Artie
We stood in my dorm room, in the narrow slot between the two narrow single beds on either side of the equally narrow room. The doorway and built-in desks and closets, all in the same light brown fake wood paneling color, were to my left, the window to my right, facing out to the quad around which the four towers stood. I faced my roommate Sandy’s bed. Sandy was not there, thank god. She was, Artemis. Nothing else occupied the room, and as far as I was concerned nothing mattered other than her in front of me. I reached out to touch her face, to stroke it gently. I caressed her earlobe. Her head came down. In pleasure, I hoped. I took the movement as permission to continue, and with that ok in my eyes I cupped her face in both hands, moving my fingers on either side of her eyes, tracing her lips, moving down to her chin, her neck.
She hummed—I don’t know what else to call it. Not a groan or a sigh, but something high pitched carried on top of an almost guttural exhalation. She reached for my face with her hands, brought my face up to hers, kissed me. It was a whisper of a kiss at first, but then she pressed more, opened her lips, licked my lips until they too opened. Our tongues came together, slipping over and under each other.
We hugged so fiercely that even immaterial spirit would not have fit between us. I combed my fingers through her hair, the beautiful shoulder length chestnut hair that I had ogled for weeks. She turned her head upwards so I could kiss her neck and work my way down to the space at the top of her blouse where the breasts began to show above the rib cage. Her hands were at my waist, holding me close to her. And then down to my butt the hands came, grasping me tightly, forcing me even closer.
We had met mid-week during a so-called orientation week that was so lackadaisical that most new students managed to avoid the boring official events. Instead we roamed a campus still missing all the upper-class kids, and we went to some of the big welcome-to-college parties hosted by the dormitory areas. It was at one of those, in Pushkin Halls, at what seemed a mile from our own dorms in Eliot Halls, that we met. She roomed in Hemingway Hall. I roomed in Tennyson. We went to the same dining hall, in Faulkner Union Building, the FUB. I had seen her—how could I not see that beauty?—in the dining hall and in the FUB but had not met her until that evening at Pushkin. She was gorgeous. I first noticed her hair. Then I saw the rest of her. She was small, about five foot three or four, with a body and face sculpted by Praxiteles. They say Praxiteles used Phryne to model the beauty of Aphrodite. Our Artemis would have served him as model for his Artemis, the goddess. We’ll never know, though. Praxiteles’s Artemis was lost long ago. Our Artemis was Greek, third generation American, with a face that would have launched whole carrier battle groups of ships.[1]
She did not see me, not beyond saying hi when Ellen, her roommate, introduced us. Ellen had met Sandy already, and Sandy was the reason the introduction happened at all. Sandy was handsome in the easy, public way handsome people are: six feet two with eyes of blue, a good eight or nine inches taller than I was and many shades lighter than my mud-brown eyes, with thick blond curls that fell below his ears. I had very fine, very straight, very uninteresting light brown hair, still cut to meet the standards of the McDonald’s where I’d worked until school started. His arms were arms. My arms would’ve been spaghetti, except that moving furniture for the stepfather made them more like fettuccine. Something to be thankful for. He was comfortable in his own skin, unconsciously strutting when he walked, able to small talk with anyone, especially girls. I was introverted, not exactly the smoothest talker, shy as a tarsier in daylight, especially around women. I had been on one date in my life, and that had been for the senior prom at my high school. Some classmates in calculus class thought it would be funny to coerce me into going with a girl in the class whom I barely knew, Laurie. I was too shy to know anyone, male or female and too inept to sidestep the coercion.
Laurie discovered the depths of my shyness on that long prom evening. She wanted to dance and partake of some of the hooch that kids had sneaked into the place. I sat and when my sitting became conspicuous, I crept into a hidden corner of the room and observed. At least I gave Laurie the chance to go off with some of her friends and to dance with other guys and to enjoy herself. Towards the end of my evening’s ordeal, I saw that Laurie had drunk so much of the liquor that she was woozy, more than woozy. Positively reeling. She was on the verge of upchucking when I got to her and eased her down next to a big old pot with a sickly palm-ish plant struggling to survive. Into the pot she deposited her dinner and munchies and lots of liquid. And then I stayed by her, bringing her water, wiping her sweaty face with some napkins, trying to get her as comfortable as I could. She never thanked me. Well, why should she.
Sandy and Artemis, Temi as she called herself, danced and talked all evening. I was not surprised. People would say they made a cute couple. And they did make a cute couple. I knew Temi was far far beyond my orbit. A shining star in the freshman firmament.[2] And Sandy was the man to hitch his wagon to it.
That was OK with me. Really. Truly. I had spent my high school years in not so splendid isolation. My shyness contributed, but then the shyness did not grow automatically from the dead soil of my personality. The stepfather that my mother graced me with helped. There was no way that I could make friends with anyone when I’d have to have them meet so nasty a man, so deeply into control that he kept tabs of the number of crackers in a sleeve of Saltines to see how many I had eaten. He had an easy time controlling my mother. He ground her down into nervous breakdown after nervous breakdown. With me he did not, maybe could not go so far, even though he used controlling me as a weapon against her. If I bucked him in the slightest, she suffered even more . He kept me isolated, under his thumb, often working for him in his home business fixing furniture. For no money, of course. He had moved us, first from Miami and then from the diverse inner city of Harrisburg to an all-WASP suburb when I was in eleventh grade. I barely knew the kids in the school. Put strangers under the stepfather’s thumb?[3] Even if the stepfather had allowed such a thing as guests, I could not possibly bring a friend to that house. I had no friends.
I took advantage of the isolation in my own way. I’d always been a good student. The stepfather’s sequestration of poor old me turned me positively studious. When not working for the stepfather or at the McDonald’s, I spent my evenings and weekends doing homework and studying ahead and reading book after book, from Thucydides to Zinn and from Beo to Virginia Woolf, and more. I love math. In my senior year calculus class, I dazzled the teacher, Dr. Saunders, when I solved a problem that neither he nor any of his students for the last decade or two had been able to crack. He asked me to write out the solution on the blackboard. I took all the blackboard space, two broad panels worth, to display my achievement. And then a kid in the class, Rick, as popular and well-liked a boy as Biff Loman himself,[4] pointed out an error in a specific line. I’d written five, but it should have been seven. It was not a terrible thing. The solution still worked fine. I’d always been terrible at arithmetic.
I’d call my studying dedication, except it was more like a response to despair. It was the only thing I could do that the stepfather could not or would not stop. It was also my future. Thanks to my schoolwork, I got a full-ride scholarship to the biggest, baddest state school in Pennsylvania. I thought of applying to ivies, but . . . too rich a broth for me, I thought. College too my stepfather could not stop. Nor could the manager at the McDonald’s. Near my last day there, he sidled up to me, put his arm around my shoulders—I shuddered but stood still—and whispered in my ear, “You don’t really want to go to college, do you? Why don’t you stay here and become an assistant manager?” I smiled. “Over my dead body.”
College broke the isolation. Suddenly I had whole dorm buildings full of friends. On my first day in the dorm, as soon as the parents went away, I searched for and found someone, Bert, who would sell me some dope. That was one step in my rebellion against the stepfather’s imprisonment. I scored a big chunk of red Lebanese hash. And then Bert and I got as high as we could. The smell wafting through the floor in the dorm brought other kids in. By the time the dining hall opened for dinner, I had a high dozen new friends. Shyness? It just disappeared.
Fortunately the RA in our dorm house, Tim, had a blind nose to such goings on. And anyways he liked to grease social interactions. That first Friday we were up at school, at the end of so-called orientation, a couple of days after the party at Pushkin, and the weekend before classes started, he hosted his own party in our dorm house’s common room, with a huge vat of hundred proof something or other to serve our needs. I had never had any alcohol at all in my whole life. Not even a sip of beer. That night I made up for it . . . and woke up the next morning in a bathroom stall with puke all over me. I remembered Laurie at the prom. I never got drunk again.
Anyway, whether or not Temi was within my orbit, I told myself I did not need, wasn’t ready for a girlfriend. What I needed, I thought, was time and space to be the adolescent guy that I’d never been allowed to be. If I had luck and charisma—what a thought!—that might include some casual sex now and then, but it was hanging out with the guys that I’d missed in high school, and that’s what I longed for. Bert and I became good friends, and not just because he had a constant supply of good smoke. He was fun to be around and play cards with or just talk. He could tell a good joke, but had a serious side too. Sandy, my roomie, was OK. Not really. He was not really a friend and had horrible interests. He seemed full of himself and his manly beauty. He was for sure determined to get into as many girls’ panties as he could. I could understand the desire, but the way he thought of women bothered me. He also wanted to get into a fraternity. I’m not sure which was more important to him, panties or frats, but suspected the frat was top of the list. He would start rushing as soon as he could. I despised the very idea of a fraternity, from its inane selectivity to its vision of women as objects to screw. Never close, Sandy and I fractured completely when his true nature became obvious.
Two older guys in our house, Dylan and Jake, roomed together. We used to mock Dylan mercilessly when he turned twenty-five. “You’re a quarter century old, man!” Jake was a few years younger. Dylan and Jake had served in the armed forces, in Vietnam. Thanks to Uncle Sam’s bounty, college was their way back into civilian life. They both became great friends. Dylan especially was a solid mate. We spent a lot of time together, playing cards, going to movies, sitting around and talking talking talking. Dylan was a philosophy major. Some of the talking got intense. We argued a lot about god. He was a theist. I was an atheist. Battles ensued.
There were some little brown tablets of mescaline circulating the campus, and Dylan and I availed ourselves of those tabs as often as we could. The psychedelic experience brought me close to transcendence many times. Dylan insisted that what I called transcendence was really the presence of god. I demurred. Jake had an old-fashioned school-house clock on the wall above his bed. He’d taken the hands off, though. Right in the middle of the clock Jake had pasted a Mickey Mouse face. I grokked.[5] I saw clearly the absurd relativity of time thanks to that clock. Dylan insisted that what I grokked was god’s divine point of view, situated outside of time. I demurred. One night Dylan and I started climbing trees on campus. Sitting in the crotch of a huge magnolia, I melded with the life of the tree, with of all of nature. Dylan insisted that that sense of oneness was my coming close to god. I demurred. And then that sunset across the fields to the north of Eliot Halls. One slender cloud blazed with the light of the setting sun, golden and red and orange and even green. And verily it was the finger of god himself beckoning me to follow, Dylan insisted. I demurred.
Not every trip was so heavy with significance. One night Dylan and I came across a little mound of dirt next to a dorm building, Baldwin Hall, one of the four dorm towers in our corner of Eliot. It was not huge. In fact, calling it a mound is an exaggeration. But we spent hours trying to get to the top of the little bulge in the ground. Halfway we’d get, and then slide right back down. Start over and the same thing. Over and over and over. We laughed so hard that we rolled on the ground laughing. One excuse: it was damned cold and the mound was covered with ice. Miraculously, no officious campus cop intervened. On another evening, walking through campus, we saw a flock of birds, I think they were swifts, dropping down to roost in the chimney of one of the campus buildings. They formed a perfect, beautiful spiral, the narrow end disappearing into the brick top of the chimney and the wide end winding inward, tightening and tightening as it went down into the chimney. That was just gorgeous. Our school had a pretty good gymnastics team, and hosted many excellent teams, including the USSR’s national team. Dylan and I, and other folks we knew, would take our mescaline and go to the meets. Lordy lordy lordy—talk about gorgeous! It gave “happy trails” a very exciting new meaning.
There was also a lot of inanity. After dinner sometimes thirty or forty or fifty of us would gather on the court outside the FUB and play volleyball, however many were there divided equally, more or less as the psyche moved us, on two sides. Most of us were either tripping or very very high. Playing volleyball with one real and a myriad phantom polychromatic psychedelic balls was a hoot and a half.
I was learning to be a friend, to have friends, to value friends. I was having a great time doing so. The bros were enough for me.
[1] I’ve made so many references to cultural artifacts, sometimes as in this case a slant reference, changing the terms of the passage I refer to, and often without acknowledging them in the text, that I feel obliged to note when I do. Here Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus is in the background.
[2] Paraphrased from that wonderful movie, Singing in the Rain.
[3] The Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb” in my mind.
[4] As in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
[5] The key word in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
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