THE CRAZY ONE IN THE CAR--episode 8

Going to College 1964-1968

Freshman Year — Winter Quarter 1965

At the second Happy Hour, while we’re doing pushups and Brother Klimczak is pressing his right foot onto each pledge’s shoulder yoke, Pledge Baylor jumps to his feet and rips off his pledge pin and throws it at Brother Klimczak and runs out of the house. Stef goes after him. Stan commands us to keep our positions but Bob Cragg goes out after Stef and George. Cragg is six feet tall and built. He graduated from the New York Military Academy and he’s proud of his physical abilities. When they come back, Cragg shouts, “Pledge Baylor!” Dale Bronkerman answers, “And Pledge Cragg!” Someone shouts, “Your brothers are with you!” And Pledge Graize adds, “Alpha Chi Rho!” and we all shout “Alpha Chi Rho!” and Stef and Stan smile. 

The next day Stef asks me about pledge class morale. What is everyone feeling about pledging? Are there problems? To me pledging is like some fairy tale set of tasks we perform in order to earn ourselves knighthood. And knighthood is worth it. And to get there, I will run through whatever mazes you set before me. I think the others feel much the same. So I assure Stef that things are fine, that even George Baylor loves Alpha Chi Rho. Brother Terpille asks me if I think pledging activities are too harsh; he says some of the brothers think it’s getting outdated. He notes, for instance, that Brother John Fergus doesn’t come to Happy Hours. I tell them that some of the pledges find it demeaning, even juvenile, but that everyone supports the goal of bonding and brotherhood. Two days later we’re invited to meet some of the brothers at Montgomery Gym where they have rented the swimming pool for an hour’s water polo game. It’s relaxed. It’s fun. There’s noise and laughter. We appreciate the effort.

At the house today I go to the upstairs shower room to use the toilet. I’ve come here instead of the downstairs bathroom because I want to practice overcoming the embarrassment of having no privacy. I want to get used to doing everything within the brotherhood. Even taking a crap. Brother “Bear” Dayton is in the shower farthest from me. He has more hair on his body than I would have guessed anyone could have. When he leans his head back into the water to rinse off, his hips push out and I watch the soap pour off the end of his dick. He’s uncircumcised. 

A. J. comes in, a white towel wrapped around his waist. He has thick blond hair but his chest seems perfectly smooth. Does he shave it? 

“Pledge Downs, you will avert your eyes.” 

He hangs the towel on a hook and steps into the middle shower stall. I can see his back and his butt as he turns on the water. He works out and it shows. 

Bear turns off the shower and comes out and stands looking at me. My eyes go to his swinging dick and he says, “Pledge Downs!” I look up in panic. “Have some consideration for the Brotherhood for Chrissake and give us a sympathy flush.” I laugh in relief and I flush the toilet. He turns to face the mirror at the middle sink; he opens his shaving kit, turns on the water, and he calls out, “A. J., can I borrow your Poli Sci notes this afternoon?” 

From the shower stall A. J. says, “Moth has them, we’ll ask him at lunch” and Bear lathers his face as he shifts his weight from one leg to another and his butt muscles respond. In the mirror he sees me watching and he smiles.

After we moved from the Whitney coal patch to Lawson Heights when I was ten, my favorite place to visit was the Latrobe News Stand. Inside the front door, display cases featured pens and ink and appointment calendars and stationery; down the narrow oiled wooden floor at the back of the room stood wall-to-ceiling racks of newspapers from everywhere and magazines on every topic from agriculture and body building to writing and zoology. One day—I was a freshman in high school—I went to the newspaper and magazine rack: The Latrobe Bulletin, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Popular Mechanics, Muscle Builder. And just past Muscle Builder, a new magazine. On the cover was a color photo of a man in a swim suit flexing and posing. For a moment I stopped breathing. He wasn’t just another body builder. There was something different about him. Something stirring and dangerous. I took the magazine from the rack. My heart was pounding. Others were browsing newspapers and thumbing magazines and I was certain they had seen me reach for Demi-Gods. Page after page of photos. Men in swim suits. Men in the gym. Men in posing straps in the desert. Men smiling. Men scowling. Looking directly at me. I bought Demi-Gods and the man behind the counter did nothing to indicate he thought it worth his notice. 

I went back to the Latrobe News Stand often. I found other magazines and I got bold enough to ask when the next issues of Demi-Gods and The Young Physique were expected. The magazines were occasions of sin and I knew I should avoid them. Each time I looked at one, I told myself this time I wouldn’t let myself get an erection. And when my penis did get hard, I promised God I wouldn’t touch it. And when I did touch it, I promised to stop before I had an orgasm. And when I did have an orgasm, I suffered the guilt of having committed the mortal sin of masturbation and the shame of having once again failed before God. The only salvation I could muster was knowing that what excited me was not the sex of the men but the thrill of my own maleness. I was aroused by my own developing masculinity. My mortal sin might be masturbation but it was not perversion. 

One day I came home with the most recent Physique Pictorial hidden in a school notebook and I took it into the bathroom and locked the door. Page after page of men in posing straps standing against Greek columns or leaning against the barbell rack in the gym or lying about in the outdoors. And then: Two young men, not body-builders and not posing. Two young men who seemed to have been caught in the middle of an ordinary day. One of them was making breakfast while the other sat at the table. Both were naked. A frying pan covered the crotch of the one at the stove. In another photo he had his back to the camera with a view of his whole body as he was washing dishes and the other was holding a dishtowel that just happened to cover his crotch. It was shocking and it was thrilling. They lived together. They cooked meals together. They shared a house. A life. Two men could be such close friends as these and their nakedness as beautiful an expression of their friendship as this. 

Masturbating to them went way beyond the superficial excitement of looking at muscle men in posing straps. I told myself it was like celebrating their relationship. But the inevitable shame that accompanied orgasm dug deeper into guilt and sin and I kept telling myself I would stop looking at them.

A. J. turns the shower off and steps out of the stall holding the washcloth over his crotch. “Pledge Downs, are you still here? Hand me my towel.” 

Bear at the sink splashing his face says, “And avert your eyes lest the sight of such splendor turn you to a pillar of salt.”

“Rock hard more likely,” A. J. says as he waits for me to stand up and hobble, pants around my ankles, to the towel hooks on the wall. My shirttail covers my crotch. 

As I hand him the towel he says, “I should make you give me fifty jumping jacks right now but I’m not a sadist.” He dries himself, wraps the towel around his waist and goes out. 

I sit again on the toilet and Bear closes his shaving kit and pulls his towel off the hook and flips it over his shoulder. He goes to the door and he turns to me, dick swinging. “Pledge Downs, for the good of the Brotherhood, you are never again to take a shit while a brother is taking a shower,” and he’s out. 

I pull paper from the roll and use it. Standing naked before the brotherhood or sitting on the toilet in front of them is one thing; but some things still demand privacy. 

*****

I go to the house every afternoon or evening after rehearsal—I’m in a student-directed play—or studying at the library—or, more often, instead of studying anywhere. I stay up sometimes through the whole night playing bridge, following orders, and talking and talking. Sometimes I sleep at the house. Some days I miss classes. I love it. I love the engagement, the interaction, the—ha!—fraternity of it. Happy Hours and Tick Duty and Constant Harassment. It doesn’t feel demeaning because we’re all playing at it—at Fraternity Life, at Earning the Right to Brotherhood, at College Something or Other. These guys live here. Together. They study and sleep and eat here. And those who have rooms elsewhere come here for dinner and the talk is constant and loud and engaged. It’s communal living; it’s fraternal living. And through it I’m making a life in the present beyond Latrobe.

*****

I’ve become lunchtime friends with freshmen Anne Dourvox and Joan Calder. Anne has lustrous brown hair that sweeps across her forehead and almost to her shoulders and she has deep brown eyes and a dusky complexion. The whites of her eyes and the white of her teeth when she smiles remind me of the close-up of Disney’s Cinderella as she dances with the prince on the shadowed terrace of the castle—So This Is Love. I’ve imagined that one of Anne’s past great grandfathers was named Darveaux and that his mother had been a dusky desert courtesan in love with some French foreign legionnaire—or something else I’m equally ignorant about.

Joan is shorter than Anne. And slighter. Her face is a pale oval framed by thin straight hair that is neither reddish nor brown. She has pale blue eyes and freckles. Her eyebrows lift in expectation of reprimand. And when she isn’t smiling a simple u-shaped smile, she’s biting her lower lip in apology for something. I like her. 

This morning Joan and I are taking a walk to find twigs and bark and withered leaves for her art project. 

“Anne is so pretty,” she’s saying as we forage in one of the campus ravines, “and so popular. She could be such a snob, but she’s just wonderful.” 

We collect a pillow case full of weeds and bark. I wait in the lobby of South Hall as she takes it to her room. She comes back with Anne and we go to the cafeteria for lunch. 

John Fergus comes out of the kitchen and to our table. He’s smiling.

“My three favorite Lunchkins,” he says. 

We laugh and John asks Anne and Joan if they would like to go with him and me Saturday night to whatever is showing at Carr Hall’s Foreign Film Series. 

Anne smiles. “So you think we don’t already have dates?” 

John says he is putting his hopes in all the gods of good fortune and Anne looks at Joan and Joan blushes and Anne says, “Who are we to resist the gods?”

And so on Saturday John and I go to South Hall and buzz Anne and Joan and they come to the lobby together. Anne is wearing a dark green skirt and matching sweater and she smiles big and wide as John steps forward. 

“May I have the honor of this dance?” he says and she lifts her jaw a bit and laughs. 

Joan in a blue skirt and knee socks and a white blouse emerges from behind Anne. She’s carrying a jacket. “Hi,” she says and, yes, she blushes. 

“Shall we go in search of what the night has to offer?” says John and out we go to Carr Hall auditorium.

Anne reminds me of the Latrobe Hill Crowd. She’s confident and even just the slightest bit confrontational and it’s fun. Joan is shy and infolding. John is low-key and funny and thoughtful and honest. He and Anne are in the same poli sci class and he jokes that Anne always knows the answer to every question the professor asks. Anne says she likes political science and John says he will never take another poli sci class and he’s finding Medieval European history a bit too meddling and not enough Evil and we all laugh. Joan murmurs that she finds Psych 1 more elementary than she thought it would be but German is intimidating and she doesn’t really understand what her art project is supposed to accomplish.

I feel myself revving up. “I’m not even sure what classes I’m taking,” I say and Anne laughs in some disbelief and Joan’s eyes open wider still. “I’m majoring in Bridge and Brotherhood and I’m determined to ace them both.”

Joan says, “Janet Blaine told me you’re in her biology lab.”

Adrenaline pumps. “So far all we’ve done is get acquainted with our Fetal Pigs from Happy Farm.” Anne ughs and I continue. “Yesterday Janet looked up from her little formaldehyde piglet carcass and, holding her scalpel in mid-air, she announced that she was having trouble locating her ovaries.” 

Anne gasp laughs and says “Ew” and Joan blushes a deeper red and I say, “I’m not sure yet if I’m going to have ovaries or testes.”

The movie is Knife in the Water. It’s my first foreign film since Carolyn drove us to Pittsburgh junior year to see Last Year at Marienbad. That one didn’t make a lot of sense but it didn’t matter because there was something beautiful about it like classical music. Knife in the Water has no inner music. Even the literal sound of the whole thing seems off. Is it a problem with Carr Auditorium speakers or is it the way the film was made? As if someone had held an inferior microphone above the actors while they talked on a pier or on the boat. And all they do is talk. And brood. Lately I’ve been feeling like a droplet of water skimming above the surface of a hot skillet and I want the movie to match that energy. I can’t let myself slow down and be absorbed by the story. I won’t let myself be absorbed.

As we leave Carr Auditorium, I wait to hear everyone else’s response. Anne is puzzled but appreciative. John says, “My high school didn’t teach Polish and I couldn’t read fast enough to keep up.” Joan is silent. “Did you like it?” I ask. She looks up at me and almost apologetically she nods her head and says, “What did you think?”

“I think I feel the way I’ll feel the first time I go to Europe and visit a foreign country.”

“And how’s that?”

“As if I’m missing something major but also that I’m being jerked around by the locals.”

I used to have a recurring dream that I would leap into the air and if I struggled and stroked my arms hard enough, I could stay up above everybody on the ground. But gravity pulled me toward the ground and they were waiting to—what? I wasn’t sure but I knew they would hurt me. I was somehow not quite human and they knew it and they might even tear me apart if I came down among them. So I stroked my arms as if I were swimming up from the depths. But if I got too high, the air was filled with criss-crossing high tension wires and if I touched them, I would be electrocuted. The mob waited for me below on the ground and the hissing wires waited above in the air. I struggled to stay between the two realms but I was pulled relentlessly to earth. All I could do was try to land far enough away from everybody that I could spring back into the air before they got to me. Something about being with John and Anne and Joan tonight feels like that—except that besides fear and anxiety, there’s also exhilaration. And my struggle isn’t arm-stroking to stay in the air, it’s talking and joking and rapid inversions of logic and undercutting and so long as they are surprised and laughing, so long as I stay just one unexpected comment ahead of them, I am safe or solid or safe and solid. Worthy.

As we walk back to South Hall in time for Anne and Joan to sign in, we’re all subdued. I want to crack a joke and spark laughter, but it feels wrong. I think they mistake the quiet for intimacy. 

We say goodnight and Anne steps back just before John might step forward for a kiss and then she puts a hand flat on his chest and steps forward and tilts her head to let him kiss her. 

I take Joan’s hand. “Thanks,” I say. “Not fond of public display.” 

She makes an “eek” face and says, “Me either.” 

“It was fun—in a jerked around foreign film sort of way.” 

She smiles. And they are gone.

John and I walk toward the house in silence. At the corner of Main and Sherman, he says, “If I were a girl dating you, I would feel inferior to you, you’re so funny.”

“What?” I hoot. “I love your sense of humor. I just blast people away, you pull people in. You make us feel like we’re in on it with you.” 

We go quiet for a few minutes. 

Then I have to say it. “I envy you.”

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The Crazy One in the Car is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, 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.