What do I remember learning at Brown? How to survive a broken heart. How to cook an elaborate stew on a hot plate. That my worst fears rarely come true. How to read a book a week. When Professor David Hirsch talked to me about Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe, the ghosts in their stories jumped out at me. I read F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance with Professor Barry Marks, and I have since written my own books about those Concord writers—Emerson, Thoreau, and their neighbors the loony, impoverished Alcotts. I thought personal style was everything in those days—how could I be friends with a girl who wore pink? I got a little smarter. My first roommate and I became good friends after all. I loved her.
Now I’m smart enough to see that I was with my people at college, a generation of confused and frightened kids looking for and finding our answers in books. As it turned out, in spite of the death of a president on an autumn day, we didn’t die at college, and we didn’t die soon afterward. World War III was a fearful, exaggerated chimera. We didn’t die, and instead we did something much more difficult than dying: we learned how to live.
You
AMITY GAIGE
I met B on my first day at Brown. He was my next-door neighbor in the newly renovated New Pembroke dormitories, the beautifully isolated dorms in the northernmost corner of campus, there at the threshold of College Hill, where all the cars decelerated to cruising speed. Just out my dormitory door were the bars and boutiques of Thayer Street, the café tables sitting in the cold sun late into October. One of the first things I did upon my arrival at Brown was to take up coffee and cigarettes. These, plus Anne Sexton’s Complete Poems, were my accoutrements as I ploddingly set about becoming the woman I’d always known I was. My freshman roommate, I’ll call her Lee, gamely rid herself of her neon T-shirts and leggings and she and I began to function as a mutual admiration society, a very small but sufficient consensus. We had both felt socially marooned for as long as we could remember—we felt apart, as poets do—and although I cannot speak for Lee, this apartness was always matched with the desire to close the gap. And this longing—romantic, mostly—felt like, to borrow from one of Sexton’s more splendid metaphors, a small coal I kept swallowing (“Courage,” 1972).
Longing. Some folks are just born with it. Men and women both. Saddled with it. Laden with it. It’s a kind of spiritual handicap. It has to be dragged along via a complicated series of pulleys, belts, and cables. I remember the sensation of longing from earliest childhood, and I shiver to think how my life’s escapades have been ruled by the attempt to avoid feeling quite so helpless against it. As I grew up and developed romantic longings, I found that poetry was the best receptacle of this newfound variation. The reading and the writing of it. So, apart from a brief phase of writing liberal-leaning poetry about homelessness and homophobia and other things I knew nothing about, I wrote love poems—overheated, technically uninteresting love poems written, of course, to the elusive, cruel “you.” Despite the fact that “you” hurt me really bad, in numerous and specific ways detailed in these poems, I am embarrassed to admit I don’t remember who “you” was. Thinking back on the boys I knew in high school, their fumbling advances and their food allergies, not a one seems heroic enough to be my poetic addressee, nor to elicit the emotions that “I” describe in my poetry. In fact, “I” have no clue what “you” did to “me.” It’s all lost to bad free verse.
B was a blond—I mean a real blond—I mean fundamentally, Teutonically blond, like gold ore; he would have looked good in a breastplate. He was tall, bug-eyed, intelligent, and dangerous. He was funny, very funny. When every other freshman in Pembroke 3 was out at a mixer or a sexual assault awareness talk, B would spend nights sketching caricatures of me and Lee with surreal words coming out of our mouths, while U2’s “Zoo Station” blared out of his enormous stereo speakers and I lay belly-down on his bed, cheek smushed to hand, dreaming about all the truths I was about to tell him. Eventually, he would suggest that we do something spontaneous, like take a trip to Prospect Terrace Park in the middle of the night, for example, a night picnic, some night music—I mean, did we ever sleep? B played the requisite guitar, but unlike other boys, his music erred on the side of performance art. He sang long, whimsical songs resembling macabre children’s stories featuring me and Lee, or elephants or death or the stars. He was just different, even within the sphere of captivating Brownies. He behaved with no inhibition. I often wished he weren’t so beautiful. His beauty began to wear on me. He was a small coal I kept swallowing. Because as obvious as my love was, it never went anywhere. Anywhere. All day long I cavorted with B; I dined, studied, and argued with B, but inevitably, at some middle hour of the evening, the time would come when B would drag his phone into his dorm room closet to call his girlfriend back in New Paltz.
This time was my writing time. I am in my own closet! I would think, in a sweat. As in high school, the perceived rejection was a verbal diarrhetic. In my journal, I wrote reams of poems about B and about the ephemerality of love and youth and the gulf between us and our ideals and how we would surely both grow up to be miserable. At last, I had found my You.
An awful lot of time went by like this. An October Parents’ Weekend left me weeping on a rock somewhere in Newport while Mom and Dad nattered on about the ocean. My wild, redheaded Theatre Arts 3 prof told us to bring our journals to class, and I was relieved to finally share my poems with somebody, anybody. Otherwise, I kept swallowing my coal. B and Lee and I went to Spats, and sat drinking Newcastle on tables that tottered over the old black and white parquet floor while B tried to shock us or make us laugh and we laughed and imagined and were good to one another, and the memory still floods me with love. Of course, one night, exhausted by the redundancy of his chaste rejection of me, I drank too much ’Castle and forced B to sit on my dorm room bed and listen to one of the angrier poems I had written about him. Afterward, he patted my head and drew up the covers and pretended that he wasn’t You.
There was a smoke shop down on Waterman. Red Carpet Smoke Shop. The cartoonish lacquered statue still stands, though I hear he’s been given a turban. I remember going into Red Carpet once to look for a billfold or penknife or some other useless male contrivance for my father’s birthday. I stood inhaling the clove and honey and mulch of the tobacco, looking at the beautiful boxes of Nat Shermans, the pastels of the American Spirits that everyone was carrying around those days, and finally the trademark robin’s-egg blue of French Gauloises. I thought, A man who shops here must be very much a man. Later, I met a graduate student with a broad, tanned brow who took me to Dunkin’ Donuts and asked me to tell him why I loved Anne Sexton so much, and it occurred to me that B had never asked me this—that in fact no one had ever asked me this. And inwardly I understood that whomever I married would have to also marry my imagination, my creative mind, accepting all of the sunshine and shadow of such a commitment, and when we parted, the graduate student slid his hand inside a pocket of his blazer and withdrew, like a literary symbol, a robin’s-egg-blue package of Gauloises.
Every writer needs an addressee. The addressee is, on the surface, the writer’s listener, often the beloved—known or unknown to her. Of course, we could think of the writer’s addressee as another version of herself. Her best self, awaiting her across the river, the end result of her slowly unfolding, timebound transfiguration. And all love poems are about the other and they are also about the self. When B was my muse, I was prolific. But my muse was also 1991 and “Zoo Station” and the fall of the Berlin Wall and how the dark tunnel of Faunce framed the quad in the sunny distance like a dream I kept having, and my muse was also myself, a self that was turning into a writer.
I don’t know where B is now. I could argue that he is right here, in these words. And the other one, the man with the Gauloises? I know exactly where he is. He jettisoned the cigarettes circa 2004, before the first of our children was born.
BDH Editor Soars, Stumbles, Snags a Wife
M. CHARLES BAKST
On the
morning of September 28, 1965, I walked into the Blue Room in Faunce House, badly in need of coffee after spending most of the night overseeing publication of a Brown Daily Herald issue that would become a national media sensation.
The headline over the news story said, “For Women at Pembroke College: Brown Health Center Prescribes Birth Control Pills.”
As BDH editor in chief, I had penned a blistering editorial backing the policy but labeling the Pembroke administration—headed by Dean Rosemary Pierrel—as hypocritical or blind for presiding over a Victorian social system that obsessed over curfews and barred women from living in off-campus apartments.
I bought my coffee at the counter, turned, and was accosted by a Pembroke junior. Something about the issue had offended her. Amid the torrent of her words, I asked contemptuously, “Who are you?”
She replied, “I’m Liz Feroe, and if you’re going to write about Pembroke, you better know who I am.”
This would prove to be a key conversation in my life, but at the time it meant nothing. After all, I was M. Charles Bakst, a senior, in a hurry to be great—in my own mind, I already was—and I presided over a mighty publication that routinely battled Brown and Pembroke administrators over long-running issues like women’s visiting hours in men’s dormitories, or really, it could be anything, such as the university’s drinking policies or its handling of the Bicentennial celebration. When student organizations disappointed us, we’d whack them too.
No topic was too large for our stories and editorials. We chronicled the national civil rights movement and the dawning opposition to the Vietnam War. And no topic was too small, not even the cranberry sauce in the Sharpe Refectory’s Ivy Room. They served the whole-berry variety; we preferred jellied.
And now we had the attention of the national press, which was intrigued by the avant-garde story of a doctor for a women’s college willing to prescribe birth control pills. So far only two students had taken advantage of this opportunity, but the precedent was set.
Of course, calling Pembroke a “college” was somewhat amiss. The university’s classrooms were coed, student activities were increasingly coed, and, indeed, that very autumn would see the launch of coed dining at lunch, one of the paper’s mini-crusades.
Still, Pembrokers had their own deans, dormitories, and social system, with sign-out times and curfews a constant issue for debate. Men had no curfews and, unlike the women, could live off campus.
It is startling to look back to those years, when tuition, room, and board came to well under $3,000. Each spring, three sign-up sheets would sprout on a bulletin board in Pembroke Hall. They were for Pembroke seniors heading for graduate school, or business careers, or marriage. Yes, you read that right. If a young lady became engaged, she would sign the engaged list so the whole school would know.
Other customs of the times? Well, if a guy was taking a girl to a football game, they would both dress up. If a girl didn’t have a date, she wouldn’t go. And speaking of dates, when a guy walked into Andrews Hall to call on a girl, he’d say whom he was there to see, and the receptionist would summon her. If you kept showing up for the same girl, the receptionist would summon her as soon as you entered the lobby. God forbid you were there to see a different girl.
I was often at the Pembroke dorms, but sometimes I was there on an academic mission, not a social one. Because my BDH duties often made me miss class, and because I was such an indifferent note-taker anyway, especially compared with my bright, industrious female course mates, I’d show up at Pembroke the night before an exam and ask someone to let me see her notes to bring myself up to speed. Which is more incredible: that I sought such favors or that I found students willing to oblige?
BDH editors served the second semester of junior year through the first semester of senior year. I was an American Civilization major, but, to me, studies ranked second to the newspaper. When production of a March 1965 issue reporting on the dismissal of eight students for smoking marijuana kept me up all night, I showed up at a political science quiz and announced to the professor that I had not had time to study and would have to take a makeup. I was frequently tardy on term papers.
It may sound like I waltzed through life at Brown. It certainly was rarefied. I hobnobbed with student bigwigs and with Bob Schulze, the dean of the college and a prince of a guy. He was a buffer for President Barnaby Keeney, who was somewhat remote and at times imperious. I talked big and wrote big, with thunderous, overwrought prose. (For example, here’s what I wrote about the crush of students lining up for hockey games: “One of these nights there is going to be a riot outside of Meehan Auditorium and the Administration of this University will have no one to blame but itself.”)
But, in fact, much of the time I was a bundle of nerves, worrying about how much trouble the next editorial would cause and chewing my way through rolls of peppermint Life Savers to calm my stomach.
We were often impatient with our fellow undergrads, such as the Pembroke leaders of whom we wrote, “Any governmental organization that allows its members to come to meetings in bermuda shorts and pass the time doing their knitting has something very wrong with it.”
The larger battle, though, was with top university officials and trustees. When words alone weren’t enough, we’d resort to italics or larger type, such as in this October 1965 editorial:
“STUDENTS WANT THE OPPORTUNITY TO BE RESPONSIBLE. THEY WANT IT AND THEY WANT IT BADLY . . . STUDENTS ARE TIRED OF HEARING THE ADMINISTRATION TELL THEM THEY ARE ‘JUNIOR PARTNERS.’ THEY WANT DEEDS, NOT WORDS.”
Whatever my inner turmoil, I loved what I was doing. I had summer internships at the Providence Journal. With the BDH we had a newspaper all to ourselves. Articles written on manual typewriters in our Faunce House offices were shuttled by cab or messenger to a shop near the state house where a linotypist banged them out again in lead type and another man took the type and created the pages. My managing editors—Steve Veiner and David Gilbert—and I would often be down there into the wee hours supervising the process and making regular runs for hot dogs. Life was heady.
And then, in December 1965, our tenure nearing an end, our world crashed. Faced one night with a shortage of staff and of copy, Gilbert, Veiner, and I crafted a hoax issue announcing that, at last, up to one hundred Pembrokers would be allowed to have off-campus apartments; applications for permission would be taken immediately. Yes, we were looking for a short-term chuckle or gotcha. But there was a serious purpose behind this glitzy “news.” It was something people would want to believe, something that would seem logical and desirable, and it had the potential to stimulate real debate.
It would not have embarrassed the university if it were true. But it wasn’t. Many students were angry; we had violated their trust. The university administration was furious with us. Our credibility was shot. The three of us resigned.
Though shaken, I emerged a better person, less arrogant, more appreciative of the seriousness and consequences of journalism, a field that would be my lifelong career.
Interestingly, our bogus claim indeed presaged reality. That April, Dean Pierrel, so long a holdout, made the breathtaking announcement that university trustees had approved a plan for up to thirty Pembrokers to move off campus the following year. The new Herald editors reported the news with the very same page layout we’d used in the hoax issue.
I knew one of the Pembrokers who got an apartment. In a way, you do too. Remember Elizabeth Feroe, who scolded me in Faunce House on the day of the birth control issue? Well, in second semester, we found ourselves sharing a class, Professor Bill McLoughlin’s “Social and Intellectual History of the United States.” We began sitting together, and shooting the breeze, and dating.
In her senior year, she proceeded to live off campus. I was at Columbia Journalism School, but our romance endured. On June 6, 1967, we were married. And we still are.
Number One Tofu Scramble with Johnny Toast
ROBERT ARELLANO
Under College Hill there ar
e tunnels for discontinued trains. There, in the dark, derelicts sleep along the ties, their heads on rusty rails. And lower forms live there—rats, reptiles—and, according to Lovecraft, something in between: creatures erect once, beasts again.
—Keith Waldrop, “Characteristic Pieces”
Matt Obert, a server at Louis Family Restaurant on Brook Street, is on his way out of the kitchen with a Cheeseburger Special, LTO on the side, when he’s collared by owner Louis Gianfrancesco. “What do you think you doing! Onion’s not a vegetable, it’s a spice!” Louis makes Matt take some back. This moment, this withheld slice of onion, serendipitously sparks the insight of four diners and the plans for Brown’s first Multimedia Lab, a state-of-the-art computer classroom on the ground floor of the Grad Center, get sketched out on a napkin over a tippy tabletop.
Since 1946, Louis has opened at five o’clock every morning, 362 days a year. In the 1960s, a young folksinger named Robert Zimmerman bounced Louis’s son Johnny on his knee before playing to the packed diner. In 1994, it’s Johnny and brother Albert who arrive at four thirty every morning to make sure the grills are hot for scholars pulling all-nighters and Providence cops coming off the graveyard shift. These days, everyone’s talking about how a lawyer representing Brown showed up telling Johnny they wanted to buy him out. Johnny says, “Let’s just say I told him he didn’t have our kind of money.”
The Brown Reader Page 6