Читать книгу Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire - Poe Ballantine - Страница 9

1.

IT SEEMS THAT ALL I DO IN THIS CITY IS DRIVE. UP THE coast. Down the coast. I drive to Clairemont Mesa. I drive to Linda Vista, Hillcrest, and Old Town. Here’s your large pepperoni, sir. Here’s your mushroom and sausage. Two hundred miles a night. And San Diego is getting crowded. And America is going to hell. And you can’t get to the beach anymore. And the disco era has sneaked in on us under the guise of a legitimate rhythm and blues revival. And my friends are all busy, getting married and making money and going off to college. And I’m twenty years old, going nowhere but down the face of a four-foot wave or to deliver a number two with onions and two grape Fantas to 2525 Cherokee Ave.

So when my parents suggest that I enroll in school, not community college but a real state university, and they’re going to pay, it seems like an answer. It seems like salvation. It’s like Linda Lovelace discovering her clitoris. All the pictures I had of myself as another of those leathery old straggle-headed, milky-eyed forty-year-old beachcombers shuffling bewildered (hey dude!) down the boardwalk, wondering what happened to his youth, suddenly and thankfully shimmer away. Oh, how can purpose be so vigorously restored!

Born again, grateful for a second chance, I settle on Humboldt State University, a nestled-in-the-redwoods academy of science famous for its marijuana and burly women, the last hippie outpost of California. It seems perfect to me: cheap, far away, no frats or sororities, not far from the ocean, and entrance requirements just above the Wyoming Community College for Ceramic Arts. Decadent, hypocritical, polluting America has become increasingly odious to me, but there’s nothing I can do to change her, so I will retreat to live in her woods with hairy, uncompetitive people who have disabled social lives and drink dark beer and smoke dope. I think I may be a lawyer. I despise lawyers of course, there’s the trouble with the whole plan. But I’m good at words, and most people secretly admire lawyers. Most people want their children to become lawyers. Most people who hate lawyers will hire one the instant they’re in the slightest trouble. And I’d like to be one of those guys who sues corporations that pollute rivers and crack up oil tankers. There are good lawyers, just as there are good witches. Rare, yes, but why can’t I be one?

School is fun! It’s really just an excuse to goof off. They don’t offer law at H SU, however, so I am pre-law. I like the sound of this. Everyone else seems to too. What’s your major? Pre-law. What is pre-law, anyway? It’s anything you want. You just get your BA in something and then apply to law school. In my case I’ve listed my major officially as psychology. I’m a screwed-up, immature, frightened, hypocritical, underweight kid, and here’s some cheap help. It’s also a breezy major. I’ve got classes like Existential Psychology and The Psychology of Creativity, descriptions too choice for a boy with a golden shovel. But I’m also honestly interested in “how people tick.”

Okay, I’m a little old for the dorms, twenty, but my parents are footing the bill and I’ve been slow out of the gate all my life. I didn’t learn to ride a bicycle till I was ten. I didn’t quit wetting the bed until I was in fourth or fifth grade. And I’m not going to mess up this opportunity. It won’t be like community college, where I took every opportunity to duck Political Science or Art Composition and smoke a doobie in the bushes. If I bear down I should be able to finish my degree in three years, after which I will immediately ensconce myself in some woodsy law enclave with low requirements and more hairy, uncompetitive potheads, and pass the state bar by the time I’m twenty-six. My parents will be able to send Christmas cards with cheerful form letters again. Forthwith I will begin suing corrupt industrial giants. I’ll have some money to spend too and maybe finally I can meet a girl who respects me.

Larry, my dormitory roommate, is a kid from Grass Valley who doesn’t smoke or drink. It’s unfortunate I don’t spend more time with him. What a steady influence he would be on me. Not that I don’t try. It’s just that we have little in common. He turns the insides of my eyelids to cotton. His girlfriend is even more boring. How can people be this dreary, and why is it that they never smoke or drink? They don’t even play cards. So it isn’t long before I’ve discovered the Tooley brothers, Andy and Brian, down the hall. A couple of more relaxed and amiably redheaded D – average students you won’t meet. On their door like a big welcome sign is a red triangular warning—Approach with Caution: Party Zone. Inside these refreshingly depraved chambers, Thin Lizzy, Kiss, and Roxy Music boom on the stereo. Pretty special ed. majors with bloodshot eyes drift in and out. In the middle of the cluttered, swamp-smelling floor, like a chalice in a legend, stands a threefoot acrylic bong, smoke lifting in a luscious, perennial magic curl from the mouthpiece.

The rest of the semester is a fog, and my grades start to slide a bit, but I’ve never had more fun or felt more simpatico with a group of lads, especially the Tooley brothers and Karlo, an industrial arts major with a nose like Cyrano de Bergerac, and the bespectacled Tee Willie Cunningham, a big Who fan who actually plans on getting good grades and going to med school, though how he can sit in a murky room for hours drinking whiskey and beer and listening to loud music and expect to become a medical professional is another of the great conundrums of our age. Give him credit. He is usually the first to leave. He mumbles the word “study,” and stumbles out the door. I’m always the last to leave. Sometimes I’m surprised by the sun. Often I miss those preposterously early classes, but psychology is not an exhaustive science. Even the professors seem resigned to the flexibility of a good line of horseshit. As long as you keep using terms such as cognitive and affect, everyone seems happy. Actually, I’m amazed at how much psychology seems to be helping me. I never knew there were so many screwed-up, anxious, immature people in the world. I am buoyed with the security of knowledge that I am not alone.

What really amazes me, however, is how quickly even a thousand miles from home, wearing no swimming trunks or suntan lotion, I’ve fallen in with the same kind of people as always, pot-smoking, card-playing, music-loving, late-night party hounds. Are they really friends or just props for the lonesome ceremony of self-annihilation? But you know, they say that 80 percent of all males in their teens and early twenties are alcoholics. And I love these guys.

The parties come one after the next like the waves on Waimea Bay. One Saturday night Karlo, Tee Willie, the Tooley Brothers, and I have swallowed some magic mushrooms down in the Tooley room. T-Rex is roaring on the box, Tee Willie is ranting about God, Karlo de Bergerac is endeavoring to titillate a special ed. major—when there’s a knock on the door. Knocks are never good. Usually it means a Living Group Advisor and a sinsemilla shakedown. Brian Tooley answers cautiously, peeking out, then begins waving at me urgently across the room.

“What is it?” I say, hopping down from the windowsill, where I have been contemplating anagrams of the abracadabra.

“It’s Mountain,” he says, his wide eyes crystalline, his lips wandering over his face as if he’s about to spray root beer from his nostrils. “He wants to talk to you.”

I step out into the hall. Many say that Sullivan Moses, or “Mountain” as he is generally known, right tackle for the HSU football team (one of the worst college teams in the country), looks like Sylvester Stallone. This evening, however, poor Mountain resembles someone kicked between the legs. Pale and bent with hands pressed to his thighs, his great bulk heaving, the big man seems to be struggling for air. How much of this attitude is attributable to my own warped perception is difficult to assess. “What’s going on?” I demand, closing the door behind me.

He waves me down to the bathroom.

I didn’t like Mountain when I first met him, straddled backward in his chair, grinning big-eared under his ball cap with a puddle of snuff in his lip. I mistook him for a cocksure and shallow athlete. I learned over the next few weeks that he was the opposite—humble, courteous, wry, and uncomfortable around people. I was also shocked to learn that in addition to being very bright, a math major, a chess player, and an admirer of the classics, he was a practicing Catholic.

“I was with Julie up on third,” he says now, his eyes rolling up in his head. He pauses to press his lips together. “And she uses this contraceptive foam and I think, I think it went up my spout.”

It’s disheartening to see such a heroic figure so easily beguiled, but despite strong guilt signals from the Vatican, usually Mountain is to be found in the company of a woman, enthralled as a dog and oblivious to all other pleasure. These cycles usually last about three weeks, after which he will make a brief appearance at one of our poker games or parties and then find himself a new girl to dote on. I’ve pegged him for a mother complex.

Poor chap. I nod, wishing I had not taken the mushrooms. I don’t know why he’s sought me. He must know that I’ve worked in a few hospitals, that I have a passably good knowledge of anatomy and physiology, but this still shouldn’t qualify me. I’m simultaneously flattered and terrified that he would come to me for help.

“I think you’ll be all right, Mountain,” I say, squatting slightly to try and see up into his rolling blue eyes.

“It’s a spermicide, man,” he whispers gruffly, revealing the large gap between his front teeth. His nose, I note, is of significant proportion, more Roman than French, I would say, and crimpedup near the bridge. “It’s gonna scorch my filberts.”

I picture the sperm-killing foam marching in corrosive ranks into his testicles, blinding the young tadpoles, scalding the delicate tubules, and rendering him permanently neuter. I can’t really deal with this right now.

“But it’s designed for sex,” I say, siding feebly, as a good lawyer would, with the manufacturer. “I’ve never heard of anyone having trouble with a contraceptive foam.”

“Yeah,” he rasps, bending over to cup his knees. “You’re probably right.”

“Look, they have to test this stuff,” I add, my doubt accumulating, even if I did work in five hospitals. “It’ll pass, I’m pretty sure. Just give it time.”

“Okay,” he says, gritting his teeth.

I slap him on his broad back. “Party down at Tooleys’ if you’re up for it later.”

He nods a thank you, licks his lips, and limps away.

About five minutes later another knock sounds on the Tooley door. Mountain is white as soap, doubled over and trembling in agony. I slip out into the hall again. I’m flying on these damn mushrooms, rainbows and grins evaporating in paint-thinner whirl-pools off my oblong head.

“Bad?” I say.

“Bad.”

I whirl around, clear a path back through the revelers, and yank the phone off the hook. “Turn off that stereo!” I cry. “Where’s the phone book? I have to call the hospital!” Everyone stares at me dumbfounded. I manage to dial correctly. It’s almost midnight. I try not to enunciate too loudly into the mouthpiece: “Student has retracted spermicide into the urethra. He’s in a great deal of pain.”

The voice on the other end says: Bring him in as soon as you can.

Brian Tooley rounds up Larry, my roommate, who doesn’t smoke or drink, and Karlo, Larry, and I race Mountain the seven miles to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Eureka. Mountain thrashes back and forth on the front seat. It’s the roughest seven miles I’ve ever known.

We all sit in the hospital waiting room nervously leafing through Vogue and Sports Illustrated (identical magazines on drugs: senseless, smeary, and stinking of cologne). Karlo wonders aloud if they’ll have to amputate. Larry shakes his head the while, expressing distaste for the libertines. After twenty minutes or so a chagrined Mountain finally comes lumbering out, biceps bulging against his shirtsleeves, the color returned to his face.

“What happened, man? Are you all right?”

“They just had to flush my radiator,” he says with a relieved grin. “I’m going to be all right.”

From this point on, especially since he’s temporarily lost some of his zest for the carnal delights (and didn’t the Pope warn him?), Mountain is my devoted companion. He makes sure I have cigarettes, checks on me at least once a day, and advises me on homework problems. After a futile night of trying to woo a freshman from Fresno or Ukiah into my bunk, I find that Mountain is usually up, door open, reading Winston Churchill or studying a chart from one of his lost-treasure fables. Despite possessing a sturdy analytical mind, he ventures up into the hills now and again with pickax and pan, and one among many of his alchemical hypotheses is a method by which gold flakes from the ocean can be cheaply extracted. It doesn’t bother him that every last gold story ends up with the finder cursed or dead. I suppose that makes him a hobbyist. At any rate, he waves warmly and invites me in. He has beer in his dorm fridge and reefer to smoke. If he doesn’t have any of his own stash, he goes door-to-door, alms for the poor. Fellow students don’t seem to mind when Big Mountain wakes them.

And now he’s a regular at our evening gatherings as well. One night my roommate Larry has gone back home to Grass Valley, and because our dorm room is so orderly and clean, we decide to have a drinking contest there. About three in the morning Mountain is declared the winner, after which Karlo pulls down my pants and I fall over pants around my ankles, collapse the Styrofoam cooler, flooding the room with ice water that makes the carpet stink for weeks. Larry is not pleased when he returns. I also overhear the Living Group Advisers the next day plotting against me. Apparently I am a bad influence on the younger students. Perhaps, I mutter to my compatriots, there will be a tribunal in which hemlock is involved. Good thing the semester is almost over.