“We probably could’ve rented horses that would get us there faster,” Zach said. We all ignored him. Tollah stared at the road in front of the car as though it might disappear at any moment.
The service road ended after we’d traveled for about an hour and we were forced to get on the highway. Immediately, as cars raced toward us from behind and narrowly swerved away from catastrophe, it became clear that this wasn’t going to work. The Ayatollah pulled onto the gravel shoulder, where we discovered that with the hazards on, we could rumble along at our own gait unmolested. We did so for the entire twenty miles to the park, arriving at around three in the afternoon.
Zach and I convinced the group to go first to Epcot Center; he and I had seen the Magic Kingdom’s California equivalent so many times, but Epcot was still virgin soil for us. The ticket seller at the parking lot’s entrance seemed unsure of whether to let our wheezing, quaking vehicle onto Disney property, but perhaps, moved by our desperate, pleading expressions, he raised the gate.
We drifted listlessly around Epcot’s late-seventies vision of the future for several hours, none of us voicing much preference as to what rides we chose. We rode silently through a dinosaur panorama and flew across the World of Transportation. We ate lunch in the Italian pavilion of the park’s World Showcase section. Carmella was unmoved by its resemblance to her homeland. We demanded to know if she took a gondola to school every day, but she waved us away. “This is like me asking if you have a hamburger for your mother and father every day.”
Finally, as the sun set, we boarded the World of Imagination ride, on which a mystical sprite named Figment teaches visitors about the fun they can have just thinking things up. At some especially wondrous point, a camera secretly snaps a picture of each car; at the ride’s end the photo is projected forty feet high onto a giant screen. As we approached the conclusion, we saw the pictures of our neighbors’ cars displayed before us. Children clasped their hands together with delight, wide-mouthed adults pointed at the Wonders in amazement. And then our picture went up. The five of us sat as far from each other as we could get, each staring into an endless void, absorbed in a silent prayer for death to come quickly. We studied ourselves in the picture looking sadder and more lost than we had ever imagined we could feel, and we knew it was time to think about going home.
We were down to our last hundred or so dollars, enough to buy us another week at Jellystone, but no longer enough for bus tickets. School started in three days, and if we didn’t head north right away, not only would we be late getting back for the new semester, we’d be making the journey without any money in our pockets. Remarkably, the more desperate our straits became, the more unthinkable it was to call home. Perhaps a week before, we still might have had the pluck to pour our hearts out to our parents and beg for help, but after ten days stuck at Jellystone, the humiliation was now too profound for any of us to imagine fessing up to it in a tearful call.
“If I try to explain this to my father he will pull me out from America and never let me come back,” said Carmella.
Amazingly, it was the Italian herself who had the idea. Somewhere along the way, she suddenly recalled, Carmella had heard of something called drive-aways. “These people,” she said, “who want the cars they have to go somewhere else, they give them to you to enjoy for your drive.” It took us a few hours to sort out what she was getting at, but when we finally did, we raced to the snack bar and bought a local newspaper. Throwing open the clas sifieds we found, sure enough, a little section labeled “Drive Aways” where car owners advertised for people to drive their cars to distant locales, some of them even offering to pay the driver’s gas and expenses. Our hearts raced as we scanned the listings, “Drivers needed to Alabama . . . Colorado . . . Texas . . . ,” and sank when we saw not one of the damned listings was for a point north.
Over hot dog dinner, we faced up to the inevitable. It was Frank who put the idea on the table.
“First thing tomorrow, I’ll be by the side of the highway with my thumb out. Just me and the road and I’ll see you chumps later.”
Instead of making fun of him, the rest of us sadly nodded. We had come to the point where Frank’s crazy notions sounded like good sense. We were going to have to split up and hitch our ways back to school. Visions of gang dismemberment at the hands of speed-crazed truckers danced before us all, but we swallowed deeply and resigned ourselves to what we hoped would be fairly quick deaths, compared to the slow journey to the grave looming before us at Jellystone.
And then Frank threw out, “And I’m taking the Italian.” His Man of the Road skills kicking in, he had beaten the rest of us to figuring what an advantage it would be to have Carmella when you were trying to flag down a truck. We spent the rest of the night bickering over who got her and who would have to carry the tent all the way home.
The next morning, we arose to face our doom. But before setting off, the Ayatollah and I went to take one last desperate look at the drive-away column in the paper. The snack bar was just opening. We flipped through the classified pages, very slowly this time—to postpone extinguishing the last flame of our hopes. But when we got to the column, we saw something that made us shudder in fright. The Ayatollah and I stared, not daring to believe our eyes.
Before us danced a tiny one-inch ad, “Driver needed for Boston, Massachusetts.” We grabbed the paper and raced for the pay phone.
Tollah spoke to the owner, who said he’d already received four calls that morning and had told them all that the first person to get to his house could take the car. The house was about ten miles away straight down the highway. I looked to Tollah. “You better take the Italian,” I said. He nodded and rushed off to grab her and together they raced to the highway, and raised their thumbs high.
Two hours later, Tollah and Carmella returned in a two-door Accord hatchback.
“How the hell are we supposed to fit in that thing all the way to school?” Zach asked. But somehow we did. The backseat was a tiny shelf, not big enough to squeeze the family poodle into, but in rotation, three of us sat there all the way back to Massachusetts. We played local radio most of the way. Frank and I didn’t speak to each other.
We made the drive in a straight shot, stopping only for gas and fast food. Thirty or so hours later, we drove onto the campus, still blotched with patches of snow. Mercifully, there was no one around to ask how the trip had gone as we parked outside Prescott House dorm.
“You going to do anything tonight?” I asked the others. “There’s probably a party. . . .”
“I think I’m going to pass,” Zach said. Everyone nodded and grabbed their bags out of the car. Muttering terse good-byes, we slunk back to our rooms to sleep.
Frank and I never repaired our friendship after that trip. Pre-trip, on campus, I’d always appreciated his Man of the Road routine, seeing it as a charming eccentricity. I couldn’t have imagined that one day it would annoy me so much it would drive a wedge between us. Nor could I imagine that a fight over a pillow would be the last real conversation we’d ever have, its wounds never quite healing, as life sent us down separate paths until, finally, we never spoke to each other again.
But before we headed down those roads, two more months of Hampshire loomed. Spring Break may have kicked some of the fight out of us, but the rest of campus returned, eager and licking their chops, to pick up where they had left off. Unfinished business would be attended to before anyone got out of there alive.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Twilight of the Gods
We crawled back from Spring Break bloodied, broken, and bowed. But while we came creeping in like a quintet of very exhausted lambs, the rest of the school roared back to campus eager to resume the battle and deliver the coup de grâce to intolerance, imperialism, and all other ills that had kept humanity in bondage for so long.
Within days, hours even, of returning to campus we were warned anew that oppression was still lurking in every corner. Vigilance was the order of the day. With all those
eyes on the lookout, it didn’t take long for oppression to reveal itself. In short order, the Community Council itself was rocked by a scandal involving one of its own elected members. Council Member Alex had been an active, if somewhat low-key, supporter of the demonstrations and occupation. Unfortunately for him, however, he had the habit of dabbling as an amateur cartoonist. He also had the extremely poor judgment to bring his talent to bear upon his elective duties. Feeling whimsical at a marathon Council meeting, Alex doodled and distributed a cartoon satirizing the meetings, in what he thought was a gentle, loving homage. Seconds after the copies left his hand, he found himself summoned before a special session, accused of an act of racial and gender hatred thrown in the very face of the Council. The problem with Alex’s cartoon, he was told, was its portrayal of the Council president, Cynthia, an African-American woman. Although she was depicted as something of a heroine in the cartoon’s text, the rendering of her had drawn on bigoted stereotypes; specifically Alex had drawn Cynthia with breasts that were disproportionately large—an ancient means of mocking the African-American woman.
There followed a lengthy Council session in which the flesh-and-blood proportions of Cynthia’s breasts were compared to the cartoon version of Cynthia’s breasts. While it was agreed that real Cynthia’s breasts were large, it was argued, they were not so ridiculously large as their hateful cartoon depiction. Alex urged, realizing that he was sinking in quicksand with every word he spoke, that he had intended the objects in question to be realistically large, not comically large. At the meeting’s end, he was duly removed from office as a Community Council member.
Meanwhile, the deliberations over the Ayatollah’s case were renewed. Shortly after Spring Break the school’s Judicial Council—comprised of a mix of elected students, faculty, and administrators—decided to impose four sanctions on Tollah and the other alleged offenders in the late graffiti incident (pending expulsion, which was above the powers of the Council). First, they were ordered to write a letter of apology to the community. Second, they would undergo racial sensitivity training. Third, they would perform some hundreds of hours of community service for the school; and fourth, they would make financial restitution for the property damaged.
They immediately appealed these to the college president, who they were told would not be able to meet with them for several weeks. Pending that meeting, however, they were ordered to write their apology to the campus at once—the campus’s need to hear their contrition was so overwhelming that it could not wait until the president got around to considering whether the punishments were just. Warned more or less at gunpoint that the direst consequences would fall upon them if they refused to comply, the three wrote and signed a letter expressing regret for all disturbances to the community and their commitment to fighting oppression with every remaining ounce of breath. A copy of the letter was delivered to every student and faculty member’s mailbox and was roundly considered to have gone not nearly far enough to repay all the damage they had done.
In the week after Spring Break I received some jarring news. One afternoon at the snack bar I ran into my friend Emily, who was part of Elizabeth’s circle. Delicately, trying not to show my hand, I asked her how Elizabeth was doing.
“You don’t know?” she said. “Elizabeth is gone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her father came and took her home.”
“Is she coming back?”
“I don’t think so. Not this year.”
“What happened?”
Emily sighed. “Things have gotten really bad out there. Nobody’s been outside for weeks. And Elizabeth was kinda out there to start with. She just got crazy. I think she lost it completely.”
I tried to sort out how this made me feel but came away confused. Was I relieved I wouldn’t have to deal with the two-year-old Elizabeth question anymore, or sad that it had never been resolved? Should I have said more to her, or not said anything at all? Should I have pulled her out and rescued her from her drift into chaos this year? Or, more romantic-sounding at the time, should I have joined her in it?
Although I knew she had left and wasn’t coming back anytime soon, it was inconceivable that there wouldn’t be another chance for me to be with Elizabeth, that she could actually disappear from my life. For the next few years I heard drips of information about Elizabeth—that she had moved to San Francisco and then away from the city, that she was working on farms somehow—and then eventually I stopped hearing anything at all. Little could I have imagined then, at age nineteen, that it would be another twenty years, more years than I had lived at that point, before I spoke to her again.
We had come to a place where we dared not move a muscle. After two years, it had gotten through my thick skull that Hampshire was not a place to “try anything.” With the campus under siege, with people watching their words in the dining hall, with Tollah and the others under permanent interrogation, with glares of open hatred greeting us down every hallway, it was time to take off-campus what scraps of energy and pride we still had left. And so we dedicated our attentions to our neighboring schools.
No one expects trouble to come in the form of an a cappella group.
Sometime in March, Tollah and a few others were roving the Smith College campus during Spring Weekend—a two-day festival of parties, teas, and formal dances all across the school. Any Spring Weekend house party worth its weight in taffeta would host a performance by at least one Ivy League a cappella group. Each year, the Whiffenpoofs, the Katzenjammers, the Kroko diloes, the Counterparts, and the Din and Tonics descend upon Smith for two days of overdressed revelry. On the second night outside a party, Tollah and some others got in a scuffle with the Princeton Tigertones, which somehow led to Tollah shouting in their coach’s face that “Hampshire a cappella could kick your ass any day of the week,” and challenging them to a face-off in the Smith quad against the celebrated—and nonexistent—Hampshire Happy Notes.
At midnight, responding to the emergency summons from the Ayatollah, six of our friends threw on their best flea market blazers and raced to Smith, where they stood on a lawn waiting for hours for the Tigertones, who never arrived. But no matter—the Hampshire Happy Notes were born.
The next weekend a dozen of us, including Nathan and Roger, piled into Janet’s van. Somehow the specter of us got up in blazers and cheap ties seemed more ghastly than our usual day dress of mohair sweaters and wool hunting coats. We set a course for Hampshire’s closest neighbor, the cloistered Mount Holyoke College, where we had been tipped off that a formal tea was under way. In the van on the way over we tried to think of some songs that we all knew the words to; Beatles songs and TV show themes seemed to be our entire common frame of reference.
Piling out of the van on Mount Holyoke’s foreboding Gothic campus, we were momentarily awed and hushed. Finding our way to the right house, we poured through the doorway, all twelve of us spilling into a candlelit room where a hundred or so students in dresses, pearls, blue blazers, and rep ties tittered quietly with glasses of white wine in hand. As we entered, the girl at the door, checking names against a guest list, gasped in alarm. “Excuse me, can I help you?”
“Hey, no problem,” Tollah glibly replied, glancing at his watch. “We’re the Happy Notes and looks like we’re a little late. But we’ll just go right ahead and get set up.”
We flooded in as panic spread across the girl’s face. “The Happy Notes? Who did you talk to?”
“I forget her name. . . . The activities chair? Naomi, maybe?”
“Harriet?”
“Exactly, Harriet. Now you’ll want to stand back, we’re gonna go ahead and get started.” He called out to the room. “Hey, everybody, the Happy Notes are here! Come gather round!” Exchanging quizzical looks, the crowd dutifully assembled, many taking seats on the floor in front of where we stood in a single-file line. If you ever have to rob Fort Knox, do it disguised as an a cappella group. When an a cappella group is announced, society’s defense mechan
isms crumble. Nothing in humanity’s training teaches it to be suspicious of traveling a cappella groups, even if the head of the social committee hasn’t been properly notified by the activities chair.
The Ayatollah took the center stage. “Hi, everyone. As I’m sure you know, we’re the Hampshire Happy Notes here to do a few of our most treasured hits for you. We want to start out now with a little number that will take you back, way back before the Cold War to the dark days of World War Two, the big one. Close your eyes now and picture yourself in a simpler time. You’re a colonel in the U.S. Army. You’ve been captured behind enemy lines. And you’re taken to a magical place called Stalag Seventeen. That’s right, join in if you know the words, this is ‘Hogan’s Heroes’.”
We broke into a vocalized version of the instrumental theme. “Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-be-ba-bep-ba. Bop-be-bop-be-baaa-bop-be-bop-be-baaa.” Our first time through the verse the crowd amazingly was with us, laughing and clapping along. The second time, we still drew polite smiles. By the fourth round, people were shifting restlessly. Mercifully, Tollah shut it down after eight verses. Somewhere in the middle of the next song—a bizarrely out-of-tune rendition of “You’re So Vain” where two-thirds of the group mumbled through the unknown lyrics of the verses—the crowd began to give each other nervous looks, the first hints of recognition that something terrible was happening here. The mixer had been hijacked and none of its planners knew how to respond, nor what ghastliness lay ahead.
Tollah introduced a song by “those lovable mop-tops” and led us into “Helter Skelter” complete with a mad, chaotic medley at the end. As we launched into “Kumbaya” we could see, at the back of the room, our hostesses conferring and racing for the phone. The group had agreed that we wouldn’t leave the stage until security came, but nineteen verses into “Kumbaya” and Tollah was struggling for more verbs (“Someone’s fishing, Lord; Someone’s walking, Lord; someone’s whittling, Lord”). When security finally showed up, it felt to us, at least, like they had arrived in the nick of time to save us before our voices collapsed completely.
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