I hung up and sat down in the tiny unlit closet where the hall phone lived. I wracked my brain to think of anyone I remotely knew who I might call. I thought of the few people whose faces I’d come to recognize in classes and at the cafeteria. Going over the few people whose names I could say I even knew after two and a half months, almost every person on that list had entered my life after warning me to “keep down the noise” or had given me an unsolicited lecture on how I could forget about everything I’d learned in Los Angeles. A few others had by turns sneered at me in public places or expressed their disgust that Hampshire was letting in people like Zach, Nathan, and myself. None of these little exchanges seemed to imply that they were just waiting for me to ask if I might live with them.
And then it occurred to me: Maybe there was someone I could call. . . . Back in my first week at Hampshire, Lonnie had taken me aside, in his characteristic manner that was the more terrifying for its seeming concern that he was anxious for my safety, and warned me that there was a group of evil, despicable people at the school. Horrible, dreadful, terrible, he said, spitting adjectives until he was gasping for breath. He didn’t want to scare me but he had reason to believe that these people, who called themselves “the Supreme Dicks,” might try—he kneaded my shoulder with a caring hand—might try to talk to me. You see, he continued, he had noticed that I bore a resemblance to one of them—one of their leaders who had left the school after, Lonnie went on, eyebrow arched, his brother had died.
“How did he die?” I asked.
“Believe me, you don’t want to know,” Lonnie said. “But because you look like the older brother, they might try to talk to you.”
My heart raced. Weird people, with some tragic secret, will want to talk to me?
He shook his head. “Don’t worry, when they do, you tell me and I’ll speak to the House Office and take care of it.”
After being told that the evil terrible people were going to try to talk to me, for my first two months always in the back of my mind was a desperation for them to get on with it already. I searched for these supposed Supreme Dicks but as Lonnie refused to supply any more details, I had no clue what to keep my eyes peeled for. Zach, Nathan, and I discussed them. Zach had heard people cursing these Supreme Dicks in the dining hall one night, but didn’t catch why. I asked a couple older students in my classes about them, but they looked as though they wanted to punch me in the face for bringing up such a distasteful topic. One day, sitting in a library toilet stall, I looked up and saw, carved into the metal door, the words “Supreme Dicks Rule OK!” Someone else had tried to scratch out the words, scraping away slashes of paint, and someone else had written below it, “NO THEY DON’T,” and someone else, “Go back to your fucking spoiled mothers you fascists!”
And then, on Halloween they materialized—more or less exactly as Lonnie had foretold they would.
Hampshire Halloween, aka Trip or Treat, was the school’s annual contribution to the liberal arts legacy. From the first days of the semester, I had been warned not to eat the food in the cafeteria on Halloween, that every last tofu pup was dosed by the cafeteria workers.
On Halloween morning, Hampshire went into lockdown, with a checkpoint established on the main road into campus. A week before, all students were required to submit the names of their visitors to security—a maximum of five guests each. In town a group of Amherst guys had stopped Zach and offered him a hundred dollars to put their names on the list. He took the money but had lost the napkin they’d scribbled their names down on.
By noon a line of cars beginning at the security checkpoint stretched far down the highway running in front of campus. (The cordon on the main road left only the back entrance and the three miles of woods and farmland surrounding the school undefended for those who were turned away and wanted to try to cross the border illegally.)
By midafternoon the school resembled a flamboyantly dressed refugee camp, with costumed students from across the East Coast flooding the lawns and wandering through the dorms trying to stock up on drugs. Nathan quoted a statistic that the campus dealers made 40 percent of their annual profit on this day alone. Lonnie prepared for the day by posting a large sign at the entrance to J-3 that read WE ARE NOT SELLING DRUGS! But though he may not have been selling, even Lonnie and the hall drones were not impervious to the spirit sweeping the campus. The entire hall ditched class and spent the day in Lonnie’s double room sewing lines of glitter threads into black cloaks, painting their faces, and—my nose informed me—honoring the occasion with a day-long marijuana binge.
At one point, Lonnie wandered into the wall, giggling, and told me, “Today, I’m not going to give you any warnings at all!” And then exploded in laughter.
As dusk fell over Hampshire, the campus echoed with the sounds of a twenty-piece jam in the dorm quad, and hippie cackles drifted from the Hampshire woods. On the lawn, ignoring the bracing cold, gangs of people in capes and wizard gowns danced or rolled on each other.
I had pulled a blue sheet off my bed, cut eye and mouth holes, and wandered the campus incognito—not that anyone recognized me even without a sheet over my head. People were beginning to remove their clothes. One hippie girl grabbed my arms and started dancing with me; the jam-style of dancing—which resembled jogging in place while waving your arms over your head—proved difficult to execute in a sheet.
The song we danced to, which seemed to be entirely drum solo, went on for minute after long minute until I had trouble calculating how long we had been dancing. I tried to leave but the hippie girl, who showed no signs of fatigue, held fast to my sheeted arms. Was it possible the song had been going on as long as it seemed, or had I accidentally picked up the wrong drink somewhere today? Was I tripping now?
I felt a pair of hands on my shoulders pull me out of the melee. Nathan, dressed as a vampire, and Zach, dressed as himself, ripped me free from the hippie girl.
“Can your girlfriend score us some ’shrooms?” Zach asked.
“What the hell is with that song?” I panted.
“It’s not a song,” Nathan explained. “It’s called a space jam. Some of them can go on for five, six hours. One song can continue over a dozen bootleg tapes.”
We walked into the dining hall. In the back room a performance-art collective dressed in long robes and scarves fluttered across a stage while some sort of Syd Barrett harmonic chant blasted and a hippie read verses of Rilke into a mike. The ensemble looked like a tribe of Bedouin traders playing a game of Red Rover. On the linoleum floor, some fifty hippies writhed and rolled on top of each other, occasionally clasping each other’s face between their palms. Zach, Nathan, and I stood in the back of the room frozen in horror.
“Are they going to do it?” Zach finally asked
Nathan shook his head. “They’re too drugged out to think about sex.”
We considered pulling the fire alarm, but then Zach had the far more efficient idea of spilling fruit punch on the floor, making it sticky and gross to roll around in. We were debating how we could steal jugs of punch from the cafeteria storeroom when I caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye.
About three feet away, someone was staring and gaping at me with a demented grin that seemed to swallow his entire face. With his tiny frame, dressed in a giant sparkly shawl that hung to his knees, a purple scarf, and pointed velvet boots, he looked something like a medieval court jester. At the sight of his grin my mind was ripped away from the discussion with Zach and Nathan, and I squinted back at the staring jester as he grew closer.
“What is your name?” he asked me. I told him. “You’re name isn’t Moser?” he pressed. I denied it. “Are you related to Billy and Stan?”
“Who?”
“Amazing!” he said, and let out a terrifying cackle that for a moment drowned out the Syd Barrett and the Rilke. And then he turned and scampered from the room in a flash.
“What was that about?” Nathan asked. I shrugged, and we returned to plotting the fruit punch
heist, our minds elsewhere, until two minutes later, the jester returned, leading along three others. If the rest of the room was animated by an airy spaciness, this little group shuffled in a dark, stagnant void that looked as though they might, with their very presence, snuff out all the light in the room. At the lead was a largish, round-shaped lug with a quizzical expression, wearing a moss-colored mohair sweater and a gabardine overcoat. Flanking him was a Sid Vicious type, a hulking character in a black leather jacket whose disgust for the hippie congregation looked so acute he seemed he might actually be sick, and a girl in a floppy dark dress with a mop of black hair covering her face.
“See!” cried the jester, pointing at me. “It’s him!”
“Oh, my God!” the lug at the front of the group answered.
“He doesn’t look like Stanley!” the girl said.
“Are you crazy?” the lug responded. “Of course it does.” They all gaped at me for a few moments more. Zach, Nathan, and I gaped back until I felt obliged to say, “Umm, I’m Richard.”
The news seemed to stun them and snap the group out of their reverie. The lug stepped forward. “Oh, right. Hi. I’m Jon. You just look like somebody.”
“Are you guys, by any chance,” I asked, “the Supreme Dicks?” They glanced at each other, eyebrows raised.
“We’re some of them.” The jester introduced himself as “Friar Tom” and then continued sotto voce, “But there are others. . . .”
“It’s kinda a big organization,” Jon explained.
A new song came on. The Doors’ “Peace Frog.” A cheer went up from the floor. “Maybe we should dance,” Jon said.
The girl with hair in her face replied curtly, “I’m leaving,” and walked out. Jon looked confused.
“Is that your girlfriend?” I asked, trying to think of something to say.
“Girlfriend? Noooo. . . . We’re celibate.”
“Really?”
“It’s like a Reichian thing. . . . It’s hard to explain.”
Friar Tom burst in. “I’m not celibate.”
“But you’re not really a Dick,” Jon answered.
“That’s true,” he admitted. Our chat was shortly interrupted by two campus security guards, led over by a hippie who pointed us out to security, screaming, “There they are!”
“Jon, what the hell are you doing here?” a guard asked.
“Just rocking to some groovy tunes,” Jon answered. He giggled, rocking back and forth on his heels while Sid Vicious to his right glowered.
The guard shook his head. “Come on, this isn’t your scene. What’re you kids up to?”
“But they’re playing my song, Officer!” Tom, the jester, began prancing around to the strains of “Peace Frog,” grabbing a hippie boy and twirling him in a waltz.
“Okay”—the guard pulled himself out of Tom’s embrace—“out of here. You’re disturbing the party.”
“Half of the people here are on, like, acid and PCP, and we’re just standing here and we’re the troublemakers?” Arthur, the punk, asked.
“I’m not going to explain it to you. You know what I’m talking about.” He then whirled and turned to me, Nathan, and Zach. “And you kids, do you know what they were up to?” We shook our heads. “What are you doing hanging around with this bunch?”
“We’re also enjoying the groovy tunes,” Zach said.
“Hmph. Lemme get your names,” he said, and made us each show our college IDs, writing our names down on a little pad. Zach, Nathan, and I looked at each other nervously.
The Dicks group was escorted to the door but before they left, Jon gave us their extension number. “You guys should come hang out. Extension two-four-five.”
“Do not do that!” security said. “Do yourself a favor and forget that number.”
I didn’t forget the number but I didn’t use it either. I jotted it on a napkin, which sat on my desk. Numerous times over the following weeks I looked at it and considered calling, but wondered what I would say. “Hi, I’m the guy who looks like the guy you used to know . . .” or “If you all aren’t too busy, my life is a living hell at this school. Would you mind coming to save me?” Instead of calling, I waited to run into them somewhere on campus. Now that I knew what they looked like, how long could it be, in a school of a thousand students, before I saw one of them? But mysteriously as they had materialized, they had vanished again into the Hampshire mists; not once in our wanderings did I catch a glimpse of any of them. I was like Wendy and Peter back in London, gazing into the fog and babbling insanely about the Lost Boys and Neverland.
Back in the phone closet, after the ultimatum from the House Office, with nowhere else to turn, I dialed the extension. After fourteen or so rings, a girl picked up.
“Is Jon there?” I asked.
“I’m not really sure.” Pause. “You know, it’s kinda hard to say.”
“Whether he’s there?”
“I mean, he should be, but he could be anywhere, you know?”
“Yeah.” I nodded to myself. “Totally.” I hung on to the phone and we sat in silence for a good minute.
The girl broke the spell. “Hey, who is this?” I told her. “I don’t know you. Are you sure Jon knows who you are?”
“Maybe. I mean, I don’t know. I met him at a hippie dance.”
“Is this Rich? Rich from the dorms? The guy who looks like Stanley?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s me.”
“You missed your dinner!”
“What?”
“You were supposed to be here for dinner last week.” She went on to explain that after meeting me, Friar Tom had told the house that I was coming for dinner the following night. They had actually cooked and everything, the girl on the phone explained, but I hadn’t shown up and no one knew how to get in touch with me.
“I think maybe he forgot to tell me about dinner.”
“That’s cool. It wasn’t very good anyway. So what’s going on?” The girl, whose name, I learned, was Meg, and I got to talking. While I sat on the tiled floor of my hall’s phone closet, we whiled away nearly an hour. She told me that things had been crazy at 21. (Mod 21 was their address.) The administration was trying to break the house up, she said, had been reading their mail, listening in on their calls. “They’re probably listening now . . . ,” she whispered.
“No one can live in peace around here,” I whispered back, and told her about my own housing dilemma.
“That’s amazing,” she said. “You should come live here!”
“You have an open room?”
“I guess so. There’s always a room, isn’t there?” I agreed there was. “But you’ve gotta talk to Susie. You should come on out.” I said I’d rush over and was given some very vague directions to Greenwich House. “In the woods behind the library,” she told me.
The red brick and concrete library/gymnasium/administration triad occupied the highest ground on campus and the geographic dead center. Paths to the various plots of campus radiated in spokes from this spot; the design gave a big piece of evidence to the group of students that believed Hampshire College, from its inception, was not a bold experiment in education reform but a plot by dark forces within the U.S. government to lure subversives to one place and then snare them in an airtight riot-control net.
Stemming from the back of the library, one spoke led straight into a dense patch of woods, and somewhere within, I had been told, sat Greenwich House. I stood behind the library, shivering in the still November night. No life was visible down the path, nothing except the clump of icy, bare trees.
I tiptoed along, cursing the cold that had really begun to work us over in earnest. I was now wearing a cotton sweater, a hooded sweatshirt, and a raincoat and still I was cold. Surely this was some kind of joke, I thought.
As I followed the path into the trees, the library behind me disappeared from view. I squinted through the night and saw up ahead what looked like five dilapidated flying saucers made of rotting wood, which had apparently thudd
ed to earth in a small clearing. The circular, two-story structures lay in dead, idiotic stillness before me. I wandered toward the first, trying to figure out how they were numbered. Close up, they looked like doughnut-shaped, broken-down condo complexes, with gray and white peeling paint, their slushy lawns strewn with plastic beer cups and rotting concert flyers. A naked mannequin hung by its toes from a tree. I thought of Colonel Kurtz’s camp in Apocalypse Now. On each porch hung a number, 8 being the first I saw. I circled several looking for 21, not seeing a person alive through the drawn shades. Finally, facing toward the deeper woods and away from campus, I heard guitar sounds pulsing from behind one door; with no identifiable melodies or vocals, the noise thudded through the empty frigid night and I stood frozen, listening to it for a moment, unsure whether I felt drawn to or terrified by its harsh, unlovable radiations.
I climbed up to the porch, stepping over a car transmission and a ventriloquist’s dummy and treading on some broken bottles ground up in the slush. Black curtains were pulled tight across the glass doors. I knocked. There was no response. I knocked again, then turned the handle and walked in.
One foot through the doorway, the smell washed over me—an aroma alive and vital with decay. The air overflowed with the afterbirth of a million cigarettes, human sweat, incense and, I thought, rotting vegetables. I fought my gag reflex and peered through the red light that lit the space. It was a small living room, about the size of a moving van, with low ceilings and walls that seemed to lean over on top of the inhabitants. The room was furnished with a couch, two armchairs, and a couple stools and a dozen or so people sitting stuffed together, crammed into open spaces between piles of debris. Like the bunch I’d met in the dining hall, this group was a mix of types, belonging to no clear tribe—a couple of punks, a few hippies, several in what I’d later know as “old man clothes,” and a decidedly preppy woman in polo shirt, cardigan, and pearls. As I opened the door, I heard someone say, “Cockroaches are my friends!”
Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Page 6