After class, walking nearly on tiptoes, I approached Ninotchka and asked her for another copy of the assignment, saying I’d lost mine. She handed me the page, giving no hint that she realized I had not been in class all semester. I asked her, “Do you really think Anna needed to kill herself?”
“Oh, yes. . . ,” she drawled, looking up at me from her desk.
“But how come she couldn’t go back to whatshisname?”
“To Karenin?”
“Right, him.”
“She’s been with Vronsky now. Once you’ve lived your romantic ideal you can’t very well return to the mundane, can you?”
“No. You really can’t.”
“I’m glad you see that.” She smiled and it occurred to me that I should become a student of Russian literature.
After the disappearance of Tasha from my life, I once again sought out Elizabeth, and once again found myself confused and frustrated by every encounter with her, and by my own inability to explain, even to myself, what I would have wanted from her.
One night we were hanging out in her room, sharing a bottle of bourbon I had, along with some Darvon she had been given at the Health Services for headaches. Feeling exceptionally at ease, I asked her, “Do you think we should go to that show Saturday night?” (referring to a concert at SAGA by the band Half Japanese).
“Why wouldn’t we go?”
I nodded. “Yeah, of course.”
“You mean like together?”
“I dunno. Maybe. Whatever.”
“Do you want us to go together?” She looked me dead in the eyes. I turned away.
“Probably, you know. Since we’re hanging out a lot.” I paused for a moment and thought. “But I guess I should check what’s going on at Twenty-one first. . . .”
She laughed. “Okay . . . ,” she said, and chased a handful of the remaining pills with a swig from the bottle.
The following night Zach and I had our radio show at Amherst. I still had a hangover from the night before, which had lingered on to well past noon. In the end, Elizabeth had declined to come back to 21 with me but, still miraculously wide awake, had left me in front of the library and wandered off in the direction of Prescott, where, I couldn’t help but think, there lived an acid dealer named Neal whom I’d noticed her chatting with in the past.
As Zach and I settled into the booth, I fumed, thinking of Elizabeth hanging out with Neal, tripping, the two of them perhaps even brazenly listening to my show. I reached for Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade album. “Happy morning, Pioneer Valley,” I said into the mike. “To start things off, here’s a smash hit from those lovable mop-tops from Liverpool, Hüsker Dü, which goes out to a special someone, who maybe at this moment is hanging out in Prescott House. I hope you’re listening.” I started up the song “Never Talking to You Again” and sat down to soak it in.
When the song ended, Zach was still fumbling for another album, so I picked up the needle and started it over from the top. When I did that a second time Zach asked, “Are you trying to send someone a message?”
“Maybe.”
“But is there any chance in hell that they are listening?”
I thought about that for a second. “No. I guess there isn’t.”
Zach nodded. “Nice work, then.”
“Thanks,” I said, starting the song over once again.
Three plays of the song later, Zach said, “I know sending this message to all zero of our listeners means a lot to you, but I’m getting sick of it. Can we play something fun?”
“Fun?!? Like what?”
He grabbed Dexy’s Midnight Runners off the shelf and started “Come On Eileen” on the turntable. “Like this.”
I started to object but then stopped and listened, and soon found myself nodding along. “I have to say, this speaks to me.”
“See? Life is a big bowl of happiness. Toora Loora Toora Loo-Rye-Aye.”
I took this in. “Let’s listen again.” I started the record over. And then again, and again.
At six A.M. Todd the station manager walked in wearing pa jama pants and a baggy Police Synchronicity tour T-shirt, his head askew with tousled bed hair. “Hey, guys.” He glanced at us nervously. “Great song.”
We nodded. “It is. It really is.” He smiled, clearing his throat. Dexy sang, “These people round here wear beaten down eyes/ Sunk in smoke dried faces, they’re resigned to what their fate is.”
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered softly.
“Yeah, well, hey. I don’t want to tell you how to run your show.”
“Good,” Zach said.
“Huh-huh. Yeah, but—”
“Here it comes.”
“I’ve been getting some complaints.”
“Complaints?” we said in unison, eyes wide. We looked at each other. “You mean someone is listening?”
“Some people are.”
“Some people are. . . . There’s more than one person listening?”
“Well, I’ve gotten a bunch of calls. I mean, people, especially the Amherst campus, sorta depend on this station to provide them with some basic atmosphere.”
“But, Todd,” Zach cut in again, “don’t you understand what this means? We’re a hit!”
“I wouldn’t say that exactly.”
“We have several listeners!” Zach and I whooped, high-fived, and raced around the studio for a few minutes in a victory dance, pausing to restart the song.
“Okay, guys. Before you get too excited, it’s finals week. Everyone is doing all-nighters getting ready.”
“Oh.” We stopped in our tracks. Todd’s invocation of tests and their relationship to sleeping habits introduced such a foreign element, we had to pause and take it in. If Todd had told us that they were listening to the show because they calibrated the radio waves and used them to cook their breakfasts in order to have energy to telekinetically reassemble their home planets, it would have been only slightly less startling. But whatever he meant, the bubble of excitement about our explosive audience-growth patterns was duly popped.
“So I’m not telling you what to play—”
“You said that before and I said good.”
“Heh, right. It’s just, maybe you might mix in some other songs here and there?”
“So you are telling us what to play?”
“No, no, no. Play anything you want. Just try maybe another song during your slot.”
“Fascist,” Zach spat.
“Guys . . .”
“You never told us censorship was part of the deal.”
“Come on. . . . I’m not censoring. . . .”
Zach planted himself directly in front of Todd. “I think you need to leave.”
Twenty minutes later we were on the bus back to Hampshire. “I don’t care what he says,” Zach said as I dozed off to sleep in the next seat. “I love that song.”
The shoes fell and fell. Ox met with his Div III committee. He had turned in, by his accounts, a still very rough, unfinished draft of his Div III thesis entitled “Beyond Logocentrism: The Postmodern Philosophies of Derrida, Nietzsche, and Foucault.” I wondered to myself when he had found the time to even come up with that title, let alone flesh out any part of a paper. He returned stoically from his meeting. “Yeah, I think maybe it’s time for the Dicks to play on a bigger stage.”
“So you’re not going to finish it next year?” I asked. Ox was at this point at the end of his sixth year.
“Oh, well. Probably not. I mean, the world needs us, don’t you think?”
Arthur announced he was moving back to Iowa. Others were summarily granted diplomas, some against their will. “If they’ve done any work since they got here, it’s easier for the school to graduate them than expel them,” Steve mused.
“Graduating people against their will,” Ox reflected. “That sounds like a human rights violation.”
For myself, just as I had tumbled into the abyss of despair, a ray of hope shone onto me. One afternoon I confided to Steve Shavel that all
was lost, that I had no chance of fulfilling the terms of my academic probation; that I was going to have to go back to California, where, separated from the others, I’d meet a fate so ghastly I dared not contemplate it. Steve asked to see the academic contract Leo had drawn up, and my Tolstoy assignment. He put on his glasses and studied the papers carefully. “I think we can do this.”
“What do you mean? How can I finish two classes?”
“Ah, but, you see, it doesn’t just say two classes. It says two, or one class plus a Div One.”
“That’s even worse. I’m not going to be able to do some monster project in the next four days. I wouldn’t even be able to get a professor to work with me on one.”
Steve took off his glasses, blew on the lenses, and polished them off. “In my day, yes, you would’ve been doomed. But two years ago the school instituted a little travesty of alternative education known as the two-course option.”
“I see. . . .”
“Which gave students a choice for each of their Div Ones: Instead of doing a project, you can take two classes in that field, and you can count those two classes as a Div One. Didn’t you say you finished the Nietzsche class first semester?”
“Yes . . .”
“So if you finish the Tolstoy class, that’s two in Arts and Humanities. You’ve got a Div One.”
“But don’t I need that class to count toward the finishing one class on my contract?”
“There’s nothing that says it can’t count for both.”
I paused to think. “So one Tolstoy paper can be parlayed to fulfill all the requirements of my probation?”
Steve nodded. “Now, mind you, Supreme Dick scriptures do not approve of the two-course option. But I can see where we might grant wartime emergency exemptions.”
“But there’s one problem: How am I going to read Anna Karenina in four days? It’s like eight hundred pages.”
“Again you’re not reading the fine print. Ninotchka says the paper should be on Anna or any work covered in this class.”
“And . . .”
“I took that class my third year—”
“What was that?”
“Never mind. But I just happen to know the first book that class reads is Master and Man. Which is under a hundred pages.”
I gazed upon Steve as though I were looking at one of the great thinkers of human history, a Socrates or Isaac Newton walking among us. “That’s amazing,” I murmured.
Four days later, after two consecutive all-nighters, I sat down and typed, “The repression of man’s nature and subversion of his will and instinct toward the servitude of other men comprise the motivating force behind Tolstoy’s Master and Man.” Four pages later I wrote, “Lying on top of Nikita, while the storm is closing in around him, Vasilii Andreich realizes himself through this liberation of his sexuality. His petty societal protections far away from him, he is finally able to liberate his sexuality, and merge with the universe.”
I tore the last page out of the typewriter and raced over to Ninotchka’s office, handing her the paper just as she was about to leave for the weekend.
Jon screened his top-secret film for his committee and passed his Div III. Meg reported that the word around the film/photo building was that his professors had told him it was the best student film they had ever seen and demanded he enter it in festivals. In response, Jon said he would probably “throw it out.” We all went to the final film showing, sat through hours of abstract color experiments and, ultimately, the much-awaited music video featuring half the school lying on the ground in the shape of a peace sign shot from a helicopter. Jon’s name was listed on the program, but when his turn arrived, they skipped ahead to the next film. In the end, none of us ever saw the fabled work and the rumor spread that Jon had burned it.
On graduation day, Zach, Nathan, and I stood at the back of the lawn, watching from a distance, as Jon, Tim, and a handful of the others accepted their diplomas.
“Do you think that someday, seven, eight years from now, that will be us up there?” I asked.
“No,” Zach firmly replied.
“I’ll try one more semester,” Nathan said.
A group from 21 gathered around Jon to look at his diploma. “Can you even imagine what these guys are going to do now?” Meg asked me.
“What do you think they’ll do?”
“I don’t know. Something major,” she said. “But a year from now, this school is going to really regret it treated them this way.”
A lazy heat covered the school, the first grips of summer’s mugginess. I sat by myself on the wall outside the library and watched the crowds wander off from the central lawn while crews loaded the chairs and platforms onto a flatbed truck. The warmth and light sun made everyone walk in slow motion and made the campus look relaxed, pleasant, and happy, and I wondered for a moment what we’d all been so worked up about. Down by the road, cars crammed with luggage honked a final salute as they carried people away, the campus breaking up, many, including my friends, I thought, never to return. I sighed and lit a cigarette, thinking back on all that had happened since I’d walked up that lawn, duffel bag on my back, eight months before.
Someone sat down next to me and from my peripheral vision, a glimpse of long red hair made me gasp.
“Elizabeth!” I managed to say. “You’re still here.”
“Where’ve you been?”
“Oh, you know. Pretty much around.”
“Lucy misses you.”
I nodded. “You know, I mean, this semester. It was, like, you know. We had fun, I think.”
Elizabeth smiled benignly as I babbled, watching as every trace of cool I had struggled so hard to assemble was shredded into tatters with each word out of my mouth. I kept going. “I think maybe next year, do you think we should, I dunno. I mean, what were you—”
She finally took pity and whispered, “Shhhhh,” and put her index finger over my mouth and then her lips. We kissed in the open for the first time in the warm summer day.
“Can I write to you this summer?” I said when she pulled away. She smiled and wrote an address down on a graduation program that was lying on the ground.
“I’ll be staying with my friend in San Francisco. You can write me here.”
“I will.” I nodded. We kissed again and then I watched her walk away. I lit another cigarette and soaked in the campus. What was all that fuss about indeed. I smiled to no one and looked down at the address, written in Elizabeth’s hand. Were zip codes only four numbers long? For a second I panicked and, seeing her walk down the path toward the dorms, thought about running after her but brought myself to order. Maybe in San Francisco they are, I told myself. Maybe they are.
Later that day, everyone gathered at Joel Joel’s house in Northampton to observe one of the Dicks’ most hallowed traditions, the Blonde on Blonde Dickel. According to Steve Shavel, every nine months the Supreme Dick extended family must assemble to listen to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde album and drink Dickel whiskey, because “that was what Tennessee Williams drank himself to death on,” he said, I later learned erroneously. According to tradition, the day would also be marked by Steve Shavel jumping off a roof. At the last BBD he had leapt from the top of 21 and gotten stuck in a tree. This time around, we assembled on Joel Joel’s balcony, which hung a good twenty-five feet above a concrete sidewalk. I looked down dubiously as Jon and Ox described Steve’s leaping history. “Somehow Dickel makes him a little weird,” Jon said. On cue, with a roar, Steve leapt through the window and out onto the balcony. Racing toward the precipice, he lunged for the edge, stopped only at the last moment by Arthur, who grabbed him by his skinny tie.
While Arthur and some others bound Steve’s hands and feet with extension cords, Jon, Ox, and I talked about their plans. “What are you guys going to do now?” I asked.
They looked at each other as though this were a subject they hadn’t really discussed before. Ox’s head bobbed in nods. “I guess I might go to New York. Maybe to th
e East Village.”
“To do what?”
They both looked astonished at the question. “I suppose get an apartment. Oh, why, is there something going on?” Ox said.
I looked at Jon. “Are you going to New York?”
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I guess I have to think about it. I mean, what’s really the point in picking something or someplace when you’re probably going to change your mind once you get there, you know?”
Yeah, I nodded. I looked around the balcony at the thirty or so people who had become my friends, who, as far as I was concerned, had saved my life at Hampshire. Many were bellowing along, loudly, badly out of tune, off-rhythm, with “Visions of Jo hanna,” Steve, lying tied up on the floor, singing the loudest. I remembered how desperate I’d been when I found them and wondered if that was the life I’d return to in the fall. I wondered if this group would ever get together again. And I wondered, not having been told that I was being expelled, if that was that, the coast was clear, and now that the Dicks were gone, I was free to return.
As if hearing my thoughts, Ox said to me, “Maybe we should see if people want to go to Denny’s tonight. . . .”
A week later I lay on my bed in Mod 21 listening to the quiet. The others had moved out—Susie went back to New York, Jon was living with Joel in Northampton, Arthur had loaded up his car and driven to Iowa. In fact, the entire campus was empty, the school having shut down after graduation. I had planned to drive back to L.A. with my high school friend Will, but as Vassar didn’t get out for another week, I had time to kill. Whenever I looked at my room, the thought of packing depressed me so much that I had to open a detective novel to chase the feeling away.
I spent my ghostly days in Northampton, sitting with Jon and Steve at the sidewalk tables of Bonducci’s Café enjoying the now warm weather with an endless chain of cigarettes and espresso shots. At night I slunk through the empty, deserted campus, jumping into the woods when I saw a security van approach in the distance and slipping back into 21, lights out to avoid drawing attention, to sleep there alone. On the final morning I lay in bed for hours, listening to the silence. I realized I was having some issues with letting go of 21 and I wondered if I should do something about it.
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