THE CRAZY ONE IN THE CAR--episode 2

Going to college 1964-1968

Freshman Year — Fall Quarter 1964

Giggles and scuffling, a click-snap and a flash of light.

My eyes open. I’m on the banister. Was I asleep? What time is it?

“Downs, you fraud.”

On the stairs, Dan Corse takes a drag of his unfiltered Camel and squints his eyes to match the smirk of his lips. He’s one of Paul Felder’s friends from Fourth, and behind him Paul, smiling a little guiltily, holds up his camera and waves the polaroid in the air. Behind Paul, Corse’s roommate Jerry Caraggino exaggerates his “Oops, we’ve been caught” expression. This is the kind of weak stunt Paul thinks is Fourth Main worthy, but why would Dan Corse—who parades what he considers his worldly cynicism for all to admire—why would he tag along to watch Paul take a polaroid of me sleeping on the banister of the stairwell between Third and Fourth? And does he hope his “fraud” comment will undo me? He’s declared that he considers “Downs’s stairwell study time” a little too affected and way too deliberate. “Downs,” he said, “gets off on conscious effect.” And Jerry Caraggino standing behind them, now with a five-year old’s look of naughty glee, why is he here? I like Jerry. Everybody likes Jerry. He has huge brown eyes and a smile as wide as a cocker spaniel’s. ECBIV says he looks like he wants you to pet him and toss him a bone. Why is he here?

“What time is it?” from me.

Paul consults his wrist watch. “Just past midnight.”

I’m holding L’Immoraliste and from the stairs I pick up the Petit Larousse. “I have an eight o’clock in the morning, I’m going to bed.”

Corse says, “Your roommate was asleep when we knocked on the door a while ago.” He purses his lips in some slight triumph and drags on his cigarette and Jerry moves out of the line of exhaled smoke. Paul smiles like a guy who just pulled off the caper of the century and he hands me the photo. It’s me. Asleep on the banister.

“Glad you didn’t get me massaging my crotch.”

Paul gaspy laughs and I go down the stairs to Third Main. “Good night, creeps.”

The light in my room is off and roommate Bob is indeed asleep or at least in bed. I do not throw the photo in the wastepaper basket. The next time Paul comes to my room he will check the bulletin board and the photo will be there. It means more to him than to me, yes?

*****

Roommate Bob goes home for the weekend and I try studying in the room. ECBIV asks if he can join me. He brings a hardbound book and a notebook. I’m not comfortable when I’m with him and yet I’m happy. Somehow with him I don’t need to jack up into the extra gear I do with others. I can’t explain it. He sits at Bob’s desk and I sit at mine. He moves to Bob’s bed and he lies back and clicks his pen and inhales as if he’s going to speak. He shifts, extends his legs over the foot of the bed. I’m conscious of everything he does.

“What’s your father like?” he says.

I laugh. He likes to throw curve balls.

“Why is that funny?'“ from him.

“I’m in the middle of The Oresteia so I guess I think the answer to ‘What’s your father like’ pretty much depends on your point of view.”

“No literary analysis. What’s he like.”

I don’t want to talk about my father. “C’mon, we have to study.”

“Does he know who you are?”

Should I just ignore him? Or maybe deflect? “He has no idea who any of his kids are.”

“What’s your most powerful image of him?”

“I don’t want to play.”

“Come on.” He furrows his brow and pouts out his lower lip. How can I resist?

“When he was about to hit any of us, he would grab hard with one hand and take off his belt with the other and as his tongue pushed into the corner of his cheek, he would bite down on it and his face would go purple. And Orestes is about to cut his mother for murdering his father. The gods will have it thus.”

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

I want him at least to acknowledge what he’s doing if only by a smile. But he’s lying on his back looking at me, brow slightly furrowed. “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. I just want to know you. We’re the same.”

And what the hell does that mean? I’ll ignore it. “John is almost four years older than me and he stayed away from home as much as he could. Jane is fourteen months younger than me and she used to have nightmares about Dad. I mostly tried to stay out of his way.”

He keeps looking at me and I keep talking. “Last year he tried to give blood at work—he’s a foreman in the steel mill—and he was told he had ‘dangerously high blood pressure.’ That led to lots of pills and stays at the Cleveland Clinic. He’s lost weight. He looks like an old man. He told Mom that while he was in the hospital he had time to think about stuff. Too Late. I feel sorry for him, but nobody likes him and he knows it.”

Before he has a chance to ask another question, I say, “Tell me something about your father so I don’t feel like a total douche taking all this time with my sad story.”

“I want to hear it. I like listening to you.”

“Well, I want to hear something about your father.”

He clicks the ballpoint pen though he hasn’t used it to write anything. “He’s a Methodist missionary dedicated to his missionary work and I spent a lot of time alone or at boarding school, a couple of them. But he’s okay. His missionary work was important.”

“Was?”

“Is. His missionary work is important.” He looks out the window into the night. “He was pretty handy with the strap, too. Very biblical. Let’s grab a slice at the Pizza Villa.”

*****

Freshmen eat meals in the dining room of the freshmen girls’ dorm, South Hall. There are student waiters for lunches, which are informal, and for nightly sit-down dinner at which the boys wear jackets and ties and the girls dresses or skirts and blouses and everyone sits at tables boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl. My favorite waiter is John Fergus. He’s a sophomore with a sly, quiet, anarchist sense of humor. Sometimes the only way you can tell he’s joking is by the slightest overlay of a smile on his lips and the glint in his eyes when he recognizes that you understand. He’s good-looking in a Ken doll sort of way if Ken can come from a New Hampshire farm family and wear glasses that hide the deep gray of his eyes and if he can habitually lift his shoulders a bit in what seems like protection from possible attack. I like John and he likes me maybe because he senses that my habitual jacked-up energy is also protection from possible attack.

John is a brother of Alpha Chi Rho, a Crow. We’ve been aware of fraternities from the first day on campus. The lobby of South Hall is always filled with upperclassmen. They wait for their freshmen dates to come down in the afternoon or in the early evening, and they linger with them at the end of the evening in corners or on couches during the last minutes before the house mother asks them to observe “women’s hours” and kindly leave. They study together in the library and they congregate in the campus hangout, The Grill. It’s impossible to avoid their jeweled fraternity pins. And I submit easily to the lure of the fraternity mystique. I want to know what goes on behind the public camaraderie and the well-publicized weekend outings with the boys at the Odd Fellows Home and the joint blood drives with their favorite sororities. It doesn’t seem to be as foul-mouthed and crass a world as I’ve imagined and I want to know what Brotherhood means. And if I worry about my sexuality, I won’t let that ruin my chance to be a part of this. I want to be wanted.

The first Saturday of fraternity round robins Paul Felder and Dan Corse and Jerry Caraggino and I visit three of the seven fraternities: the Sigs, the Crows, the Phi Delts. ECBIV doesn’t go. He says he has no plans to join a fraternity and he probably won’t have the grades anyway. Corse doesn’t want to waste his time with the Crows. He thinks they’re weak, good-hearted jerks with no social skills or savvy. He responds to the guys of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, who carry themselves with casual elegance and a suggestion of raunch that appeals to him.

The Sigs are first. Their house stands on Main Street across from Rose’s Pizza Villa and on the corner of quiet, residential Sherman Street. It’s a two-and-a-half storey red brick building with white trim and signature white plaster lions standing guard at the front entrance. It has the institutional symmetry of a building designed specially for the fraternity. The Sig brothers in their Sig blazers welcome the freshmen with a variation of their casual elegance designed specially for this occasion. Corse talks and laughs with them and I would like to know what he responds to in them, what The Secret of the Big Red Sig House is. I am no closer to an answer when we leave than I was when we got there.

At the other end of quiet, residential Sherman Street is the Crow House. From the sidewalk, a huge tree with low limbs in the tiny front yard hides the house from view; when we get to the short brick walkway, what I see is an ordinary house. It’s two storeys with gabled roofs—and it’s covered with brown wooden shingles. It’s an ordinary family house refurbished to accommodate twenty-five-plus brothers of a forty-plus brotherhood. The front door is open and everyone inside is talking.

We are greeted by four beaming frat boys, all of whom wear Alpha Chi Rho blazers and each of whom takes one of us on a tour of the house. My tour guy is the shortest beaming brother and the one whose tiny mouth keeps opening and closing as do his tiny eyes and I imagine tossing worms at him as he chirps on about the house. Paul and Corse and Jerry disappear into the crowd with their chaperones. I’m taken to the living room, which is just large enough to force fit an old baby grand into the far corner (“We practice our song for the Greek Sing here and sometimes Brother Morton plays before dinner while the rest of us play bridge and shoot the breeze”). Down the front hall is a small room with bookshelves, though few books, and one window with drawn curtains. (“The library is mostly for when a brother needs to study alone or if somebody wants to make out in private with their date”). The first floor also has three study rooms with five or six desks and dressers crowded into each. Other freshmen, some of whom I recognize, move in and out of rooms. It’s as if we’re all wondering how a realtor got so many people to come to this small shabby house. There’s a bathroom between two of the study rooms and there’s a powder room for female guests; both have been unsuccessfully cleaned for the round robin. If you smell Lestoil, somebody smeared it around to make it seem clean.

Up the narrow back stairs—Paul Felder is on the way down, entranced by what his guide is saying—we reach another study room and two sleeping rooms that accommodate six or seven sets of bunk beds each (“It takes almost no time at all to stop waking up to other people’s alarms.” Indeed, each bed has an alarm clock taped somewhere to its metal frame and plugged into an extension cord). My guide tells me that one sleeping room has no heating vent and is called “the cold room” and the other has one heating vent and is called “the warm room.” Along the upstairs hall he takes me to the shower room. Lestoil here. And Clorox. Three sinks and a mirror on one wall. Along the wall perpendicular to it are three narrow shower stalls, none of which has a curtain. Against the opposite wall and only a couple of feet across from the stalls stand (sit?) three porcelain toilets (“You learn pretty fast to get over your embarrassment about having no privacy”). Barry Dingle from Third Main comes into the shower room with his guide and stares open-mouthed.

My guide and I go down the back stairs and into the hallway. He pushes open a swinging door into a smallish, crowded dining room. Tables have been pushed against walls papered with a green-and-gray flower design. It’s hot and there are too many people. I am looking for the easiest way out when I see John Fergus across the room and he sees me. He brightens, he smiles and I laugh out loud and he lifts his chin and a welcoming arm. My heart beats a little faster as I go to him.

“When I didn’t see you,” he says, “I thought maybe you decided not to come.” He means it but he says it with a twinkle.

“I’ve been admiring your toilets.”

“Ah yes. Mostly I try to take my dumps at South Hall.”

And then in his loud-oblivious-old man voice, “But enough about the bowel movements of Alpha Chi Rho. Let me introduce you to some of the men who produce them.” He puts his arm on my back and his hand on my shoulder and he looks at me and smiles.

It’s hot, it’s crowded, it’s loud. But I’m with John.

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The Crazy One in the Car is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely co-incidental.