Joe College

by Tom Perrotta

  “Milton sick?” I asked.

  Nick shook his head. “Bowling. His team switched to a Thursday-night league.”

  “I didn’t know Milton was a bowler.”

  Nick took a moment to dab at his perspiration mustache with a paper napkin. When he took the napkin away, the mustache was still there, but his expression, without changing much at all, suddenly seemed unfriendly.

  “What’s it to you what Milton does in his spare time? You keepin’ tabs on the man?”

  “Come on.” I chuckled defensively. “I was just making small talk.”

  “Hey, Brad,” Nick said, “Better watch yourself around this one. He’s got us under surveillance.”

  Brad was usually too preoccupied by his meal to bother with conversation. He hunkered down over his plate with the single-minded concentration of a man who didn’t always get enough to eat, and had to stock up when the opportunity presented itself. That night, though, he made an exception.

  “You a Bonesman?” he asked, his eyes widening with curiosity behind his thick glasses, one earpiece of which was held in place by a cocoonlike mass of electrical tape. Brad had dropped out of Yale Law School a couple of years earlier, and had since developed some sort of paranoid obsession with Skull and Bones, the notorious secret society whose tomblike headquarters was located right next to our dining hall.

  “I can’t believe this.” My face flashed hot with guilt, as though Nick’s accusation were somehow true. “All I said was that I didn’t know Milton was a bowler.”

  “And a damn good one,” Nick added. “One-eighty-seven average.”

  “That is good,” I said, my indignation already fading into uncertainty. Maybe I’d misread Nick’s expression; maybe he’d just been kidding around. “I’m lucky if I break one-fifty.”

  “The CIA runs this whole place,” Brad continued cheerfully. “‘Light and Truth,’ my ass. ‘Darkness and Skulduggery’ is more like it.”

  A moment of silence overtook the table. The only one who didn’t notice it was Kristin, who was caught up in an urgent-sounding conversation with Djembe.

  “Suck my cock!” she commanded, in a guttural impersonation of a male speaker. “Kneel down and lick it, you prep school bitch!”

  Even before she finished, Kristin realized that her audience had expanded beyond Djembe. Blushing sweetly, she reached up to adjust the paper cap she kept pinned to her hair at a charmingly impossible angle.

  “My obscene caller,” she explained. “I changed my number twice but he still keeps tracking me down.”

  “Gross,” said Sarah. “My roommate gets those all the time.”

  “Outrageous,” Djembe declared in his elegant Nigerian accent. “This should not be tolerated.”

  Nick gave a soft, derisive chuckle, just loud enough for Brad and me to hear. Djembe had long gotten on Nick’s nerves, originally for his regal bearing and exotic good looks, but more recently for his close and sexually charged friendship with Kristin.

  “Hey, Jimbo,” Nick called out. “You know why they don’t have any obscene phone callers in Africa?”

  Djembe turned wearily toward our end of the table. He had long ago given up correcting Nick’s deliberate mispronunciation of his name.

  “Please explain,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you why.” A slow grin of triumph spread across Nick’s face. “’Cause they don’t have any fucking phones.”

  For some reason, he addressed this punch line to me instead of Djembe. Even after the joke met with a deafening lack of response from the rest of the table, he kept his eyes glued to mine, as if daring me to laugh, to join him in an alliance against the humorless stiffs and African princes of the world. The best I could manage for him was a tight little smile, a cowardly smirk of approval.

  The dish line had its own eccentric rhythm, out of synch with the rest of the operation. It was quiet when the dining hall was packed and noisy, and increasingly hectic as the place began clearing out. You got to lounge when your co-workers were hustling, and then had to pick up the pace just as everyone else began slacking off.

  At its best, the dirty end of the line was simply unsavory. At its worst, the work was filthy and relentless. Tray after tray—some of them stacked into precarious double- and triple-deckers—came streaming down the conveyor belt at a pace that seemed reasonable enough right up to the moment when it suddenly became demonic. In the space of a couple seconds, you had to grab the silverware, rinse the plates, and empty the glasses, sorting each item into separate racks. When a rack got full, you had to shove it into the dishwasher, which resembled an automatic car wash, and then grab a fresh rack from underneath the conveyor belt, all without missing a beat on the next tray. It was just possible to accomplish these tasks without shutting down the line if the diners did as they were told before bussing their trays—i.e., dispose of their paper trash and uneaten food, and place their silverware on the right—but not everyone found it in their hearts to cooperate. You would get coffee cups half-filled with peanut butter, a mound of mashed potatoes studded with cigarette butts, someone’s eyeglasses tucked inside a taco shell. You’d grab for a plate, only to discover that it had been painstakingly coated with mayonnaise, or find yourself staring in confused revulsion at a bowl full of melted chocolate ice cream and green peas. All over the dining hall, it seemed, people were ripping their napkins into confetti, and dropping the confetti piece by piece into nearly empty glasses of water, just to give us the pleasure of reaching in with our bare hands and scooping out clots of saturated paper. By the end of the shift, you were soaking wet and smelled exactly like the webbed rubber floor mat you had to hose down before calling it quits—ripe and meaty and hazardous to the public health.

  Eddie Zimmer was late that night, but I didn’t mind covering for him. Eddie and I had handled the Thursday-night dish line all year, and had developed a model working relationship. Outside of the dining hall we barely exchanged two words, but inside we looked out for one another. When things got hairy on my end, he was more than happy to pitch in. I didn’t have to ask, either; he’d just appear at my side and start grabbing for dirty dishes. If one of his Ultimate Frisbee games ran a little late, I’d discreetly punch him in at five and take care of both ends until he made his entrance. It was no big deal—for the first half hour of the shift, the dish line was basically a one-person job anyway.

  It was the Thursday before spring break, and an irrational euphoria had taken hold of me, as though I were heading down to Daytona to judge the wet T-shirt contests instead of facing a two-week stint behind the wheel of the Roach Coach. Part of my good mood was relief—I had dodged a bullet in my George Eliot seminar and would finally have time to catch up on my reading over break—and part of it was anticipation. Reality was throwing a big party on Friday, and Polly had called a few hours earlier to find out if I was sticking around for it. It was our first contact since the awkward parting on Tuesday night.

  when she hadn’t called me on Wednesday, I’d pretty much decided to skip the party, despite my semi-prominent position in the magazine’s hierarchy. I figured she and Professor Preston had patched things up and wanted to spare myself a potentially depressing encounter with her—or worse, with them—on the eve of the long vacation. Max’s parents were coming to town and had invited our whole suite out to dinner, an obligation that could easily consume the whole night if I let it. But something in her tone alerted me to a new spectrum of possibilities.

  “You going with anyone?” I inquired.

  “Just Ingrid.”

  “So what’s up with you and Peter?”

  She let go of a big breath, a not-quite-sigh of fatigue and exasperation.

  “We had a long talk.”

  “And?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess we’re taking a break from each other or something.”

  “A break?” I found it difficult to modulate my voice, as though I were going through puberty all over again. “Does that mean it’s over?”

 
“This is boring, Danny. Will I see you there or not?”

  “Are you kidding? Back home they call me Party Guy.”

  “Great. Save me a dance, Party Guy.”

  The clean end of the dish line was located in the furthest reaches of the kitchen, near the entrance to a storeroom for dry supplies—bricks of paper napkins, towers of Styrofoam cups, box upon box upon box of Green Jell-O mix, gleaming five-gallon cannisters of pudding that looked like something we might have dropped on peasants in Vietnam. A stairway at the back of the storeroom led down to the basement, a labyrinth of narrow corridors, cubbyhole offices, walk-in freezers and refrigerators, and, most ominously, the prep room, a vast, morguelike space housing six stainless-steel tables big enough to accommodate the average-sized corpse, plus an impressive array of slicing, dicing, peeling, and chopping implements.

  I happened to be sorting silverware on the clean end when Eddie and Lorelei appeared at the top of the stairs. She looked nervous; he seemed stunned. Even if their faces had been totally blank, though, I’m pretty sure I would’ve known what they’d been up to. Three years of college had brought me into frequent contact with couples who had just engaged in some form of sexual activity—not to mention highly infrequent but generally quite memorable contact with couples actually in the process of engaging in some form of sexual activity—and I’d gotten so I could recognize them at a glance. It wasn’t that they all looked the same—some were mussed and seemingly drugged, some were fresh from the shower, some were furtive, others smug—but what they shared was an aura of privacy and collusion that sealed them off from the rest of the world, marking them as temporary foreigners in our midst, people you’d need to address in an unnaturally loud voice if you wanted them to understand what you were saying, or even that they were being spoken to in the first place.

  Lorelei came out first, stepping tentatively into the heat and chaos of the kitchen. On a normal night no one would have given her a second glance, but that night—maybe because Albert had been looking for her, or maybe because she was blushing (you got the feeling it would take a lot to make Lorelei blush), or maybe just because she was walking so slowly—she might as well have been naked. Her entrance stopped everything.

  I gave a quick nod as she passed, trying not to betray anything, with my expression. Up to his elbows in soapy water, Brad Foxworthy opened his mouth as if to ask a question, then closed it without making a sound. Sarah, who worked as cook’s helper on Thursday night, stood frozen over a tray of manicotti, pinching a sprig of garnish in her raised hand as though it were a dart. Nick was the only one of us who didn’t seem to think that silence was an appropriate response to Lorelei’s dreamy march down the aisle.

  “Well, well,” he called out. “Look what crawled out of the basement.”

  Lorelei stopped short, wincing at the sound of his voice. She raised a finger to her lips, but Nick wasn’t about to be shushed. He crossed his arms over his chest, mimicking the tone and posture of a disapproving parent.

  “Young lady? Where in God’s name have you been?”

  Though still in high school—she was employed through some sort of work/study arrangement—Lorelei usually had the self-possession of someone much older, at least when it came to putting men in their place. On any other night, she would have just ignored him and gone about her business. For some reason, though, Nick’s question flustered her; she seemed to feel herself under an obligation to answer it.

  “Outside,” she lied, in a voice bereft of all conviction. “Smoking a cigarette. I lost track of time.”

  Nick grinned unpleasantly. I had always thought of him and Lorelei as allies, but now I wondered if I’d been paying close enough attention.

  “I bet that’s not all you lost,” he told her.

  “Fuck you,” she said. “You’re not my father.”

  Lorelei, cast a quick, nervous glance in the direction of the storeroom, apparently waiting for Eddie to step out and defend her honor. At the same moment, a sudden hush descended upon the dining hall, an absence of sound far more conspicuous than the dull background roar it replaced.

  “Maybe not,” Nick admitted, grinning unpleasantly, “but I’m sure your brothers would be interested to know what you’re up to.”

  “Leave my brothers out of it,” Lorelei shot back, her voice wavering between a plea and a command.

  Before Nick could reply, the singing started up, the harmonies startling in their purity and sweetness. Still clutching her parsley, Sarah pivoted in the direction of the music. Brad Foxworthy extricated his arms from the soapy water and began peeling off his yellow rubber gloves. Matt poked his head into the kitchen.

  “C’mon everybody,” he called out, beckoning us with his icing-covered trowel. “It’s the Whiffs.”

  It was a tradition for the staff to interrupt work whenever a singing group performed in the dining hall. Like rats summoned by the Pied Piper, we emerged from the kitchen in single file and lined up along the wall near the mouth of the conveyor belt, all of us in our blue shirts and paper caps except Nick, who was decked out in the stained white clothes and absurd hat of the professional chef. Resplendent in their formal wear, the Whiffenpoofs stood in a semi-circle in front of the nonfunctional fireplace, crooning “Surfer Girl” for their captive audience. One of them was black, one Asian, one short, one both short and prematurely bald; the rest looked like close relatives of Vice President Bush. If not for the salad bar separating us from them, we might have looked like two rival street gangs from a highly peculiar metropolis, faced off and ready to rumble.

  I had spent enough time at Yale to know that one member of the Whiffenpoofs was known as “the Pitch,” and I assumed it was the Pitch—he happened to be the short, bald guy—who stepped forward after “Surfer Girl” to inform us that the group had just learned a whole slew of Beach Boys’ tunes in preparation for their upcoming trip to Southern California and Hawaii.

  “None of us are surfers,” he admitted, absent-mindedly fiddling with the waistband of his tuxedo pants, “but we’ve been told we look pretty good in our bathing suits.”

  On cue, the whole group let their pants fall to their ankles, revealing gaudy tropical-print swim trunks, and then struck muscleman poses for the whooping crowd. When the cheers and catcalls had subsided, they launched into a lumbering version of “Help Me, Rhonda” that made the Beach Boys look like a bunch of swinging anarchists by comparison. Spotting her chance, Lorelei slipped out of line and looped around the salad bar to the front desk, where Albert was unhappily holding the fort, reduced to checking IDs and meal cards in her absence. She knew him well enough to know that he wouldn’t dream of making a scene while the Whiffenpoofs were singing “Help Me, Rhonda.” The worst he inflicted on her was a stern frown, which she countered with an apologetic shrug before taking her customary seat.

  The singers had just managed to pull up their pants and wipe the smiles off their faces before the Pitch issued the ritual invitation for any former Whiffenpoofs in the audience to join them for the singing of “The Whiffenpoof Song.” A second or two had passed with no takers when Brad Foxworthy, who was standing right next to me, stepped out of line and began retracing Lorelei’s path around the salad bar. I figured that he wanted a word with Albert, but instead of veering right toward the front desk, he veered left, defecting to the enemy. Despite his sopping blue shirt and taped-together glasses, the Whiffenpoofs seemed to recognize him as one of their own. They broke ranks to make a space, gathering him like a missing link into their chain. Bug-eyed and happy-looking, he stood between Nelson and Tripp, their arms around his shoulders, his around theirs, as the chorus line of poor little lambs began to baa and sway.

  Halfway through “The Whiffenpoof Song,” Eddie slipped into line beside me, filling the space Brad had so recently vacated. I turned to him, arching my eyebrows significantly.

  “Where the hell were you?” I whispered.

  Eddie didn’t answer right away. He reminded me of one of those movie gangsters
who doesn’t realize he’s been shot until he looks down and sees the flowery bloodstain spreading across his shirt.

  “The compactor room,” he said finally, squinting at the Whiffenpoofs as though they were giving off a painful radiance. “It was the strangest thing.”

  On our way out of the dining hall, I asked Matt if I could buy him a beer to celebrate the official start of spring break and make amends for blowing him off on Tuesday night. I was under no illusions about getting any work done for the next couple of days and didn’t figure he was, either.

  “Wish I could,” he said. “I’ve got to pull an all-nighter on that Shakespeare paper.”

  “An all-nighter? Can’t you just hand it in after break?”

  “Jessica’s coming tomorrow. I want to get it out of the way before she gets here.”

  He held the door open for me like an old-fashioned gentleman, then followed me outside. A light drizzle had fallen during dinner, and now the world smelled fresh and fertile, less like New Haven than it had before. We both noticed it at once, pausing at the top of the steps to sniff at the damp breeze, which wasn’t quite strong enough to make me forget about the rank odors wafting up from my shirt.

  “Got a topic?” I asked.

  “Not even close.” He grinned with apparent pride. “Haven’t even read the damn play.”

  The main gate swung open ahead of us, and an attractive senior in a lacrosse uniform—her name was Blinky or Tick, something not quite right that kept slipping my mind—came limping up the path with a cast around one ankle, the rubber tips of her crutches sucking at the wet slate.

  “Broken,” she announced ruefully, in response to a question no one had asked.