Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Part 4

"Can your girlfriend score us some 'shrooms?" Zach asked.

"What the h.e.l.l is with that song?" I panted.

"It's not a song," Nathan explained. "It's called a s.p.a.ce jam. Some of them can go on for five, six hours. One song can continue over a dozen bootleg tapes."

We walked into the dining hall. In the back room a performance-art collective dressed in long robes and scarves fluttered across a stage while some sort of Syd Barrett harmonic chant blasted and a hippie read verses of Rilke into a mike. The ensemble looked like a tribe of Bedouin traders playing a game of Red Rover. On the linoleum floor, some fifty hippies writhed and rolled on top of each other, occasionally clasping each other's face between their palms. Zach, Nathan, and I stood in the back of the room frozen in horror.

"Are they going to do it?" Zach finally asked Nathan shook his head. "They're too drugged out to think about s.e.x."

We considered pulling the fire alarm, but then Zach had the far more efficient idea of spilling fruit punch on the floor, making it sticky and gross to roll around in. We were debating how we could steal jugs of punch from the cafeteria storeroom when I caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye.

About three feet away, someone was staring and gaping at me with a demented grin that seemed to swallow his entire face. With his tiny frame, dressed in a giant sparkly shawl that hung to his knees, a purple scarf, and pointed velvet boots, he looked something like a medieval court jester. At the sight of his grin my mind was ripped away from the discussion with Zach and Nathan, and I squinted back at the staring jester as he grew closer.

"What is your name?" he asked me. I told him. "You're name isn't Moser?" he pressed. I denied it. "Are you related to Billy and Stan?"

"Who?"

"Amazing!" he said, and let out a terrifying cackle that for a moment drowned out the Syd Barrett and the Rilke. And then he turned and scampered from the room in a flash.

"What was that about?" Nathan asked. I shrugged, and we returned to plotting the fruit punch heist, our minds elsewhere, until two minutes later, the jester returned, leading along three others. If the rest of the room was animated by an airy s.p.a.ciness, this little group shuffled in a dark, stagnant void that looked as though they might, with their very presence, snuff out all the light in the room. At the lead was a largish, round-shaped lug with a quizzical expression, wearing a moss-colored mohair sweater and a gabardine overcoat. Flanking him was a Sid Vicious type, a hulking character in a black leather jacket whose disgust for the hippie congregation looked so acute he seemed he might actually be sick, and a girl in a floppy dark dress with a mop of black hair covering her face.

"See!" cried the jester, pointing at me. "It's him!"

"Oh, my G.o.d!" the lug at the front of the group answered.

"He doesn't look like Stanley!" the girl said.

"Are you crazy?" the lug responded. "Of course it does." They all gaped at me for a few moments more. Zach, Nathan, and I gaped back until I felt obliged to say, "Umm, I'm Richard."

The news seemed to stun them and snap the group out of their reverie. The lug stepped forward. "Oh, right. Hi. I'm Jon. You just look like somebody."

"Are you guys, by any chance," I asked, "the Supreme d.i.c.ks?" They glanced at each other, eyebrows raised.

"We're some of them." The jester introduced himself as "Friar Tom" and then continued sotto voce, "But there are others. . . ."

"It's kinda a big organization," Jon explained.

A new song came on. The Doors' "Peace Frog." A cheer went up from the floor. "Maybe we should dance," Jon said.

The girl with hair in her face replied curtly, "I'm leaving," and walked out. Jon looked confused.

"Is that your girlfriend?" I asked, trying to think of something to say.

"Girlfriend? Noooo. . . . We're celibate."

"Really?"

"It's like a Reichian thing. . . . It's hard to explain."

Friar Tom burst in. "I'm not celibate."

"But you're not really a d.i.c.k," Jon answered.

"That's true," he admitted. Our chat was shortly interrupted by two campus security guards, led over by a hippie who pointed us out to security, screaming, "There they are!"

"Jon, what the h.e.l.l are you doing here?" a guard asked.

"Just rocking to some groovy tunes," Jon answered. He giggled, rocking back and forth on his heels while Sid Vicious to his right glowered.

The guard shook his head. "Come on, this isn't your scene. What're you kids up to?"

"But they're playing my song, Officer!" Tom, the jester, began prancing around to the strains of "Peace Frog," grabbing a hippie boy and twirling him in a waltz.

"Okay"-the guard pulled himself out of Tom's embrace-"out of here. You're disturbing the party."

"Half of the people here are on, like, acid and PCP, and we're just standing here and we're the troublemakers?" Arthur, the punk, asked.

"I'm not going to explain it to you. You know what I'm talking about." He then whirled and turned to me, Nathan, and Zach. "And you kids, do you know what they were up to?" We shook our heads. "What are you doing hanging around with this bunch?"

"We're also enjoying the groovy tunes," Zach said.

"Hmph. Lemme get your names," he said, and made us each show our college IDs, writing our names down on a little pad. Zach, Nathan, and I looked at each other nervously.

The d.i.c.ks group was escorted to the door but before they left, Jon gave us their extension number. "You guys should come hang out. Extension two-four-five."

"Do not do that!" security said. "Do yourself a favor and forget that number."

I didn't forget the number but I didn't use it either. I jotted it on a napkin, which sat on my desk. Numerous times over the following weeks I looked at it and considered calling, but wondered what I would say. "Hi, I'm the guy who looks like the guy you used to know . . ." or "If you all aren't too busy, my life is a living h.e.l.l at this school. Would you mind coming to save me?" Instead of calling, I waited to run into them somewhere on campus. Now that I knew what they looked like, how long could it be, in a school of a thousand students, before I saw one of them? But mysteriously as they had materialized, they had vanished again into the Hampshire mists; not once in our wanderings did I catch a glimpse of any of them. I was like Wendy and Peter back in London, gazing into the fog and babbling insanely about the Lost Boys and Neverland.

Back in the phone closet, after the ultimatum from the House Office, with nowhere else to turn, I dialed the extension. After fourteen or so rings, a girl picked up.

"Is Jon there?" I asked.

"I'm not really sure." Pause. "You know, it's kinda hard to say."

"Whether he's there?"

"I mean, he should be, but he could be anywhere, you know?"

"Yeah." I nodded to myself. "Totally." I hung on to the phone and we sat in silence for a good minute.

The girl broke the spell. "Hey, who is this?" I told her. "I don't know you. Are you sure Jon knows who you are?"

"Maybe. I mean, I don't know. I met him at a hippie dance."

"Is this Rich? Rich from the dorms? The guy who looks like Stanley?"

"Yeah, I guess that's me."

"You missed your dinner!"

"What?"

"You were supposed to be here for dinner last week." She went on to explain that after meeting me, Friar Tom had told the house that I was coming for dinner the following night. They had actually cooked and everything, the girl on the phone explained, but I hadn't shown up and no one knew how to get in touch with me.

"I think maybe he forgot to tell me about dinner."

"That's cool. It wasn't very good anyway. So what's going on?" The girl, whose name, I learned, was Meg, and I got to talking. While I sat on the tiled floor of my hall's phone closet, we whiled away nearly an hour. She told me that things had been crazy at 21. (Mod 21 was their address.) The administration was trying to break the house up, she said, had been reading their mail, listening in on their calls. "They're probably listening now . . . ," she whispered.

"No one can live in peace around here," I whispered back, and told her about my own housing dilemma.

"That's amazing," she said. "You should come live here!"

"You have an open room?"

"I guess so. There's always a room, isn't there?" I agreed there was. "But you've gotta talk to Susie. You should come on out." I said I'd rush over and was given some very vague directions to Greenwich House. "In the woods behind the library," she told me.

The red brick and concrete library/gymnasium/administration triad occupied the highest ground on campus and the geographic dead center. Paths to the various plots of campus radiated in spokes from this spot; the design gave a big piece of evidence to the group of students that believed Hampshire College, from its inception, was not a bold experiment in education reform but a plot by dark forces within the U.S. government to lure subversives to one place and then snare them in an airtight riot-control net.

Stemming from the back of the library, one spoke led straight into a dense patch of woods, and somewhere within, I had been told, sat Greenwich House. I stood behind the library, shivering in the still November night. No life was visible down the path, nothing except the clump of icy, bare trees.

I tiptoed along, cursing the cold that had really begun to work us over in earnest. I was now wearing a cotton sweater, a hooded sweatshirt, and a raincoat and still I was cold. Surely this was some kind of joke, I thought.

As I followed the path into the trees, the library behind me disappeared from view. I squinted through the night and saw up ahead what looked like five dilapidated flying saucers made of rotting wood, which had apparently thudded to earth in a small clearing. The circular, two-story structures lay in dead, idiotic stillness before me. I wandered toward the first, trying to figure out how they were numbered. Close up, they looked like doughnut-shaped, broken-down condo complexes, with gray and white peeling paint, their slushy lawns strewn with plastic beer cups and rotting concert flyers. A naked mannequin hung by its toes from a tree. I thought of Colonel Kurtz's camp in Apocalypse Now. On each porch hung a number, 8 being the first I saw. I circled several looking for 21, not seeing a person alive through the drawn shades. Finally, facing toward the deeper woods and away from campus, I heard guitar sounds pulsing from behind one door; with no identifiable melodies or vocals, the noise thudded through the empty frigid night and I stood frozen, listening to it for a moment, unsure whether I felt drawn to or terrified by its harsh, unlovable radiations.

I climbed up to the porch, stepping over a car transmission and a ventriloquist's dummy and treading on some broken bottles ground up in the slush. Black curtains were pulled tight across the gla.s.s doors. I knocked. There was no response. I knocked again, then turned the handle and walked in.

One foot through the doorway, the smell washed over me-an aroma alive and vital with decay. The air overflowed with the afterbirth of a million cigarettes, human sweat, incense and, I thought, rotting vegetables. I fought my gag reflex and peered through the red light that lit the s.p.a.ce. It was a small living room, about the size of a moving van, with low ceilings and walls that seemed to lean over on top of the inhabitants. The room was furnished with a couch, two armchairs, and a couple stools and a dozen or so people sitting stuffed together, crammed into open s.p.a.ces between piles of debris. Like the bunch I'd met in the dining hall, this group was a mix of types, belonging to no clear tribe-a couple of punks, a few hippies, several in what I'd later know as "old man clothes," and a decidedly preppy woman in polo shirt, cardigan, and pearls. As I opened the door, I heard someone say, "c.o.c.kroaches are my friends!"

The discussion stopped for a second as everyone looked up at me. I nervously smiled, braced for someone to ask what I was doing there, but they showed no surprise or curiosity about my sudden appearance and turned back to their conversation. "Ox," a girl pleaded to a frail young man in an overcoat, bouncing anxiously from one foot to the other, "they're everywhere. They're in the shower."

Ox shook his head. "What's so bad about sharing your shower? c.o.c.kroaches wouldn't exterminate you."

I stood listening, ignored by the group. I looked around the room, strewn with discarded garments, plates of food, and people crouched in every corner. As they discussed them, I saw the walls were alive with a dance of c.o.c.kroaches rhumbaing happily from floor to ceiling. The music thudded out of a little turntable on the counter. A banner heralded BOB WEINER FOR CONGRESS. On the opposite wall, a framed photo of three Apollo astronauts grinned maniacally. I considered edging back out the door, but at that moment conversation hit a lull and I found the nerve to ask, my voice squeaking with anxiety, "Does anyone know if Meg is here?"

The crowd turned and looked at me with tired amus.e.m.e.nt. No one spoke until the one they called Ox, short for Daniel Oxenberg, said, "I'm pretty sure she's in Boston." Others murmured agreement. I was about to protest when Jon suddenly tumbled down the staircase at the other end of the room. Stumbling forward, he saw me and said, "Rich. You're here."

"Oh. Jon, hi! How's it going?"

"Pretty good. Pretty good. How are you doing?"

"I'm great." The conversation had reached an impa.s.se and we stood smiling at each other, Jon's hulking roundish figure bobbing up and down. The rest of the room watched us, nodding and smiling, as though they might very pleasantly doze off at the spectacle our dialogue presented. Finally, I steeled my nerve and blurted out, "I talked on the phone to some girl named Meg and she said it might be all right if I lived here!"

At this many started out of their stupor and bolted upright; the c.o.c.kroaches on the walls danced a bit faster. "Oh, really?" Jon said. "Oh, right. Definitely, you should. For sure." He gave me a knowing look, like we were acting out a prerehea.r.s.ed script; I wondered what my next line was supposed to be.

"It's just-I'm getting kicked out of Dakin." The room murmured its approval.

"Oh, wow. Then you have to live here." Several nodded in a.s.sent and my heart did a little skip, while I remained absolutely terrified and confused.

"But he's gotta talk to Susie," someone said. Others agreed. "Let's bring him up to Susie."

"And we all get to interview him!" a girl with dark bangs said fiendishly.

At once, the room broke the rust free from their joints and rose to their feet. "Let's take him to Susie!" Jon turned to rummage through the refrigerator as I was herded up the stairs and into a large bedroom that seemed so different from my dorm room, it was as though I had stepped through a portal into another universe.

If the downstairs air greeted you with the stench of death, one step into this room and an aroma of thick, stagnant sweetness ran you down like an eighteen-wheeler. The room glowed in a deep purplish-red light, hung dense with willowy draperies and furnished with tattered Louis XV armchairs. A half dozen more people, all of whom appeared on the verge of fading from consciousness, slumped on the floor and in chairs as a scratchy Bessie Smith alb.u.m played on an antique turntable. The effect was like entering a Gilded Age New Orleans brothel that had been ransacked by a very unmotivated band of Huns.

On a great billowing bed, covered with cloudlike comforters and rags of old blankets, sat Susie. At the sight of her ironed-out blond hair, and confronted by a face full of makeup sufficient to repaint a medium-sized cottage, I was first roiled by an overstimulation of the senses-as in a room that had been decorated within an inch of its life. But on second glance, a slightly maniacal but sweet and comforting smile lit up her face and indeed the entire room, at once putting me at ease and making me want to instantly confide all my cares and woes to her.

"Susie," someone said, "this is Richard. He wants to move in here."

"Oh, really?" She sat up. The others around the room stirred slightly.

"Deb threw him out of Dakin."

"Oh, my goodness. Well, then, of course you have to live here," she said.

"Is there even a room open?" Ox asked.

"There's always a room." I nodded but found this very hard to swallow. As I came upstairs and looked around, there seemed to be at most two bedrooms downstairs and three upstairs, and there were no fewer than twenty people in the house just at that moment.

"If it's too crowded," I stammered, "I can just, um . . ."

"Don't be silly! There's Steve's room. n.o.body's seen him for two months. Is he even enrolled next semester?" she asked the room.

"Was he enrolled this semester?" someone else asked.

Ox's head started bobbing uncontrollably as he slowly spat out words one at a time, taking a huge pregnant pause between clauses, his eyes lighting up to savor the many secret meanings. "I . . . got a message . . . from Laura . . . who said she hung out with him . . . in Florida."

"What's he doing in Florida?" someone asked.

"And she said," Ox continued, "he was talking . . . about coming back . . . for Ken's Hermeneutics."

"When's that?" Susie asked. No one seemed to know. "Well, I don't think Steve's been enrolled for at least two years. It's fine, you can have his room."

"But he needs to interview!" The crowd had gathered around the bed and pushed in.

"That's right," Susie said. "We need to interview you. You don't mind, do you?"

"Not at all." I shook my head, panicking in mortal terror.

"Good." She patted the bed beside her, motioning for me to sit down. "Who has questions?"

People stared at me, or glared at me, in contempt and boredom, I thought. "Do you have a name for your p.e.n.i.s?" asked a heavyset girl, standing in the doorway wearing clunky black boots.

"Oh, be quiet, Jeanie. Can't you see he's still just a baby?"

"Yeah, right," she spat, seeming indignant with the whole thing. "Okay, then, tell us the names of all the girls you've screwed since you got here, cowboy."