Читать книгу Full Circle - Michael Thomas Ford - Страница 18

A college dorm on the first day of a new term resembles nothing so much as a sea lion rookery during the winter birthing season. Upperclassmen, appointed to oversee the operations, herd the newcomers with a practiced, weary air, while the freshmen pups tumble over one another in their hurry, all wide-eyed excitement mixed with fear of the unknown. An infectious madness surrounds the proceedings, and it’s impossible not to be swept up in it. Soon things will settle into a more sedate routine, but those first few days are pure bedlam. If you are one of the fresh arrivals, you feel half-explorer, half-clown, vulnerable in your newness but determined to make your way in this unfamiliar world.

As Jack and I carried our belongings into Pinchot Hall and up to our room on the third floor, we passed through a circus of sights, sounds, and smells. The voices of the Grateful Dead mingled with Janis Joplin’s as Jimi Hendrix’s guitar wailed behind them. Men of all kinds moved in and out of doorways, enthusiastically greeting old friends and nodding curtly at new faces. Most had hair longer than that of Jack and myself, and it appeared that growing a beard would be one of our first priorities. Peace sign posters and images of Che Guevara graced many dorm room walls, and the scent of pot was ever-present, in bold defiance of the numerous warnings we’d received in our new-student packets about the university’s no-tolerance policy on drugs.

Our room was number 308. It was a double, as we’d requested on our applications, and it was completely unremarkable in every way. To the left of the door was a closet, then a long L-shaped desk, the shorter leg of which extended into the room and separated the work space from the sleeping area, which featured a twin bed situated against the wall. The right-hand side of the room was a mirror image of the left, as if the entire building had been rolled from an assembly line. Not that we much cared what it looked like. Pinchot (named after two-time Pennsylvania governor and avid conservationist Gifford Pinchot) was the newest of what were called the East Halls, built in 1967 and therefore mostly free from the wear and tear inflicted by previous occupants. Rising ten stories above the green lawns, it felt to us like our very own castle.

As we unpacked, we discovered that our mothers had followed the packing list sent by the school’s office of student housing to the letter. They had also apparently done their shopping together. Opening a box marked BEDDING, we found inside two corduroy bedspreads, both blue, as well as two sets of sheets in the same hue. Matching towels waited for us at the bottom of the carton. We stacked it all on our beds in two tidy little blue pyramids.

“Are you guys brothers or something?”

We turned around to see Andy Kowalski regarding us with an amused smile. We didn’t know it was Andy, of course, never having seen him before. What we saw was a big, broad boy wearing bluejeans and no shirt. His light brown hair was shaggy but not overly long, his cheeks were covered in stubble, and around his neck was a leather thong on which were threaded three ceramic beads the color of fire. Against his tanned skin they shone like rubies. His chest was patterned with hair, which trickled down his stomach and disappeared into the top of his jeans. His feet were bare.

“I’m Andy,” he said, giving us a name to put with his face. He then repeated the question, “So, are you two brothers? All your stuff matches. That’s why I asked.”

“No,” Jack answered, as usual speaking for both of us. “Not really. I’m Jack, and this is Ned. We’re neighbors. From back home, I mean. Philadelphia.”

Andy nodded and smiled again, as if everything was now perfectly clear to him. “Got it,” he said. “City boys. I’m from Crawford County.”

The part he didn’t say—and didn’t need to—was that he was a farm boy. I could tell by his way of talking. Like many people from Western Pennsylvania, he identified himself by his county, not his city. It was a holdover from the days when farm boards, and not the government, were the principal holders of power in a region. Although that had changed, many in the farming communities still saw themselves as being united against the threat of bureaucracy. Since many small towns had similar or identical names, or had yet to even make it onto maps, a person’s county of residence made for the most easily-recognized form of identification. To Andy, hailing from Crawford County was akin to being part of a clan.

“We don’t live in Philly exactly,” I said, correcting myself. “We live a little outside it.”

I don’t know why I felt the need to de-citify myself and Jack. I suppose I feared that Andy would think us snobs, and for some reason I wanted him to like us. He was the first person we’d met since arriving at Penn, the first person, really, we’d met outside of our old lives. I wanted it to go well.

“Well, how would you not-quite-city boys like to share a joint with me?” Andy asked.

I hesitated, but Jack immediately said, “Sure.”

“Come on,” Andy directed. “Let’s go to my room.”

His room was on Pinchot’s seventh floor. A double like ours, the right side was Andy’s space. The bed was covered with an actual quilt made of hand-pieced squares in the traditional Jacob’s Ladder pattern favored by the Amish. On the desk was a photograph of Andy with two people I assumed to be his parents, although they seemed a little old to hold those positions in his life. A poster of Jane Fonda in her Barbarella getup was taped on the wall beside the bed, and a dog-eared copy of Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience lay on the floor.

Andy shut the door and sat down on the edge of the bed. Reaching beneath it, he pulled out a wooden box about six inches long by four inches wide. Like the quilt, it too looked handmade, the wood rubbed to a soft glow. Andy removed the lid from the box and took from inside it a small bag of pot and some rolling papers. Taking a paper, he folded one edge over to form a vee, into which he poured some of the marijuana. Then, with what looked like practiced hands, he rolled the cigarette using his thumbs, gave the edge a quick lick, and sealed everything shut by running a finger along the resulting seam.

The whole process took less than a minute. It reminded me of a scene in True Grit, which Jack and I had seen back in June the weekend it opened, where Kim Darby as Mattie Ross, the feisty teenage tomboy hunting down her father’s killer, rolled a cigarette for John Wayne’s sheriff Rooster Cogburn and placed it in his mouth. Mattie’s brazen action said a lot about who she was—independent, free, and nobody’s fool. Andy’s said something similar. By inviting us to share a joint with him, he was welcoming us in. By showing us how well he could roll one, he was displaying a sophistication and bravado that set him apart as someone willing to court danger. It was his first attempt at seduction, as far as Jack and I were concerned, and it worked.

“What about your roommate?” I asked as Andy lit the joint and inhaled deeply.

He held the toke for a long time, finally releasing the smoke in a gentle stream. It curled up from his mouth, like the dying breath of a dragon. “What about him?” he asked, passing the cigarette to Jack.

“Will he mind?” I said. “About, you know, this?” I waved at the joint, which Jack was inexpertly sucking on.

Andy laughed. “Shit, no,” he said. “He won’t mind. He’s a Negro.” He laughed again, as if this explanation was complete in itself.

Jack held the joint out to me. I took it from him, pinching it between my thumb and forefinger. Andy was watching me, and I wanted him to think I knew what I was doing. Putting the joint to my lips, I inhaled deeply. My lungs inflated, filled with the acrid smoke. The burn was intense, much more than anything I’d experienced the few times Jack and I had smoked pot before. I wanted badly to cough, but I forced myself not to. I held the breath as long as I could, then let it out. My lungs, still afire, sucked in clean air.

“Good shit, isn’t it?” said Andy as I returned the joint to him.

Already the potent THC was coursing through my blood. My mind was being tickled by teasing fingers, my thoughts slowing as I sank into the warm glow. Jack, too, was feeling it. He settled onto a chair and leaned back, grinning. I looked from him to Andy, suddenly happy beyond words.

“Hey, are you guys into Blind Faith?” asked Andy, jumping up and going to the record player that sat on a makeshift bookcase beneath the room’s lone window. “Have you heard their album? It’s fucking amazing.”

He pulled an album out and showed it to us. The cover photo depicted a young girl, naked, holding some kind of phallic silver airplane in her hand, the head pointed suggestively toward her crotch. Andy laughed. “Fucking amazing!” he said again.

He removed the record from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable, and gently lowered the stylus. Music poured from the speakers placed on either side of the window, a bluesy rumble of guitar.

“Clapton is God, man. He’s God!” said Andy, standing up and swaying as the song burst into life. He took another hit from the joint, shutting his eyes and tilting his head back.

We stayed in Andy’s room all afternoon. When the joint had been smoked down, and even the roach was nothing but a charred nub, we made a quick trip to a grocery store for chips and beer, which Andy purchased without an ID by charming the teenage checkout girl. We went in his beat-up pickup truck, a red 1958 Mercury-100. It had a three-speed automatic transmission, and whenever it would reluctantly move into another gear, Andy would yell, “It’s Merc-O-Matic!” Jack and I found this hysterical, and by the time we returned to Andy’s dorm room, we were all shouting, “It’s Merc-O-Matic!” about every fifteen seconds or so.

Andy’s roommate was there when we got back, sitting at his desk and reading. As promised, he was black. Tall and thin, he wore his hair in an afro. Upon seeing him, Andy let out another whoop.

“Chaz, my man,” he said. “What’s going down? These are my buddies, Ned and Jack.”

“Hey,” Chaz said. He went back to his reading. Looking over his shoulder as I passed, I saw he was deep into Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice.

“Chaz is one of them revolutionary Negroes,” Andy said as he popped open a beer and handed it to me. “What’s that group you were telling me about, Chaz? The Black Cougars?”

“Panthers,” Chaz said, not taking his eyes away from the book. “The Black Panthers.”

“Panthers,” Andy repeated. “Chaz says they’re going to take the power away from white people. Sounds good to me. Let someone else be in charge for a while.”

Chaz turned to look at us. “Damn right someone else needs to be in charge. Do you know for every white man being drafted to fight in Vietnam, three black men are being drafted?”

“That’s because someone needs to take the place of all those faggots running to Canada,” Andy replied. He took another record out and dropped the needle to it. The Who’s Tommy rocked the room. “Hell, those black boys should be proud they’re over there shooting gooks.”

Hearing Andy say the word faggot, I felt my sense of happiness fading. I had no real opinion about the war in Vietnam, and my feelings about the men who went north to avoid being drafted into the conflict were equally neutral. But through the cloudy haze of my high, I realized I was one of the faggots Andy had so casually dismissed, and I didn’t want him to hate me. I looked at Jack, to see if he was having a similar reaction, and was both surprised and saddened to see that he was laughing along with Andy at the joke.

“You won’t think it’s so funny when you’re over there trying not to get your white asses killed,” said Chaz, returning to his reading.

“We can’t get drafted,” Jack said. “We’re in college.”

Chaz snorted derisively. “That’s right. All you white boys are safe in college. How many black men do you think can go to college? Why do you think they’re taking so many of us?”

“You’re here,” Andy pointed out.

“And I worked like hell to get here,” said Chaz. “My momma and daddy worked like dogs to save enough money so I could come here. Didn’t nobody hand me a scholarship or pay my way.”

“Hey, I’m not here free either,” Andy told him. “My grandfather’s worked his farm for forty years and never asked anybody for a handout. Everything we have, he earned.”

“What about your parents?” I asked, noticing he made no mention of them.

“Dead,” Andy said. “Killed in a car accident when I was two. My grandparents raised me.”

That explained the photograph on his desk. And, I thought, probably the hand-stitched quilt as well. I imagined his grandmother piecing the blocks together and quilting the open spaces with painstaking care. What would she think, I wondered, if she could see Andy sprawled across it with a beer in one hand and his dirty feet resting on the top.

I made a silent prayer that neither Chaz nor Andy would ask me and Jack if we were at Penn State on scholarships. Already I feared Andy would end our friendship if he found out about what Jack and I did with one another. I didn’t want to give him—or Chaz—another reason to view us with disdain.

Fortunately, the conversation waned as Andy became more and more drunk. Chaz accepted a few hits from the second joint to be rolled from Andy’s stash, and soon he was laughing along with Andy and Jack as he tried to explain Eldridge Cleaver’s argument for the raping of white women as a way of eroding the dominant power structure. I listened, growing more and more anxious, until finally I reminded Jack that we had a lot to do before our first day of classes began the next morning. Reluctantly, he said good-bye to our new friends and the two of us returned to our room.

“Andy’s great, huh?” Jack said as I made my bed and unpacked the rest of my things.

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s a nice guy.”

“I like Chaz, too,” Jack continued. “I’ve never had a Negro friend before.”

“I don’t think they call themselves that,” I said. “I think they’re just black.”

“Oh,” said Jack, halfheartedly putting away some clothes in his closet. “Anyway, they’re both cool.”

I wanted to ask him why he’d laughed at Andy’s remark about faggots. Before I could, he was behind me, sliding his hands around my waist and pushing his crotch into my ass suggestively. “Want to fool around?” he asked.

I almost said no. The combination of beer and pot had made me far too relaxed. But Jack continued to grind himself against me, and slowly my libido wrestled its way through the blanket of conflicting emotions in which I was wrapped. I found myself growing hard, and when Jack slipped his hand down the front of my pants and began stroking me, I gave in. Moments later, we were on my bed, naked, our limbs entwined as we celebrated our first night truly away from home.

We fell asleep in my bed, our joined bodies curled into a question mark.