THE CRAZY ONE IN THE CAR -- episode 38
Going to college 1964-1968
Summer 1968
A few weeks ago Howdy and I made plans for him to come to Meadville the day after Carolyn and Dick’s wedding. Bill will stay at Liz’s so Howdy can have his bed.
I tell Khorvack stories of Howdy and me. Tales of two summers as day camp counselors and how the campers loved rainy days because Howdy and Flipper (our camp nicknames) improvised stories and acted out all the characters. And how senior year Howdy and I wrote a musical about the freshman to senior year experience at Latrobe High School.
I know it’s tearing Khorvack apart and I’m glad. I want to hurt him.
When Howdy arrives, Khorvack jacks into hyper-drive. He buzzes around the apartment trying to join in, which makes me that much more determined to spend as little time around him as possible. He insists we stay in the apartment that evening for dinner and he describes each dish and he delights in letting Howdy know how detailed is his awareness of my dietary peculiarities.
The next day Howdy and I go for a walk on campus and he tells me about the wedding.
“Carolyn may have been marrying Dick, but you were the main topic of conversation.”
“Everyone wanted to know if I’d heard from you and the running joke was everybody expecting you to crash the ceremony à la Benjamin Braddock.”
“Or when the minister asked if there is anyone here who….”
“Carolyn forgot to smile the whole time—except when the cake cutting was under way. And that, only because they made a mess of it.”
“There were two weddings—the adults in one room drinking and commenting on Carolyn’s obvious fatigue, and the college kids in another room, eating in silence, watching Carolyn’s detached exhaustion.”
“She cried when she left.”
Back at the apartment, Khorvack appears in the living room archway, right hand cupped over left.
“David?”
I thought he was at a meeting or teaching or something.
“Yes.”
“Zach Schott tells me that The Stranger, the movie taken from Albert Camus’s novel of the same name and starring Marcello Mastroiani and produced by Dino De Laurentis, is playing at—“
“Christ.” I’m laughing. “Who’s the leading lady?”
He perches on the arm of the sofa. “Anna Karina.”
“And who wrote the screenplay?”
He opens his mouth to respond.
“Who directed? Film company? Was it shot on location? How long did it take to film?”
His face has gone purple-white.
Howdy chimes in. “And the sixty-four thousand dollar question: At what voltage does the projector run?”
“Anyway,” Khorvack says, assuming his smug legs-crossed-lips-pursed-cigarette-poised-on-knee pose.
I’m surprised at my anger and at my aim. I know it’s not just about him and his insufferable, needy, possessive—“No wonder you can teach an eighty-minute class. You’ve got one thing to say and you spend seventy minutes on trivial related crap before you finally get around to—”
“Anyway.”
“What a fucking simp.”
Howdy has gone still.
Khorvack stands and walks out of the room. And out of the apartment.
Howdy and I go downtown to Teddy’s bar. When we come back at 5:30 for dinner—Howdy wanted to stay downtown but I insisted—Bill’s sitting on the sofa reading. He looks at us.
“Bob went to Teddy’s but when he saw that you were there, he came back and he waited and went back after you left.” Turns back to the book.
“So he’s not here for dinner?”
“I’m guessing he’d rather not.”
“Psychologically unable to eat with us?”
“Something like that.”
I can’t tell what he’s thinking or how much he knows.
I get my jockstrap and tights for tonight’s dress rehearsal—we open tomorrow—and Howdy and I go to the Grill. He’s leaving in the morning, so he comes to the rehearsal. And when we get back to the apartment, he goes to his room and I fall asleep on the living room sofa still wearing the jock and tights.
I hear the front door open and I check my watch. After midnight. It’s Khorvack. I go to my room to get out of the tights.
He pads in after me. He closes the door and perches on the edge of the bed.
“David, may I have a word with you?”
I’m standing on one leg with my back to him as I pull off the tights. How many times have I heard that question these last few weeks and then listened to decisions he’s come up with about his frazzled psyche. “Where’s Howdy?”
“In the kitchen. David, may I have a word with you?”
Tights in dresser drawer, T-shirt pulled off over my head, I step out of the jock and turn to face him.
He’s dragging furiously on his cigarette.
“As you have probably noticed,” he says, not looking at me, “the situation in this apartment—as you can imagine—has become unbearable for me.”
I’m as surprised as he must be to hear me say this: “I’m leaving on Monday so there won’t be any problem.”
“And so would you please leave tomorrow?”
“I’m leaving Monday.”
“Would you please leave tomorrow.”
I start to shake. Tomorrow is opening night. For weeks I’ve been holding on because I have felt sorry for this little deformed queer, but I can’t hold back any more.
“I’m leaving now and I don’t want to hear another word about it from you.”
He lifts his chin.
“Open your mouth and you’re going to be sorrier than you’ve ever been.”
He stands, to make a declaration of some sort.
“Get out of here. Get out or I’ll smash you into a crippled pulp.”
He gasps and leaves.
Howdy comes into the doorway.
My heart is pounding and I’m breathing hard.
We pack and go to the C. U.
Cochran Hall was built in the early years of the twentieth century as the first men’s dormitory on campus. The top floor of three still has a couple of rooms that during the school year serve as crash pads for the school radio jocks and student government types. Each has a metal bed frame and a mattress. In the summer they’re empty. This summer they’ve become crash pads for S. E. T. crews. Howdy and I will crash here and tomorrow after Howdy leaves, I’ll tell Baker. He’s the C. U. student manager and the S. E. T. producer.
After the opening night performance—we’re a hit—everybody crams into Baker’s apartment to celebrate and I’m in a corner talking to Bill Barnes and Betsy Storm, the pianist for the show. I keep watching Thom Coleman the way I used to watch Jerry. He’s wearing a striped t-shirt that shows off his biceps and his thick straight hair falls in front of his eyes. Great cheekbones and a slightly crooked nose and slightly crooked teeth that complement his wrinkly smile.
In the center of the room, Frank Watson leans back in his chair, smiling his charming and lethal Sydney Greenstreet smile. He’s feeling particularly accomplished as director of the show, but this production belongs to Thom Coleman, who looks at me and I smile.
“Thom,” Baker says, “are you crashing here tonight?”
My heart pounds. I’m not sure what’s happening, but I keep looking at Thom, willing him to read my mind even though my mind hasn’t formed words for what I’m thinking.
Last week I was lying down in one of the C.U. crash rooms and Thom came to get me for rehearsal and I pretended to refuse and he pulled my arm and I pulled him onto the bed and we pretended to struggle and Baker interrupted before it got awkward. And at the post-rehearsal party, I watched him avoid Jan Hillhurst, who was falling all over him, and something in the way he engineered tireless acrobatics to get away from her suggested that his avoidance was rooted in something deeper than her drunken obnoxiousness.
“Thom, are you crashing here tonight?” Baker asks.
Thom looks from me to a hangnail that suddenly needs attention.
“I’m thinking I’ll probably go to the C. U.,” he says. “I want to shower tomorrow and all my stuff’s in the crash room.”
I can feel his determination to avoid looking at me.
For the next hour he drinks a lot, he throws up, I hold him over the toilet and then sit with him, his head in my lap, and everybody laughs. I like brushing his hair away from his face. When it is determined that he will, in fact, live, he and Bill and I leave and we walk to the C. U.
“What party?” he says. “What liquor?”
We all laugh.
“Dartmouth’s Summer Theatre is doing And People All Around,” Bill says.
“We should go,” Thom says.
And I say, “I just happen to have a ’62 Ford Falcon that can take us to New England.”
When we get to my crash room, Bill says Khorvack went to Buffalo to see a friend of his. A psychiatrist. “He and you could be locked up in the Warren State Penitentiary for the Criminally Insane.”
I can’t tell if he’s joking.
“Gotta take a piss.”
August 2, 1968
…when I came back from the john, Bill had left.
Thom took off his pants and I helped him with his shirt. He pulled my pants off and he was on me first. And we were together. And we stayed together all night.
It’s his mind, I told him, that I love.
“Platonic, huh?” he said as we were sweating and breathing hard and squirming.
“You’re going to bite it off,” I said and he kissed me.
“You deserve it.”
Typical homosexual remark, eh? Well, tough.
He says he had an inkling of how I felt because of the way I acted during our afternoon in the country sitting on the rock under his favorite tree.
He pulled out of my mouth before he came.
Why did it seem so natural and easy?
*****
The Selective Service shrink is in military uniform. He could be anywhere between thirty years old and somewhere in his forties. His hair is shaved close—of course. He’s sitting behind his desk in this tiny room with file cabinets and no windows. He has occasionally leaned forward and tapped a pencil on the desk, but mostly he’s leaned back in his chair, which is what he’s doing now. I feel like an animal new to the zoo and the shrink is trying to decide which cage I should be put in.
“Are you a homosexual?”
I’m not sure how long I’ve been sitting in this straight-backed chair in front of his desk. I’ve answered his questions.
Do you have plans for next year? I told him about Loyola.
Holding up Dr. Whorting’s letter: What about these suicide attempts? I told him about Jerry.
Did you have sexual relations with Jerry? I told him about the IFC kegger.
Subsequent ones? No.
Any others? I told him about Khorvack.
Others? I told him about the night with Thom.
How many times? Once.
“Are you a homosexual?”
I’m exhausted. “I don’t know.”
Without passion, without disbelief or rancor—he’s truly asking—he says, “You don’t know if you are a homosexual?”
Something explodes in me.
“Here’s the deal: if you draft me I’ll either be the best goddamn soldier you ever saw or I’ll lose my mind and the army will pay for my institutionalization for the rest of my life.”
I’m looking straight at him and trying not to breathe too heavily or rapidly. He couldn’t lean any farther back in his chair without falling over. He’s looking at me, holding his pencil with his right hand and he’s biting on it.
“Okay,” he says. “Fair enough.” The chair comes forward and the interview is over.
So. I’ll learn the fate of David’s Quest for a 1-Y Deferment—“qualified for military service only in time of war or national emergency”—in a couple of weeks. Maybe I’ll get the 4-F—“not qualified for military service”—if you’re nuts, have only one leg, or are homosexual.
The next day I drive to Meadville and Bill and Betsy and Thom and I pack up the ’62 Ford Falcon and we drive north.
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.