I looked for Susie to intercede, but she stared at me benevo lently, waiting for my answer.
"Ummmm . . . I"ve really been focused on my work this semester."
Everyone stared aghast, and then in unison broke out laughing. "You"re a virgin!" someone shouted. "That"s perfect." I turned dark crimson. Jon reminded me, "Don"t worry. Supreme d.i.c.ks are celibate."
"You are really?" I asked.
Ox said, "Yeah, that"s very important. And vegetarian."
In one corner, an emaciated man with stringy black hair, named Brian, was cutting up lines of cocaine on a full-length mirror that lay on the floor. He looked at me. "I"m sorry," he said in a tone of great courteousness. "Do you want a line?" I nodded and scampered across the room. Grabbing a rolled-up five-dollar bill and ignoring the fact that flecks of blood dotted the rim, I leaned down and, trying not to be greedy, sucked up the smallest line on the mirror. I bolted upright and felt the shot of blood leap through my brain.
"Put some on your gums." Brian showed me how. In seconds I felt excited to continue the interview. And suddenly the idea of moving in here seemed overwhelmingly great. "I really want to live here!" I yelled to Susie.
In the hours that followed, a cast of thirty or so drifted in and out, taking turns asking me questions. It was never clear who actually lived in the house and who had a vote as the questions flew from every corner. I was asked about why I was being thrown out of the dorm; there were many questions about Lonnie, whom they all seemed to know. Several, rather than asking questions, directed long speeches at me, warning me that if I moved in, the whole campus would hate me. "There"s no going back," Ox said. Friar Tom appeared and gave a soliloquy about how the Supreme d.i.c.ks were about love, which was violently booed down by the room.
Sa"ad, a twenty-year-old black man sporting dreadlocks and a blazer with little mod pins and an English accent that came and went, sat down on the bed and asked me what sort of music I listened to.
"Ummm . . ." I stalled, struggling for an impressive answer. "Bowie . . . Velvet Underground . . ."
"Of course." Sa"ad nodded. "But have you listened to anything lately?"
"I like Husker Du?" I said, more as a question than a statement.
Sa"ad chortled. "You really listen to them? Don"t you find them completely derivative?"
I nodded, carefully. "Yeah, sometimes . . . but not maybe their last alb.u.m . . . ," I said, wondering what derivative meant. "What do you listen to?"
Sa"ad fixed a braid in his hair. "There"s some Joy Division I can stand. I used to like the Swans, but I"m getting bored with them. Psychic TV are geniuses, of course."
"Of course."
"Do you really think so?"
I nodded solemnly, praying I wouldn"t be asked to name one of their alb.u.ms. Sa"ad fell silent a moment and looked me deep in the eyes. "So how long have you known that you"re gay?" he asked.
"I, um, well . . ." I looked around the room for support, but the others stared blankly at me, waiting for an answer. "I"m not sure. . . ."
"Oh, stop it," Susie mercifully interrupted. "Sa"ad thinks everyone is gay."
"Are you saying he"s not!?"
"Of course he"s not. He"s just a nerd! Look, he"s wearing a Hawaiian shirt under his sweater." I didn"t know if this defense was helping my cause, but I kept silent. The discussion soon drifted back to the house"s celibacy strictures. "It"s Reichian," Ox explained to me. "It"s important for your orgone energy."
Susie disputed this, saying, "Celibacy is just the line they use to get laid. You guys know that s.e.x is the best thing in the world for your orgone."
"Susie!" Ox looked genuinely shocked. "I can"t believe you"re saying that. I know my celibacy is very serious." As the night wore on, everyone seemed to forget about my interview. Once the c.o.ke ran out, the crowd thinned as people trailed away or just fell asleep where they sat. The clock on Susie"s nightstand read six A.M., and I was having a very hard time keeping my eyes open as the celibacy debate continued. I sensed that asking if the interview was over or if I had been accepted would be tactless, so I sat quietly and tried to follow the conversation about campus figures I had never met and books I"d never read.
I jerked upright and realized I had fallen asleep leaning against the wall. The clock read ten A.M. The room was quiet, with several people dozing. On the other end of the giant bed, Susie sat up writing in a crepe-bound journal. She noticed me shudder awake. "Hi." She smiled. I smiled back. The face that had seemed so jarring twelve hours before now looked like the warmest, most caring on earth.
"Ummm . . ." I struggled for words. "Is the interview over?"
"Congratulations. You can have Steve"s room."
"But, uh, what if he comes back?"
"Then you"ll have to fight him for it." She smiled benevo lently, but with no sign that she was joking. She told me I could move in immediately. I struggled to my feet, realizing I hadn"t eaten since lunch the previous day. My skull felt on the verge of implosion, and when I swallowed, my mouth seemed to be filled with vast quant.i.ties of rotting-vegetable-flavored quicksand.
"It was nice to meet you," I said.
"It was really good you found us. You belong here." Susie turned back to her diary. I beamed at her as I struggled my way down the stairs.
CHAPTER FIVE.
Cold Turkey.
On Thanksgiving I returned to Los Angeles for the first time and my family gathered to celebrate the holiday with the family of one of my high school best friends, also named Richard. In high school, Richard was perhaps the most noted figure of our generation. Typically dressed in overalls, white-collared shirt, and bow tie, he was given to flamboyant spectacles such as the day when he stormed the roof of the administration building in pirate costume and threw tortillas ("food for the ma.s.ses") to the campus below, setting off a day-long riot.
After a semester at NYU, however, his semicrazed, mischievous swagger seemed shaken. His head was shaved and he muttered the phrase "The city, man. It"s real," over and over. He said he had been arrested by the NYPD for chalking drawings of Ubu Roi on the subway walls and had spent a night in jail. I wondered how both of us had graduated from high school under the illusion that graffiti was a socially and legally acceptable form of expression.
Richard"s first roommate had been a basketball player who, one night with his friends, brought a semicomatose girl to their room and dropped her on the bed. They were in the middle of discussing which of their group should a.s.sault her first when Richard leapt from his own bed and attacked them with his lacrosse stick. The girl momentarily came to her senses and raced for safety, leaving Richard alone with a group of unsatisfied, drunk basketball players, who stopped just short of inflicting upon Richard the a.s.sault they had intended for the girl. A week later, the roommate was expelled for attacking a campus security guard. His replacement was a student from Taiwan who Richard nicknamed Homeboy and who spoke no English-at least none directly to Richard. On a couple of occasions, however, Richard had walked into the room and was sure he"d heard him speaking perfect anglais on the phone, which he abruptly dropped when Richard entered.
"The city, it"s just real," he repeated again as we drove away after dinner toward Ricki"s house. If we had gone to a normal high school, Ricki would have been our queen. Perched atop a clique of the wealthiest, prettiest L.A. teens, in a just world Ricki wouldn"t have even known our names. But in our world, every year after Thanksgiving dinner, she heard a knock on the door and found Richard and me standing on her front stoop waiting for her mother to invite us in.
Keeping up the tradition seemed to put Richard in a better mood, carrying him back to his old mind-set.
"Oh. My. G.o.d," Ricki exclaimed when she saw us. "You are so not here. This is college now."
"Now, be nice, Ricki," her mother tutted. "That"s so sweet of you boys to stop by and say h.e.l.lo. Would you like some pumpkin pie?" We pushed past a slack-jawed Ricki to take our places in the living room. Over pie, we talked about our first months at college and Richard recounted tales of Homeboy, who had taken to feeding the mice that infested their dorm, leaving bits of food around on the floor. Ricki had gone to college in Colorado and was mildly impressed with the fact that the students there were "less judgmental" than people had been in L.A., and she claimed the film program to be decent.
I tried to explain what I"d been doing at Hampshire, tried to tell them about my new housemates at d.i.c.k House/Mod 21, where I"d moved just before leaving, but I couldn"t get out much more than "They"re really interesting people. Like really focused on, like, the arts and stuff." When I threw out the question "Do you have to, like, go to cla.s.ses at your schools?" their giggles reinforced my idea that the facts of Hampshire life were better left unspoken here.
In the days before Thanksgiving I had carried my belongings across campus an armload at a time into Mod 21. After avoiding J-3 for days, I moved under the cover of night, hoping to avoid confrontation with Lonnie and the hallmates. Ox and Friar Tom had offered to come and help. At two A.M. we crept onto J-3. "I can"t believe you live here," Ox said, looking in awe at the Dakin stairway. "I haven"t been to Dakin in years."
"Has it changed?"
Ox peered through the dim hall light onto J-3. He glanced at Lonnie"s many warning signs posted at the entrance to the hall.
"I guess there wasn"t any such thing as a quiet hall back then."
"I think this hall"s sorta a special place."
"Oh, my G.o.d." Ox"s head bobbed up and down and he hopped from toe to toe, as though a surge of excitement was struggling to break through the fossilized layers of apathy he had blanketed himself in. "J-three. That"s where . . . Adrian lived."
"Who was Adrian?"
Ox"s nodding grew more frantic. "Adrian, oh, really. Yeah, Adrian . . . She was a New Wave monster."
Friar Tom ducked into the lounge, discovered a tub of hummus in the refrigerator, and brought it back, along with a long wooden spoon. "Be careful, Rich," he warned. "Don"t let him start having flashbacks to his hippie days or we might lose him."
"Her father was the Grateful Dead"s road manager." He stared wistfully at the door to J-307. "Of course, this was all before I was celibate."
On cue, Lonnie emerged from his room, indignant in fluffy robe, hair tied back with a scrunchy. "What is-h.e.l.lo, Tom. . . ."
"Lonnie! Well well well well well."
They stood in silence, looking at each other. "I think they were friends when they were first-years," Ox whispered. They stared each other down like gunmen preparing to draw.
Friar Tom drew first. "So do you still do the joogie dance before you go to sleep?"
Lonnie turned dark red. "Tom, you need to leave my hall. Richard, what do you know about these people? What are they doing here?"
"I"m moving in with them."
I won"t swear that steam actually poured out of Lonnie"s ears and that his eyes leapt from his head, but within moments it felt as though the hall had been enveloped in a cloud of smoke.
"How-how did this happen?"
"Just one of those things, I guess."
Lonnie exhaled, dropped his head, and looked defeated. "Do you realize who these people are? Have they told you the things they"ve done?"
Friar Tom grinned broadly and raised his eyebrows. Ox was still studying Adrian"s old door. "At the Limelight, there was a table named after her. . . ."
Back at 21, we carried a load of blankets and my duffel bag into the living room.
Ox asked, "Does anyone know if there"s a key to Steve"s room? I mean Rich"s room?"
The crowd looked blank. "Rich," Ox said, "I think you"re going to have to just card it."
"Oh, okay." I nodded, and followed him down a tiny hall off the living room. At the second door, Ox stopped, took out his student ID, and ran it down the groove between the door and the jamb with a twist, forcing the k.n.o.b to turn free. "It"s pretty easy, really," he told me.
The room smelled intensely of cat urine. The floor was carpeted with old clothes, alb.u.m covers, beer bottles, papers, and candles that had burned down and melted into the floor.
"Is Steve going to mind me stepping on his stuff?" I asked.
"Oh, really? Is Steve back?" Ox said, looking surprised. I threw my rubble on top of the rest of the rubble and plopped on the bed, a single, monastic-looking futon with a blanket tossed over it. On the wall was tacked a quote from Bertrand Russell, "Life is nothing but a compet.i.tion to be the criminal rather than the victim," written in dripping fountain pen on a piece of parchment paper, a print of the Munch painting The Dance of Life.
"Welcome home," Ox said.
We walked out into the living room, where Ox announced, "So I guess Rich is living in Steve"s room now." The group stirred slightly and looked up at me in befuddlement.
"Just so long as you don"t stay in the bathroom all day," said one with a knot of waxed hair and giant c.o.ke-bottle gla.s.ses.
"I"ll try not to."
"Steve goes in and stays forever. We timed him at over six hours one day."
I laughed but they all nodded back at me, straight-faced. "What does he do in there?"
"What Steve Shavel does in the bathroom is the Supreme d.i.c.ks" most closely guarded secret."
For much of that first night I sat in the living room trying to puzzle out who actually lived there and what they were talking about. The revolving cast seemed equally at home plopping down on the floor or going through the refrigerator. The talk whirled between the latest moves by the Supreme d.i.c.ks" enemies around campus, the effects of deadly orgone radiation (DOR), which was said to be taking hold across the Pioneer Valley, and gossip about other campus and local bands, little of which made any sense to me but which I struggled to follow as if for an immersion cla.s.s in a foreign language.
Much of the conversation focused on various facets of "orgone energy," the life force. A theory of Austrian psychoa.n.a.lyst-c.u.m-scientist Wilhelm Reich, orgone had become the cornerstone of the Supreme d.i.c.k worldview, and Reich the group"s guiding philosopher. Wilhelm Reich had been, early in his career, a protege of Sigmund Freud"s, but he eventually took his master"s ideas in esoteric directions, theorizing that all life was fueled by a force known as orgone energy, which in its purest state was a deep blue. When individual lives were dominated by anger or went out of harmony, their orgone became blocked, poisoned, and red. Reich eventually designed a machine, an orgone acc.u.mulator, that aided the flow of orgone in individuals.
Late in his career, Reich moved from Austria to the tiny town of Rangeley, Maine, where he founded a commune and built a ma.s.sive orgone acc.u.mulator gun with which, he claimed, he created rain showers and shot down an invading alien s.p.a.cecraft.
Although Reich had insisted that orgone energy could be released by the power of the o.r.g.a.s.m-which he defined in fifty-three stages-Supreme d.i.c.k philosophy argued that in contemporary corrupt society (suffering from "the emotional plague"), s.e.xuality had become colonized by the state and consequently o.r.g.a.s.m was no longer an efficient mechanism for releasing orgone energy. And thus, it was argued, celibacy was the only solution.
Around eleven P.M., Marilyn and Arthur tumbled in the door with a paper bag filled with food, which they spread out on the coffee table for everyone to grab at; cheeses, a pasta salad, bread, olives, hummus, a half-eaten block of tofu were all quickly devoured.
"Those f.u.c.ks in Forty-three wouldn"t go out," Arthur cursed. "And I know they made lasagna last night."
"Where did this all come from?" I asked Meg.
"It"s called mod shopping. We try to keep our food supply restocked at least once a week."
"Other mods give it to you?"
"Sort of. . . . They give it to us when they go to sleep and we go into their mods and try to fill our shopping list."
Around one A.M., a call came from Tim Fall, up at Prescott.
"Tim thinks we should play at Mod Eighty-nine," Jon announced, hanging up the wall phone.
"Eighty-nine!?" some exclaimed. "Those guys are so wasted, they won"t even notice we"re playing. Will the party even be going by the time we get there?"
Jon shrugged. "I dunno. Tim says it"s pretty happening."
Slowly, the room shook off the crust of stationary hours and rose to their feet, wrapping themselves in moth-eaten jackets, scarves, and hats; reaching for guitars, amps, and drums lying around the room. I knew, as I"d been told constantly, that the Supreme d.i.c.ks were not just a social collective but an actual rock band, but until now, that idea had never sunk in.
As we filed out the hall and into the snow, I asked Ox, "So this is like a gig? This mod invited us to play?"
"Not really. . . . We are kinda booking it ourselves."
"So it"s okay to just show up and do a show?"
"Ohhh, really?" Ox nodded. "I don"t think so. Is it?"
Wrapped up from the cold, we made our way across campus in a long line, sliding across the icy paths, each of us with an instrument in hand. This was my first return visit to Prescott House, the collection of three-story tin-lined ski chalets, since I had partied there as a prospective student. All year, the little village had loomed in my imagination as an enchanted fantasyland, a nonhippie sanctuary on the campus. But somehow I had never found my way back to Prescott. In fact, by November, I wasn"t quite sure where the tin village was, never having noticed the little path leading into another clump of trees behind the Science Center.
Our group wandered into Prescott like a pack of refugees, schlepping our belongings in our arms. A distant XTC song filled the canyon between the buildings and we followed it to its source, a mod at the far end, at the top of a narrow red fire escape. We tripped our way up the metallic steps, slippery in the frost, struggling to hold the railing and clutch our equipment, pushing through revelers packed tightly together in the cold.