All the floors were oak, even in the kitchen, which was wide enough to hold a full-size kitchen table. The floors were a little worse for wear, but, after years in homes and apartments with wall-to-wall carpeting, we found them beautiful, anyway. The walls had recently been painted off-white throughout, so we wouldn’t have to repaint unless we chose to.
All four bedrooms were upstairs, the two larger ones in front, both with bay windows, the two smaller ones in back, one on either side of the bathroom. Jonathan and I insisted that Claire and Tony have the largest bedroom, then we flipped a coin for the next largest one, which adjoined theirs—oddly enough, with an inner door connecting them, along with the standard doors that led from each room out into the hall. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to win the toss or not. The thought of being separated from Claire only by the thickness of a door excited me, but I wasn’t sure I could bear overhearing her and Tony making love. I left my fate up to the toss of a coin. I called heads, and heads it was.
The house was so large that, if it hadn’t been for a stroke of luck, we wouldn’t have had enough furniture to make it looked lived-in. Claire had mentioned the house to a patient at the nursing home who was quite fond of her. The old woman lit up as Claire described it, saying it sounded just like the house she’d lived in all her life, until she’d come to the nursing home. She told Claire that she’d stored every stick of furniture from the house and insisted that Claire have it all.
Claire demurred, it being against the rules for staff to accept gifts from patients, other than simple things, such as flowers or candy. But the woman told her son, who approached Claire and insisted he would clear it with the management. He also told Claire there was considerably less furniture than his mother remembered, much of it having been sold at auction to help pay her nursing home bills. But there was a dining room set, a double bed, an easy chair, a rocking chair, assorted side chairs, a couple fake Oriental rugs, a phone table, a few lamps, and two end tables—enough to fill out our house in a way we never could have afforded to do on our own.
Working hard together, we had the furniture in place and most of the boxes unpacked by suppertime. We bought pizza and beer and collapsed in the living room. Kolvacik rolled a few j’s, which mellowed us out considerably. It felt marvelous to be in our own house. I could tell that Kolvacik was jealous of the arrangement. I’d heard from Claire he’d nearly backed out of marrying Mina at the last minute, and he was already chafing under the restrictions of domestic life. He had told Tony if he’d had the chance to move in with them before the wedding arrangements had gotten so far along, he would have chosen that. Neither he nor Mina had looked too happy all day, and they seemed to be smoking a little too enthusiastically that evening.
As we sat around chatting, I got to know Jonathan a bit. He was tall and gangly—he seemed to fold himself into a chair when he sat down—with long red hair and a thin red beard. He was a serious sort of guy, though not without a sense of humor. He didn’t smoke with us, and he didn’t say much, but if you addressed him directly, he answered without reticence.
I knew he worked with Kolvacik out at the Harley-Davidson plant and that he’d just transferred from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to UW-Milwaukee the previous semester as a political science major. I asked him why he’d made the unusual transfer, Madison being much better known. He said he was interested in political organizing and that there was a lot more to be done on the Milwaukee campus than in Madison. He was certainly right about that. UW-Milwaukee had a well-deserved reputation for being apolitical—or apathetic, if you wanted to look at it that way.
Jonathan had grown up dreaming of going into traditional politics— he was from Boston and was weaned on the exploits of John F. Kennedy— but he’d lost interest in that. He said, somewhat vaguely, he was searching for alternative political solutions. Being from Boston, he had no family in the area, which was what had attracted him to living in the house with Tony, Claire, Jonah, and me. He’d lived in a group house in Madison and liked the family feeling of it.
It wasn’t long before the work and excitement of the day—not to mention the beer and the dope—started to get to us all and conversation began to fade. Jonathan checked out early and went up to his room. I wasn’t far behind. As I went up the stairs, Claire and Tony were announcing their intention to go to bed, too. Kolvacik protested, calling them wimps and party-poopers in a futile attempt to get them to stay up. Mina told him to cool it and get his coat. The last thing I heard before closing my bedroom door was Kolvacik calling her a bitch and telling her to get off his back.
It felt good to be in the quiet of my own room, though I always felt a little insecure being alone when I was stoned. I turned on the standing lamp beside my bed to warm things up. Having less furniture than anyone, I’d inherited the lamp from Claire’s old lady friend, along with her bed, one of her rugs, and her rocking chair. I sat down in the chair and started to rock. If I rocked too fast, I felt dizzy, but if I rocked slowly, it felt soothing. My mind wandered off, and sometime later—five minutes or half-an-hour; I couldn’t say—I heard Tony and Claire enter their room. They were discussing Tim and Mina, and I was a little shocked at how clearly their voices carried through the connecting door. None of us was going to have much privacy.
“I still say Tim never should have married Mina,” said Claire.
“What the hell could he do?” asked Tony. “Her old man would’ve kicked the shit out of him if he’d called it off.”
“Oh, you’re exaggerating. Sure, he would’ve been pissed off, but he wouldn’t have beaten Tim up. That wild man act of his is phony—it’s like when a gorilla beats his chest.”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to cross a gorilla!”
“You know what I mean, Tony. It’s all for show. He’s never hit anybody in his life.”
“How about shot?”
Claire ignored him. “I just hate to see them so miserable,” she said. “They were both such happy people before.”
“Well, nobody ever said marriage was easy.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I have to tell you what it means?”
“I guess not … Do you wish we weren’t married, Tony?”
“Naaah. It’s okay. No marriage is perfect.”
“Geez, thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Well, are you going to contradict me?”
Claire didn’t answer. “I didn’t think so,” said Tony.
I cleared my throat.
“Hey,” said Claire, a different tone in her voice, “you don’t suppose he can …” I knew she must be pointing toward the door that connected our rooms.
“Maybe,” said Tony. “We probably ought to put something over it. I don’t want to talk anymore tonight, anyway. I’m beat.”
I listened to the muted sounds of them undressing and their footsteps going to the bathroom and back, in turn. Finally, I heard the click of the bedroom light switch and the soft sound of their bodies sliding in under the sheets. Suddenly, I was hot with jealousy and desire. I wanted to be the one to share late-night chats with Claire. I wanted to be the one to slide under the sheets with her. I was tired of being on the outside. And then I was just tired. Without bothering to visit the bathroom, I stripped and crawled into bed, falling asleep almost instantly to the whoosh of cars passing by on Downer Avenue.
I ALWAYS THINK OF THOSE next few months, from January through April, as the party months (somewhat guiltily, I must admit—I’d planned to become more politically active, but once my butt wasn’t on the line anymore, I let it slide). Due in part to Kolvacik’s influence, our house became the center of nightly gatherings of friends and acquaintances. I got the feeling he spent more time at our house than he did at his own—without Mina, as often as not—and he often brought his buddies along. Tony and Claire never complained to him, although I heard them complaining to one another, late at night, sometimes. Jonathan never complained, either—he was usually off at one poli
tical meeting or another until all hours. And I was having too good a time to complain.
I enjoyed the constant availability of marijuana. It seemed to be part of the deal that we provided the space and Kolvacik provided the dope. It was always good stuff, too. I was drifting through life at that point, away from my family for the first time, unsure of my career plans, and without a girlfriend. It was easier to lose myself in a haze of marijuana than to deal with my feelings about any of those things.
It got so that Kolvacik depended on me to stretch out the evenings for him. Despite working early at the Harley-Davidson factory, he never seemed to want to quit. Tony and Claire generally went to bed long before he left. Even his buddies usually moved on before he was ready to call it a night. But I was never in a hurry to end the fun—especially with Tony and Claire in the bedroom next to mine. I preferred to know they were well asleep before I went to bed. So, for the first time since I’d met him, Kolvacik turned his full attention to me. I discovered that, when he needed you for something, Kolvacik had a way of making you feel special.
First, he set me apart from the others, praising my endurance and willingness to experiment. Then he told me more about himself, a kind of pseudo-self-revelation that made me feel trusted. He cooked up little escapades that bonded us to one another—like the night he took me to what he said was a special tree for him, overlooking the lake, and had us climb it together, thoroughly stoned. I’d never been a tree-climber, and I couldn’t quite believe it when I found myself at the top, staring down the steep bluff and out over the dark lake. That was another talent Kolvacik had, talking you into doing things against your better judgment. He took perverse pleasure in my discomfort. But at least he didn’t desert me—most of the time, anyway. It took him the better part of an hour to talk me down out of that tree, but he did it. And I’ve never been afraid of tree climbing since.
We also talked by the hour—sometimes in the living room and sometimes on long walks around the East Side or along the lake—about everything from education to politics to art to music to the nature of consciousness. Kolvacik was an inventive conversationalist, always presenting radical points-of-view that challenged my preconceptions. And he never failed to praise me for an original insight. It was difficult to pin down his real attitudes, his gut feelings, about things, though. Just when I thought I’d established his position on something, he’d swing around to the other side. It was dizzying, but it kept the conversation lively. Sometimes we talked right through the night.
During those party months, under Kolvacik’s tutelage, I twice dropped acid. I would never have tried it with him alone—I was savvy enough not to trust him entirely—but there were always others involved. The first time I tried it, the experience was similar to the time I took mescaline, only more intense, more spiritual. It was easy to understand why Timothy Leary, the guru of LSD use (not to mention Aldous Huxley, many years before him), saw it as a door to spiritual perception that should be available to everyone.
While on acid, the boundary between myself and the rest of world blurred. At one point, we went outside and explored our little backyard. As I stood on the brown winter grass, I felt the energy that was my legs and the energy that was the earth flowing back and forth across the imaginary boundary at the bottom of my feet. Then we walked over to the river to watch water spill over a small dam. The rushing of the water was one with the rushing of my blood, both processes powerful and full of life. Even the stones along the riverbank, which I’d always thought of as cold, inert masses, sprang to life, revealing to my inner eye the ever-changing play of their energy.
The culminating experience was watching the sunrise from a landing at the top of a long set of steps leading from the end of Brady Street, at the top of the bluff, down to the footbridge over Lincoln Drive. Lake Michigan stretched out before us, vast as an ocean, matched only by the vastness of the dim sky above it. The light grew by degrees—and, truly, it did seem to grow, like something organic, one band of color sprouting from the previous one, forming a broad rainbow of pastels that stretched itself out above our heads, further and further from east to west, until we nearly fell over backwards trying to follow it.
And then, like the god humans took it to be for thousands of years, the sun began to come up, a molten red-orange disc, rising out of the vast lake like Poseidon from the ocean’s depths. It grew and grew, sweeping the pastel from the sky, its red-orange light overtaking everything. Like a giant rising from sleep and unexpectedly levitating, it lifted itself out of the water and up into the sky. When we were finally able to tear our eyes away and look around, everything had been awakened by the light. The bare trees were defined by it. The glass of tall apartment buildings reflected it. Great clouds of birds flew out across the water toward its source, as if the light itself would feed them. And perhaps, I thought, it did feed them, perhaps it fed us all in ways beyond the obvious ones of giving us warmth and making things grow.
The second time I took acid—again supplied by Kolvacik—I made the mistake of watching a horror movie. It started out innocently enough. We were all gathered in the living room, enjoying the high, when Kolvacik turned on the The Tingler, one of Vincent Price’s many B movies. At first, it was so absurd everyone enjoyed making fun of it. The premise of the movie was that, if someone experienced mortal terror and was unable to scream and release the terror, his spine would be crushed by a thing called The Tingler. The movie included a scene where Price, silhouetted behind a hospital screen, surgically removed a Tingler from a victim’s back. It looked like a giant, wriggling centipede. The whole movie was utterly ridiculous—except for one scene.
In that scene, a man set out to frighten his wife to death. He hid in a closet and suddenly thrust his hand out toward her, through the partially opened door. The poor woman was dumb, so that, when she screamed, no sound came out. At that moment, the camera focused on her face, a mask of terror, her mouth wide open, her eyes hideous with fear.
I can’t tell you a thing about the rest of the movie. That frightful image stuck with me for the rest of the night. I found myself terrified to go to the bathroom alone. When our visitors left, and everyone else in the house started upstairs to bed, I was panicking inside, but I managed to hold myself together. I went to my room and lay on the bed with all the lights on. Still, I was terrified, though I couldn’t have said of what—of terror itself, I suppose.
I was all right as long as I could hear Tony and Claire rustling around in their bed, but eventually they fell asleep and the house became utterly quiet. Though the room was brightly lit, all I could think about was the darkness outside and the unnamable terrors it held. I couldn’t imagine ever facing it alone again. I was certain I had crippled myself mentally for life, that I would never again be capable of being alone at night.
What have I done to myself? I kept thinking. What am I going to do?
Panic seized me again. Not caring what they would think if I woke them up, I turned off all but one dim light in my room, my heart pounding fiercely in the near-darkness, and opened the door to Tony and Claire’s room. I couldn’t see their faces. All I could make out were the two humps formed by their bodies under the quilt. But it was enough—barely enough—to stave off the panic. I dragged my rocking chair to the threshold, sat down, and stared at those reassuring humps on the bed. I knew then I would make it through the night. I wouldn’t sleep, but I would make it.
Sunrise was a blessed event. I experienced first-hand the relief primitive humans must have felt when the light arrived each morning, relieving them of their real and imaginary terrors of the night. I was still worried that each night would bring the terrors back to me, but luckily I was wrong. Once I came down from the acid, the feeling passed. But it was not an experience I cared to repeat. I never took acid again.
Despite some bad experiences, I came to depend on Kolvacik’s escapades to add excitement to my life. I found myself disappointed on those rare evenings when he didn’t show up. The more time I spent
with him, the less attention I paid to Claire. I knew she was disappointed, but we never spoke about it. I think she and I had both assumed that, living in such close proximity, we would grow closer. But at the outset it distanced us from one another. I felt I couldn’t compete with Tony and Jonah. She felt she couldn’t compete with the excitement Kolvacik’s companionship offered me.
She also told me I was more distant when I was stoned, which was certainly true. In some part of me I knew that by smoking so much I was running away from her. I couldn’t have her as a lover, and I couldn’t bear just being her friend. The few times I awoke in the middle of the night to hear her and Tony making love, I was paralyzed with jealousy. I lay on my back, my body stiff, feeling like someone laid out on the rack. Every groan of pleasure I heard from their room was like a turn of the torture wheel. I wanted to scream, to leap up and pound on the connecting door—anything to shut them up. But I couldn’t speak or move. All I could do was lie there and listen, tantalizing and torturing myself.
One night, in late March, I awoke to something else—the sound of a heated argument between Claire and Tony. I couldn’t imagine how it had gotten started in the middle of the night, but by the time it woke me it had gone well beyond intense whispers across a pillow. Light leaked under the door, and I could hear Tony pacing in his bare feet. Though they were trying to keep their voices down, they often slid over into full vocalization.
The first thing that recorded itself in my hazy brain was Claire’s voice saying, “Don’t run away from me, Tony. You’ve got to deal with this.”
“With what? All I hear is the usual bitching. What do you want from me?”
“I want you to listen to me, and I want you to talk to me. I don’t know who you are anymore. And I don’t think you know who I am.”
“I haven’t changed, Claire. There’s nothing to talk about.”
“You don’t just talk when things change, when something dramatic happens. You talk every day. You share your feelings. I don’t know what you’re thinking about, anymore. I don’t know what’s important to you.”
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