by Lewis Shiner
Was she aware of what she was doing to him? Was she flirting or only trying to make him feel included? If she was flirting, was it all a shuck, or was there something real behind it? Deep in Hubbard’s guitar solo he tried a move several of the black dancers were doing, slowly bending his knees as he rocked back and forth, taking Susan with him until she was straddling his right leg. She gently slapped the back of his neck and said, “Cole? Cut it out.” He straightened up instantly, feeling the heat in his face.
For the rest of the dance he was terrified that he’d gone too far, only to have her slip out of his arms at the end, pat his cheek, and say, “That was nice.”
Over the course of the evening he worked up his nerve and danced a few more times, once with a girl who was an entering freshman like him, freckled and innocent-seeming, there with her future sorority sisters, and once with a woman who must have been close to thirty, with dark roots and a gravel voice, who called him “hon” and talked him through dipping her until he got it. After that he danced with Susan again, and dipped her, allowing himself to fantasize briefly about what it would be like to go home with her to her trim little white-shuttered house.
By 11:00 Susan was yawning and the noise level in the club was climbing, the band cranking their volume to cover the noise of the shouted conversations. The air was thick with smoke and humid with sweat and Cole was relieved to get out into the hot night air.
At the Villa Capri, Susan got out and hugged Alex, then Cole. “Welcome to Austin,” she said, and kissed his cheek. Then she got in the car with her husband-to-be and drove away.
*
Registration at the ancient, unairconditioned Gregory Gym was every bit as hellish as Susan had warned them. Cole was assigned a one pm slot on the first day and arrived to find a line that stretched out of the gym and down the block. He’d brought the latest Joe Gall novel, The Star Ruby Contract, to read while standing in line.
Gradually they moved out of the blazing sun, up the stairs, through the three massive doors, down another set of stairs, and up another set to the top of the bleachers. One row at a time moved down to the gym floor, and the other rows shifted down behind them. Sections of wooden fence, held in place by sandbags, corralled off the basketball court, with hundreds of students lined up at the various tables. For the first time, Cole began to comprehend the magnitude of thirty thousand students on one campus.
By the time he reached the third row, he was halfway through the book. Gall had been captured by a renegade Chinese regiment in Burma. After a lavish dinner, he was forced, at gunpoint, to watch a Kachin sword dance. Suddenly he was pinned to his chair, hands immobilized on the tabletop. One of the sword dancers darted in. “And there I was. Staring at my left index finger, parted neatly from my hand.”
Cole shut the book. The bleachers tilted and he couldn’t find his breath.
“You all right?” a deep-southern voice asked. It belonged to a compact guy with a Hawaiian shirt and blond sideburns that flared out past his earlobes.
“Yeah, I just… It’s a long story.”
“You need a drink of water or something, I’ll hold your place.”
Cole nodded, stood up confusedly.
“There’s a fountain over yonder.”
“Thanks,” Cole said, and wove his way through the lines. He splashed water on his face and down the back of his neck. The temperature had to be close to a hundred, and the air smelled like old gym shoes. He stared at the stump of his middle finger, the horror of that morning returning in snatches—the ambulance, Jerry’s body, the post-surgical nausea, the pain. The memory of the pain burned its way from finger to elbow, making him squeeze his wrist with his left hand.
He ran cold fountain water on the phantom pain until it stopped, and then he took a long drink. He dried his hands on his jeans and went back to the bleachers and introduced himself.
“Joe Maynard,” the blond guy said. “Tupelo, Mississippi.”
By the time they got called down to the basketball court, Cole had the rough outlines of Joe’s story. His father was a lawyer and Joe was the youngest of four kids. His sisters had opted for community college and his brother for Ole Miss. Joe was more ambitious. He’d gotten good grades and done well enough in what he called “throwing events”—discus, shot put, javelin, and hammer—to have his pick of non-Ivy League universities. His father had wanted him in a conservative southern school like Vanderbilt, Duke, or Emory, and Joe had fought for ut instead. Fewer restrictions, a strong and modern English department. More women. Like Cole and Alex, Joe had made it into Plan II.
Joe was excited about being away from home, about starting what he called his “real” life. Cole chose not to burden him with his own misgivings, which the registration process was only making worse. He felt like a tree being fed into the sawmill of the university, destined to emerge in four years as uniform pieces of lumber suitable for shoring up the decaying structure of society.
They made their way past the barricades to the English table, and found the tray of computer cards for the World Literature course. Joe reached for the cards and the irritable grad student behind the table snapped, “Don’t! Lesson One, freshman, is do not touch the trays.”
“May we have two cards, please?” Joe said, feigning contrition as Cole wondered how often fist fights broke out in the lines.
They both had to show their Plan II acceptance letters to get the cards. “Don’t sweat on them,” the grad student said, “or the computer’ll spit them out. Then you’ll really be in for it.”
Holding their cards by the edges, they hit the other tables together. The 101 Algebra course Cole had signed up for was already out of cards. “They may open another section later,” the math grad student said. “Or they may not. You can always try your luck at adds and drops next week.” Joe had placed into an advanced course that Cole wanted no part of, so he took a Geometry card instead. They split up at the end so that Cole could sign up for Russian and Joe for German.
Cole understood that they were lucky to have gotten most of the classes they’d asked for. A day later, Susan had warned them, and they wouldn’t have had it so easy. At the end of the maze they took their stacks of cards to another hostile grad student, who fed them into the computer and handed them their course schedules on sheets of 11 x 14 paper with pale green horizontal stripes.
He took Joe to Dirty’s to celebrate. Over cheeseburgers he explained why the book had freaked him out and showed off his mangled finger. Joe had a few scars of his own from weekends spent fishing and camping. As they finished, Joe mentioned that his next job was to find a place to live, and Cole smiled. “This is your lucky day.”
*
By five pm the outside temperature had finally started to drop. As far as Alex could tell, it was hotter than ever inside the house on Castle Hill. He’d opened all the windows and set up a couple of box fans to help get rid of the resinous smell of the tung oil that the workmen had used to finish the floors. He stood in front of the downstairs fan and let his sweat dry while he checked his watch again.
As Cole had predicted, the floors had only finished curing the day before. The contractor had hooked up the electricity and gas, but due to the crush of students, the phones had only been working for two hours. Haverty’s was scheduled to deliver the furniture any minute, and Cole was still not back from registration. Alex wondered if he’d met some chick in line and was having his way with her in air-conditioned comfort.
At that moment the screen door banged and Cole walked in with a redneck in a loud shirt and ridiculous sideburns.
“Alex,” he said, “meet our first tenant. This is Tupelo Joe.”
Much as Alex wanted the whole renting business over with, he was not at all sure that this rube was somebody he wanted to share a house with. Nor was he thrilled with Cole having made a unilateral decision. As he searched for a polite way to say all that, the Haverty’s truck pulled up at the curb and suddenly Cole and Tupelo Joe were helping to unload it and Alex was s
tanding by the stairs directing traffic.
They’d picked out the furniture at a Haverty’s in Dallas in July, Cole and Alex and his father, and Alex had watched in wonder as Cole talked his father into double beds for each of the rooms, solid wood desks and chests of drawers, and a foldout couch in the living room for his father’s own use.
“Which one is my room?” Tupelo asked from the back of a box spring headed up the stairs.
“The middle one upstairs,” Cole answered from the other end. “Between me and Alex.”
They were done in less than an hour. Alex tipped the Haverty’s guys then went inside, shut all the windows, turned on all the air conditioners upstairs and down, then sprawled in the middle of the living room with his arms outstretched. Tupelo lay down companionably a few feet away and Cole sat on the bottom of the stairs.
“This is a beautiful house,” Tupelo said. “How’d y’all come by it?”
Alex had to admit, now that it had some furniture, it lived up to his first impressions, and then some—high ceilings, lots of light from the oversize windows, and the glossy oak floors.
“Alex’s father bought it,” Cole said. “It’s his Austin beachhead for his crime empire.”
“Y’all are pulling my leg now, right?”
“You never heard of the Mexican Mafia?” Alex asked. “La eMe? That’s us. Drugs, prostitution, murder. Cole there is our top hit man.”
“I wouldn’t mind some drugs, now that you mention it,” Tupelo said. “We can maybe bring in some of them prostitutes later on.”
*
Madelyn’s first task for the so-called Summer of Love had been to dispose of her virginity with the least fuss possible. She’d been on the Pill for three months and was as ready as she’d ever be. A number of boys had made clear their willingness to provide the service; she chose the sweetest of them. When the moment came, he was surprised at her lack of resistance, all the more so when she told him it was her first time. The act itself had been fun and exciting and only slightly painful, though it didn’t end with the fireworks she’d hoped for, at least on her part. Apparently it was more than satisfying for her partner, who proceeded to fall in love with her. She hadn’t anticipated that, and though she tried to break up with him as gently as possible, it was gruesome for both of them in the end. She saw that she’d been naïve to think it could be a simple, friendly transaction; she would remember that going forward.
She filled the rest of the summer with a minimum wage job at Skillern’s Drugs and plans for ut. Her father had insisted on a private dorm for the first semester, until she “got her bearings.” The contract specified a ten-pm curfew on weeknights, midnight on Saturday and Sunday. She supposed she could put up with it for four months. Even more iniquitous was the university policy that forbade coeds to wear pants or shorts to class; only dresses and skirts were permitted. The length of the hemline was not specified, and Madelyn planned to put that oversight to the test without delay.
As a Plan II student, she also had few options for her courses. She couldn’t afford a car, and after paying for her dorm, her father would not have a lot left for an allowance. She suspected she might have to get a part-time job, despite her father’s opposition to any interference with her studies.
With her dreams of freedom being smothered in the cradle, she put up only token resistance when he vetoed her idea of studying Arabic and pushed her toward Russian instead. “The Arabs,” he said, “would regard an unveiled Western woman who spoke Arabic with the same lack of seriousness that they would a talking camel. Whereas the Soviet Union has transcended gender.”
“Yes, Daddy,” she said.
*
In the hallway before her first Russian class, Madelyn recognized someone from her dorm, a petite girl from Denton named Denise Glover. Unlike most of her dorm mates, who sported items from the fall Neiman-Marcus catalog, Denise’s appearance was subtly off, her hemlines in a no-man’s land between ankle and knee, her palette too dark, her black, frizzy hair always out of control. This had already endeared her to Madelyn, so she took the opportunity to get her talking as they found two seats together near the front of the room.
Denise admitted that she was taking Russian from a purely practical viewpoint. “I can work as a translator until I can make a living doing what I really want to do.”
“Which is?”
“I have no idea,” Denise said, and put back her head and laughed.
That was when Madelyn had her second recognition of the morning. Three rows behind them sat a skinny guy with longish, wavy brown hair that she knew from somewhere. The Chicano boy next to him was also familiar.
The feeling nagged her through the first five minutes of class and finally drove her to a second look. This time she noticed his boots, which activated her memory of the St. Mark’s party. Unfortunately, he caught her looking and offered her a cocky grin, which went on to remind her of the garage and his predatory stance over the perfumed brunette with the breasts.
She gave him her best I’m-here-to-make-a-return-not-a-purchase smile and faced the professor again. Interesting coincidence, she thought.
When the class ended, he blocked the aisle. “I’m Cole,” he said, holding out his hand.
She pretended not to see it. “Oh, I know who you are. Lead guitar.” She pointed to his friend. “Bass guitar.”
“You have the advantage of me,” he said, startled.
“Yes, it appears that I do, doesn’t it?” She flashed her most dazzling smile. “If you’ll excuse us?”
He stood aside and she and Denise made their exit. Denise, she was pleased to note, did not spoil the effect by looking back.
“Gracious,” Denise said. “Who are they?”
Madelyn wondered if she’d ever heard anyone her age say “gracious” before. “A couple of private school boys from Dallas. A bit full of themselves.”
“I think the tall one was interested in you.”
“I suspect he’s even more interested now. He needs a little air let out of his tires. He’ll be able to grip the road better that way.”
*
First Alex had to go through Adds and Drops to get into the World Literature class he needed for Plan II. He barely pulled that off, and he was unable to trade his Economics class for Introductory Accounting like his father wanted. It was like a microcosm of the Soviet Union—shortages, lines, uncertainty, delays, bureaucrats, senseless rules.
Then there was the ordeal of the fourth roommate. Having confirmed that Tupelo Joe smoked dope, Alex didn’t want to bring in a straight. His father was putting on the pressure and couldn’t understand why he’d turned down three applicants in a row, one of them an rotc cadet.
Last-minute salvation arrived in the form of Sunny, from Pakistan via Fort Worth. His father was a doctor, and Sunny himself was worldly to the verge of arrogance, dark-skinned and handsome, with a voice as mellifluous as a tv anchorman’s and long hair that he flipped out of his eyes with a toss of the head. He’d missed registration because he’d been visiting Pakistan with his parents, a “minor issue” that was “being taken care of.” He found the downstairs suite “suitable” and they negotiated a few specifics. Sunny was vegetarian and would use his own cookware, which he would keep in his room. Alex explained that there would be band rehearsals downstairs, that the basement was soundproofed, that they would never go past midnight. Sunny wrote a check for the first and last months’ rent.
The next day, as Alex made the rounds of bulletin boards to remove his flyers, he found a hand-lettered notice on bright yellow paper: “Experienced drummer and organist seek singing guitar and bass players for top 40 combo with intent to pull down heavy bread on Fraternity Row.” Alex copied down the phone number and brought it up with Cole that night.
“It’s like fate or something,” Alex said. “The exact pieces we’re missing.”
“Frat parties?” Cole said.
Alex had hoped for more enthusiasm. “That’s where the big money is. Why, w
hat were you thinking?”
“I guess I hadn’t thought about it. Sure, what the hell, let’s give ’em a try.”
Alex made the call and set up an audition for the next afternoon, Saturday.
*
Alex was dismayed to discover that the organ in question was a Hammond B-3, weighing over 300 pounds. Getting it down the basement stairs was an ordeal of another sort, costing strained backs and multiple bruises. This better work out, Alex thought.
Nolan, the drummer, had a double bass set, four toms, and five cymbals in addition to the hi-hat. By the time they were set up next to the organ and the cases were piled in a corner, the basement was smaller than Alex had hoped.
A dehumidifier had taken care of the dampness. The remodeling crew had turned them on to some salvaged acoustical ceiling tiles, which Cole had mounted on the walls, and they’d pieced together scraps of industrial carpet on the floor. Still, once you turned the instruments high enough to cover the drums, it got loud fast. It also got very hot, and with no windows, the box fans didn’t help much.
Ron, the organist, had a sweet tenor that complimented Cole’s and Alex’s voices. Nolan’s drumming was steady and he knew all the parts. Substituting organ for rhythm guitar changed the sound of a few songs like “Daytripper”—not, Alex thought, necessarily for the worse.
It came out fairly quickly that their band in Houston had been named The Other Side, and when Cole made a disgusted sound, Alex jumped in to cover for him. “We had a, uh, rivalry with a band called The Other Side in Dallas.”
Ron had a long, shiny mane of blond hair that Alex suspected might be dyed. He smiled and said, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”