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4.

NEVER HAS A SUMMER PASSED WITH SUCH AGREEABLE speed, and now even school is something to look forward to. My second semester at Humboldt, or Ho-Hum State, as Mountain likes to call it, picks up right where I left it. All the lads are back. Though Karlo, Tee Willie, and the Tooley boys haven’t changed much, I’ve cast aside my sissy pirate blouses and platform shoes, sheared off my salon-curled hair, sold my jewelry, and flushed my contacts down the toilet (tired of bloodshot eyes and crawling around on the floor looking for a lost lens). The era of the hetero woman-man is over. Mick, you can wipe off your bloody lipstick. With my short hair and new plastic-framed glasses, it takes a few moments for my old comrades to recognize me. Also, I’ve decided to ease back on the festivities a bit since I’m going to need at least a B average to gain entrance into a decent law school.

But the parties never stop coming, and it seems a waste to let them pass without me. One night, only a few weeks after school starts, there’s a poker game down in the Tooley room. We’ve bought a half gallon of Safeway gin, which some are mixing with orange juice, others dry vermouth and green olives on toothpicks. Mountain and I are in the second category, swilling freely and making Gaelic jokes.

“Shut your piehole, Edgar Donahoe,” says Andy. “The bet’s to you.”

“I’m not anti- Gaelic,” I mutter, dashing off my ninth martini. “Just because I’ve never been to a Gaelic bar.”

Mountain fans his cards in his meaty hands, shakes his head, and says in a perfect New England accent: “I say aftuh we shoot the Demo-crats, we send all the Gaelics back to San Francis – co.”

I throw away my cards. “In the words of a famous Cartesian, ‘I quit, therefore I fold.’”

Brian loads the long bong, packing in that sticky, pinesmelling sinsemilla that costs forty dollars for a quarter ounce but is worth it, people, let me tell you.

There’s another kid named Andy, a bedazzled freshman just grateful to be in our sophomoric presence, sitting at the end of our makeshift table and obediently losing his money. “Tell you what,” I say. “Let’s all be mountain ranges. I’ll be the Himalayas.” I point to Karlo. “You be the Pyrenees. Tee Willie, you’re the Sangre de Cristos. And you two …” I indicate Andy and Andy. “You guys be the Andes.”

Oh whore whore whore. My compatriots laugh so hard some of the chips fall off the table. I find this a good time to mix another Safeway martini. Am I not hilarious when I’m swacked?

“What about me?” says Mountain, pouting. “I want to be Mount Sinai.”

“You’re drunk, Moses.”

“Hot puppies.”

“Deal the cards, doughface!” shouts Karlo. “And fix me a bong.”

“Seven stud.”

“What’s wild?”

“Ask not for whom the bong tolls,” says Brian, handing the bong across to Karlo. “The bong tolls for thee.”

My perception starts to get hazy at this point, but I know the sun’s not up yet, and I’m winning money at poker even if I’m drunk as a giraffe. Tee Willie has slipped out. It must be very late because all the lights in the dormitory across the way are off. I raise the window and with one of those orange highway cones that make perfect megaphones, I begin shouting at the darkened windows. “Wake up you dope-smoking sheep diddlers!” I call to them. “Rise and shine you hairy-legged fairy queens!”

Mountain grabs the megaphone: “Eat Jesus!” he cries. “Not war!”

Karlo and the Tooley boys are in stitches. The other Andy, the doe-eyed freshman, suggests meekly that maybe it’s too late for this. Mountain and I are still under the impression that we’re being hilarious, which is one of the many downsides of alcohol.

Mountain bellows in his great baritone: “Is that tapioca in your beards, men, or are you just glad I came!”

As we continue to shout clever insults the lights in the windows across the way flicker on, angry faces appear below raised blinds, and a Living Group Advisor, fists balled, is marching in his slippers across the lawn. It’s Clyde. I recognize Clyde. I pissed him off two weeks ago. I don’t like Clyde much. He’s an undeveloped suburbanite like me, except he gets a free room and oodles of arbitrary power simply for sucking up to the authorities. I step out into the hall to meet him. When he sees it’s me, he begins to swear, “Goddamn it. You again, Donahoe?”

Mountain swings out of the room behind me. “Put ’em up, Burt,” he says, curling his fists in a nineteenth-century bareknuckle pose. “I’ll pulverize ya.”

“I’ll expel you, Moses,” Clyde bellows. “Donahoe, you might as well start packing your bags now.”

By now most of the students on my wing are awake, peering blearily out their doors.

In the morning, I’m brought with Mountain, the Tooley brothers, and Karlo before a tribunal called the Citizens Action Review Board, a sort of kangaroo court composed of four LGAs, including Clyde, and led by Deirdre, a hefty nymphomaniac with one contiguous eyebrow, who doesn’t like me because I’m always after her girls, even if I never have much success with them. I would’ve tried Deirdre but I hate waiting in lines. “What do you have to say for yourselves?” she says, wriggling snootily in the fumes of her short-lived reign of importance.

“We’re sorry,” says Andy, who always does the talking. Both the redheads are bowed.

“It won’t happen again,” adds Karlo, who is only months away from graduation and cannot risk antagonizing the academy.

Mountain is extravagantly silent and giving off his usual aura of danger and private amusement.

Deirdre, apparently satisfied with the kowtowing of my comrades, and not yet willing to undertake the task of grilling the likable right tackle of our illustrious football team, now turns to me. “What do you have to say for yourself, Edgar Donahoe?”

I’m not in the mood to give in to this self-important panel of ass-smoochers with their knickers in a knot. Students are all they are, my own people. I’m not normally the rebellious type. Maybe the truth is that I can see I have no future in psychology or law and I am looking for a dramatic way out. Maybe I’m still drunk.

But I say calmly, “Expel me if you like.”

“What?”

Mountain chuckles softly.

“Without truth and beauty, civilization dies,” I say, lifting my head.

“What does that have to do with being drunk at three in the morning and shouting out the windows?”

“America is dead,” I reply. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“You’ve been warned three times already.”

I shrug. “Give me the hemlock.”

“You won’t apologize?”

“No,” I say. “Your smug little gang of four sticks in my craw.”

“Very well,” says Deirdre with a dry lift of that firm and expert upper lip. “We’ll convene and inform you tomorrow morning of your status with the university.”

But I don’t give them the pleasure of their convention. The next day at ten a.m. I drop all my classes in a heroic farewell. I feel like Bolivar liberating the Venezuelans. Some professors urge me to stay, but I’ve suddenly seen the light and the error of my ways and the notion of freedom is ringing in my head like a phone call from the gods. Do you really think I’m going to be a lawyer? I’m too old to be living in the dormitories anyway.

Mountain sticks his big-eared head in my door as I zip up my only suitcase. “What are you gonna do, Johnny?” he says.

I turn about. All night I didn’t sleep, my mind teeming. “I’m leaving the continent,” I tell him.

“Where you going? The island?”

“If I can.”

Mountain, cool-eyed, nods. “How are you going to get there?”

“Hitchhike.”

“I’ll come with you,” he says.

“Let’s go,” I say, my heart swelling.

“I can’t, man,” he groans. “My dad’s paying for everything. I’m a year away from graduating.”

“Well, wish me luck then.”

“Come on down to my room, man.”

“I’ve got to be going. I’m no longer a student here.”

“I just want to play you a song. I’ll give you a ride down to the highway.”

Mountain’s room is furnished in milk crates, cinder blocks, and probably seven hundred record albums. “Well, Deadwood,” he says, extending a hand. “Don’t know if I’ll ever see you again, but it’s been a barn burner.”

“Yes, it has,” I reply, shaking his hand, my stomach falling.

He turns his face away suddenly and clears his throat. “What do you want to hear for your last song at Ho-Hum State?”

I believe he thinks I will choose something rousing and defiant, Ramones or AC / DC, but instead I pick a sad song, “Time Waits for No One,” by the Stones. “Do you remember when they sang ‘Time Is on My Side’?” I ask him. “Well, it didn’t last long, did it?”

“Do you really believe America is dead?” he asks.

“Are you kidding? Have you seen the social pathology index lately? The Goths are standing at the gate, man.”

He shrugs. “Still seems like it wouldn’t hurt to get your degree.”

“You’ll regret not coming with me,” I say, snapping my finger at the air. “Because it’s all coming down, Johnny. You’ll see.”

He drops his head. “I’ll drive you down to the highway.”

“I’ll get my suitcase.”

As he stops along the edge of the highway, he seems amazed that I’m actually going to go through with it, especially since it’s October and cold, and I only have a hundred and fifty dollars that my father gave me for college expenses (beer) for the month.

“You sure?” he says, standing at his open door. “It’s raining, man. It isn’t too late to go back.”

“Adios, Mountain. Thanks for everything.”

“Good luck, man.” He pumps my hand—for a moment I think he may shed a tear—then he turns all at once and climbs stiffly back into his car.

The highway is nearly empty and the passing traffic makes a lonesome ringing sound. I stick out my thumb. The rain increases. People don’t pick up hitchhikers the way they used to, not with serial killers, social parasitism at an all-time high, and cloudy-headed malcontents like bad hangovers from the sixties terrorizing society simply because their parents are rich. Nevertheless, I imagine I will end up in Wales or Asia, in an opium den or the bed of a glamorous, diamond-studded harlot who will teach me the secrets of the Orient. I can still see the university on its safe little knoll, peeking up through the mist of the mighty redwoods. I think of going back. All I’d have to do is say I’m sorry.

A bashed-up red Pinto pulls over. The window rolls down. A fat blond guy wearing a jade earring leans over. “Where you headed?” he says, wiggling a can of Coca-Cola at me.

“East,” I say.

“I’ll give you a ride to Elko,” he says, with a wink.

“Elko?” I say.

“Nevada. I’m going to visit my sister there.”

The rain beats on my head. I climb into the car. In a Pinto you sit nearly on the ground. Behind you is a gas tank that will explode into flames with the slightest impact. Talk about a flaming asshole. My benefactor smiles at me like an angler who has caught himself a nice trout. The floor below me is a landfill of Coca-Cola cans. I wonder if those people who apologized to the Citizens Action Review Board are smarter than I am. Undoubtedly they are. Jesus Christ, and I almost had a B average.