The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters

by Chip Kidd

  “I really don't want to say. You'll understand when you see it.”

  “Nonsense. We don't have time for games.”

  I'd mounted the Polaroid on a piece of fiveby-seven inch poster board, with a protecting flap of black construction paper. Just now I reallized that it should have been plain, brown wrapping instead. Rats. I held it up.

  “It's small,” I said, as he approached. Dare I add it? Oh go ahead. “The picture is, anyway.”

  He took it, lifted the paper covering.

  Bingo.

  “What?!”

  Power! I can do ANYTHING.

  Of course, he had seen it before. But not from this angle, his face in the background. Not with me smiling next to it.

  He looked at the photo just long enough to accept it wasn't bogus and jammed it into his pocket, before anyone else, Lord forbid, could see.

  “We'll discuss this later, Hap.” Clipped. Face liver red. Wouldn't look at me. “Five o'clock. My office. Be seated.”

  It's a date. Aces—I was really on top.

  Himillsy's turn next. The hell with her. She was still in my bow-wow house.

  Don't Even Bother, Miss Molecule.

  Okay, she looked great: in a size zero custard summer wool suit with black trim that Coco Chanel would have killed her to get the pattern for; the matching hip-level leather accessory bag with linguine shoulder strap, the simple but stellar chrome earings, the ebony kid gloves that accented her hair and with it formed a triad of deathless perfection. Hims had made all of it. Christ, why didn't she major in fashion?

  “Ready?” She handed him a strip of five and dime photobooth pictures of herself, holding white horizontal cards. Small.

  He squinted at it. “You're yanking my chain, Girly.”

  “Then you're not getting it,” she said. “Look closer.”

  He put on his reading glasses. Each card had a word. Four panels total.

  As he strained to make sense of it, she brought something metal out of the bag, gleaming chrome (it matched her earrings!!), and leveled it at his chest. Silence seized everyone.

  The cards: 1. Don't 2. Look 3. Now 4. !!!

  When I realized what she intended, you'd assume that my first thought would have been Jesus! or Yikes! or Duck!, but it wasn't. It was Wow, where'd she get one so beautiful? My second thought (okay, first and a half) was Jesus!

  Winter, oblivious, gave in.

  “Sorry, darlin'. Time's up.” he said, and let the picture fall. Then he saw it. She smirked and nodded, as if to say, “Yup!”

  And fired.

  Deafening. Put the motorcycle to shame. I'd never heard a gun go off before, except in the movies. This was much, much different—there's just no way they can duplicate that in a theater. Remember, Chez 207 was made of concrete and had no rugs or curtains. My eyes watered from the shock, and I was deaf for the next five seconds. I just watched Winter land against the wall, which, though soundless, registered with an impact that knocked my pencils to the floor and left my teeth rattling. He slid down, in disbelief, his hands tight to his chest. He was breathing like a freight train approaching a stop. Eyes pinched.

  I admit, I was looking for blood. Couldn't see any. People started to stir, startled. Confusion and smoke, as Himillsy stood firm and returned the revolver to her bag. She didn't even bother to blow on the barrel—too cliché. My ears were opening up.

  Then Winter, like Lazarus, rose. Untouched. Dazed and gasping, but fine. Himillsy was saying something to him. I shook my head to get it.

  “. . . careful what you ask for.” Smoothing her hair, which didn't need it. “Now, as soon as you forget that,” she went to her seat, “you just let me know.”

  • • •

  “Oh, don't make such a big deal out of it.” Hims plunged into her burger—victory dinner at the Diner. Despite her protests, I detected a sense of relish other than the one in her mouth.

  “Really, where did you get it?”

  “Drama Department, natch.” She swallowed. “I just went and filled out a green rec and submitted it to Props. Said I was doing my own production of Death of a Salesman. At least I didn't lie.”

  “There's no gun in Death of a Salesman.”

  “I know. Good thing Susie Sign-Out missed opening night.”

  “Amazing. I'll never forget the look on his face.”

  “Me too. Especially when Maybelleen became a Ziegfeld Zombie and you showed him whatever it was. Spill.”

  I didn't like scolding her, really, but I let her have it. “I wouldn't have to if I wasn't abandoned at the Skeller. You could have been in on it. Thanks a lot.” Of course my complaints were all for show—thank God she went AWOL.

  “Oh, soak your head.” A lopsided smile.

  And I was grinning too. Sheesh—how did she do that to me?

  I told her all about the house, wondering how much of it was old news to her.

  Left out the “conversation” in Winter's car.

  And the photo session. Said I'd swiped the pic off his bedroom desk—a photo of one of his cats. Might have been too, if I'd thought to include them.

  She was disappointed. “I would have taken a whiz on his toothbrush.” Which meant she probably had. “Well,” she sighed, “at least the class is finally starting to get interesting. Soreback'll think twice about giving that one again. We were the only three that aced it.”

  “And David David.”

  “Maybe. Mr. Mirth.” She allowed him, for a moment, into her thoughts. “I hear he used to have a pulse . . .”

  • • •

  At five o'clock I rapped on the door to 406 in the VA building with a tremulous fist.

  “C'min.”

  Whoa. He sat at a draftsman's board made of glass. The top, an inch thick, was the size of a small billiards table. The base was a stupendous nickel-plated mechanism of shimmering gears, cranks, and levers that were ready to be set to the proper coordinates and send the whole thing blasting into orbit. I'd never seen anything like it, before or since. It made me want to kneel before its Machine Age majesty and beg for my Luddite soul. During our entire exchange Winter remained bent over it, engrossed in something far more interesting than I would ever be. Me: a pesky satellite.

  “Hap.”

  “Yes.”

  “I won't have to see anything like that, ever, again. Will I?”

  “N-no, I—”

  “Which goes double for anyone else. Clear?”

  “Certainly, yo—”

  “Fine. Don't slam the door.”

  So much for my mighty “quotes” shield—it lay on the floor crumpled and riddled with holes. I didn't even have the power to ask him what my grade was. Shit, didn't I deserve better than this after what we . . .

  No, you fool, he was unconscious.

  At least I still had six more of the Polaroids.

  Every angle. Boy, was I going to give those a workout.

  I turned to go, and hesitated—the Salvation Army in me took command: “Mmm, at the risk of, well, sticking my nose in it, there's something . . . else I'd like to say.”

  He finished drawing something. “Speak.”

  “Well, it's just, about Besti—Mike. I think, you're a little rough on him. I mean, he actually works really hard, and—”

  “Hap.” I braced myself. As he made his declaration, he started to erase something. “The worm forgives the plow.”

  End of discussion.

  “Right.” Well, I tried. “See you at the opening tomorrow?” At last he raised his head.

  A terrible smile.

  “Wouldn't miss it.”

  • • •

  Turns out the Arts and Architecture Faculty Show, which I so airily dismissed before, was—to a small group of participants—of much graver importance than you could ever tell from just looking at it. It was a hierarchical checklist. A scorecard, for those who knew how to read it—of who ranked where in the School of A & A.

  I was later made privy: seniority, tenure, favored-nation sta
tus with the dean, all of it played a part in the show's arrangement. The art itself was of less than no importance (Surprise!). Very simple: it was all about where the work was in relation to the entrance to the lobby gallery. The closer you were to the door, the better your position.

  Winter's was way, way in the back, around a corner to the left, in a cul-de-sac.

  The show opened at six thirty on Friday. Hims and I went at seven.

  When we got there, a sense of disquiet socked us from the get-go. Weird: everyone swarmed in the atrium outside the gallery, sipping jug wine, munching cheese curds. Dottie, resplendent in mud-colored horizontal wide-wale corduroy, didn't even deign to acknowledge us (her former “protégés”!) as she exchanged gripes and arched eyebrows with Misty and a visiting French quasi-expressio-theorist whom we'd named Bobo.

  “What gives?” asked Hims, opening the door to the gallery. “Oh!—”

  Yikes. The smell. Rotting shit—no other way to describe it. Faint—but unmistakable, and everywhere. Backed-up toilet? We got our glasses of grape-juice-with-a-giggle from the abandoned refreshments table and ventured forward. I pulled out a handkerchief and used it as a gas mask. Hims picked up a few napkins next to the Triscuits and did the same.

  Dottie's new body of work lay beyond. She was really taking herself to the next tier. Paintings of: a mounted moose head lying on the floor with an apple in its mouth, The Last Supper from the back, and a portrait of what appeared to be Charles Laughton in a blue flannel nightgown and curlers. All second from the front—no dummy she.

  Winter, the only other person in the gallery, loitered, taking them in. Hands in pockets.

  “Hi there,” I said. He spun. Double-breasted worsted wool ash gray suit. Yellow-on-yellow necktie, its tight Windsor knot like a lighthouse lamp just lit in the twilight blue of his shirt collar. The sails of a matching foursquare. Toffee-colored suede wingtips. Groomed. Waiting for Mr. Cukor to call him on set. Supreme.

  “Kiddies.”

  “You smell that?”

  “Smell what ? This?” He winked and nodded to Dottie's ka-blooey period.

  “Where's yours?” I asked, from under the cotton.

  “Follow the yellow brick road.” He hiked a thumb to the back.

  We went to find it. The further into the gallery, the worse the stench.

  “Christ, I hope they called the custodian.”

  “Kind of makes sense, actually,” said Hims.

  It all flowed past us: rough sketches for watercolors of lakeside tree stumps; snow-fogged somethings; a five-point stag, startled and insulted that it had been made into kitsch— again; a ceramic cuckoo clock, “hand-painted” and no cuckoo in sight; a series of round placemats, in different sizes, meant to represent the planets; a collection of pennies, pasted onto a rubber mat in the shape of Pennypacker Hall (get it?); and oh, the things that had been done to flowers—asters to zinnias—put in more grotesque poses than virgins in the Book of Martyrs. This salon culminated in a succession of nude self-portraits, eight when I stopped counting, by a portly man with inoperable gout and a very open mind, who really, really ought to have been turned over to the authorities.

  Too many freaks, not enough circuses.

  We turned left at the rear, and made it to the Sorbeck Shrine. Four projects.

  Mills plotzed. “Cripes, who's teaching whom?”

  The first was a book cover for Hitler's Switzerland: The Illusion of Neutrality During the Third Reich by Joseph Donald McC., and published by Spiral Books. A plain white rectangle seemed to float over a charred, ashen background. The title and author type was set in a Newsprint face that dropped out white from a viscera red band running along the bottom. Offset by the black and white, the scarlet-backed lettering gave just the right hint of the Swiss flag and sprang off the surface. No author could have wished for better.

  The second was a poster about war atrocities that he'd offset-lithographed himself, probably because no printer in town would have touched it: a wrenching UPI photograph of a preteen Asian girl with both arms blown off, dazed and lying in the middle of a battle-ravaged street— Nagasaki, probably. Two-hundred point teletype letters, across the top, spelled out I AM NOT ARMED. Underneath the picture, in an orange no-nonsense political campaign poster font: VOTE NO ON MILITARY EXPENDITURE BILL #151.

  Whatever that was.

  “Hilarious,” Himillsy rasped. “Where's my design credit?”

  The third was another poster. Horizontal. Smoke stacks—the very same from Titans of Industry, now blown up to truly alarming scale, threatening to choke the viewer before he could read it. Slabbed-serif block characters in alternating red, white, and blue bled off the top and sides.

  U.S. STEEL:

  KEEPING AMERICA BEAUTIFUL SINCE

  1875!

  And finally: a white enameled metal box with rounded corners and edges, resting about three feet off the ground on a plain black slab pedestal. I recognized it as the deluxe ice chest from the window of McClanahan's Sporting Goods, for the tailgate partymaven who has everything. The school's logo was appliquéd onto the front in cloisonné, and it clocked in at a hundred and fifty smackers. Winter had silkscreened, onto its lid, in sans-serif Trade Gothic Condensed fiveinch high lettering,

  WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T OPEN . . .

  Someone already had, and hastily tried to reseal it.

  I asked Hims: “Should I?”

  “Go ahead. Hurry up and let's beat it.”

  I lifted and released a Pandora's worth of reeking horror. A brown lava nightmare of festering poop filled it to the top. More words, on the inside of the lid, in the same style as the others, formed a series of phrases that trailed into the dreadful muck, until they became completely submerged.

  THE CURRENT CURRICULUM.

  THE ACTING ADMINISTRATION.

  CAMPUS ARCHITECTURE.

  THE WHOLE GODDAMN LOT OF—

  “Shut it! God! ”

  Bam!

  Eyes tearing.

  “Puke and barf, he's gone borneo!”

  And he was nowhere in sight by the time we got back to the entrance. I practically pulled the door off its hinges. Sweet, sweet air.

  On our way to the car, Hims, who'd been auditing French lit that term, said, “Well, now we know.”

  “What.”

  “Winter Sorbeck is a madman who thinks he's Winter Sorbeck.”

  • • •

  The Crock of Shit, as it quickly became known, was gone from the gallery by the next morning, but nonetheless became an instant legend in the VA building. Most everyone was scandalized, naturally, but here and there one overheard whispers of admiration—even the muttered admission (from me, at least) that it was “the only piece that mattered.” There was no mention of it in the review of the show in Monday's Collegian.

  Which was glowing, by the way.

  • • •

  At last: Springtime at State. May-pole dances, Postmidterm depression, Frisbees, the Faculty Show, and of course, Fiji Island.

  Phi Gamma Iota was the only fraternity with its house actually on campus—the rest were over the town line. The school wasn't legally supposed to support any “selective societies,” so Fiji exercised a loophole and, once a semester, threw open its doors to everyone for a big “house” bash with a vague South Pacific theme, selling tickets to benefit some nameless charity. This allowed it to stay closed the rest of the year. Feege was the Football Frat—at least a third of the brothers were in the gridiron.

  I was just going to go by myself—figured it was the only way I'd see the inside of a frat house without having to put my rear up for paddling. I wouldn't even have dreamed of suggesting it to Himillsy, it just sort of slipped out the afternoon of the party. She jumped. “Oh! Let's go together! A kick in the pants! Pick you up at eight.”

  • • •

  Were it not for the Corvair, I wouldn't have recognized her. “Himillsy?”

  “No, not tonight! Tonight I'm . . .” she got out of the car and spun like a d
ervish “. . . Swoozie Moonshoe!”

  “The heck?”

  She was Molecule Monroe, down to the mole, in a voluptuous poofy blonde wig, stuffed ice blue cashmere “headlights” sweater, teeny saddle shoes, and flouncy black poodle skirt. Stunning, really, in a sort of “Marilyn had an abortion but it lived and went on to public school” kind of way.

  “And you're . . . Derrick Dick!” She pulled out a bulky State letterman's sweater from the trunk and handed it over.

  “I'm what ?”

  “Lose the tie! We're Derrick and Swoozie, the toast of campus! There's not a party blazing that doesn't pray we'll bound through the door and ruin the glamour curve! The gown is our oyster!”

  I pulled on the cardigan, which she must have gotten at the Goodwill and embroidered with “Derrick.” It made me feel like Tab Hunter's stand-in. And maybe even like . . . her date. “Oh, Swoozie, you're the bee's knees!” I chimed, emboldened by my new role, “you filthy bitch!”

  Fifteen minutes later we gained the steps of Fiji's fraternal fortress—a horrendous quasi-Athenian pile of columns and flagstone that made Tara look like tract housing. But I'll admit, for this one heady night, I was alive with the thought: we were going to be included.

  In front of the doors a doughy pledge sat at a card table with a lock box and an ink pad, collecting the cash in exchange for hand stamps. He had extremely bucked teeth.

  “That's funny,” Miss Moonshoe brayed at him and handed him a fiver, “I don't see a hand up your ass.”

  “What ?”

  “I always thought Kukla had a hand up his ass.”

  “Swoozie!” I said, winking at the moose and scared out of my wits and rushing us along, “You minx! You must be stopped !”

  Luckily we were swallowed by a crowd as thick as he was. I took her elbow.

  “Swooze, try not to get Derrick killed before he gets a chance to knock back a few, deal?”

  “Oh, I know. That Swoozie, she's such a shrew. And a slut! Derrick should drop her like a molten bowling ball.”