“What the hell took you guys? We were dying up there,” Nathan complained, and they manhandled us toward the door.
Over the next weeks we filled out our repertoire, adding the Hawaii Five-O theme, the Beatles’ “All My Loving,” “California Dreamin’,” pieces of “You’re So Vain” (mostly the chorus), and the national anthem. With practice, we put together a very tight ten- to-seventy-five-minute set, complete with skits and encores. The Hampshire Happy Notes toured New England, doing impromptu shows and being chased off half the liberal arts campuses in the region. On the road with the Notes, we momentarily revived a bit of the enthusiasm that seemed to have been drained from the glum Hampshire campus. It was, however, during this tour that I sustained the one college injury that would follow me for the rest of my days. One of our skits at Williams concluded with a shoving match, the band degenerating at the end into a giant dog pile. I was trapped at the bottom of the dog pile with my back bent at such a harsh angle, I screamed and feared it would break. Twenty years later, I still feel the pain at times and beg off strenuous activities, citing my old a cappella singing injuries.
Back on campus, the Ayatollah’s case finally came before the college president, whose primary interest seemed to be getting the whole matter out of her life in the quickest way possible. Therefore, after being told that Tollah and the others were fighting the remaining sanctions and refusing to comply, with a harrumph she said she was willing to overturn the sanctions and let it go at that, gambling, no doubt, that by this time the campus had moved on and the matter could safely be brushed under the table.
However, the Ayatollah shocked her by throwing in a new element. Pointing out that his entire semester had been consumed in disciplinary hearings, himself held hostage in his mod, expecting to be expelled at any moment, and further pointing out that his parents were not remotely rich and had worked hard and saved their money to help finance his time here, the Ayatollah demanded that his semester’s tuition be refunded. An angry face-off followed, with some heated words exchanged, at the end of which the president announced she had to leave in a few days as part of a delegation that was visiting the Soviet Union and that she didn’t have time to deal with this silliness. When she returned, she declared ominously, she would straighten all this out. Whether his money would be refunded or whether he would now, after all, be expelled was left hanging in the balance awaiting an opening in the president’s schedule. And there the matter was left to sit, unresolved for the rest of the semester.
One evening shortly after this, as Tollah and I loafed around the 89 living room, a question occurred to me that I had never thought to ask. “Tell me, Ayatollah,” I said, “what did that damn graffiti say, anyway?”
“How would I know?” he answered without blinking. “Is my name Henry?”
“Of course not. Of course. But did he tell any of you that night what it was he might’ve written?”
Tollah looked at me sideways. “Well, I saw it. They’re keeping the sign in the dean’s office.”
“So what did it say?”
The Ayatollah drew a deep breath. “What it said was, ‘Lesbi ans, third world students, and cripples: Suck our tits.’ ”
I took that in and thought back on the turmoil of the past semester, pausing to note that the accused trio included one lesbian and one third-world student. I looked at him and thought about what he had endured and the uncertainty still ahead. “I guess that says it all,” I said.
“Put it on my tombstone.” Tollah nodded.
Despite all the adventures of the past two years, as spring semester wound down, the campus had become a lonely place. The Ayatollah was under virtual lockdown in our mod. Since Spring Break, Frank and I remained on distant terms, generally avoiding each other. After spending a few months milling around Northampton, Jon had largely decamped to New York, where Ox and Tim Fall had rented a ramshackle studio space in Alphabet City, accessible through a vacant lot dotted with cast-off syringes.
Zach’s path had taken him in an unexpected direction. Early in the semester, he and I had made friends with Lori, a girl who lived in a mod next to mine. Our friendship had blossomed when we learned that she was a diehard Bruce Springsteen fan, a species unknown in postpunk/pregrunge Hampshire. Intrigued, we told Lori that we, too, were devoted to the Boss and began a club reviewing the complete oeuvre. Each day we convened in Lori’s room and listened to one song, working our way chronologically from Greetings from Asbury Park all the way to Tunnel of Love; discussing the day’s song at length after we listened. Armed with two years’ worth of assimilated critical theory jargon, Zach and I held forth on the mythopoetic archetypes in Springsteen’s narratives, on the use of narrative as an instrument of control, and the subtle subversion of the sense of the other in songs like “Thunder Road.” Through the spring our friendship with Lori grew until one day, as I got a bit too expansive on the subject of “My Home-town,” she suddenly screamed.
“Wait a second!” Lori hollered. “You guys are joking! You’ve been joking this whole time!”
Grabbing a broom, she chased us out of her mod and down the stairs, refusing to speak to or acknowledge us for a week after. Somehow, apologies were made and eventually accepted and the club resumed, albeit with a more restrained dialogue. Shortly thereafter, Lori broke the news to me one afternoon that she and Zach had been “hanging out.” Theirs became the first relationship I had seen up close in my life and perhaps because it was such a defiance of gravity in those days, it lasted all throughout college and on to today, where their marriage and children persist as perhaps the one bright relic of that lost age. More importantly for me, in the meantime, their “hanging out,” whatever that was, meant more nights wandering the campus alone.
Steve Shavel and Nathan spent the semester in a desperate fight to save their philosophy professor. In past years, Hampshire might have smiled benignly on their activism, however misguided it was judged to be. In this day and age, however, their fight on behalf of europhallocentric studies could no longer be tolerated. Not only would their protests not save the professor’s job, but they found themselves in the crosshairs for having caused an outcry. In May, Nathan learned that his financial aid had been withdrawn and he thus would not be able to return to Hampshire. For Steve, however, the punishment was something once considered unthinkable—after a decade as a fixture of Hampshire College, he would be handed a diploma and sent into the world.
With Elizabeth gone, my attentions and interests were aimlessly scattered around. I spent many nights in underlit Prescott House stairwells, trying to make myself heard by scowling girls over the roar of guitar-clatter echoing off the cinder-block walls, and more and more learning, simultaneously, to look as though I didn’t care if they heard me or not. Meanwhile, the clatter and drone coming out of the tape decks and at SAGA concerts was sounding increasingly familiar, more and more like the dissonant sounds once produced here by my now departed friends.
One night at a party, Meg and I discovered we both were carrying jars of pills. In those days the campus health service office was notoriously free about dispensing prescriptions to whoever showed up reporting the most tenuous of symptoms. I had made the trip the day before and complained of headaches, for which I had been prescribed Darvon. Meg had been experiencing a bit of back pain and had been given some muscle relaxers. We traded a couple pills each and washed them down with the Jack Daniel’s I carried in my overcoat pocket. A few others standing nearby noticed our exchange and produced a few bottles of their own, offering to trade. In the end we pooled our supplies, mixed them in one big pile, and each took out a handful that we chased down with more Jack Daniel’s.
A few minutes later, I sat in a corner on the couch, surveying the spinning room. Meg and a few others of my friends thrashed against each other to a particularly angsty Sonic Youth song. I saw Nathan come in and wave; we’d had plans for a grand celebration of his final days at Hampshire. Against the far wall stood a first-year girl with a knot of black ha
ir and a black leather jacket whom I’d talked to on the beer line about how she hated that in the warm weather everyone had to pretend they were happy. I noticed her glance, and when she saw me still looking at her, she sneered in contempt, looked away, then looked back again. The room dipped and dived around her and I wondered how she stayed on her feet without holding on to anything. She’s very good, I thought, and I wanted to ask her how she did it.
I leaned forward to stand up. When I tried to wave to them I realized I couldn’t move my hand. I looked to my left at the pair of punks sitting on the couch next to me and tried to tell them that I was stuck but I realized I couldn’t speak.
I sank back into the couch and watched the room spin around me; Meg slammed her elbow into a guy’s jaw on the dance floor and he fell to the floor in pain; Nathan and a friend did shots of something at the kitchen counter; the girl in the leather jacket sneered at me some more. I could feel nothing, not my limbs, not my frozen face; even the sense of anxiousness that had plagued me more or less since I’d gotten to Hampshire, the sense of imminent doom, floated just beyond my reach. Paralyzed and trapped in my head, I looked out at my friends and wished this moment could last forever.
EPILOGUE
May 1991
My father raised his glass, beaming. “We thought you’d never make it, but nothing can stop you now!” The rest of the family joined in the toast. My mother hugged me and we all clinked glasses. I thought as I lifted the glass to my lips, Don’t count your eggs before they shake hands with the president.
At last, the family had arrived to celebrate closing the breach in their financial levees that had been my college career. However, as we sat, jubilant, at the Aqua Vitae Restaurant, there was a nagging awareness at the front of my mind that, less than twenty-four hours before graduation, three of my comrades were waiting for a meeting with the college president, where their fates, as well as mine, hung in the balance.
It impressed even me that having come so far, and being so close to actually graduating, I still hadn’t managed to leave well enough alone. After five years, one last piece of poorly planned spectacular idiocy just had to happen.
During my last year, I had finally drifted out of mainstream Hampshire life to the point where the administration no longer even knew my name. After that fateful second year when I saw the removal of most of my friends from school, I had barely even been a Hampshire student—living in apartments in Northampton, taking my classes at Smith and Amherst, going for weeks at a time without setting foot on Hampshire soil.
After the mad year of ’87-’88 the campus settled down into relative normalcy, with only the occasional halfhearted takeover disrupting the normal schedule. The message had been sent and it was reiterated in a steady drum roll of teach-ins, seminars, and impromptu lectures on the lawn. Few expulsions were needed to enforce the new era, and it would have taken someone even dumber than me to fight the times.
In 1990 the Berlin Wall came down, but at Hampshire the walls had gone up to stay. By my fifth and final year Halloween was rung in with a smallish party at SAGA, where a few dozen hippies kept the Trip or Treat flame burning while the rest of campus focused on schoolwork. The Tavern was shut down. Campus security began appearing at parties and asking students with cups of beer in their hand for ID. At the library it became hard to get a table; terminals in the computer room were reserved days in advance. Slowly but surely terms like exercise, motivation, goals, GRE, and relationship wormed their way into the vocabulary. People worked out, went on dates, and planned for their futures, and these remaining few of us who remembered the old days felt very much alone.
When I stopped by, I walked the campus like something of a ghost, my old comrades gone. New students, if asked whether they had heard of the Supreme Dicks, went completely blank; all traces of the legend washed away in just a few years. Only the graffiti in the library toilet stall lingered on, still bellowing, “Supreme Dicks Rule OK!” and below, “NO THEY DON’T,” and then “Go back to your fucking spoiled mothers you fascists!”
At Amherst College, I stumbled into a Gothic architecture class. In the first session, the professor projected a slide of a sculpture carved into one of the towers of Chartres Cathedral: a depiction of a cat, twisted and clinging desperately to a crevice, its eyes fixed with horror at the ground hundreds of feet below. Its mouth contorted in a terrible scream. “That,” the professor explained, “according to the Gothic world, is the human condition.”
I became an art history student at once and to my shock found myself attending classes and writing actual papers and, in my time, starting a Div III on the predictably cheery topic of “Images of Death in Art of the French Revolution.” At the beginning of the year, I had no idea how I would pull off writing an entire major paper, but in a mind-altering series of all-nighters in the library computer room, I managed to hammer one out that, to my astonishment, my committee accepted. And to my astonishment, I found myself ringing the bell that Steve Shavel had once nearly given his life to destroy.
So maybe it was my past calling out that made me listen the week before graduation when Patrick, a new acquaintance, laid out his plan to paint over the giant Hampshire sign at the main gates to make it read “Dartmouth College.” Somehow, twenty-four hours later, I found myself stationed inside the campus windmill in the middle of the night with a walkie-talkie, calling in the movements of security to the team at work desecrating the sign. And it was a happy reminder of my Golden Age when every part of the plan fell to pieces—the walkie-talkies didn’t work, the stencil wouldn’t fit. As I realized it had all gone wrong and fled through the woods to get off-campus, three of my comrades were nabbed and called before the president, the night before graduation.
Ultimately, I was allowed to graduate on the condition that I sign a confession the moment after I accepted my diploma, pledging to pay for damage to the sign. Since we’d used indelible paint (so they couldn’t paint over it) the bill ended up being fairly substantial; in my time after Hampshire I had no means of paying, which thus led to my transcript being withheld for years to come until the whole thing seemed, one day, to have been entirely forgotten.
Meanwhile, after a few years in Northampton and New York, Jon, Ox, and eventually Steve Shavel relocated out west to Seattle, where the Dicks were on the brink of being signed to the burgeoning Sub Pop Records for years. Sometime after they arrived, a movement that became known as “Grunge” swept out of Seattle and took America by storm. This emergent demographic was famed for their depressive, decadent lifestyle, their nihilistic refusal to champion any agenda or cause, and their devotion to completely unmotivated, ironic negativity-driven “slacking.” The living room couch became the totem of a new age. The Supreme Dicks never played again at Hampshire College and Mod 21 was gone, but our long nights of trying to decide whether we should get up and get dinner would light the world for years to come.
Explanations and Acknowledgments
Impossible though it is to believe that so many spectacular adventures could have happened in the life of one mere mortal, I can attest that they did. For readers of this newfangled genre known as memoirs it can be a chore sorting out the “That really happened” from the “He just made that up.” But I am here to say that everything in here actually occurred—or at least, this is how I remember everything having happened, and I have, in the course of writing this book, attempted to verify all these stray bits of memory whenever possible with others who were there. To the best of my recollection and reporting, every conversation recorded here actually happened pretty much as depicted. The words are reconstructed as best I can reconstruct them and shaped into dramatic form, but the gist of every conversation, the critical takeaways, I insist are as described. Every event described here within—from expulsions to stairwell parties—actually took place pretty much as recorded.
The only element I have deliberately fudged is in the names of the characters in the book, which have been changed, with critical details in order to
mask their identities. The three heroes of this book—Jon Shere, Dan Oxenberg, and Steve Shavel—are by their consent depicted by their real names. As is Her Majesty, the queen of Amherst punkdom, Ramona Clifton, whose proper place I felt it was important that history accurately record. Other than those, however, the characters have been assimilated, combined, and rearranged to ensure that no one depicted in this book is meant to represent any actual person who shared those days with me. In particular, I have taken care that the characters of the administrators—from my advisor to the college president—are in no way meant to represent the characters of actual people who held any of those jobs. What is depicted of their official duties, however, from warnings to conferences, all actually happened.
It has been a long road bringing the tale of these epic days to the masses and I have been carried on some very tall shoulders. First of all, I want to thank my agent, Daniel Greenberg, whose idea this whole thing was in the first place and who stood by it through thick and thin. A million hosannahs also be upon Monika Verma at his firm, who saw our little project through. At Gotham, thanks to the brilliant Jessica Sindler for getting me in shape and steering me through to the light and to William Shinker and Brett Valley for bringing me in from the cold. Over the decade I’ve spent writing this book, I’ve sprung out of the past to badger many of my old comrades, scraping their memories for glimpses of what was in their tape decks and on their dorm walls. Especially thanks to the gentlemen of the Supreme Dicks mentioned above as well as Tim Wilson, Colin Logins, Rachel Schaal, and Nelly Re ifler for sharing with me.
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