“So that’s what happened to him. I want a nest, too.”
“We thought you found a place to sleep already,” John said with some impatience.
Topher continued to stand over us, on my side of the bed. Since I was still mostly dressed, I wiggled over closer to John, and told him to get in bed. He eagerly dropped his jacket to the floor, kicked off his shoes, and got under the covers.
Topher was still a bundle of LSD energy, and his squirming made me giggle. Though we were lying in bed, sleep seemed as out of reach as reality. I was still tripping, too. Only John seemed able to lay still, and he was not pleased with our childish chit-chat.
“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas,” Topher said, barely straight-faced. In the early morning light, I could still only make out a small ring of brown in his otherwise darkly dilated eyes. Tripping eyes.
“How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know,” I responded in my best Groucho Marx. Even John laughed, his side of the bed shaking as he tried to fight off a response.
“Damn, you are impossible to stump,” Topher said. He was laying on his back, his arms folded under his head. John had now turned back to us, and was also laying on his back, with me cuddled up to him, uncomfortably close in this chemically-induced “yuck” at being physical, but definitely enjoying the mental gymnastics possible when you let your mind go. Though I had my back to Topher, I was able to turn back to laugh and talk as the thoughts bubbled in a silly way to the surface.
But John only had so much patience for it all, and after a few minutes, for him, enough was enough.
“Seriously, dude,” he said with a huff. “You can’t find anywhere else to sleep?”
“I was perfectly at home in the hammock outside,” he responded smartly. “Until someone started shooting at me!”
“They’re only BB’s,” John said, annoyed.
“Still, target practice with a hammock underneath. That’s seriously deranged even for you guys,” Topher wriggled and squirmed and could not get comfortable.
“Boys,” I stated sharply. I was starting to feel sleepy and I wanted them to shut up.
“I’m still tripping,” Topher whined.
“So are we,” John said. “But we’d like to pretend we can sleep. Why don’t you go watch TV or something?”
“I don’t want to watch TV.”
“Take my car and go home,” John finally said, exasperation clear in his voice. “Just seriously, get out of our bed.”
“Fine,” he said, sitting up and pulling his shoes on dramatically on the edge of the bed. “But I’m taking this with me.” And he plucked the baseball cap, his baseball cap, the baseball cap I had forgotten that was sitting backwards on my head, off my head. The tactile memory of the band remained. He put it on, facing forward, took his jacket, and sneered at Patrick, who lay snoring in his nest. He looked back at John, who was sitting up in bed now, keys in hand, which he had plucked from the drawer of his nightstand. He tossed them to Topher, across the room. He snatched them out of the air, and though he didn’t want to, he smiled.
"My mother thanks you. My father thanks you. My sister thanks you. And I thank you,” he said dramatically as he walked out the door.
“Yankee Doodle Dandy!” I cried out, knowing he was laughing as hard as me as he trotted up the stairs and out the door.
After about five solid minutes of acid-laced giggling about this game of movie quotes we had going, and trying to explain to John how we could both have so much interest in these “awful and boring movies” with no special effects or graphic sex, we conceded he just didn’t get it, on that one. And that we were both over tired and in need of sleep. By the time the sun was fully up, and most normal people were greeting their late and lovely September morning, John’s room was silent. Sleep was dreamless and heavy, and most welcome.
Chapter Fifteen
There are many ways to bear witness to something larger than our own petty, individual lives. One of these ways is to experience October in New England. It is like living in a Monet, like giving lungs to Vivaldi. It is drinking from a witch’s brew of smoky smells and corduroy textures. It is the height of perfection, and gone so quickly all that remains is a sense of it, like a dream you can’t quite recall, but that affects you nonetheless.
October the year I was a sophomore in college passed just as brilliantly as any other. I was discovering that the two classes conducted in large lecture halls were a complete waste of time. There was no way to take attendance when there was over one hundred students in the seats. As long as I followed the syllabus, did the reading, and showed up for any guest speakers, quizzes, or exams, it was disturbingly easy to get B’s. So I was basically down to a one day week, and I was even phoning it in with my news writing class, my major for Christ’s sake. My professor noted that I would probably prefer feature writing over covering hard news, and I could not have agreed more, except that I really didn’t even like the feature writing all that much, either. I didn’t want to call people up and interview them, or worse, have to go talk to them in person. It felt weird. I spent most of the semester writing stories she could have no way of knowing if my sources were for real or not. I guess you could say I was taking two fiction writing courses that semester.
On the mornings I wasn’t sleeping until noon at John’s house, I could be found sleeping in my room at Bristol. That was the month I started spending more and more time in my own room, and less time at John’s. There were many evenings when I’d wait for him to get out of his late labs, having been promised dinner or a movie at the SUB. Most of them ended before they began, with a phone call telling me he’d skipped class, just woken up, and was going to stay home instead of driving out to campus.
A phone call if I was lucky. I was dealing with hall phones and a gaggle of freshmen girls again. There were nights when I did not know what happened to him at all, though I soon learned not to fully believe him when he told me he’d see me later, and started doing things on my own.
I spent more and more time with Topher. Lunch, dinner, after-dinner hanging out. Sometimes Patrick would hang out with us and we would find creative places to get high. College Wood became a favorite spot, on the bridge just down from the dam.
“So, what the hell is going on with John?” Patrick asked Topher and me on one such night on the bridge. “He seems different this year.”
“I don’t think the house is good for him,” I offered. “It’s constant chaos, and he’s never been one to practice much self-discipline.”
“Yeah,” Topher began, lighting another round. “But I see Ben and Jared on campus all the time. Aaron is in one of my classes, and he’s always there. Do you ever just bump into John?”
We all sat in silence, passing the pipe, thinking.
“C’mon Greer,”Patrick pushed. “You know him better than us. Does he seem ok to you?”
“I think it’s just John being John,” I replied. I shrugged and thought a moment more. “You know how he loves to be dark. Ben told me he cleans the house in the middle of the night, while the rest of them are sleeping.”
“And that doesn’t seem strange to you?” Patrick snorted.
“Strange? Yes. Abnormal, no way.” I passed the empty pipe back to Topher. “He’s an only child, living with four other guys. I think a transition period is probably pretty normal. Besides, it definitely can’t hurt for that house to get cleaned every once in a while, even if it is at three in the morning.”
***
Ok. There was a bit more to the situation than I was willing to talk about with Topher and Patrick. Even though I spent four or five nights a week at his house, John and I had sex only once, maybe twice, per week. And we were nineteen years old, with plenty of freedom, birth control, and intoxication. While I heard all kinds of stories about him staying up all night on the nights I was not there, when I was there, he’d fall asleep before eleven. We hardly did anything but hang out, get high. Hang out, get high.
I felt like a failure. I
was losing whatever allure I once had for him. I wavered between an all-consuming need to make him see me again, and anger that he could make me feel so weak. On the nights I spent at Cloud 9, I felt like such a girl, like a black hole of need when I saw how Jared and Wayne sneered at my presence. I knew that they gave John a hard time about his girlfriend being around all the time.
I took the nights John blew me off very personally, but never said anything. I’d tell him I understood, that I had a paper to write anyway, that I already had plans with Topher. None of it seemed to faze him.
Gwen tried to get me to open up. She would invite one or two girlfriends over and they would talk about their own boy problems over pizza and rum and cokes. Instead of seizing the opportunity to make some real female friends, I would usually excuse myself after about fifteen minutes of their chatter, escaping to Topher’s room, or the library.
“What do they know?” I’d ask myself, nose buried in some book. John was supposed to be my Heathcliff. Falling out of love never happened on the moors.
***
Halloween that year gave us a number of choices of parties to attend, and around Cloud 9, there were plenty of psilocybin mushrooms to go around. Mushrooms. Another first.
I stood in the living room at Cloud 9, staring at the shriveled, sad looking brown things in my hand.
“I’m supposed to just eat these?” I asked with some disdain.
“I could eat them for you,” John offered, fidgeting with his gray turtleneck.
He had been decidedly uninvolved when it came to picking out a costume that year. But when everyone pressured him not to be an asshole and have some fun, he dumped the responsibility of his costume on me. Payback is a bitch, or so they say.
“Why couldn’t I be the Wizard?” he whined.
“Why couldn’t you say something three weeks ago?” I placed the mushrooms on the counter and helped him into his cardboard vest and began to tie it in the back. “Topher and I worked on this damn costume all week.”
“But the Tin Man?”
“Perfect, isn’t it?” I asked. He sneered at me and shoved a handful of mushrooms in his mouth. He grumbled.
“If it was perfect, you wouldn’t be Dorothy,” he joked, though his reference to the Wicked WItch wasn’t all that funny. I ignored the insult when I saw Ben approach.
“Here,” Ben said to me. “Dorothy! Love it, love the pigtails,” he continued, grinning and tugging on one of my short braids. ”If you eat the shrooms in a peanut butter sandwich, they’re better. I’ll trade you.” And he handed me a half sandwich of white bread, peanut butter, and hallucinogenic mushrooms. I swept my pile off the counter and gladly made the trade.
I felt giddy when he looked me in the eyes and grinned and our hands touched in the exchange. He was dressed in a white, button-down shirt, open to the middle of his chest, revealing a long, beaded necklace. Jim Morrison, from The Doors. His black jeans fit him perfectly; he looked really good walking away to make himself another sandwich.
“Thanks,” I called after him, eating my sandwich and feeling it in my knees when he turned and grinned at me and went about joining the guys in the other room. I don’t think John even noticed the exchange. But Topher did. The scarecrow may not have had a brain, but he was no dummy.
Sitting in the backseat of John’s car on our way to our first party, Topher and I knew that Patrick, dressed all in brown as our group’s cowardly lion, and John were too absorbed in whatever it was they were talking about to pay attention to us. We always felt like kids along for the ride, just lucky to tag along.
“People are strange, when you're a stranger, faces look ugly when you're alone,” he sang vacantly, staring out the window of the back seat into the darkness zooming past us. I sat back and closed my eyes, feeling the warm haze of a mushroom trip kick in.
***
The party was your typical, off-campus, two-keg affair. College kids must come in a close second to grade-schoolers when it comes to enthusiastically greeting All Hallow’s Eve. There were yuppies in business suits, superheroes of all sorts, Jesus, Elvis, and Marilyn in droves. Most were homemade concoctions, thrown together and named at the end. More than one guy came dressed as a woman.
John set about quickly getting drunk. It didn’t matter that we were tripping, and I didn’t much care. It meant that I had more freedom. I couldn’t remember the last time I found his drunkenness “cute.” Trouble was, I was so obsessed with him losing interest in me that I did not notice my waning interest in him. I thought I was motivated by his lack of attentions, instead of propelled.
Standing in the kitchen of the small apartment on the second floor, I sipped at a beer and looked around at all the costumes. I’ve always been a fan of the holiday, and appreciate a creative attempt at dressing up. Conversation wrapped around me, but didn’t touch me. I was lost in my own head. In my daze, my eyes happened to rest upon Ben, deep in conversation with some chippie I did not know. She was dressed as Wonder Woman, with half her ass hanging out of her leotard.
I looked across the room at John. He was busy taking credit for his costume from Raggedy Ann. I tried to place her, but it is difficult on Halloween. Just some girl. I wondered how long it would take for him to notice his girlfriend was in the same room.
Maybe it was the mushrooms, but it was hard to really care. I felt that I should care, but it was difficult to muster the energy for it. I looked back to Ben, still in conversation with the slutty superhero.
Looking up and catching my stare, he smiled one of his trademark, butter-melting smiles, and gave me a slow, Jim Morrison wink, before returning his attention back to Wonder Woman. I was glad for the stability of the counter behind me. I’m not sure if it was the costume or the chemistry, but I actually swooned.
***
The rest of the night went as any other hallucinatory, Halloween night should. We wandered from the original party to another party down the street. Topher walked with his arm hooked in mine. We sang songs from The Whiz, and laughed as Patrick stumbled down the street, calling out “Ain’t it the truth? Ain’t it the truth?” in his Cowardly Lion costume. John walked up front, taking long strides, talking mostly to himself.
At one point on our walk, Topher bent down to pick something up in the darkness. He stood hunched over in the small wash of light coming from a distant porch lamp. Then he turned to me.
“Hold out your hand,” he said. Our friends continued on their way, oblivious to our delay.
I held out my right hand, palm side up, and waited. Topher placed a small, round object in the center of my hand. It was cool and heavy for its size. I held it up in the outlying light.
“Is it a marble?” I asked, squinting my eyes to make out the colors.
“Best I can tell,” he said. We resumed walking, no longer arm-in-arm.
“Thank you,” I said holding on to the tiny gesture in my hand.
“Don’t mention it,” he answered.
John was so far out in front, he failed to notice, and even if he had, I don’t think he was in any condition to care.
***
Now, I would not have brought up the marble if it didn’t play a part in our story. Funny the way some things happen.
The marble, I must say, is a lovely specimen of tiger’s eye. Gorgeous ribbons of gold, honey, and espresso-brown, intermingling in a silky luster. I still have it, in a box in the top shelf of my closet. On the night Topher found and gave it to me, I found it to be the perfect mushroom companion. Smooth and round and hard in my hand, easy to turn over and over with absent-minded tenacity. I did not drop it once in all the hustle and bustle of an overcrowded three-floor house party, or during a squished ride back to Cloud 9, where I had to sit across the laps of three guys in the backseat of John’s little hatchback.
I did, however, drop it in John’s bedroom, as I was removing my costume and preparing for an uneventful night’s sleep. John had decided to have “one more” beer out on the deck with the guys, after letting Tophe
r and Patrick take his car back to campus.
I was on my belly, halfway under his bed, with my head turned to the left. The dim light in the room made it hard to see under the queen sized bed. I swept my right arm up and over my head, slowly feeling for the small object.
“Got it,” I mumbled to myself when at last I retrieved my tiny treasure. It was when I was pulling my arm back to my side to shimmy back out into the room that I scraped my arm against a stack of magazines.
About ten minutes later, John stumbled into the room.
“Hey, Sweetness, how are you feeling?” he slurred, trying to bend down to remove his boots without falling over. It was no good.
“Like a house fell on me,” I answered, disgusted by his sloppy display.
He removed his boots from his sitting position on the floor, then struggled to get up, holding onto the corner of his chest of drawers. He made a loopy stumble forward toward the bed, then stopped short, and actually stood up straight.
“Oh, shit,” he groaned. His slicked back hair was breaking free from the gel, and falling forward in stiff, stretched out curls.
“I think I like the farm girl bent over the tractor best myself,” I started, kneeling on the bed, and pointing to a photo in one of the magazines I had spread out. His bed was covered, corner to corner, in porn.
“Though I can see what you like about this one, in the dog collar and leash. She’s so dark and scary, like Abby with a boob job.”
“Knock it off, Greer,” he finally said weakly, making a move to gather the evidence.
“Oh, no,” I said, placing my hand smack down on two pilots servicing one flight attendant. “No, I’m enjoying this way too much for you to take it away now. My favorite part is thinking about all those glorified speeches about how demeaning the adult industry is to women. Remember those? When there were real girls around to impress? Ones who don’t just, oh, I don’t know, get so intimate with the contents of a toolbox on a first date?”
Beware of Love in Technicolor Page 18