Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost

by Richard Rushfield

  One night, Ox invited me to follow him into Amherst to visit some friends. It was much whispered that Ox had been spotted with an Amherst High School girl named Christie, a member of the local punk scene. Christie, it was said, had an older sister whose name was invoked only in hushed reverence. Ramona had been described to me as some kind of dark Valkyrie, the “Death Rock Queen of Amherst,” a cold beauty of such power that she had in her time, allegedly, lured both Robert Smith of the Cure and Ian McCullough of Echo and the Bunnymen into her clutches. J Mascis, lead singer of the local postpunk band Dinosaur Jr., was said to have been driven mad by his relationship with Ramona and composed the entire first Dinosaur album about her.

  The ties between the Supreme Dicks and the local punks of Amherst and Northampton were strong, the punks often dropping by 21 to pay their respects when they visited Hampshire campus for a concert or to buy drugs. Since moving in, I’d gotten to know most at least by sight and kept abreast of their gossip, which centered largely on Dinosaur Jr.’s internal politics and, more cautiously, whispered tales of Ramona. But although the Dinosaur members drifted through the coffeehouses, I had never laid eyes on Ramona or even her little sister Christie, so when Ox suggested a trip into town “to visit friends,” a reference pregnant with the hint that Christie might be among these friends, I leapt from the couch and scampered after him.

  On the bus into Amherst, I asked Ox directly, “Are we going to see Christie?”

  “Oh, Christie? I don’t know. I just thought we’d stop in at Clase Café” (the Amherst diner that was the local punk hangout).

  “So I don’t suppose she’ll be there?”

  Ox became coy in response to the implied violation of celibacy. “Wow, maybe. Yeah, I guess she might. Yeah, probably. I think you’re right.”

  As it turned out, Christie was there. A petite punkette with blond hair streaked with black tied back under a bandana, she sat at a table in the center of the smoke-clogged diner with five others of her tribe, most of whom I recognized from their visits to Hampshire. Ox walked up behind her chair and stood quietly coughing to get her attention, while Christie talked about the Sonic Youth concert coming up in Boston the next weekend.

  “Oh, wow, Christie. Oh, right. You’re here,” Ox finally broke in.

  Christie turned around and looked at him and smiled shyly, as though they shared some scandalous secret. We sat down and joined the table, where the conversation inevitably soon turned to Dinosaur Jr. gossip (there was said to be strife within the band). I studied Christie for signs of royalty and determined that she did indeed have regal, princesslike qualities about her. Where the rest of the table seemed hyped up, boisterous, shouting, jittery from too much caffeine and God knows what else, Christie was poised, unflappable, and almost supernaturally confident and secure. When she spoke in her soft, girlish voice, the rest of the table quieted and leaned in attentively. I also noticed that despite her leather jacket and shredded jeans, Christie projected something clean and almost farm-girlish.

  More surprising, though, was the reaction Ox provoked. Whenever Ox mumbled a half-comprehensible observation, I noticed with envy how Christie touched his arm and laughed at every witticism. I, meanwhile, struggled for the attention of Christie’s friend, a stringy girl with ironed-out dirty-blond hair named Tasha, badgering her with questions about Amherst High School, which she barely dignified with answers. Around 21, it was a common joke to refer to Ox as the Supreme Dicks’ teen heartthrob, but this was the first time I had witnessed the phenomenon and it was fairly breathtaking.

  After the table had finished off five successive plates of Clase’s famed grease-ridden, overcooked French fries and I had swallowed two chocolate malted frappes, Josh, one of the punks, suggested we return to his house. His neighbors, he said, had thrown a party the night before and their keg was sitting on the back porch at most half-finished. We walked through the dark streets of the picture-postcard Amherst neighborhood. The cold had let up to the point where we could, in our overcoats and gloves, almost linger outside without risking frostbite.

  On the way, I asked Ox about Christie.

  “So were you, like, hanging out with her?”

  “Rich!”

  “I mean, have you helped her problematize her celibacy?”

  “Oh, right. Well, maybe sometimes I’ve been able to help her with that.”

  I asked about Tasha, but Ox only knew that she had just moved to town. “She talks a lot about London.”

  Three hours later, the beer keg abducted, we lay sprawled in various corners of Josh’s unfurnished living room. The glow of a single white bulb sitting atop a shadeless lamp provided the sole illumination, a Butthole Surfers album blasted from a turntable, and a broken window let in the cold as we sat wrapped in our jackets. Josh held the center of the room, doing an extensive and brilliant imitation of Amy From the Phone. He was fairly certain, he explained, that she was an inmate at the Hampshire County Mental Hospital in Northampton. A friend of his who had been admitted there a few weeks before said he talked to a girl on his ward who had been locked away after an extravagant series of suicide attempts. The friend, Josh claimed, was 90 percent certain that this girl spoke with the voice of Amy, although she feigned ignorance when confronted. She also, apparently, had a Dinosaur Jr. sticker on her backpack and supposedly—although this claim seemed more tenuous—had been overheard telling another inmate that she had friends named the Dicks.

  In one corner of the room, Christie and Ox sat in deep conversation. In the opposite corner, I sprawled against a moldy rolled-up blanket with Tasha. I intensely watched her as she intensely watched Christie and Ox talking. Finally, she looked back at me.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing. I mean, I wasn’t looking, I was just, like, somewhere else and not using my eyes.”

  She nodded. “Have you ever been to London?”

  I noticed I was very drunk. “No. I mean, yeah, when I was really little.”

  “I’m going to go there.”

  “Wow. That’s cool.”

  “There’s this amazing market by the canals. You can get leather boots for ten dollars.”

  “That’s rad.”

  “Rad?”

  “Oh, right. Sorry. I’m from California.” We talked more about London. I offered to go with her fifteen or twenty times but she managed not to acknowledge my offers. I looked across the room, which, after a dozen cups of stale beer and half the Jack Daniel’s from my overcoat pocket, teetered back and forth like a carnival ride. I wondered how Josh remained standing so straight. He had begun playing a guitar along with the album, when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, the front door open and a dark figure walk in. Tall, thin, with long black hair, ghostly pale, dressed entirely in black, she stepped in and paused at the doorway, surveying the wreckage of the room, like an avenging demon standing coldly atop the rubble of the apocalypse.

  “Oh, my God,” I said a bit too loud.

  Josh, hearing me, dropped his guitar and turned around. “Ramona!” he said. “When did you get back?”

  “I thought Amherst might be less depressing than Boston for a day or two,” she murmured. “Of course, I was wrong.”

  “You want a beer?”

  “I just need Christie. Mom sent me to find you.”

  Christie stood up and I noticed I was standing myself, as though at attention. Mouth agape, I stumbled forward before I could stop myself. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m a big fan.” I stuck my hand out.

  Ramona furrowed her brow, looked me up and down, and turned her back to me. “Josh, if you’re coming to Sonic Youth, you can’t bring Charlie. He’s not allowed in my house.”

  “Yeah, totally. Charlie’s got a job anyway.”

  Christie pulled herself together to leave and to my disappointment I saw Tasha get up to go with her. She walked over to me. “So I guess, cool hanging out with you.”

  “Yeah, it was. I mean, yeah.”

&n
bsp; “Are you going to Sonic Youth?”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “Yes, I am.”

  As she left, it occurred to me that I hadn’t thought about Elizabeth in nearly an hour.

  In the next breath, I tapped Ox on the shoulder. “We better get back to campus,” I said. “I need to check on somebody.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The End of the End

  As the semester crept along, there was never much doubt in the big sense how the story would end for Mod 21, just uncertainty about when and how heavily the hammer would fall. But by the atmosphere around the house you would never have known you were watching the death throes of a golden age. Although we were too cynical and too committed to our sense of persecution to be consoled by false hope, no group of friends was more skilled at burying their heads and avoiding a subject. The procession of probations, warnings, inspections, and administration conferences trooped by, and it became unmistakable that we were being led to our doom. But just as the alarm mounted to a defeating pitch, all went quiet; the seriousness of our dilemma made it seem ridiculous to talk about—or at least to talk about with anything other than casual disdain for the prospect of expulsion. And so we marched toward crucifixion with sneers on our faces, strolling along like we were headed to a family picnic.

  I, however, was having a harder and harder time suppressing my mounting panic, and I often fled the disintegrating situation, taking comfort among the punks of Amherst, or even occasionally dropping in on Elizabeth and hiding out with her, although each time I did this, her aloofness, no matter what transpired between us, made me vow never to come near her again.

  After my conference with Leo, I made a brief stab at knuckling down and taking my classes seriously, but I found that focusing on schoolwork only reminded me of the hopelessness of our situation and made me panic all the more. Much more effective for my mental heath, I found, was to maintain my wall of denial by pushing away anything that might remind me of Hampshire officialdom, starting with classes.

  I finally reached my I-just-need-to-not-think-about-this-now moment during a lecture in my World Food Crisis class. The professor was earnestly leading us through a dissection of American corporate farming techniques, explaining how big farming tied agriculture to the world-dominating interests of the corporate state, which had a vested interest in keeping the rest of the planet hungry and dependent. As he explained how millions were dying because of government strategies, all I could hear were the words in my head, Where will I live next semester? The impending catastrophe of being expelled from college or even just losing my campus housing drowned out his chatter about starving millions. I looked over at Zach, who had fallen asleep, and felt the fear rise in my throat. While Zach slumbered, I gathered up my books and stumbled out.

  One afternoon sometime later, sprawled on the floor at 21, cutting out pictures from Susie’s old Interview magazines to decorate tape covers, I realized that it had been well over a month since I had been inside a classroom. At that same moment, the revelation came to me that by checking out of class entirely I had in all likelihood guaranteed that I would be expelled. I looked at the clock and realized that my Tolstoy class started in twenty minutes. I jumped to my feet and looked at my copy of Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, which had lain on the living room floor for weeks. I picked up the phone on the wall and dialed Tasha, asking her if she wanted to meet me at Amherst’s punk hangout Clase Café.

  “Yeah, that’s where I’m going.”

  “Cool, then I’ll see you there.” I raced to the bus stop and into town.

  I spent much of the following weeks in Amherst hanging with the local punks and waiting to see Tasha. My entrée to the Clasé society had been paved by the surprising endorsement I’d received from Ramona herself. A week after meeting her, I had tagged along with Josh to the Sonic Youth show in Boston and had crashed at her house. Throughout the weekend, she had barely noticed me despite my desperation to get her attention, not wanting to squander these precious moments in her royal presence. Pondering how to honor my generation’s muse, I decided to compose a poem. While the house slept that night, I crouched at her kitchen table over a stack of white notebook paper. I started and abandoned a dozen or so stabs at a homage worthy of her. Finally I stopped and asked myself, What kind of poem am I trying to write here? One of the few poems I knew by heart, Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty,” came into my head. Something like that would do, I realized. I started scribbling.She walks in beauty, like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

  Thus mellow’d to that tender light

  Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

  The next morning, as Ramona made coffee in her kitchen, I handed it to her.

  “This is for you.”

  She squinted at the page. “You wrote this?”

  I nodded. “I just put the words on to the paper. You were the one who created them.” She scrutinized the words for a few minutes, then folded it up and put it into the pocket of her robe. She nodded at me and said, “Thanks,” without inflection, but I detected, I was almost certain, the merest hint of a smile at one corner of her mouth and my heart leapt.

  Whatever the effect of the poem, and whatever her private conversations had been with the girls, on the ride back from the concert Tasha actually seemed to notice that I was sitting next to her, crushed in the back of Josh’s car. On the way to Boston, she chatted with Christie and nothing would have indicated she was aware that she was shoved up against another human being in the crowded backseat, that her elbow was digging into a human stomach and not mere nylon seat lining. On the ride back, however, she went so far as to share a cigarette with me and to my amazement, Christie asked me several questions about whether I liked Hampshire.

  In the following weeks, I spent every afternoon at the Clase waiting for Tasha to get out of school. When I saw Elizabeth on campus I was able to wave at her from afar, at least 50 percent of the time, I calculated triumphantly, free of desperation. It occurred to me in the next breath that I was replaying with Tasha the exact pattern that had tormented me with Elizabeth, and I wondered how one was supposed to break this cycle of wanting more without ever being able to express that it was more you wanted.

  At the beginning of April I asked if anyone at 21 was going anywhere for Spring Break, a question met with predictable blank stares. The campus soon emptied and we roamed the thawing lawns oblivious that all the other students had decamped. With the sun meekly shining through after months in hibernation, we sprawled for hours in front of the closed library. For once, with Hampshire’s paths empty, its brick-and-cinder-block buildings rising around us peacefully, we experienced a taste of the pastoral ideal promised in the admissions brochures.

  Around this time talk focused on the looming question of whether we would be allowed to play at Spring Jam. The Dicks’ performance at the previous year’s Jam, coming just in the wake of Billy’s death, had been the traumatizing event that had sealed the group’s status as Campus Enemy numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5 through 158. (Oliver North held the number-four slot.) Given the current climate there might have been little reason to suspect that we would be allowed to play, except there still remained a mild queasiness about repressing free speech on campus, at least with Luntz and the leather-jacket-wearing guys who ran the school’s music events.

  Relations between Luntz and the Dicks were among the more complicated in our universe. An aficionado of bands like Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, and the Butthole Surfers—all of whom he had brought to play on campus during my first year—Luntz should naturally have been aligned with the Dicks’ anarchic nature. But whether it was that musically, he felt the Dicks turned anarchy into mockery or the infuriating passive-aggressive way that Jon, Ox, and Steve had of refusing to get to the point with everyone who tried to talk with them, or his lingering sense that somehow they were making fun of his music—whichever of thes
e elements pushed Luntz over the edge, the hatred in his eyes when he saw the Dicks was unrivaled by that of any Women’s Center petitioner or Housing Office apparatchik. Nonetheless we remained more or less on the same side of the fence, each loosely bound to the school’s punk caucus. And so it was thought that given these bonds, the shame of caving in to the administration and outright banning us from the Jam would be more than Luntz could bear, hate us though he might.

  Which left the question of what we would perform. After last year’s debacle, could the Dicks just get up and play songs? The legend of the previous Spring Jam had inflated until it was retold as Hampshire’s crash of the Hindenburg; when the Dicks took the stage, the entire school would be braced for a world-class outrage. How could we possibly meet those expectations? How could we ignore them? In long afternoons at the Clase and late nights at the Red Lion Diner, everything was put on the table—human sacrifice, child abduction, satanic incantations, bestiality. But it also seemed that for most of the group after five to ten years on campus, the possibilities for shock had been thoroughly exhausted.

  Jon seemed to think the whole thing was “silly” and serially mocked each scheme that was proposed. During this period he spent most of his time locked away in an editing bay, cutting his mystery Div III film, about which he refused to speak. The group endlessly speculated the film was based on a relationship Jon was secretly having with a girl in Pennsylvania, whom people claimed he would visit during his unexplained disappearances from campus. Others, however, disagreed. “I don’t think Jon would make a film about anything as conventional as a relationship,” Meg said.

  I visited Susie in her room, where she had been closeted with her Zelda Fitzgerald for weeks, and asked what she thought might happen.

  “Oh, I’m sure they are going to do something idiotic and everyone will get upset and there will be a big fuss.”