I could make the entire Airport Lounge fall silent when I walked in. In cla.s.s, seats on either side of me miraculously stayed empty, even as people crouched on the floor for want of chairs. In the dining hall, food flew at my head from mysterious unseen corners. My hallmates, amazingly, didn"t recognize me when I encountered them in public.
In my Supreme d.i.c.k youth of the previous year, I thought I knew what it was to be a pariah. But in truth, I had been merely the most junior and obscure member of the hated group, my name not known to any but our most committed enemies. Now I was front and center, my picture in every mailbox. When in the midst of the fuss Zach and I looked back, we realized how gentle and collegial the protests against the d.i.c.ks had been compared with the fury of a mobilized campus.
It took a few days to sort out what had happened. After scheduling Dave"s welcome-home bash, Frank, disappointed with the fairly tepid turnout for the Safe s.e.x Concert, had decided to turn this into the party of the year. With his working-cla.s.s, "man of the road" elocution, Frank was a natural salesman and a gifted story-teller, spinning yarns that grew with each telling. Frank had gone to SAGA and wandered from table to table, inviting people to the greatest party Hampshire had ever seen. By the time he reached one large table of girls, which included our hallmate Sally, the party had grown to epic dimensions. He envisioned a grand soiree that would feature a battle of the bands, Jell-O wrestling, and, most pertinent, "a kiddie pool filled with beer," which, he added fatefully, would serve as the stage for a wet T-shirt contest.
It is interesting to ponder how different history might have been had Frank just excluded that last phrase from his pitch, had the words wet and T-shirt never left his mouth. But oblivious as we were to the political turmoil around us, we never even noticed the blasting powder piling on the campus sidewalks and never thought how small a spark it would take to blow the entire place to smithereens.
Moments after Frank left the table, Sally sprang from her seat and made a beeline to the Women"s Center, which called an emergency meeting of its membership that very night. Of the feelings of hurt and outrage that were expressed at that meeting, I am told, the greatest was the pain caused by the knowledge that Hampshire women had agreed to drench their shirts in beer and parade themselves for the amus.e.m.e.nt of patriarchal tools like Frank, Zach, and myself.
The next day at the weekly Community Council meeting, an angry delegation from the Women"s Center stormed in, demanding that something be done about this out-of-control fraternity. Excessive arm-twisting was not needed. The council members competed with each other to express their outrage that such a thing as a fraternity could exist on Hampshire"s hallowed grounds ("I came here to feel safe from things like that") and that the school had allowed itself to slip so deep into s.e.xism and prejudice that Frank, Zach, and I felt comfortable using official funds to lure Hampshire women ("taking advantage of underprivileged financial aid students") into a contest for our s.e.xual, misogynistic amus.e.m.e.nt.
There was some discussion about whether it would be adequate punishment merely to ban the party, outlaw Sigma Pi, take away our housing privileges, and make us publicly apologize to the community; but in the end it was decided that, no, all these measures failed to rise to the occasion. s.e.xism and patriarchal enslavement were on the rise, one might say they were running amok across Hampshire, and this was the Council"s one last desperate chance to "fight for progress before it is too late." If we were allowed to remain on campus, it would be a sign to s.e.xists that they were safe to practice oppression w.i.l.l.y-nilly wherever they liked. When it came time to vote on the motion that the gentlemen of Sigma Pi fraternity be expelled forthwith and any trace of their presence be erased from the scrolls of Hampshire history, the resolution was carried by unanimous consent.
The Community Council, however, had no power to actually expel, and voting on student disciplinary matters had never, as far as anyone could remember, been in their line of duty. "In my day, the only students who tried to get other students in trouble lived very lonely lives," Steve reflected. "And even the narcs could be reasoned with." But like the Pharisees, the Community Council referred our case over to the person who could impose a death penalty, the dean of students. With a recommendation that the highest penalties be imposed, the Council sent us on to the administration, where our fate would be decided.
Before meeting with the dean I had a showdown with Sally on our hall. "You can"t blame me for telling. What you guys were planning made me feel unsafe in my own home."
"You have to know," I pleaded, "that there is no way we were going to actually have a wet T-shirt contest at Hampshire. Even if we wanted to, how could we have pulled that off?"
She shrugged. "That"s what Frank told me you were doing."