“I’m still hungry,” Tim moaned. Heads nodded. The snack bar where we could buy (or “liberate” in the pockets of an overcoat while the student clerk read a magazine) cellophane-wrapped tempeh burgers and tofu pitas, we quickly noticed, had closed. People glanced nervously at Jon, having a harder time now disguising their growing desperation for a solution.
“I guess we could go to Denny’s,” he said softly.
“Yeah, definitely,” many agreed, while no one stirred from their place.
“Maybe we should vote for who gets to go in your car,” Meg suggested.
Election fever swept the lounge as everyone agreed this was the most equitable system. “All right,” Ox announced. “Who votes for Meg?”
Meg’s hand went up. “You guys suck,” she spat, grabbed her coat, and stormed off.
“How many vote for Michael?” Michael’s hand went up.
“How many vote for Angela?” I considered for a moment raising my hand in support of her, but in the end let her nomina tion go forward with only her own vote. She made no acknowledgment of my betrayal, which confused me all the more.
At the end of the balloting, we were all tied with one vote each, except for Tim, who got no votes after having given his own to Friar Tom, who had stormed off hours before and wasn’t there to vote for himself. We broke into bickering about how to conduct another round of voting before conversation drifted to the topic of Steve Shavel’s return. Jerome had heard a rumor that he had been spotted in Northampton, supposedly having dinner at Beardsley’s, the town’s expensive restaurant, with a table of Smith girls and, it seemed, their parents. While it was considered possible that he was hiding at Smith, people were incredulous at the idea that he would so brazenly wander around Northampton.
“He really does love Beardsley’s,” Ox said.
The discussion was interrupted by the appearance of Annette, a second-year who was universally noted as the most beautiful girl at Hampshire, famed for her resemblance to Cleopatra. Annette lived in the Critical Theory Mod, and her group, along with the Black Light kids, was one of the few still more or less tolerant of the Dicks. Despite her renown, Annette, for some reason probably having to do with her perpetual air of disgust with life itself, was friendly with us and had even dropped in at 21 on occasion. If you thought life was that miserable, Steve Shavel later theorized, where better to spend it than with us?
“Are any of you going to kill yourself tonight?” she asked, looking us over with approving distaste.
“Maybe. It’s looking like we’re never going to eat, so we might have to,” Jon answered. “What about you, Annette?”
“I’ve vowed never to kill myself before midnight. That way I won’t have to wonder if the day could get any worse.”
Annette told us that there was a “truly horrible party” going on in Prescott, and suggested we go play music there.
“Really?” Jon asked. “Are they Dicks fans?”
“I’m sure they despise you.”
“We should check it out, then. I guess we can head to Denny’s after that.”
Everyone nodded at the good sense of the plan, hunger notwithstanding.
An hour and a half later, having been ejected with our instruments from yet another party, we huddled at the bottom of the Prescott canyon as tiny flakes tumbled down from the sky. Next to me, Angela was panting from the stumble down the stairs, her face flushed with excitement.
“I’ve never seen snow before,” I murmured to her.
She stopped smiling and looked me dead in the eye. “I don’t really need for us to talk now, okay?”
“Yeah, totally.”
We all stood and looked at each other, arms full, shivering and unsure of what to do.
“I guess we could go to Denny’s, maybe,” Jon said.
But before we could revisit that question, we marched back through to 21 to drop off the instruments. By the time we unloaded, it was half past one and I noticed now that I was really, truly hungry. The adrenaline of the past hour had masked my empty stomach, but now I was aware of a deep pain and looked vainly around the room for food, seeing only plates of half-eaten tofu scrambles perched on the edges of sofas and the floor. By now I had learned better than to look in the refrigerator or cupboard for food—having been attacked by the creatures dwelling inside more than a couple times.
I glanced around the room and caught others with looks of unease on their faces. It occurred to me that the dining hall and tavern were now closed. And there were still sixteen of us.
“Well, I guess we probably should think about going to Denny’s now,” Ox said. We all nodded and then sat down to reclaim the seats we’d been in when the Denny’s subject had first been raised seven hours before.
With a solution still impossible to conceive, random topics again drifted through the room. The hungrier we got, the more ridiculous it became that we weren’t moving, and the harder it became to resolve the issue. The more desperate the cause was, the more anxious one became about it. That anxiety caused an inversely proportional need to keep your mouth shut so as not to allow yourself to look at all anxious. The room was engulfed in manic chattering about school gossip while we fought to steer clear of the subject on our minds.
As we discussed Susie’s upcoming meeting with her advisor (the first in a year; in her third year at Hampshire, Susie was widely celebrated for never having completed a class or a Div I), I began to feel I might be going insane. The thought of getting to Denny’s gnawed away; I could feel the hunger circulating around the room, and yet no one would mention it.
Finally Jon said, “Well, I don’t really need to go to Denny’s. It’s cool if you guys want to go without me.”
“Nobody wants you to come, but we need your car,” Marilyn reminded him. Jon would never in a million years let anyone borrow his car.
“Oh, right. I guess so.” He sat thinking. Eyes turned attentively to him. “You guys know Larry Ogletree is going for the world’s hot dog eating record?”
We had heard that. Larry Ogletree was the immensely large (six-foot-three and many hundreds of pounds) bearded fourth-year, famed for the vast trays of food he demolished at the dining hall every night. He had recently declared his intention to break the world’s record for most hot dogs consumed in a minute. The local Stop & Shop had been signed on to sponsor his heroic attempt, hosting the event in its parking lot and supplying the hot dogs.
“He’s doing it tomorrow. We should check him out,” Jon continued.
“Don’t you think he’s sleeping before the big day?”
“He’s probably up training all night. . . .”
Slowly we rose again, gathering ourselves for a trip to the Merrill House dorm where Ogletree lived.
“Maybe if he’s training, there’ll be a lot of leftovers around . . . ,” Ox threw out.
“Yeah, but what are we going to do with hot dogs?” Monica said, referring to our vegetarianism.
“Yeah, that’s a good point.” Ox nodded. Inexorably we redressed ourselves for the cold and filed out the door.
At two A.M., all was quiet in Merrill House. We caused a sizable racket climbing the stairwell, as the fifteen of us stomped in, in our boots, laughing and hooting. When we filed into Ogletree’s hall, C-3, we were amazed to find his door closed and no sign of life anywhere.
Our group barely squeezed in, and the noise of our titters and embarrassed chuckles resounded off the walls, making the space roar like the Indianapolis Speedway. We squeezed in to stare at Ogletree’s door. No sound came from within. We stood in silence for a moment, searching for a next move. Finally, Ox solved the problem by knocking.
From behind the door, we heard what sounded like a stampede of miniature buffalo. And then a deep, booming bellow called out, “What the hell is it?”
“Ogletree!” Jon said. “Are you up?”
A minute later the door flew open. Ogletree, a blanket wrapped around his massive frame, stood panting before us, looking a bit like the anim
ated version of Bluto from the Popeye strips. He eyed us with such hate, I started to back away toward the door.
“What are you fucking doing here?”
“Oh, Ogletree.” Jon smiled. “We thought you’d be training.”
“Training? I’m sleeping! Tomorrow’s the day!”
“Well, we just wanted to come and support you.”
His hallmates began waking up, hollering at us to get out or they’d call security. Ogletree, set off balance by Jon’s forward manner, invited us in to hang out and hear about his preparations. Six of us squeezed into the room with him while the rest stayed in the hall, bickering with the hallmates.
“Don’t you guys have anyplace to go?” one girl in a bathrobe yelled.
“Oh, no. Not really,” Ox said. “Our mod is really depressing.”
The girl looked at me with a face wrenched up like she was about to spit out the sour taste in her mouth. “You assholes are pathetic. Why didn’t you all kill yourselves with your friend?”
I recoiled and glanced at Ox, hoping he’d explain what that meant, but he merely nodded and said, “Oh, right. We should. Definitely.”
About ten minutes later, two members of campus security pushed their way into the hall. A Tweedledee, Tweedledum pair, both shortish, with faces bright pink from the night air, they nodded sagely to each other when they saw us. “Where’s Jon?” said the shorter of the two.
We directed them to Ogletree’s room, which they somehow shoved inside. “I shouldn’t get my name taken again this semester,” Marilyn said, and walked out of the hall. A couple others followed.
“What happens if they take your name?” I asked Angela, who was again standing beside me, having rejoined the group.
“You’ve never had security take your name?” she cooed. “Oh, this is exciting!” She gave my arm a little rub and I looked at her. She smiled at me and I became very confused.
From inside Ogletree’s room we heard security arguing with Jon and Tim. “Why do you guys always have to start something? Why can’t we have just one night without trouble from you?”
“We’re just being supportive!”
“You think Larry needs this kinda support? You think seeing you freaks in the middle of the night is gonna help him swallow any more dogs?”
Ogletree vaguely defended us but the rest of his hallmates looked ready to riot. “Get them out of here!” someone yelled.
The security officers eventually herded us all, step by step, down the stairs and out of the dorm. As we shivered in the cold they made us show them our campus IDs and they recorded our names in a little notepad. About two-thirds of us didn’t have IDs, which, in the case of Jon, Dan, Jim, Angela, and some others, was not a problem, as they were already on intimate terms with the officers, whom they called Paul and Mike. “You know you have to carry your ID at all times on campus?”
“Totally, Mike. We will.”
“Then why do we have to go through this every time?”
For the rest, however, the request set off a series of confusions that took at least half an hour to sort out. Their questioning revealed to me, for the first time, who among us actually went to school here. We turned out to be a fairly even mix of un-enrolled students, ex-students, visitors from out of town, and, it turned out, two punks who went to Amherst High. This produced long queries of “Who’s responsible for this one? Whose guest is he?”
Our non-Hampshire student majority were warned that they should not step foot on campus again without first registering with security and having someone sign them in. By the time Paul and Mike came across the high school kids, they were so flummoxed and put out at the thought of having to call their parents that they let them off with a warning to never ever come back again.
When it was finally my turn, Paul and Mike took my ID and looked me up and down. “You’re a first-year. What are you doing with this lot?”
“They’re my friends.” I shrugged.
“Well, you need to get new ones.” Paul put his face close to mine, the mist of his breath wafting across my skin. “Listen, the days of the Supreme Dicks are over, kid. The school’s had enough of these assholes, and by next year they are all gonna be gone. Do yourself a favor and don’t go down the tubes with them.”
I nodded and looked at Jon and Ox. “It’s true, Rich. You better run.”
For the next couple hours, we stood outside the dorm in the cold, again debating how we might get to Denny’s, semiplausi ble schemes derailed by a new topic and each conversation running down another rabbit hole. Every few minutes an irate voice would yell, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” from the dorm windows above.
By four-thirty cold and mounting exhaustion urged me to walk away—as some others had done—and go back to the mod. However, the thought of appearing anxious, of missing any of the action, made quitting unthinkable, as deeply painful as this journey had become. There were seven of us left standing in the cold; our number had been whittled down but we were still too many.
The first traces of thin, reedy light appeared behind the quad. I winced as the world became disturbingly visible. The trash-strewn, patchy Merrill House lawn we were standing on looked unspeakably tawdry in this first light. We all fell silent. Jon finally said, “I guess maybe Denny’s was a bad idea.”
No one said a word. Then Angela spat, “Fuck you, guys,” and stomped off, giving me, I imagined, an especially accusatory glare.
In the dawn light, we watched her walk out of the quad, across the main campus road, and down the path behind the library leading to the Greenwich House woods. As she disappeared from sight Ox murmured, “I guess we could fit in Jon’s car now. . . .”
Ninety minutes later, at around seven in the morning, with Marilyn lying across our laps in the back and two people squeezed into the front passenger seat, we pulled into Denny’s in Chicopee. A couple of trucks idled in the parking lot, steam pouring from their exhausts. The restaurant was a quarter full with men in jackets, ties, or work uniforms sitting alone and reading newspapers. After the standard million or so questions to the waitress from Jon about what was made with animal fat and what was cooked on the same grill as the meat, we ate our bowls of cornflakes in silence.
Finally Ox spoke up. “This was definitely worth it. I’m really glad we came.”
The night after our Denny’s trip word drifted back to 21. We learned that Larry Ogletree had failed to capture the world’s record for most hot dogs consumed in a minute, falling short by a single heartbreaking dog.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Legend
In dribs and drabs, around the living room and during nights spent talking over cardboard cups of drip coffee in the Bridge Café, the full story of the Supreme Dicks began to emerge.
The conversation always started with my question “Why do people hate you so much?” In my first months I began to sense an empty space in Dick history. Somewhere in all our conversations was a void that the residents of 21 often walked right up to but then scurried back from with an uncomfortable giggle.
At first there were references to “after what happened last year” and allusions to three members of the group who were no longer present, Billy, Stan, and Joel, who had once played a huge role in Supreme Dicks life.
But nothing I had heard explained the intensity of the hatred that punched us in the face every time we left 21. Clearly the group had bugged many in its time. Their refusal to take anything even a little bit seriously got under the skin of the school’s more earnest sorts—the activists, the alternative music nerds. But in these days, the earnest activists still remained a minority; the only thing the bulk of the campus took with true seriousness was comparing the seed levels of different marijuana strands.
By the end of the semester I had managed to piece together the full story; the curtain fell from Dick history and I began to understand that I had fallen in with a group that wasn’t just unpopular but despised on a primal level by a school otherwise dedicated to peace, love, and apathy.
> The Supreme Dicks had come together three years before I arrived, somewhere around 1982-3 (dates varied according to the telling). By all accounts the group began gathering in an earlier mod where Jon, Ox, Tim, and Arthur had lived. They came from different tribes—Jon had been a New Wave skateboarder when he first landed on Hampshire’s shores, Ox a devout Deadhead, Jon a hippie avant-gardist, Arthur a working-class punk. The group was rounded out by Joel Jacobs aka Joel Joel, a roly-poly jester, whose gigantic, perpetual broken-toothed grin had the power to unnerve all who looked upon him, leaving them shaken for days as if they had walked away from a car crash. Joel Joel lurked around campus in tandem with Stan Moser, a dark, brooding, mop-headed, emaciated native of the Amherst area.
The group initially came together as a loose conclave, united by a low-grade destructive impulse, a lack of ambition, and nocturnal schedules. None of these traits was particularly remarkable in Hampshire of the early eighties, when the school was dominated by a checked-out breed of hippies, the angsty dregs of the last days of punk rock, and a smattering of rich New York downtown types. The group coalesced around a disdain for any organized anything (movements, seminars, parties, schedules) and a common aesthetic—layers of secondhand rags later described as “old man clothes.” Their early jam sessions were flailing attempts at postpunk intensity, undermined by a common lack of willingness to take basics such as rehearsing or learning songs seriously. The musical side of the group was augmented by Joel Joel and Stan’s merry pranksterism, which was initially limited to merely bugging people around the dorm halls.
With the addition of Steve Shavel, the movement began to take on philosophical underpinnings. A tall, lanky philosophy student, Steve was a notable figure around campus in his unvaried attire of gray cardigan sweater, white oxford shirt, skinny tie, and red Converse high-tops.
Steve came into the Dicks’ life one morning when Ox wandered into the lounge of Dakin Hall and found Steve asleep on the couch with a young waiflike girl. For the next several mornings, Ox awoke to find this strange older person (Steve at this point had already been at Hampshire well more than the traditional four years) asleep on the tiny lounge couch, head to toe with the same girl, and he’d give the slumbering pair a nod as he took his tea with soy milk back to his room. On the third day, Ox was mixing his tea when a deep and sonorous tone called from the couch, “I say, that’s not Lapsang souchong by any chance?”
Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Page 10