Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost

by Richard Rushfield

  “Oh, Rich,” Jon asked one day. “You’re spending a lot of time hanging out with that Elizabeth girl.”

  I nodded. “I guess she’s pretty weird.”

  “Oh, really. Wow, well, does she know you’re celibate?”

  “Of course. She respects our lifestyle.”

  “That’s cool. . . . So you guys are doing a lot of coke?” Jon looked at me sideways. I couldn’t figure out whether he was expressing disapproval or curiosity, but I felt immediately defensive. Curiously, Mod 21 was the one place in Hampshire College where drugs were rarely seen. It was a gesture that seemed to infuriate our enemies all the more; the world assumed our behavior could only be explained by some bizarre combination of drugs, but when they learned that Jon, Ox, Steve, and the rest were behaving that way sober—a state more or less unknown on the rest of campus—that information often pushed people into frothing madness.

  That night Elizabeth and I sat on the floor of my room. We were a couple lines into a half-gram when the door flew open and Steve Shavel stood before us. “Ah, Richard. Right, I forgot that you’re borrowing my room.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “Oh, I say, is that cocaine you’re doing there?”

  Elizabeth hunched over the mirror to defend our diminished supply.

  “Could I trouble you for just a line or two of that? I’ve got this Div Three I have to finish, you know.”

  Steve joined us, sprawling across the floor, smoking cigarettes by the light of the giant candle Elizabeth had brought over that was melting into the ragged carpet. Steve insisted we turn off the Siouxsie and the Banshees album we were playing, selecting instead the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath.

  He sat with us for the rest of the night, trying to explain Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to us.

  “To ridiculously simplify it,” he said after a long exposition, “when I say I have a headache and you say you have a headache, we have no way of knowing whether we’re talking about the same thing.”

  “But we both know what our heads are,” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes, but what is an ache? How do I know my ache is your ache?”

  “What else could it be?”

  “In the world of subjective experience, it could be anything.”

  We sat staring into the candle considering that, listening to the Stones pound out “Paint It Black.” “Wait a second,” Steve said when it was over. “Play that again.”

  I rewound it. The coke was almost gone and I knew any minute it would start getting light out. I hated being awake when the sun came up. “Rewind it again,” Steve said when the song ended. He seemed to be deep in a train of thought. Elizabeth and I, coming down hard though we were, waited anxiously to hear what he was thinking.

  After the eighth time we played it, he stood up. “It’s about . . . his girlfriend’s funeral.”

  Elizabeth and I looked at each other, confused.

  Steve said, “He talks about a line of cars all painted black . . . and my love never to come back.”

  “Ohhhhhh.” A chill went up my spine. How had I never seen that?

  Steve continued. “And what about looking into the setting sun, where he says my love will laugh with me before the morning comes.”

  Elizabeth and I laughed. “Wow, it is.” We played the song back and over again, giddy with revelation. And suddenly, laughing in the middle of it, Elizabeth and I clasped hands and as Steve explained on, she traced one finger down the side of my face. That night, lying in bed together fully dressed, we stared at each other and somehow our faces came together and we kissed for a very long minute before she said, “Good night,” turned over, and went to sleep. I thought, This is the moment I’ve been waiting for my entire life.

  Little did I see that almost within moments, other shoes would start falling from the sky like snowflakes in a western Massachusetts blizzard.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rites of Spring ’87

  In the spring of 1987, Zach and I got a radio show. One night, Steve Shavel had told us about a clause in the five college charter (the covenant that bound Hampshire, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and UMASS together) that required each school to open a portion of their facilities to students from the other colleges. This meant, we learned, that each of the other college radio stations had to open up a small number of their DJ slots to Hampshire students, which alone of the schools did not have a station.

  First thing the next morning (meaning two in the afternoon), Zach and I called WAMH, the Amherst College station, and made an appointment with Todd, the station manager. Later that day, we walked across the Amherst campus, with its stately neoclassical buildings, well-manicured hedges, and trash-free paths, eyeing the well-manicured and trash-free students who bustled buoyantly along to class, even cheerfully, making the frozen landscape seem like more a winter carnival than the canvas of death it appeared at Hampshire. In our dark, ragged overcoats, we leered nervously at the cheery scene, like prisoners released from solitary confinement and suddenly thrust into a tea party.

  The studios of WAMH were located in a dorm basement deep in the center of campus. When we walked in, Todd was sitting at a desk in the outer room, focused on sorting through a milk crate full of records. In a booth to the left, a DJ was playing an early Genesis song. Humming along, Todd stared at the cover of a Warren Zevon album and then wrote something in a tight hand on a yellow index card, which he placed near the back of a card file, under Z. When he caught sight of us, he perceptibly winced, before quickly pulling himself together.

  “Oh, hi, guys. You must be the fellas from Hampshire.”

  He motioned us to some chairs and we sat down in front of his desk. “So tell me what kinda radio show you were thinking of.”

  “One about music . . . ,” I said.

  “And community,” Zach added.

  “Right. That’s great.” Todd nodded. “Music is pretty much what we do. What kind of music are you guys into?” He eyed us skeptically.

  “Mostly . . . ,” Zach said carefully, “mostly . . . progressive music.”

  “We love progressive here. That’s our big thing.” He motioned toward the speakers pouring out midperiod Genesis.

  “I’m kinda into sorta postpunk stuff, too, kinda,” I said, emboldened.

  “Aha. I love it.”

  “He means gothic,” Zach shot back. “Rich is really into gothic.”

  “It’s not gothic. It’s death rock.”

  “That’s why you bought that Siouxsie and the Banshees album yesterday?”

  “They are not strict gothic. That’s punk crossover, mostly. The Birthday Party isn’t gothic.”

  “Why don’t you just wear a cape?”

  Todd, looking increasingly alarmed, broke in. “Hey, guys. That’s great. I’m totally into experimenting and exposing the campus to some new things.”

  “Awesome.” Zach nodded.

  “But we have to always remember, while it’s good to mix some of that stuff in, we are serving the whole Amherst community. You can’t forget also to play the stuff that people want to hear.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Not commercial stuff, I hate that crap too. And we’re never going to compete with the fifty-thousand-watters in Springfield, but, you know, cool college music. But, hey, I love punk too. And I think the direction it’s going now is amazing. You guys must’ve just died over the Iggy Pop album.”

  “I guess so.” Zach and I looked at each other.

  Todd started singing “Real Wild Child” to himself. “Well, you’d probably be surprised to hear that Amherst students actually loved that album.”

  “So can we have a show, then?”

  “And lucky for you, there’s a slot that we haven’t been able to fill yet. How would you guys feel about Sunday morning?”

  “That sounds great.”

  “From three to six A.M.”

  Back at 21, the living room was in a pensive mood, everyone rapt in private contemplations. Jerome leafed through a copy
of New Music Express. Ox pasted letters cut out from magazine headlines onto a sheet of paper, making a flyer advertising “600 Dead Tapes, 1969-present. For sale or rental. Cash only. Grass not accepted.”

  Sprawled across the armchair, Jon talked quietly on the phone. “I dunno,” he said. “I guess I feel it’s kinda like wouldn’t anyplace be pretty much just the same as this. . . . Yeah. . . . I know, you’re right, Amy.”

  Amy From the Phone had started calling the house sometime during Jan Term. One would answer the phone and a voice both pixielike and threatening—threatening in the manner of child ghosts in horror films—would say, “Hi,” and then not another word. The unnerving silence had inspired many of us to begin babbling and then actually conversing with her, although on her end she only spoke the words yes, no, and okay.

  It was not clear how we knew that her name was Amy. The only hard fact we knew for certain was that she had been calling the house of the local band Dinosaur Jr. for a few months prior; it was thought that someone there had given her the number of Mod 21, referring her to us, as it were. Theories about her identity abounded—an inmate at the nearby Northampton State Mental Hospital, an agent for the school administration, a groupie, even that she was a secret alter-ego of Dinosaur Jr.’s laconic front man, J Mascis. There was, however, not a shred of evidence to back any one of these theories and nothing was known concretely beyond the sound of her voice and her four-word vocabulary.

  Something, however, about the lulling/maddening way she deployed her four words inspired trust in more than a few in the house. Jon, most of all, could be found in long conversations with her (all the more surprising because he seldom had long conversations with anyone), confiding secrets and inner pains.

  Only Susie failed to be won over by Amy and would become livid every time she picked up the phone and heard her “Hi,” cursing her within an inch of her life.

  When I walked in that night, Jon was telling Amy about the stream of warnings falling upon the heads of every member of the house. In the first week of spring semester, Mod 21 had officially been placed on housing probation. Faith, the Greenwich House master, had dropped by and delivered a list of “conditions necessary to continue your housing eligibility,” meaning if we didn’t fulfill each of the terms, 21 would be broken up and we would all potentially be banned from student housing, forced to find lodgings off-campus. The list included: “No noise complaints. All trash must be cleared of surrounding area. Damage to walls and structure must be repaired. Three consecutive cleanliness inspections.”

  Susie read the list aloud to the living room and was met with a gloomy silence. Ox finally broke the hush. “That doesn’t sound too hard. . . .” Groans poured down on him from every corner of the room.

  Within the following days it seemed every member of the extended 21 family was placed on academic probation; at least those were who were actually Hampshire students (which seemed to be about a third of the house). Susie met her announcement in characteristically grandiose fashion. Having been summoned to meet Milton, her advisor, a writing teacher whose office she dropped by once a year or so, she declared her impending departure for the meeting several days in advance, giving us a countdown to the final moments as she fussed over what outfit to wear, perfumes, gifts to bring (although it was agreed this was hardly necessary; it was well established he was in love with her already).

  When the afternoon arrived, she descended the stairs adorned in her customary black shirt and black leggings with a fluttering skirt, aflow in scarves and tresses. We all rose and saw her to the door. “Don’t worry.” Susie batted her heavily lined lashes at us. “I’ve got charm enough for ten Miltons.”

  The trouble was, I learned after she left, that Susie had never actually finished a class in her three years at Hampshire. As far as anyone knew, she’d never actually been to a class—although some said it was possible that in her first semester—her first couple weeks of her first semester—she may have gone to a class then. Certainly, everyone agreed, she’d never done a paper, a project, completed a Div I, or filed her Div II. Even by Supreme Dicks standards, this was an impressive record. Between the photo and music classes available, most of 21 had at one time or another stumbled into a class so undemanding that it was easier to finish it than to flunk it. Some of the room had even made major dents in their graduation requirements before the dawn of the Dicks. Ox was supposedly working on his Div III on Derrida. Jon didn’t actually go to classes but was the prodigy of the film department. Even Arthur had found shop classes.

  The tension in the living room grew thick as we awaited Susie’s return.

  “They couldn’t really expel her, could they?” I asked Ox.

  “Ohhhh, I don’t know. Probably not. But the school’s being pretty crazy.”

  The door opened and Steve Shavel flew in. “Lars from the Greenhouse Mod overheard the president talking at Central Records. She told him her motto this year is Just Say No to Supreme Dicks on campus.”

  “Dick persecution rears its head once again.”

  Steve nodded. “It’s Hampshire’s only socially acceptable form of discrimination.”

  We sat glumly. “What will Susie do if they kick her out?” I whispered to Ox.

  “Oh, what do you mean, what will she do?”

  “Um, well, will she have to go someplace . . .”

  “Yeah, maybe. I guess she could stay at Joel and Chris’s place in Northampton.”

  Three, then four hours passed without her return. Our discussion of her fate had evolved into an argument about avant-garde film, with Steve Shavel making an impassioned defense of Godard, Pierrot le Fou in particular, while Jon insisted that Godard was no different than Steven Spielberg and that Week End looked exactly the same as E.T. to him.

  Sometime after ten, Susie threw open the door and paused dramatically in the doorway, a sackful of books in her arms and a gust of frigid air filling the room. She took two steps forward and collapsed onto the couch.

  “How did it go?” everyone asked.

  “It was horrible. Je suis fatiguée. Do we have any wine?” she asked, insanely.

  “What happened?” I pleaded.

  “Milton”—she paused for dramatic effect—“wants to leave his wife.”

  “What?” everyone screamed, confused. “For you?” Ox asked.

  “Probably, but I told him he wasn’t allowed to talk about that. He told me he hasn’t loved her for years and that she mocks his poetry.”

  “Wow.” We took this news in. Milton’s wife was, it was known, an art librarian at Smith famed for her stern, dramatic, but very sexy older-lady bearing. Why she was with the schlumpy, whining Milton was a source of frequent speculation, the answers usually descending into elaborate S-and-M fantasies.

  “His poetry is pretty bad.” Jon yawned.

  “That’s not the point,” Susie snapped. “He’s a loving husband and he deserves better.” We all looked at each other. No one seemed to agree that he deserved better, but with Susie worked up, we conceded the point.

  “So I guess he didn’t kick you out?” Ox asked.

  “Kick me out? Of course not! The poor man, though. Yvonne”—the dean of faculty—“is giving all our advisors so much trouble. He really is having a hard time keeping them out of my hair. I just feel terrible.”

  “So did they give you any . . . punishment?” asked Marilyn.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, darling. We came up with a contract. I told him that if it will get him out of trouble, I would love to do a Div One this semester.”

  “A whole Div One!?” Ox blurted.

  “Yes, idiot. I can do it. It’s only one little paper. I’m going to write about Zelda Fitzgerald!” She beamed with pride. “Milton took me into town to buy some books on her. You know, I’ve always said Zelda was the genius of the pair. Just look, everything decent Scott ever wrote he stole from her.”

  Susie rattled on about Zelda, radiating excitement. Everyone else glanced at each other with undisguised sk
epticism.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered to Ox.

  “A whole Div One! That’s pretty major for Susie.”

  “How long does it have to be?”

  “I don’t know. . . . At least eight pages . . .”

  “Double-spaced?”

  “Maybe ten double-spaced.”

  “You don’t think Susie can pull that off?”

  Ox shook his head. “I just don’t know. . . .”

  My own warning came a few days later, heralded by what I now dreaded as the surest harbinger of doom—opening my mail slot and finding a pale beige envelope with my name and box number typed on the front, the red Hampshire College logo in the upper left mocking me like a jackal. Since the last few times I had been summoned, I always braced myself for one of these envelopes waiting in my mailbox like a time bomb; nothing good could arrive in an envelope bearing the college insignia. On any average day I was secretly cowering in fear over being caught for at least three things I had recently done. These trips to the mailroom had become games of Russian roulette, leading up to the agonizing moment of suspense as I opened my box and peeked inside to see if I was being expelled. I generally avoided checking for weeks at a time; the more I had to fear, the longer I stayed away.

  But knowing that, one by one, we were all being called in, I was slightly prepared for the stationery of doom and merely sighed with world-weariness when I saw it waiting for me. Inside, the note from Leo was brutally to the point.

  We should talk. Please stop by this week.

  The note was dated two weeks before. Back at 21, I showed it to Steve Shavel and asked for advice. He studied it thoughtfully.

  “This is just the first note?”

  I nodded.

  “Then that’s not a problem. It’s not until the third or fourth summons that you have to take it seriously.”

  “You don’t think I should go hear what he wants?” I asked.