THE CRAZY ONE IN THE CAR--episode 1

Going to College 1964-1968

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Freshman Year — Fall Quarter 1964

At last I’m in college and I’m determined to embrace every bit of Life Experience college has to offer. Informational meetings for the campus newspaper and the College Union and ROTC—check. Get-acquainted freshmen dinner for Roman Catholics on the same evening as new friend Paul Felder goes to get-acquainted dinner for Jews—check. The freshman dance—check. I danced til midnight and the next day I wrote a thank-you note to my sister for making me learn to fast dance the week before I left for college.

Every day of freshmen orientation week I wore my navy blue dink beanie with the gold felt ‘68 on the front, and around my neck the homemade sign telling who I am and where I’m from and where I’m living on campus—Dave Downs class of 1968, Latrobe Pennsylvania, Baldwin Hall Third Main—and I wandered around campus to get upperclassmen to quiz me on Allegheny College history and if I failed, I wanted them to put me in the freshmen stockades by the fountain outside South Hall. It took three and a half days into freshmen orientation week before I got a bite, but on the walkway outside Bentley Hall, which the handbook tells me is the oldest building on campus and “one of the finest examples of Federalist architecture”—it does look like the Liberty Bell might have spent time there—I saw three freshmen girls and a little gnome of a freshman guy all wearing their dinks and their signs and all being quizzed by a couple of upperclassmen.

Down the walkway I bounded waving my arms. “Ask me questions! Please! I’ve memorized every goddamn piece of Allegheny College history from its founding in 1815 to last year’s football stats. Go Gators!”

They laughed.

“At least make me sing the alma mater.”

“Okay, Frosh, sing the alma mater but to the tune of Do Wah Diddy Diddy.”

And I did. I got out several bars—“Alma mater beatissima”—before they chuckled and walked off with the girls, leaving me with the gnomey freshman guy, who mumbled something and went off in the opposite direction.

Still, it was an experience and I Want To Experience Everything. I want to hurl myself off metaphoric cliffs and I want to test my ability to land on both feet and to keep going, which I did at the all-school party the last day of orientation week. In front of the entire student body and faculty assembled at the sports stadium, when the emcee of Freshmen Improv Skits pointed to me and called out, “Here comes a tall, suave, virile sophomore,” I mounted the stairs to the stage with tall, suave, virile steps and—I have no idea where it came from, but I knew I had to ridicule sophomores—I threw up my arms, waved my hands from my wrists like captive birds, and I sang out to the entire audience, “Helloooo, dahlings!” I minced, I lisped, I sashayed—at one point I hid in an imaginary closet—and then I snapped back to tall, suave, virile freshman me and I exited to applause and cheers and shouts.

I jumped and I landed safely. And I want to keep jumping. I want to get cast in school plays as I did in high school because just maybe I’ll decide to be an actor. And I want to join the track team and break the school record in the one hundred twenty yard high hurdles because that’s what I did in high school and it helped get me here: “well-rounded.” And I want to earn an A in every one of my classes because I’m the first person in my family to go to college—okay, my brother went to Saint Vincent College but it’s in Latrobe and he lived at home so it doesn’t count—and because Allegheny gave me scholarships and loans to come here.

One minor obstacle to this last item: if you want to study, it can’t happen in your room. Everybody on Third Main keeps their doors open all the time. The hallway vibrates with chatter and laughter and you hear radios and stereos blaring every song the Beatles have released since their Ed Sullivan appearance. And just about every other evening a couple of guys will run down the hall yelling kamikaze war cries as they storm into a room and spray shaving cream all over the beds. Or if somebody is dorky enough to close the door because he’s studying, they’ll sneak down the hall and pull the door open and hurl water balloons at him hunched over his books. And when Barry Dingle at the end of the hall was clueless enough to lock his door, they waited until he was asleep and they rigged an elaborate trap with a bucket of water—I hope it was water—above the door and he made the mistake of getting pissed—yes, that’s what I said—after he got soaked and then complaining to the floor counselors. It’s going to be a long year for Barry Dingle.

So since studying in my room isn’t a practical option, I went looking for a private out-of-the-way space and I found it in the back stairwell between Third and Fourth Main. It’s quiet, there’s light from the fixture on the cinderblock wall, and the banister is just wide enough for me to lie on if I don’t wiggle too much. The door to each floor stays closed and if someone comes out, the cross bar clangs and the door makes a whooshing sound as it opens, so I can study here in solitude while also—very important—making a dramatic statement about my academic priorities.

For about twenty minutes this evening I’ve been lying on the banister, Andre Gide’s L’Immoraliste open on my chest, and on a stair the Petit Larousse dictionary my girlfriend Carolyn gave me as a going-to-college present. I’m reaching for the Petit Larousse for the many-teenth time when the door to Fourth Main clangs and whooshes open and unsubtle footfalls come down the cement stairs and anticipation with a twist of uncertainty jolts my guts.

He stops a couple of stairs above me. “I expected I’d find you here.”

Everything he does seems aimed to encourage me but also to knock me off balance, so I feign nonchalance and say, “Well, I did leave breadcrumbs.”

He comes down to below my feet and he leans against the banister, reaches up and tilts the book to read the title.

“Last time it was The Secret Sharer.”

I try for clever. “And you were on your way to the laundry room with a big bag over your shoulder. Like a thief in the night.” I smile, maybe hoping to melt through to whatever is behind his unflappable exterior.

He shifts weight and his black and red striped jersey moves with him, hangs in slight folds from his left shoulder to his right hip. “Yeah, well, eventually even a thief has to have clean underwear.” He adjusts his butt against the metal banister posts. He’s wearing cream-colored chinos. There’s the hint of a bulge, which I tell myself I notice because I want to become a writer and I must learn to be observant, and he says, “You wanted a place to read Conrad and I needed clean underwear and so we both used the back stairs.”

All I have is, “Must be Destiny.”

He looks at me with his unruffled blankness tempered by the always slightly furrowed brow meant to suggest his puzzlement at what’s going on around him. From outside comes the jingling tune of the ice cream truck. He pushes away from the banister.

“Nine-thirty. Let’s get a Mr. Softee.”

I reach into my pants and take all the coins out. “I have six pennies.”

“I’ll give you nine.”

“I didn’t say that so you’d—”

“Fine,” he says and he starts down the stairs. Should I stop him?

He says, “Get down here,” and I take my books and we go down two floors and out the side door of Baldwin Hall to the ice cream truck parked on Main Street where Prospect makes a T with it.

I met him last week when I went to new friend Paul Felder’s room on Fourth Main to go to lunch and as Paul was showing me something—I don’t remember what—we heard from the hallway, “Who’s the new guy?” He was leaning in the doorway, picking at a hangnail. He was tall, taller that I am and I’m six two. Paul looked momentarily dismayed, maybe reluctant to introduce me to his floor mate, Edward Charlton Bond the fourth, who stayed in the doorway for a few minutes after the introduction and then pushed himself upright into the hallway. “Okay, I’m out,” and he left.

The next day he was coming into the lobby of Baldwin as I was returning from a meeting with my Intro to Drama teacher and I saw that his upper lip was swollen and one of his front teeth was broken.

“Jesus,” I said, “what happened?” and he said, “Let’s kill an hour in my room.”

Later that night I wrote in my diary:

October 12, 1964

Edward Charlton Bond IV—what image does that name evoke? Rich, aloof, cultured, unliked, ugly? I agree; however, Edward Charlton Bond IV is a PK (which he said means Preacher’s Kid) who stands six feet five inches tall but is not “the tall, gawky kid” he said he knows everyone sees him as. And I liked him from the first. I went to his room today to find out what happened: he lost a tooth and split his lip in a fight downtown that he said he had nothing to do with and he said maybe one day he’ll tell me the whole story.

Consider ECBIV—‘Ed’ doesn’t sound right and the guys on Fourth call him ‘Stretch,’ too, but I just can’t—among those few whom I truly like here.

There’s a line at the ice cream truck: Six or seven upperclassmen from Caflisch Hall who rag on one another and ignore the freshmen; three co-eds who might have come from Reis Library across Prospect Street and who ignore everybody; and a few Baldwin guys, Paul Felder among them.

“Hi, Dave,” Paul says in what is either a vain or a purposefully unsuccessful attempt to brighten his dour face. “I went to your room but you weren’t there. Hi, Ed.”

Paul is five feet not-too-many inches tall. ECBIV looks down at him. “Hi, Paul,” he says. “What’s up?” He has a low resonant voice with just a touch of adenoidal something or other. And I like his hands. They’re big and bony and yet they suddenly arrest in the most artful of gestures. Not like a dancer, more like a basketball player. Or maybe a sculptor. He leans in doorways and lounges against banisters or on his floormates’ beds, but he can stand tall and straight as he does now talking with—maybe at—Paul. I feel sorry for Paul and a little guilty because I know that my friendship with him is fading as my affection for ECBIV grows.

Paul gets his ice cream and says a subdued see-you-guys as he goes up the walk to the side door. When ECBIV and I have our cones, he says, “Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to run into Paul in the back stairwell.”

We walk. Allegheny College sits atop a hill that rises gently but definitively out of and away from downtown Meadville like a small medieval castle removed from the peasant huts huddled in the valley below. There are lawns and pathways and large old trees. We sit on a stone bench—“Gift of the class of 1904”—along the path to Reis Library and we eat our ice cream. The night air is cool. There are lamp posts at intervals. We can see the Prospect Street wing of Baldwin Hall. Most of the rooms are bright with light. Most of the curtains are open.

“Let me ask you a question,” ECBIV says. He pops the last of his cone into his mouth and chews. “Did you ever play with dolls?”

Oof. I don’t know if he thinks I’m homosexual and Jesus knows I’ve agonized about it the last couple of years. I finally talked with Carolyn a few weeks ago and she thinks I’m either tormenting myself unnecessarily or, more likely, being way overly dramatic; but we haven’t had sex yet—not even close—so how can I be sure? I don’t think ECBIV is homosexual, but how would I know anyway? I like him, I’m glad he seeks me out. Is that homosexual? Is that abnormal? Still, why did he ask that question? Does he think I won’t notice the implication? Or am I being too defensive? I tell him that I did in fact play with dolls but that I wasn’t actually playing with dolls, it was more like they were people acting out the stories I was making up like the people on Search for Tomorrow and The Secret Storm, my favorite soap operas since, I don’t know, first grade.

“I guessed you did,” he says. “I did too.” He reaches into his shirt pocket for a pack of Old Golds with the book of matches slipped into the cellophane wrapper. “But I don’t remember what I did with them.” A flash of fire, the cigarette tight between his lips as he returns the pack and the matches to his pocket and then he looks at me and takes a drag. “We have a lot in common.” Exhale. He looks out across the lawn to the lights in the rooms of Baldwin Hall. He could be Old Gold’s collegiate answer to the Marlboro Man. “It’s funny, though, how not one of the guys on Fourth or anywhere else for that matter would see any resemblance between us.”

Before I can ask him what he means, he stands and says, “Gotta get to the station,” and he walks, or ambles, across the library lawn and up the sidewalk of Prospect Street and across Main Street to Cochran Hall, the College Union that houses the radio station. He’s the engineer for an upperclassman who plays jazz Sunday nights from 10:30 until early Monday morning. I want to stay on the bench and watch him until he disappears into the CU, but I don’t want to be doing that if he turns back to see, which I know he won’t do even if he wants to because he wouldn’t want me to see him doing that.

I finish the ice cream and I go to my room and I get nine pennies from the jar in the top dresser drawer and I go to his room and put the pennies on his dresser. And back to the stairwell between Fourth and Third. I can still finish that chapter of L’Immoraliste.

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