THE CRAZY ONE IN THE CAR -- episode 39
Going to college 1964-1968
Summer 1968
August 24, 1968
Thom and Bill and Betsy and I are on a wine and bread and cheese picnic in New Hampshire. Wednesday we drove from 6:00 p.m. until 7:30 a.m. Thursday for the Dartmouth Summer Repertory Company. The first night we stayed in a motel but the manager asked us to leave. He said we caused a disturbance but actually he was scared of us. Bill’s hair is long, he wears round lavender glasses and plays the guitar. Thom’s hair is straight and long and he wears a pendant. And Betsy. The lone female in our group. He didn’t want us in the first place.
So we went to town and got two rooms in a big old hotel. It’s great. Bill and Thom and I drew cards to see who got to sleep in the room with Betsy. Bill won. Whew. In a bit, Thom went into our room. I stayed a few minutes talking with Bill and Betsy and then I followed into the room. Thom was lying across the bed dressed. I made inane conversation, got undressed, turned out the light, crawled under the sheets on my side of the bed. He lay on his side.
Betsy came to tuck us in, told Thom to get undressed, and he said nothing. When she left, he got up, undressed, came back to the bed. We lay a long time not speaking. Finally I touched him, he faced me, and I kissed him.
He pulled me away before he came.
Bill and Betsy slept in one double bed—just slept, Bill said, though he and Liz did break up last week. And Thom and I slept in the other room. For the second time.
“You know too much about people,” he said. “You make me feel so small.”
So here we are at the top of a high quarry with the woods behind us, Bill playing the guitar and Betsy crying (she always cries when she gets drunk) and Thom has taken a photo of us.
Last night I dreamt that Carolyn was back—unmarried. Dick hadn’t shown for the wedding.
August 25, 1968
We’re on our way back. Yesterday on the way from the quarry to the car I sprained my ankle. Today I can barely walk.
The second night at the Coolidge Hotel he lay on his back beside me, his hands behind his head and I had rolled over, put my arm on his chest, my hand along his jaw, tried to ask him to look at me. And finally, when he made no move at all, I took my arm away, began to roll to my side of the bed, and he quickly rolled to his stomach and grabbed my arm, put his face against it, kissed my hand. He wanted me but he couldn’t say it. We almost talk.
August 27, 1968
On the way home Thom and I sat in the back as Betsy drove. I couldn’t drive because of my ankle. There was a silence between us that I know he felt too. I had been thinking about the night before when I had for the first time in my life done what I had done with him. And then he was tired. I rolled off him and put my hand across his back, his neck. Finally he said, “You’re not helping matters much.” And I went to sleep.
Driving back, I wasn’t really pissed or anything, just thinking—we said little. In the car Bill’s guitar was vertical between us on the seat and resting against the front seat. I leaned forward, draping my arms over the front seat for a few minutes and then for the first time since I met him, Thom touched me. He put his hand on my back. Yes, he had reciprocated and with real sincerity, before, but he had never initiated—out of fear of rejection I like to believe. But this time I think he felt that it was all over if he did nothing. I was not going to try anymore. And he did. He leaned his head on the pillow on the guitar case and I held his hand, rubbed his back. Betsy was driving and for a while Bill lay on the front seat.
When Bill sat up, I let Thom go and leaned against my door. When Bill lay down again, Thom said, “Betsy, hand me the sleeping bag. I’m going to lie on the floor.” He got the rolled bag and squeezed between the front and the back seats, his head near my feet. I lay on the seat with my head at his feet. With the guitar above us and protecting us from Betsy, Thom put his hand on my stomach, undid my pants and I did the same to him. He tried to reciprocate what I had done for him the night before, but I was afraid. So we masturbated each other. We came together. And it was all his doing. He wanted it. He planned it. For once it was not my manipulating. Someone else, Thom Coleman, wanted it.
The first night, he pulled out of my mouth before he came. The second night he didn’t and in the car, he wanted me. And with Thom it doesn’t seem wrong. It doesn’t seem ugly and twisted.
I guess beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. I guess one iguana doesn’t think another is ugly. Or something.
*****
“You got a letter today from the Selective Service Board.”
I’m in the C. U. on the second floor hallway wall phone with Mom.
“Open it.”
“I did. You got your deferment. 1-Y. For one year.”
I’m quiet. Relieved. And lots of other stuff, too.
She realizes I’m not going to respond and she says, “I don’t know whether to be happy or not.”
I don’t quite laugh. And I won’t ask her to explain. “Can’t help you there.”
Three days later I get a letter from her that includes the Selective Service notice. Under a block labeled “Remarks” is this sentence: “Inability to form, develop, or maintain human relationships.”
Thom’s gone home. In a few days he’ll leave for New York. He says he wants to write to me. He left me a poem:
power is to know me inside outside
and keep your vicious armslength
and never look surprised.
to mirror me with words
well-chosen words
bible words
down the listening well a shiny penny.
expose my goddamned guise
before the shell was spun
and leave me underneath
a rock, a tree, and thee.
you
with the power to destroy me
did not.
Khorvack’s back in Meadville. I call him to say I’ll find a way to repay the money he gave me. He invites me to dinner.
He’s made seared steaks with baked potatoes and green beans. And an arugula salad. He’s smiling. He says nothing about what happened. There’s light in his eyes and a bounce in his step as he pours more wine and continues talking. Either he’s insane and has forgotten or he’s insane and has poisoned my steak.
“So I will be at my parents house on the South Side of Chicago and I’ll give you directions for getting there. We can stay with them for a few days and then find you an apartment near Loyola.”
Or he’s insane and will do anything for me.
He has to be back in Meadville a week or so after I get to Chicago. I can deal with him for that long.
In Latrobe sitting with Mom at the kitchen table as we wait for Jane to come from Pittsburgh. We’ve been talking about Dad.
“The last thing he said to me was, ‘I’m not worried about John and Jane, I know they’ll be all right.’” She’s taking the wax paper off a plate of chocolate fudge she made this morning. “‘But what’s going to happen to Dave?’”
She looks at me.
“I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and he said, ‘If you don’t know what I’m talking about, now is not the time to start.’ And he turned toward the wall.”
A car pulls into the driveway.
“That must be Jane,” she says and she goes to the front door.
It’s a Will I Laugh or Will I Cry moment.
September 6, 1968
Last night, after four years, I flew again and, as ever, it was not a free, soaring act. As ever, it was a battle between my physical and emotional power to stay in the air and the force of gravity pulling me into the hands of the hostile, shrieking beings on the ground below.
But last night there was an added terror. Last night I was hunted by a shadow-substanced beast that is part me. I never knew exactly where it was, but I knew that if I lost my uplift in the air, if I stopped my struggling flight upward, the devouring thing that is part me would hurl me to the earth and tear me apart. I tried to scream and I woke up gasping, my heart pounding.
I lay in the dark, in the quiet, a long time. I know the rampaging beast who is part me and who intends to rip me to pieces isn’t real. I know the power it has is the power my nightmare self gives it. I know that.
Still, how do I destroy it? How can I wipe it out forever?
Today Allegheny and Jerry and Latrobe and Carolyn end.
Tomorrow I go to Chicago to begin again.
******************
The End of The Crazy One in the Car.
The Story continues. Details soon.
Thanks for reading.
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.
Just absolutely breathtaking. Wow.