Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost

by Richard Rushfield

  The silence broke and I sat up straight in bed as I heard the front door spring open and a pair of gruff voices stomp inside. “Holy crap, look at this place!” I heard one of them say.

  “It would be easier just to torch it.”

  I heard the steps draw closer. They opened the door of the room next to mine. “PU!”

  And then the door to my room flung open. Two workmen in overalls stood in the doorway looking at me lying in bed, reading a comic book. I looked up and smiled. “I was just leaving,” I said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  What’s Left Behind

  In September I was assigned to a room in Merrill House, one of the two remaining dorms where I was still allowed to live. Along with Dakin, Merrill House formed the other half of the brick-and-concrete dorm quad surrounding the cafeteria. While Dakin took in the dregs of Hampshire housing—the Ellis Island of incoming freshmen—Merrill had a somewhat more selective, urbane reputation. About 10 percent of each incoming class was sent directly to Merrill, forgoing their Dakin initiation. It was widely believed that the school selected the worldly sophisticates of each class to go straight into Merrill’s social big leagues. It was never clear how the housing offices would have determined their selections when they barely knew our names, let alone how well we might mix at parties. Nevertheless, it was undeniable that an outsized percentage of incoming students from New York City were sent directly to Merrill.

  Built in three wings of four floors, Merrill House was also home to Hampshire’s famed clothing-optional hall. The house’s older students were an odd grab bag. While possessing the social skills necessary to mingle in Merrill’s swift currents, they were missing one or another DNA particle that would have guided them through the communal demands of mod life. Typical among these was Dirk Cahill aka Duke. In his fifth or so year at Hampshire, Duke was a paramilitary enthusiast who often threatened those who rubbed him the wrong way with complex revenge plots featuring exotic imported weaponry. Every night Duke and an oddly assorted gang of Merrill’s older students sat in the dining hall at a corner table adorned with candles, where they ostentatiously served each other from bottles of red wine.

  I limped back to campus and carried my duffel bag to the dorms with a sense of doom, remembering the trials of the last year and still not quite believing that my friends were gone; my home in 21 was no more. I was set a bit at ease, however, when I found my new hallmates on A-1 were considerably more welcoming than those who had greeted me on J-3 a year before. Among my new neighbors were Ike, a freshman from a Pennsylvania Quaker school who spent long hours strumming REM on his acoustic guitar; Sarah, a perpetually cheery Preppy Deadhead girl from Westport; Sally, a slightly sullen, borderline hippie social science student from Vermont who, I was delighted to find, had a small collection of Sinatra albums; and Frank, a working-class rocker who soon became one of my closest friends.

  While I had been hiding away in the Greenwich woods the previous year, Frank and a few other first-years had formed a postpunk band named the Butt Buddies, which had alternately become the terrors of the dorm and the gravitational center for the discontented fringe of the class. When I told Frank that I had been a member of the Supreme Dicks, he was at first disbelieving; having heard the Dicks legends, he’d thought it an ancient clan long extinguished. “No, we were very real,” I told him.

  Real as they may have been in my time, the void left by the disappearance of Jon, Ox, Steve, Arthur, Tim, and all the others from campus was constantly in my mind. I knew that Jon and Steve, at least, were probably in Northampton, but I wasn’t sure how to get in touch with them. Since May, I hadn’t received any letters with their new phone numbers or contact info. I thought to go into Northampton and ask at Bonducci’s, but in the first weeks of the semester, there had not yet been time. Steve was still, I believed, an enrolled student at Hampshire, or at least, since he hadn’t been expelled or forcibly graduated the year before, he was eligible to become a student again, so I assumed he would appear on campus eventually.

  I soon learned that one of the responsibilities of living in hall A-1 was greeting a constant parade of visitors to the Hampshire campus. Several times a day, I walked out of my room and found a stranger, or several strangers, standing in the hallway, seemingly looking for someone. If I greeted them, they would reply without hesitation, “Could I buy some pot from you?” To the entire East Coast liberal arts community and to a good percentage of the surrounding counties at the time, Hampshire College was legendary as a land where drugs grew from every tree, where dorm rooms were wallpapered in LSD, where Quaaludes were passed out at the beginning of each lecture. Throngs of drug seekers wandered onto campus every day in search of this magical kingdom of drugs and honey. When they came to campus, they generally wandered toward the dorms. And when they got to the dorms, they walked into the first door they saw, which took them to Hall A-1. Amazingly, none of the campus dealers had thought to take advantage of this walk-in trade and set up shop on our hall, but my hallmates knew where to refer the visitors and cheerily sent them on their way, later visiting the dealers they had pointed the way to and asking for a referrers’ discount.

  More disturbing than random drug seekers were the signs of a terrifying new trend in the incoming class. One afternoon in the dining hall, Zach and I met a trio of long-haired, flannel-shirted metalhead first-years, who told us they were starting a band called Power Slave. The hyperactive lads gave us a little demo of their sound, air-guitaring and drumming one of their songs on the table. But our jaws dropped when, to our horror, they began bragging about the number of classes they were taking—five apiece. They went on to explain how they planned to finish all their Div I’s in their first year.

  “I’m not sure you guys understand how this place works . . . ,” I said. “First year is supposed to be about getting to know yourself. Understanding what, you know, like, motivates you.”

  “Fuck that,” one of them bellowed. “What motivates me is to get into a decent grad school as quick as I can.” Zach and I looked at each other and wondered what sort of world we were suddenly living in.

  Another element that perversely seemed to act in our favor was that the previous year’s steady trickle of demonstrations against the injustice of the week had now exploded into a flood. Almost every night at SAGA, dinner was interrupted by some earnest group announcing an urgent community action, an all-campus demonstration against sexual orientation discrimination, or gender bias, or racism or classism or harassment. The announcements often droned on for as long as twenty minutes, ruining many a dinner, but they had the ironic effect of taking the attention off those who remained from the Supreme Dick ranks. With the campus constantly running off to one or another teach-in or sensitivity training session, mobilizing against the great isms of our times, everyone seemed to have forgotten their loyal adversaries of yesteryear, the Supreme Dicks. Those few who bothered to remember seemed to have forgotten that Zach, Nathan, and I had once been members of the campus’s most hated social club. And so we slid back into the general population unnoticed, back into lives of tranquillity and dissolution.

  By the end of September, life at Merrill House felt if not idyllic, then at least manageably annoying. The fog of marijuana smoke was persistently irritating, but I had managed to bond with enough of my hallmates that I did not live in dread of coming home every night. Frank and the Butt Buddies gathered on most nights for some sort of impromptu party. I even took steps to sign up for classes, although I realized as I did it that this was a pointless, if noble, step. What’s more, my advisor was so flummoxed with the way I had weaseled through last semester’s probation, he hadn’t bothered to renew it.

  I was even inspired to decorate. One night in the laundry room, my eye was caught by the stunning array of colors of the lint sheets removed from the dryers. I gathered up an armful, gently carried them up to the hall, and stapled them to the wall. I spent the rest of the night visiting the other laundry rooms around campus to complete my Wa
ll of Lint. Frank and Ike seemed impressed, but Sarah and Sally shrieked and demanded I tear it down. I refused, accusing them of wanting to stifle my artistic expression. Sally settled the dispute by summoning the House Office, who declared my installation a fire hazard and demanded I remove it at once. I complied but found myself muttering, “Narc,” under my breath every time Sally walked past for the next few days.

  Since my first moment back on campus, I had both prayed for and lived in fear of my reunion with Elizabeth. During the summer, in one of my lowest moments of melancholy thinking back to the lost friends of Hampshire, I poured all of my thoughts and regrets—all of them—into a letter to Elizabeth and sent it to the address she had given me. Two weeks later it came back—apparently a zip code needed more than four digits, even in San Francisco. But somehow, despite the fact that she had never received my gushings, the fact that I had set them down on paper, the fact that I myself was aware of them, put me in terror of running into her again.

  For the first few weeks our paths never crossed. I heard Frank talking about her one day and learned that she had moved into a mod in Enfield with some friends and that things had gotten “really intense out there. Those guys never go out.” At the tail end of a few drunken nights I had come close to wandering across campus and knocking on her door, but always held myself back.

  Finally, halfway through September, at a party in Prescott, I saw her. I was walking up a stairwell. The steps were wet with spilled beer. I slipped and grasped the metal handrail for balance, only to discover it was gluelike, sticky beer. Prying my hand loose, I looked up. Elizabeth was standing at the top of the stairwell, Lucy by her side, glaring down at me. I looked around to see if there was still room to run, but finding myself trapped, the crowd pushing up behind me, I pulled myself together and stumbled to the top.

  “Oh, hi, Elizabeth. Hi, Lucy,” I muttered.

  “Those stairs don’t like you,” Elizabeth said. I noticed, through my own drunken haze, that the glassy distance in her eyes was even more pronounced than it had been last spring.

  “No, they don’t,” I said. “I guess this school doesn’t like me. You know, they broke up Twenty-one.”

  They nodded. “Our mod is like . . .” Elizabeth looked at Lucy to finish the thought.

  “A magical harem.” They both burst into giggles.

  “That sounds great,” I said. “Elizabeth, I’ve . . .” I tried to find my thought. Elizabeth smiled open-eyed, while little Lucy at her side glared up at me skeptically. “I guess I wondered when I’d see you.”

  Elizabeth smiled. “When you’d see me see you seeing me.” They broke down in giggles again.

  “Well, maybe I’ll stop by,” I said, slinking away while they continued laughing.

  Three hours, a dozen drinks, and a couple pills Frank had prescribed later, I stumbled across campus to Enfield House. Her mod was lit in the dull violet light from a batik-covered floor lamp. Elizabeth lay on a couch, staring at her hand. “Hello,” she said, not bothering to move.

  Over the following months, I found myself stopping by her mod late at night on a regularly irregular basis, each time producing the same thrill of being reunited with Elizabeth and, the following day, the same confusion of not knowing what we were, or even whether Elizabeth, who barely left her mod, had any sense that this visit was not the last one and thus that there was any cumulative weight to our time together. But as many times as I swore never to return, driven by my frustration with my own inability just to “be cool” about the feelings whirling inside, I kept finding myself at every party I went to scanning the room for Elizabeth, and over and over again, late at night, wandering back to Enfield, hoping to catch her alone.

  Manageable though Merrill life seemed, quickly enough, a note of chaos found its way into my world. One evening, as I sat in the back room of the dining hall with Zach, Frank, Nathan, Sarah, and some others, we looked over at Duke’s table. One of the group’s traditions was that when one of them went for a beverage, he or she brought some back for everyone. As we looked over, a curly-haired boy in a black blazer pinned with minibuttons was carrying a tray of coffee cups back to the table, and he passed them out to his friends.

  “This has to stop,” Zach muttered.

  “I think it’s sweet,” Sarah cooed.

  “Zach, I think you got a point.” Frank nodded. “That’s no kinda behavior for a respectable dining facility.”

  The next evening ten of us lined up at the front door before SAGA opened. We raced inside and took seats at Duke’s table, settling in for a siege. Within minutes, trouble started. The mod guy and a red-haired girl walked into the back room, saw us, and stopped dead in their tracks. The mod guy’s jaw fell. He whispered something to the red-haired girl, then ran back down the hall. A couple minutes later, Duke and five others of his group strode in and marched over to us, a bloodthirsty look in their eyes.

  Duke leaned on the table, palms pressed down hard, and stared us in the eyes one by one, nodding at each of us to send the message that he was committing our faces to memory for his files. Finally he spoke. “Very. Fucking. Funny. Guys. Very. Fucking. Funny.”

  We sheepishly smiled up at him.

  “Okay, I can deal with your little stunt. But lemme tell you, if this ever happens again, every person at this table is a dead man. A. Dead. Man.”

  “That sounds fair.” Zach nodded.

  “Shut the hell up, freak,” Duke barked. He gathered his men together and carried over a neighboring table, which they positioned so that one of its corners touched one corner of our table, preserving, technically at least, the continuity of his unbroken sitting-at-the-same-table string probably dating back to the mid-seventies. We ate uncomfortably next to each other for the entire two-and-a-half-hour SAGA dinnertime. When at last Duke got up to go, he repeated his routine of looking each of us in the eyes and reminding us, “Never again. Not if you want to live.”

  With that threat on the table, the decision had been taken out of our hands; we had no choice but to line up the following night at SAGA and occupy the table once more.

  “So the rest of the dining hall won’t actually let him kill us, will they?” I asked the others.

  “No way,” Frank said. “This place has just been waiting for someone to start the revolution. Believe you me, these folks have got our backs.” Looking around the room, however, I saw a great many people laughing and pointing and, if I wasn’t wrong, shaking with glee at the thought that we were about to be mass-murdered before their eyes.

  When Duke arrived, on cue his face turned red and the smoke poured from his nostrils. The time for gentle warnings had passed. He stood at the head of the table and raged at the top of his lungs, detailing the ways he was going to massacre us, collectively and individually. Pots of boiling hydrochloric acid were mentioned; Green Beret units parachuting onto the Merrill roof were invoked. He picked up the table and knocked our trays of lasagna and SAGA’s famed “Calico Skillet” to the floor. He grabbed Zach by the shoulders and shook him. But through it all, we held our ground. I wondered how at this peace-loving school, at this peace-studying school, people could just watch idly, even contentedly, while violence and tyranny exploded in their midst. But somehow they found the resources within themselves to do just that.

  Eventually, Duke and his friends finished venting and moved on, constructing the adjoining table once again. Each time they passed behind they made sure to knock their trays against our heads. When finally they left, we let up a little cheer of victory, which the rest of the hall did not join.

  The next day, three separate people told me that Duke had outlined to them the ways in which I would soon meet my doom. To one, he explained he had miniature tear gas cartridges that were small enough to slide under my door and time-fused to explode moments later. To another, he promised that he wouldn’t actually kill us but that through his connections in the FBI and CIA he would make our names disappear from all records, erasing us as though we had never existed, m
aking life impossible—at least if ever we wanted to get credit cards. Frank and I warned the rest of our hall that someone might come in to bomb us with tear gas. Most seemed vaguely concerned and promised to keep a lookout, although I noticed the tiniest hint of a smile sneak across Sally’s face.

  In the following issue of the Merrill House newsletter, a photocopied samizdat produced by the House Office and distributed to every bathroom stall in the dorm, Duke had authored an article entitled “20 Ways to Kill Dickheads,” which outlined the various assassination methods one could use against us. The Merrill House staff handed out copies to whoever came into the office, including to Frank and me. I marveled that September wasn’t even over and already I felt completely uncomfortable in yet another dorm.

  Again, I made initial stabs at getting some academic momentum rolling. I signed up for a Tolstoy class taught by Ninotchka, and also tried out “Ways of Un-Being: Perspectives on Madness in Modern Literature,” despite an ominously dense class description in the course catalog. On the first day, the professor assigned a reading from Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge—“just to get us all on the same page, linguistically,” she said.

  That night I started reading, tearing through the pages at a breakneck pace. This is easy, I thought as I reached page ten. Then I realized I had no idea what I had just read. My eyes had walked over the pages. I had taken in the sentences but they passed over me like a mild breeze, leaving nothing behind and no memory of the experience. I tried again and after another ten pages, I shook myself off. It was as though I had gone into some kind of trance. I had no clue what it was I had just read. I resolved to focus and looked down, going very slowly over each word. I read:Moreover, the unity of the discourses on madness would be the interplay of the rules that define the transformations of these different objects, their nonidentity through time, the break produced in them, the internal discontinuity that suspends their permanence. Paradoxically, to define a group of statements in terms of its individuality would be to define the dispersion of these objects, to grasp all the interstices that separate them, to measure the distances that reign between them—in other words, to formulate their law of division.