by David Adjmi
Later that night Chris and Julian (they lived across the hall) made drinks called Purple Nurples, and James and Bolt and Fish-Eater and I all got wasted and went to a “big blowout party” at a room down the hall. At the big blowout party I chatted up a girl from Arizona named Eve Hammer. Her father invented cleaning products, she said. He invented a scrubbing brush that dispensed liquid soap when you squeezed the handle, and he got rich from the scrubbing brush, and the family moved into a mansion. As she spoke about the mansion, I felt myself entering it, as if I’d managed to break in with my imagination. I felt myself jumping forward in time to a deep intimacy I felt with this woman, an intimacy I’d never known. The liquor bolstered my bravery and in the middle of her conversation about cleaning products I leaned in to kiss her. My first kiss!
I took Eve back to my dorm room and brought some vodka with me. We were tippling and kissing and groping on the bed. My dreadlocks kept falling in her face and I kept pushing them away. To give to illusion of spontaneous desire, I climbed on top of her very suddenly, then lashed myself to her body like it was a mast. Her body was not compact, it was like a mountainous slab—too big to caress but I scaled its slopes and curves as best as I could. When I got to her face I could smell her hair, the tropic salvo of papaya. The dorm mattress made sharp squeaking noises beneath us: hard evidence of the male prowess I was trying to make legible. At some point, Eve looked up at me through the miasma of liquor. There was a brief flicker of lucidity in her eyes: clearly, I had no idea what I was doing. I was trying to build a simulacrum of desire that would be perfect and complete, but the shape of the thing I was trying to build eluded me. I hoped some of my functional bisexuality would kick in—after Weinberger introduced it as a possibility, we never again discussed it; I was too shy to ask him about the particulars, and before I knew it the therapy was over, but I still clung to it as an ideal. I was hoping if I acted the part, new desires would spontaneously arise, so I tried doing masculine things. I shook Eve’s shoulder and squeezed the skin on her neck. I squeezed her hands like they were the mitts of a lobster, then slammed them on the mattress so that the coils in it fleetingly fit my knuckles. “Do you have a condom?” she asked (my self-esteem skyrocketed; I was someone of whom such a question could be asked) and as it turned out I did—I’d taken it from the basket the girl from Montecito passed around that afternoon. As I drunkenly unwrapped it, a broad shaft of light enveloped us on the bed. When I looked up, there was poor James standing half in the doorway and half outside the room frozen in terrified contrapasso, his virgin insufficiency echoed and magnified by my display of manly prowess with Eve Hammer. James had broken a protocol; this was college and there were conventions around sexual activity, he should have known. “Sorry, Dread,” he mumbled in shamefaced apology. He offered to leave but Eve said no, that it was alright, that she was drunk and had to go back home. James stood there for a long time apologizing gratuitously while Eve Hammer groggily buttoned up her shirt.
I felt intense relief. I didn’t know if I could’ve gone through with it. And then immediately I began to spin a mythology about Eve Hammer. I could feel the outlines of a story forming, the story of a man who desired nice heterosexual sex, a spurned lothario—but sensitive—who was desperately in love with an elusive woman. I could feel myself stoking new desires, insisting upon them the way my father insisted upon my endless unanswered Jewish questions. Eve became my idée fixe, an abstraction to which I attached free-floating urgency. If I kept the urgency alive, I could keep the power I’d been drawing to me those first few days of school.
I talked about Eve Hammer to James (who continued to frown naively and beat himself up over his bad timing and ruined protocol); I pined openly about her to Chris, the cute blond guy across the hall after whom I secretly intermittently lusted; I prated and boasted about her to Paul Bachant, my new architect-major friend who chain-smoked and was always cutting shapes out of foam core. I ambled through my suite of goosed-up regrets and fake-horny feelings for Eve to anyone who would listen. People were receptive to my plight—which was building momentum; it felt like the beginnings of a movement.
We started to refer to Eve Hammer as The Hammer, which sounded like something Fonzie on Happy Days might call one of his girlfriends. This pleased me. Straight men objectified women—I wanted to be one of them. It was male bonding, it felt like progress. I knew the progress was based on a lie, but I was holding fast to Weinberger’s assurances (however vague) that sexual orientation was like a garment, and like any garment it could be taken off and reassembled at will. If that was true then I wasn’t lying—or even if I was, I was lying to myself, which made it a kind of ethical stance, a way of repealing the lie.
A couple of days after the big blowout party, I got a call from The Hammer herself. She wanted to talk, she said, and her voice had a gelid impersonal air. I took her tone as a kind of seduction. “I’ll be right over,” I said. I changed into my tam and Sex Pistols T-shirt and ripped jeans and walked to her apartment at the other end of the hall. But when Eve opened the door she wore a grim, uninviting expression. Her hair was in a matronly bun. She wore desexualizing sweatpants to make clear the platonic character of our meeting. She sat me down in the living room—a public space—and hastily proceeded to take inventory of my failings as a lover. She had not been impressed with my lovemaking technique, she said, and hadn’t found my groping and neck and hand squeezing arousing but, on the contrary, boring and off-putting. I felt rejected and hurt but was determined to act bored and masculine (I think I even said something like “Whatever, Hammer,” when she encouraged me to take classes in feminism).
If there was an advantage to The Hammer’s rejection, it was that I now had permission to be crestfallen. I began drinking to excess every night to ward off the despair of my loveless solitude. I thought it would be compelling to be publicly drunk a lot, that it could signify lovelorn isolation, horny male drives, things that would make me sympathetic—but it was difficult to tease out validation from my roommates. James was nice but passive, Fish-Eater was lonely and strange—and I defied Bolt’s basic precepts about what it meant to be a person, and he’d come to hate me for it.* I had to look elsewhere for social approbation.
I spent more and more time at Rona and Pam’s down the hall. They consoled me chirpily about Eve Hammer and told me I was “going to find someone” and not to worry. Rona and Pam were a little déclassé but I liked all the attention they gave me. Their apartment was bursting with tennis trophies and pennants and Champion sweatshirts and purple eyeliner and protein bars. They sipped water from identical pink and purple water bottles emblazoned with school insignias: Go Trojans. They frightened me in the way Bolt frightened me, but at the same time they appealed to my appetite for normalcy. Their friend Cathy was over at their place a lot of the time—she too was approving, and consoling, and strangely in awe of me for reasons I never bothered to question. Eventually a clique began to form between the three girls and me, Paul Bachant, and Paul’s two roommates—a blond, tall man everyone called Big Brother, and a sullen but intermittently sweet guy named Wulf. Together we’d shuffle in a pack to California Pizza Kitchen and to Westwood to see Edward Scissorhands at the Avco. We’d go to Tijuana and get wasted off our asses. We’d go to Marie Callender’s for pie, to Souplantation for all-you-can-eat soup, on day trips to Manhattan Beach where Rona was from. I forgot about Eve Hammer, and forgot I was even trying to win people over with my performative kvetching and lovelessness. At times, though, I had no real idea what I was doing with these blond people who went to chain restaurants. Who were they, these chirpy happy people with helium voices and Champion sweatshirts?
Cathy was different. She seemed like the others—she drank smoothies and took aerobics classes—but was sensitive in a way they were not. Like me, she had an artistic bent. She wanted to be an actress, and had interned the previous summer at a place called Williamstown, where she met Rebecca De Mornay and the guy who played Norm on Cheers, and was Christophe
r Reeve’s dresser for some play he was in. At Williamstown she learned about an absurdist writer named Eugene Ionesco, and she got me to read his plays, which I loved. The comedy in them was dark and bold and utterly insane. “I find him very inspiring,” she said. Everything inspired and impressed and interested Cathy. Everything felt so private and secret with her. When we were with the others I’d catch her laughing slyly at me, looking askance as though we were always in some secret communion—which, as it turns out, we were. She wasn’t urbane or fashion conscious, she had a gauche perm and spoke with a midwestern accent, but I still liked her. When we were with our clique we walked a few feet behind, speaking in hushed tones in some new idiolect we invented on the spot. “Cathy and Dread!” they’d complain in tandem while making the requisite eye rolls and sighs. One night we ended up at the cafeteria, Café Eighty-Fuck (Café Eighty-Four but we thought it was clever to give everything a dirty name), and had one of those defining three-in-the-morning conversations about life, and how full of shit people were, and how sad it all was. I expressed my frustration with the superficiality of people—even as I strove for a kind of heightened superficiality in my own life. Everything I said back then was shot through with hypocrisy, but I didn’t see it as hypocrisy; my thoughts and emotions weren’t organized around a single center. I wanted to be too many things at once. I wanted integrity, but at the same time I didn’t give a shit about integrity. I was a giant maw. I just wanted to consume everything, and I wanted to be more than the sum of my own parts.
USC was a large university; the different parts of it were like small microclimates in which I could experiment with different possibilities for the kind of life I might have. Suddenly people—all sorts of people—wanted to know me. I was a gadfly, the most social of social butterflies. And in this crazy fluxion of social activity I found my way into a new and very prestigious all-male clique.
The guys in it were cut from the disaffected cloth of Bret Easton Ellis novels. Dominic was from Hong Kong and took a lot of acid. There was a British guy named Sebastian, and a goth called John who had Peter Murphy’s threadlike slimness and dyed his hair bright pink. There was a deadhead named Chris from New Jersey who wore tie-dye shirts and had perfectly bronzed skin and big muscles. It wasn’t a very cohesive group but we had a loose affinity for one another. We bonded in our common distaste for Trojans and football and the cheesy California stuff my other clique liked.
Together, we’d maunder in a pack and brood in sluggish silence. It wasn’t the silence of rumination, it wasn’t laden with hidden meaning or emotion, it was empty and masculine. I’d tag along in my usual phony equability whenever they went to a concert, or to Venice Beach to buy tie-dye shirts or drug paraphernalia. I am becoming a man now, I’d think as I essayed a diffuse manly enjoyment of our quiet aimlessness. I started to affect monosyllables and deliver them in a deep-voiced grunt: “Cool.” “Rad.” It felt strained but I inferred my discomfort was healthy. Dominic made me mixtapes of ska music, and got me a bootleg of a Bad Brains concert (because I’d pretended to like them), so I forced myself to listen to these at home even though I detested all of it. It was my castor oil, my homeopathy, a bit of poison to cure me.
With all my drinking and clique hopping I didn’t give an enormous amount of thought to my classes. I didn’t like college all that much. I was always at the bursar’s office talking to some woman behind a plexiglass window. I hated all the pro forma course requirements and how students were herded like farm animals from place to place. I hated the broad boring lectures in giant corporate amphitheaters, how professors assigned survey textbooks and took notes on large projection screens. The one class I loved was Introduction to Film, taught by a man named Drew Casper. Drew was very theatrical. Every week he made his big entrance in his leather bomber jacket and aviator sunglasses, and spoke over a tiny microphone clipped to his shirt. He had spiky white hair, and his face looked pulled back like he’d had a face-lift or two. Drew had an encyclopedic understanding of movies and film theory. His voice was drenched with dreamy infatuation whenever he talked about mise-en-scène or sound editing. If one of the TAs hadn’t seen some esoteric thing like The Passion of Anna (“one of the great films of all time . . . by a master”) he took it as a personal insult and would reprove them in front of the class. He also loved Doris Day. He would regularly sing the praises of Lover Come Back and Pillow Talk, movies that sounded really shitty to me, but to him Bergman and Doris Day weren’t mutually exclusive. I hadn’t realized you could admit love for something lowbrow and still be interesting. It occurred to me for the first time that that could be a kind of sophistication.
We watched movies in that class that blew my mind: Touch of Evil, Caligari, and Wild Strawberries. My favorite was Rear Window. Jimmy Stewart plays a photojournalist hobbled in a big cast and wheelchair who spends his days watching people outside his window through binoculars. He has a girlfriend, sort of (Grace Kelly), but he doesn’t want to be subsumed into her feminine domestic softness, with her mint-green dresses and socialite luncheons and sybaritic lobster Newburg takeout orders from the 21 Club. He wants his masculinity—something he has to protect, just as Bolt had to protect his by inspecting the little squares in his abdomen every morning in the mirror. Grace Kelly is really into Jimmy; she wants a commitment. She keeps appearing in swirling cocktail dresses and diaphanous negligees, hair perfect, lips laminated with red gloss, but Jimmy prefers to stare through his telephoto lens, past the glass partition of the window. “Can’t we keep things status quo?” he asks, before dispersing himself in the flurry of images across the courtyard.
Jimmy seemed to desire Grace Kelly but he was ambivalent about that desire; maybe that desire would suffocate him and lead him to choices that would ruin his life. I connected to that problem. Drew told us the people in the building across the way were manifestations of Jimmy’s fears and desires, and the prospects were sometimes grim. Miss Lonelyhearts tried to kill herself because men were so horrible to her. Mrs. Thorwald’s husband chopped her into pieces and stuffed her in a trunk. The life you picked had monumental consequences. If you chose badly you could be destroyed. But if you speculated about other lives, you were safe. I understood this intuitively. I knew to cultivate distance in my relationships, and to compartmentalize my life so that no one got close to me.
Sebastian and Chris’s dorm room quickly became a social hub; it was where everyone went to get drunk or high. I spent more and more time there with the deliberate aim of studying manliness. I was speculative and remote, like Jimmy Stewart in the movie. I watched people more than I was with them, like watching the world from inside a cyclorama. Sebastian’s side of the room was tidy, his walls festooned with tapestries and Metallica posters. Chris’s was a debauched nest of beer cans and pot and ragged, unelasticized pairs of Fruit of the Looms. He was often drunk or stoned, and would customarily swagger around with a Budweiser bare-chested, or in a tight-fitting Hanes T-shirt so that the taut mass of his pecs bulged through the fabric. People I’d never met were always in and out, playing hacky sack or watching the same porn tape over and over. Boys with large, dark eyes played poker with their girlfriends draped over them. Our masculine quietude was every so often punctuated with slight head raises to indicate hello, or high fives. Every so often someone would break out in a groovy dance to a Jerry Garcia guitar solo. I could never tell when it was appropriate to talk, so I trained myself to be quiet and genial. I didn’t possess needs or opinions. I ceded my wants and desires to everyone around me so I could be part of life. I was scared to give offense, scared to reveal anything of myself, scared I didn’t have a self to reveal.
Sebastian owned a bong and I admired him for it. The purchase of drug paraphernalia impressed me; it felt a sign of connoisseurship. The implementation of one’s interests and curiosity into manifest plans, ideas into things, the formation of hobbies—none of this occurred to me yet; I was still too scattershot in my aims. I watched him prepare a hit one time. He pulled the clump of we
ed out of a small plastic bag he kept in his JanSport, then carefully parsed the clump for seeds, which he said made the smoke taste rancid. As I watched him, I began to feel that the agricultural aspect of pot smoking made it degrading. People culling flowers and plants to sniff and smoke, it seemed grubby—all that sad rummaging for pleasure, like they were starving orphans in a bombed-out shelter licking their hems for crumbs. At the same time, the desire to be stoned felt irrepressibly male. There was something so cavalier and dangerous about deliberately drugging oneself—it had to be a sign of manhood. The other guys would constantly push me to get stoned with them, but I still had my yeshiva-instilled ideas about even soft drugs; I associated smoking pot with AIDS and filth and pork sausages. I kept saying no to them, but my resistance only increased their determination.