Home Run

by Paul Kropp

  My life became more complicated the next day when Kirk decided to join the ranks of my friends. It’s very difficult, when someone decides to become your friend, to say “no, thanks”—especially when the prospective friend is very polite.

  The next morning began with a cheerful wake-up suggestion from my roommate, “Hey, Al, let’s have breakfast.” I groaned and went back to sleep. That afternoon, when we met our dorm counsellors, it was Kirk who plopped down beside me and listened cheerfully while we were warned about the evils of drinking, drugs, sex, and failure to keep up with the course work. And it was Kirk who said, afterwards, “Let’s get dinner over at Slavin.” I had no reason to refuse.

  So we stood in line at Slavin Hall—alias The Slop House or Sloppy Joe’s—waiting for the elderly cafeteria ladies to put some appropriate slop on our trays. Tonight’s dinner consisted of roastbeef slop, mashed-potato slop, and something that looked like car-rot-and-turnip slop, all looking like they had been shaped with an ice cream scoop.

  “I love this kind of food,” Kirk said as we moved along the line.

  “You do?”

  “Sure. It’s great down-home cooking, just like the ladies’ group makes for our church. What’s not to like?” “The flavour,” I said, “or lack of it.”

  “Al, I think you’ve got to perk up,” he said, looking quickly in my direction as he took a second slice of apple-slop pie. “School can be a wonderful experience if you just learn to embrace it.”

  Kirk actually spoke like that, a mixture of high school guidance counsellor-speak with enthusiastic phrases that you might see on a poster in a dentist’s office. I thought, at the time, that Kirk might really see life like that, but things turned out not to be so simple.

  We sat down with a bunch of other first-year students to the right of the entrance. Somehow, second-and third-year students found a way to avoid dining in Slavin even if they were on a meal plan, but first-years clustered together like the pathetic little souls they—I should say “we”—happen to be.

  “So, Al,” my roommate began, “tell me about yourself.”

  For a fleeting moment, I was tempted to feign illness and escape, but then I remembered that he was my roommate, and that I was stuck with him for at least a semester.

  “Hmmm,” I began instead. “How about white, non-smoker, sometimes-drinker, occasional thinker. That kind of sums it up.”

  “Hey, that’s good,” he said, flashing those pearly teeth. “You’re funny. That was the first thing I noticed about you. I wrote a letter to my family last night and said that I had a really funny roommate.”

  “Funny ha-ha, I hope. Not funny weird.”

  A perplexed look came over his face. It was as if he had to translate what I had just said into his own language before he could get it. Then he laughed, not a lot, but enough. “See, you are funny.”

  “And you?” I asked. My mouth was full of congealed gravy, potatoes, and mushy roast beef, so I couldn’t say much more.

  “In high school, they used to say I was a pretty serious guy,” Kirk replied. “But I’m not sure about that. Some people think you’re dull just because you don’t want to shoot squirt guns at Bible camp.”

  “Right,” I said, not because this made much sense, but because Right is a very good thing to say in almost any circumstance. It suggests (a) that I’m listening, (b) that I agree, and (c) that I want to hear more.

  Kirk went on to tell me about the rest of his life: the wonderful family back home, his fabulous girlfriend, the ranch where he grew up, the small religious school he’d attended. It was a touching story, really, like an episode of Little House on the Prairie.

  Kirk was the kind of person who gestured with his hands when he talked. This brought attention to his fingers, which were long, and to the ring on his left fourth finger. I had to stare hard, but then I could read the words: True Love Waits.

  “Interesting ring,” I said. “It almost asks a question, like, waits for what?”

  Kirk smiled and didn’t miss a beat. “Waits for marriage,” he replied. “I got it after the pledge.”

  “The pledge?”

  “The abstinence pledge,” he went on. He said this with an absolutely straight face, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “Everyone in my high school did the pledge, but I went a step further and got the ring.”

  “Abstinence meaning what?” I asked him. “Abstain from booze, drugs, sex?”

  Kirk smiled. “We made a commitment to a life of purity.” He looked at me when I frowned. “I mean, clean living. So we’ve got to abstain from all that. No corrupt images and no sex before marriage.”

  Once again I had to translate. No corrupt images = no porn; no sex before marriage = no sex for an eternity. Now I understood why Kirk had a computer without email or an Internet connection. He was simply cut off from the world of sin, a world I was so desperately trying to join.

  “So can you, like, look?” I asked him. At that moment a particularly striking blonde was coming through the slop line and waiting at the cashier. “Can you look at a girl like that one over there, or would that be too much lust?”

  “Oh, no, we can look,” Kirk said, following my gaze. “We just can’t touch.”

  “Right,” I said, repeating myself. “You’re saving yourself for marriage.”

  “That’s the pledge,” he replied. “It’s a goal I’ve set for myself. Kathy and I both pledged that we would wait.”

  “Kathy?”

  “My girlfriend. Almost my fiancée.”

  “Almost because you haven’t asked her?”

  “Right,” Kirk replied. Now it was his turn to use the word. He did seem a bit embarrassed by this question, though. It was the first time I’d seen him look less than perfectly self-assured.

  “But you’re going to ask her.”

  “Right. As soon as I graduate, or maybe before,” Kirk replied.

  “Hmmm,” I said. Hmmm is a cut up from Right on the response chart. Hmmm is the kind of thing a doctor says when you’re describing the funny tumour growing on some private part of your body; Right is what guys say to acknowledge that something is correct, unless there’s an extra letter i, as in Ri-ight, which mean that something is obviously not correct. Is it any wonder that English is so difficult to learn?

  “So that’s your goal, then, to abstain?” I asked.

  “No, I want to get my degree and then go on to divinity school. I’m going to be a preacher,” he said, pausing. “No, I’m going to be one of the great preachers.”

  “But why here? Why did you come to this wretched hive of scum and villainy?”

  Kirk looked at me with a raised eyebrow. He must have been impressed by the vocabulary, so I didn’t bother to tell him that the line was borrowed from Star Wars.

  “So I can learn about the devil where he lives.”

  Talk about conversation stoppers! A guy who says he’s come gunning for the devil and then looks you right in the eyes, well, it makes you begin to sweat just a little.

  “And what about you, Al? Why are you here?”

  I felt awkward, like some mashed potatoes had lodged in my throat. “I…uh…I’m kind of interested in Keats and Shelley. You know, poetry.”

  He was still looking at me. Kirk had very intense way of looking at you. Guys rarely look at each other directly, or even indirectly for more than a second or two, but Kirk just kept staring at me. Obviously he didn’t believe a word that I said. This wasn’t surprising, because I didn’t either.

  “Okay, that’s just a line,” I admitted. “Mostly I’m just interested in girls.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Uh, girls,” I repeated. “Mostly, I think, I just want to get laid.”

  I got the shocked look I expected, and maybe deserved.

  Back in high school, the getting-laid comment was quite true. That’s what it’s like when you’re sixteen or seventeen. But now that I’m older, life has become more complex. I really do like Keats and Shell
ey, the handful of their poems that I’ve read, and I’m really not only interested in sex, but that doesn’t mean I’m not horny half the time. This is normal, I think. Most of my friends have already had sex, or so they say, and that might make me the last remaining eighteen-year-old virgin on the planet, excluding Kirk, of course, who’s prepared to wait for it. Maybe I should read the Kinsey Report and check, but I think eighteen year olds should be thinking about sex half the time. What’s the alternative? Politics? Philosophy? Economics? The world is full of excruciatingly dull topics that I might want to think about when I’m older, like thirty or forty.

  So our awkward dinner concluded and we began to walk out of the cafeteria. That’s when I saw the Pajama Party flyer on the wall. It was all part of the Frosh Week hoopla, a five-day binge of sports, parties, meetings, and library tours. Note the incongruity. I suspected the sports and parties were there only to encourage us to take the library tour. But there was the poster: “Pajama Party Friday. Wear your best or your worst, but wear something! Come!”

  I looked at Kirk, then at the poster, and I began to get the germ of an idea.

  3

  The Pajama Party

  “WHY DO I HAVE to go with you?” Kirk whined.

  “Because you’re my roommate and that’s what roommates do,” I began. “And because you said you wanted to learn about the devil where he lives. Well, if the devil doesn’t live at this pajama party, then I’ll be very disappointed.”

  “Get Fuji to go,” Kirk said. He was referring to a guy in the next dorm room who played strange music late at night.

  “Fuji can’t go anywhere without his computer. He may not even own pajamas.”

  The guy in the room next door was actually named Franklin but he was permanently tied to his Fujitsu laptop, hence the nickname.

  “But you’re not wearing pajamas,” Kirk said at last.

  I could tell he was crumbling. “These are my pajamas, or as close as I’ve got to pajamas,” I explained. My outfit consisted of a pair of cotton shorts and a wrinkled T-shirt from an old Thinkertoys concert. I felt it communicated a certain sense of cool, without going overboard. “Besides,” I went on, “you’ve got real pajamas and a robe, for God’s sake.” Then I realized my slip. “Oh, sorry.”

  “Forgiven,” Kirk replied.

  “So you’ll come?” I was begging at this point, but what was a little lost pride compared to the prospect of going to this event on my own?

  “Okay, but you’ll owe me one,” Kirk replied. He looked quickly into his closet for something to wear.

  In his pajamas Kirk appeared, well, dapper. There’s another excellent word that has dropped out of the language. In the old days, guys like Cary Grant were always dapper, but Brad Pitt? No, it’s mostly a lost concept. We talked about that once at Maggie’s Friday film society back home, the disappearance of dapper. Pretty impressive discussion that night. Anyhow, Kirk was wearing pajamas that looked like they’d been ironed and a bathrobe that was almost elegant. I half expected to see him smoking a pipe just to complete the look.

  So dapper Kirk and rumpled me headed across the quad to Eggers Hall, the student centre. This was a stark, white building that must have been designed by a Japanese architect who had played too many years with Lego sets. Endowed by a rich man named Eggers, it was now referred to by many names: The Egg, Eggs and Ham, Eggo Hall, and, my own favourite, Egregious Hall. Remind me, when I die, never to endow a hall with the name Macklin.

  We arrived fashionably late, as I planned, to enter a party in full non-swing. The problem with official university parties for first-year students is that most of us aren’t officially old enough to drink. It is not that we don’t drink, but that we’re legally not supposed to drink. The Burrard U lawyers, in their wisdom, have pointed out the infraction of serving liquor to kids under nineteen, so all they offered was punch—like at a high school dance. The absence of alcohol for all these kids, many of whom began illicit drinking years ago at the ripe age of eight or twelve or thirteen, was sure to put a damper on events. At this pajama party, the girls were literally on one side of the room, the boys on the other (so reminiscent of first-year high school dances), and the DJ was playing entirely for his own amusement.

  “I’m bored,” I said.

  “I’m amazed,” Kirk replied.

  Around us were maybe a hundred first-year students, all dressed in pajamas. The guys tended to favour outfits like mine, casual running shorts and cut-offs with T-shirts flopping over; the girls were in soft cotton pajamas, usually with robes to cover most of their sleeping outfits. The guys came as they often were, half-shaved, half-rumpled, half-dressed; the girls all wore makeup and had done something—whatever it is that girls do—with their hair.

  “A den of iniquity,” I said, using another Star Wars line. This was half-ironic, since there was no real iniquity in evidence: no revealing clothing, no suggestive behaviour, nothing lewd or the least bit lascivious.

  “Really?” Kirk asked.

  “I could only hope.”

  We went to the refreshment window to pick up two non-alcoholic punches, then turned back towards the crowd, pseudo-drinks in hand.

  “This reminds me of church camp.”

  “Oh? You wore pajamas at church camp?” I asked.

  “No, it’s just that people are feeling awkward. They need to loosen up.”

  “You loosened up at church camp?”

  “Of course we loosened up,” Kirk snapped. “For one thing, we all danced. At least, that’s where I learned how to dance. Would you hold my bathrobe?”

  With one quick gesture, Kirk took off his silky Ralph Lauren-style robe, handed it to me, and walked across the room. I saw him looking at the tables of first-year girls until he picked one terrifically unlovely girl and stopped at her table. What is he doing? I asked myself. The answer was soon clear: he was inviting her to dance. In almost no time, the girl took off her robe and walked with Kirk to the dance floor.

  The DJ, eyeballing two people who might actually get the party going, obliged with some music that had a beat. Kirk and the girl began to dance. Once again, I thought I was in a 1940s film. They were doing something—the waltz, the two-step, the marimba…what do I know about dances?—with a kind of effortless grace. They danced that number, then changed steps to a second song. By then, everyone in the room was watching them, or pretending not to watch them, or making fun of them, but otherwise giving them all the attention we had to give.

  When that number was finished, three girls (three!) came up to Kirk, all begging to dance. Kirk picked one of them, the music began again, and a few other couples—mostly girls dancing with girls—got up on the floor. Somehow, without seeming to work very hard at it, Kirk had started the party.

  We spent three hours at the pajama party, long enough for Kirk to have danced with virtually every girl in the room, including several who had obviously been born with two left or cloven feet. The atmosphere was contagious enough that I even did a little dancing myself.

  I do the white-guy shuffle, as my black friend Scrooge calls it, a kind of talentless pushing and shoving of hands and feet in vague time with the music. Unlike the ballroom dancing that Kirk had mastered, my dancing is strong on “cool” and weak on movement. It seemed good enough in high school, but with Kirk sweeping around the floor doing dance after dance, my own effort seemed a bit flimsy.

  It was sufficient, though, to get a smile from a girl named Shauna who lived over in Houser House (nicknamed House House, Hoser House, Bowser House, Who’s House Is This Anyway House, etc.). She was a blonde girl, with a light dusting of freckles and lovely pale blue eyes under thin, pale eyebrows. I immediately decided that she was the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, but I’ve made this judgment several dozen times in the past. Shauna and I danced a little, then I stopped at her table to talk, and finally she gave me her cell number with a giggle and a smile.

  “Quite the party,” Kirk said as we headed back to our dorm.

&
nbsp; “Did you see the devil?”

  He shot me a look. “What makes you think that Christians can’t have fun?”

  “Not sure,” I replied, a bit troubled. “I thought fun was a heathen thing.”

  “Wrong again, Al,” he sighed. “Wrong again.”

  “So I got a phone number,” I said, pulling out a scrap of paper with Shauna’s cell scribbled on it. “How about you?”

  “I’m not looking for a girlfriend. I’ve got one back home,” he replied. This was the famous Kathy, a girl who sent a lovely perfumed letter to Kirk every day, and whose devotion was by now legendary, at least in our dorm.

  “Yeah, right,” I said. Maybe I should have added the extra i: ri-ight. “The girls were all over you tonight, so what did you get?”

  “Lots of dancing,” he replied.

  “Yeah?” It was that leading-question yeah.

  “And there’s this girl who really likes ballroom dancing,” Kirk added. “She wondered if I’d help her practise some steps.”

  “Steps?”

  “Yeah, steps.”

  “Ri-ight,” I responded.

  4

  Butter

  From: amacklin@​BU.​edu

  To: maggiemac@​sl.​edu

  Went with roommate to a pajama party. He gets all the girls and does all the dancing, I get to stand around and hold his bathrobe. Is this fair? I mean, is this FAIR?

  From: maggiemac@​sl.​edu

  To: amacklin@​BU.​edu

  Wish we had a pajama party here. There’s a group getting ready to re-enact ancient Greek games, and another putting on an all-girl Lysistrata, and the girl down the hall wants to set up a Simone de Beauvoir reading group. Not only don’t I have the right clothes; I don’t have the right kind of brain. Missing you, my sweet numbskull.

  Perhaps I was inspired by the numbskull reference, but on Friday night I was actually in my bed reading Keats. I’m not kidding. Me, Al Macklin, reading Keats. Now that doesn’t mean I was understanding Keats, but the poetry was at least passing in front of my eyes when I heard Kirk come in from the bathroom.