Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost

by Richard Rushfield

  But I knew this could not go on forever, and I counted down to the expiration date on my charmed life. In a vision that perpetually haunted my sleep, I pictured my roommate, the football team’s star human meat grinder, arriving home after a night of keg-pounding and date rape at a Scorpions concert; he would spend the rest of the evening vomiting on my bed and pummeling me to a fine paste while casting aspersions on sundry elements of my physique. (Amazingly, this scenario played itself out, almost to the letter, on a friend who went to NYU.) So when Hampshire’s promise of a room of one’s own was dangled before me, it was like hearing the phone from the governor’s office ring just as the warden had finished his final polish of the electric chair.

  But beyond the unbelievable lure of the freshman single, Hampshire College looked to be very much a continuation of the bless edly cloistered life I had known thus far. Hampshire College had been founded as a self-conscious experiment in education by the four major schools located in the idyllic western Massachusetts wilderness of the Pioneer Valley. These institutions—Amherst, Smith, and Mount Holyoke colleges and the University of Massachusetts—conceived Hampshire as a laboratory free of the constraints of established schools, an educational institution with standards second to none, with the boldness to traipse down the paths its stodgy neighbors feared to tread. Hampshire professors were to serve without tenure, students would not have majors but create their own multidisciplinary courses of study; communal living, no grades, projects rather than papers—all this was Hampshire’s promise. When the gates opened in 1970, the boldness of the experiment met the spirit of the age and the school was flooded with applications. It was campus legend that for that first year Hampshire was harder to get into than Harvard.

  And for a few years the promise of looser restrictions but world-class standards seem to have held. However, by the early 1980s looseness was clearly driving the cart. Whatever the talk of world-class standards, Hampshire drew a collection of misfits and malcontents from around the globe, drawn to the school by its lack of formality and discipline. The structure of the school, intended to break down departmental walls, had become a three-tiered work-at-your-own-pace gauntlet of invent-your-own projects and concentrations. Without a static four-year system, the school was famed at this point for the high number of students who stayed on as undergraduates well beyond the half-decade mark, and for the one student who had “majored in” Frisbee. While the first-year admissions may have been impossibly competitive, by the time I applied somewhere upwards of 60 percent of applicants were accepted. And even that figure is suspect. To this day, I have never met anyone of my generation who admits to having been rejected by Hampshire.

  When making up my mind, I had heard murmurs of all these legends and found them all immensely reassuring. No standards, no requirements, and single rooms; why, I wondered, didn’t everyone go there?

  My dorm room was furnished with a few pieces of wooden block furniture pushed into one corner and a pale-green plastic mattress leaning against a wall. Exhausted, I lowered it to the floor and climbed aboard. Rolling up my jacket for a pillow, I quickly passed into unconsciousness and, the drum solos resounding from a far-away hall, drifted to a land far away from Hampshire College.

  Some hours later I awoke, my face glued to the green plastic by a sheet of hardened drool. The world was dark and I could barely make out the outlines of the room, the furniture shoved to one corner. I felt my body warring between pangs of disorientation, hunger, nicotine withdrawal, and exhaustion. Outside I heard distant strains of conversation and drumming. Someone strummed a guitar very, very slowly. I realized I had missed the orientation sessions that Deb, the house madam, had warned me I was to get myself to immediately. I turned on the light and picked up the schedule.

  “7 P.M.—Hayride and new students mixer. The Red Barn.” I wondered if I might find Malaria there. I threw on a jacket over the orange Hawaiian shirt I’d picked out for my first day of school and headed out.

  It was a warm, still, summery night and the campus was out loafing in the damp heat. Across the dark quad, clusters of students plopped on the ground talking, some drinking. I walked by one group passing around a purple glass bong. A man who looked to be in his fifties sat on the ground taking a hit in his turn. I wondered if he was a parent? A professor? I looked around in vain for any sign indicating where the Red Barn was, or even where the main part of campus was. The paths I had taken that bright morning had vanished.

  Around a picnic table a group of seven or eight sat nodding their heads gently in silence. I approached and noticed one of them picking at an acoustic guitar. Was he actually playing something, or just poking it, perhaps tuning, or inspecting its structural integrity? I stood at the group’s edge with the others. No one looked up at me, so I began nodding my head, more or less in time with the others, who seemed to be keeping rhythm with some unheard melody. The guitarist gently rubbed his fingers across the strings, humming softly to himself as others grooved to the phantom melody.

  After I’d been watching for a few minutes, the guitarist stopped. He cleared his throat, as if coming out of a trance, pulled his long hair back, tying it with a rubber band, and looked up, straight at me.

  “Can I help you?” he asked. The others stopped nodding and also looked at me.

  “The Red Barn?” I stammered. “I was looking for the hayride.”

  The guitarist stared at me with a look of deep sadness, as though glimpsing for the first time the sad fate of a doomed planet. “Jesus,” someone else muttered. “Fucking first-years.”

  “The Reagan Youth are taking over.” They all shook their heads and grimaced at each other. I grinned like a halfwit. “Is it down by the road?” I begged.

  A young man in John Lennon glasses said, “We don’t know anything about your hayride, but if you’re looking for the Barn, yes, it’s down by the main road.” I thanked him and walked on into the night, listening to the group exchanging whoa-what-was thats behind me.

  A sign reading New Students directed me down a muddy path through a yellowing field. In the darkness the crickets chirped and a stream burbled somewhere far off. I tried to recall how I had gotten here from Los Angeles, where I had woken up just that morning. After ten minutes’ walking, I arrived at a big red barn sitting next to a cluster of clapboard buildings. Out front, a few students picked beer bottles and plastic cups off the ground. “Is the hayride still happening?” I asked one.

  He shook his head and said without looking up, “It ended hours ago.”

  I walked inside the barn, which had been converted into a sort of assembly hall. The room was deserted but, starving, I lunged for the disheveled food tables. Even in my hunger the plates of sticky glowing cheese cubes and melting broccoli spears were too ominous to toy with. I spied, however, an unopened jug of Gallo red table wine and picked it up. Slipping quietly out the door, I retraced my way down the path toward the dorms.

  Back at Dakin House, I plopped down in a lounge on the first floor. Three others sat on mustard-colored couches, glancing at each other while a Leonard Cohen tape played in a tiny cassette deck on the table between them. They gave me nervous looks as I entered. I collapsed next to a pinched-faced young woman who had her arms clasped around herself as though for protection. I opened the jug of wine and took a sip, which provided a moment of solace to my empty stomach, followed by a spasm of pain, which I chased away with another gulp. Still no one spoke; the boy leafed through an ancient copy of the Utne Reader.

  “Are you all freshmen?” I asked.

  “First-years,” said the girl next to me. “We’re called first-years here.”

  “Right, well, are you?”

  “I’m a transfer,” volunteered a boy in floppy blue jeans and V-neck sweater, who looked much too normal and clean-cut to be here.

  “Where from?” I asked.

  “Bucknell.”

  “What the hell are you doing out here, then?” I guffawed.

  He answered in earnest, nodding as
though he’d been forced to tell this story many times. “Last summer, I picked up a book, poems by Richard Brautigan. And I just knew, right away, that was what I was going to do with my life.”

  “Write poems?”

  “Write poet-try.”

  I nodded, impressed, and offered him a sip of the Gallo. He shook his head and rewound the tape to play a song over again.

  The girl next to me said, “I’m first-year. I’m going to study plant biology.”

  “That sounds hard.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not. It’s just something you have to work at a lot.”

  “Did you guys go to orientation?”

  They looked at me incredulously. “You missed it?”

  “Was there anything important?”

  The girl looked like she was about to cry. “You’re going to be in so much trouble tomorrow.”

  “What happened?”

  “Everything. You better call your advisor first thing in the morning.”

  I didn’t feel up to asking how they knew who their advisor was, so I took another sip of the wine and, after a few quiet moments listening to the Leonard Cohen tape, noticed the room was starting to spin, very pleasantly. A few minutes later, we were joined by a guy with curly brown hair and glasses, in a denim jacket with a clock hanging from a chain. “WASSUP!!” he greeted us. “Home-ies!” We soon learned, with little prompting, that he was Ace from Baltimore, a musician of the streets, so he told us.

  “Is that the same as a street musician?” I asked.

  “You watch your tongue, my man.” Unfolding a sheaf of lyric sheets, Ace volunteered to perform his raps for us. All of them. I gave a look of alarm to the girl, who said, to my horror, “That would be nice.” I drank rapidly through my jug as the raps beat past. Frequently, Ace would lose track of his beat and have to start a song over. I remember, about half an hour in, turning over the jug and finding the wine was all gone. I have a rough memory of crawling through the halls of Dakin House sometime after this on my hands and knees, trying to get back to my room. I remember crawling past an open door and a hippie girl seeing me and calling out, “Horsey ride!” She raced out to jump on my back, but then, catching my ghastly pallor, yelled, “Oh, no!” and ran back into her room, slamming the door behind her.

  A while later, I woke up in my still dark room, my face again stuck to the pale-green plastic mattress. But this time I had a horrible feeling that a nuclear warhead was about to launch from my stomach. I lunged for the door and, in midleap, realized I was completely naked. I grabbed at my jacket and, holding it, raced into the hallway, barely making it out of my room before I collapsed on the hall floor. My body, convulsing, churned up the jug of wine, every last drop of it, sending it on the return trip from my stomach onto the hall’s brownish-gray, Lysol-smelling carpet. Naked, I heaved and shuddered and bawled, amazed that the wine kept coming and coming, long after it seemed a jug, even two jugs, had been released. The thought passed through my head: It’s like the Chanukah oil. And more miraculously, no one came out into the hall to discover me vomiting over the carpet of my new home.

  When all was finally expelled, I stood up and looked down at the catastrophe I’d unleashed. I wrapped the jacket around my waist and grabbed a handful of paper towels from the bathroom. I dabbed and mopped at the sea of vomit, but its volume didn’t seem to decrease. After a few more pathetic tries, I saw there was nothing to be done and gave up. Feeling much better for the purgative effect on my stomach, I plopped back onto my green plastic mattress and sank back to sleep.

  In the morning, after a good night’s rest, the mattress actually felt rather homey. I was able to lie on it peacefully for several minutes before the smell hit me—and the sound of voices in the hall.

  I stood up, threw on yesterday’s clothes again, and gently opened my door. The horrible, deathly holocaust smell rushed into my room. I gagged and looked up. Lonnie stood with ten or so others, inspecting the lake in their hall.

  “Richard,” Lonnie said, “did you do this?” They all glared at me, nostrils flaring in revulsion. I considered making a break for it, but then remembered I had no place to go. This was my home now. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, I didn’t.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Slaves of Dakin House

  As the young woman in the lounge pointed out, entering Hampshire students are not freshmen, we are first-year students or simply “first-years.” Sophomores are second-years. Hampshire’s educational system at that time cast aside the hidebound tradition of the four-years-to-a-diploma frog march practiced at other schools in favor of a work-at-your-own-pace plan. In theory this meant that a diligent student could earn a diploma in three semesters (that theory was never, to my knowledge, tested in those days—I met few in any great rush to see how fast they could graduate). In practice it meant that many students stayed longer than four years, some much, much longer. Counting the years up skirted the issue of what to call a student approaching his second decade as an undergraduate; terms like fifth senior year becoming as unwieldy as roman numerals—not to mention all the hierarchical baggage of the freshman-sophomore-junior-senior paradigm.

  Though it was not empowering to be a lowly freshman, I thought, lying on my pale-green plastic mattress, the clinical tag “first-year student” lacked romance; it failed to capture the drama of my journey—traveling thousands of miles from home, diving headlong into an unsupervised adventure in a foreign woods.

  Perhaps this was why, whenever first-years gathered, someone was sure to throw out the statistic that the average Hampshire student “seriously considers dropping out three to five times in their first year.” This statistic was followed by wildly varying accounts of the number who would actually do so (anywhere from 25 to 90 percent), the number who would actually graduate (almost none, one in fifty tops), and the number who would commit suicide (not less than a third—most by leaping from the Dakin House roof).

  Whenever the “considered dropping out” number was offered, I found it impossible to believe that any first-year could have considered dropping out only three to five times. By the end of September, I’d had few waking hours when I wasn’t considering dropping out.

  But reexamining the statistic as it was quoted, the modifier seriously gave it some legitimacy; none of my dreams of fleeing survived long enough to lead to anything as tangible as filling out a transfer application, buying a bus ticket, or visiting a naval recruiting station.

  Within weeks of landing on Hampshire’s shores I had fallen farther than I had ever in my brief life imagined possible. In high school, I never mistook myself for “cool,” but after a few years I’d achieved a certain status—if not enviable, at least definable. On good days, my clan occupied ground roughly parallel to, or even slightly above, the drama crowd. A clique of revival-movie-going, Cole Porter-reciting, self-styled intelligentsia, we somehow maintained an edge of freakishness that gave us the slightest bit of caché in Less Than Zero/Brat Pack-era Los Angeles. But now, in the woods of Massachusetts, I wasn’t even a nerd.

  I saw nerds around my dorm—they walked everywhere in one big pack, carrying stacks of books, and held hushed lunchtime discussions in the middle “quiet” room of the SAGA dining hall (named for the company that had once provided food services, although this task had long since been passed on to the Marriott Corporation). I tried one desperate day to sit with them, approaching one of my nerd hallmates as an “in,” but I was rebuffed by their bearded leader with a stern “We’re preparing a presentation today. This isn’t social time.”

  Denied even nerddom, I became a nonperson. I wafted around campus, droped in the Bridge Café (so named because it was, in fact, a line of tables on the sliver of a bridge between the library and athletic buildings), eavesdropping, sipping coffee and glowering over a Jim Thompson novel checked out of the library. Through the Bridge windows I looked down on the still-summery grand lawn and watched the armies drift by—battalions of tie-dyes and oversized wool sweaters
and mere platoons in black jeans and leather microskirts, like jaded refugees from Warhol’s factory.

  I passed long hours in my dorm room digging through my duffel bag and boxes (despite having nothing to do, I still hadn’t found time to unpack), searching for my Clockwork Orange T-shirt, which never turned up. One afternoon, overwhelmed by a burst of motivation, I bought some thumbtacks from the bookstore and hung my Apocalypse Now poster. But most of the long hours I passed listening to tapes on my tiny boom box, Ziggy Star-dust in heavy rotation, summoning comfortingly painful memories of my ninth-grade years when, new in high school, the end-of-the-world ballads had seemed pertinent to me.

  I paid a couple visits to Drake, who lived a fifteen-minute walk away through the fields in the distant “mods” (modular living units). Unfortunately for me, he had fallen into a relationship with an older woman who lived off campus, and he spent most of his time at her cabin somewhere in the woods. The Miami Vice parties, he told me, had died out. “The switch to earth tones really hurt us.”

  One day, however, Drake paid me a visit. Knocking one afternoon on my door, he announced, “Grab a towel. It’s time you had a sauna.” One of the most celebrated aspects of the Hampshire experience was the clothing-optional sauna, famed throughout academia. Through these early days, my knowledge of the sauna had loomed ominously above my every move. It was a specter I knew I would have to confront, but nothing made me think I was ready to face that day yet.