THE CRAZY ONE IN THE CAR--episode 14
Going to college 1964-1968
Freshman Year — Spring Quarter 1965
It’s the Crowbar Party at Bousson and since only senior men can have cars on campus, for the rest of us the fraternity has chartered a bus. It teems with talk and laughter. I’m with sophomore Cathy Persons, whom I met at the Theta tea last month. She asked me to be the narrator for the Orchesis show and I agreed and I asked her to our Crowbar Party and she agreed.
It’s a clear cool night. There are stars and people are walking the grounds and sitting at picnic benches; in the cabin it’s hot and crowded and the band plays loud and every body synchronizes to the throbbing beat. Cathy dances beautifully, she talks a lot, she laughs, and I’m having a great night.
I do not succeed at not watching Jerry and May and I catch him looking across the room at Cathy and me. When they go outside and do not return, I try not to think about them and Cathy and I dance every dance without a break like possessed Grimm Brothers characters.
Jerry and May reappear two hours later to catch the bus back to campus. Cathy and I sit three rows behind them and I watch them as Cathy and I talk. Jerry turns around every few minutes and when he does I make sure I’m saying something to Cathy.
The bus drops everyone at Brooks Circle. I walk with Cathy into Brooks Hall and Jerry and May take the path to South Hall. From Brooks I take the walk past the observatory that leads to the Crow house. Jerry’s on it ahead of me. Shall I walk slowly and avoid him?
“Jerry Caro Mio.” No, I can’t.
He turns and fairly beams when he sees me. “Hey.”
I snap into a bright, shallow, arch tone. “I could swear you went to the Crowbar Party tonight.”
“You’d swear correctly.”
“And yet I don’t remember talking with you and your date at fucking all.”
“Well,” he gets a sly savvy look, “my date and I decided to go for a walk around the lake.”
“For over two hours.”
“We must have had a lot to talk about.”
I have to be my sincere friend self and I do it convincingly. “We missed you, but we surely understood. I hope it was a good talk.”
“Yeah, it was.” He senses that I’m not going to say anything, so he goes on. “I had wondered about her because she just goofed around on the first few dates. I wondered what else there was to her. Glad to discover she can get serious.”
I hear that with a pinch to my heart. Goddammit, why? I should be happy for him. I should be happy for them.
April 25, 1965
I couldn’t stand it if what I feel for Jerry is unnatural. I can’t think of anything uglier. Oh Lord, help me. If this is the warped, distorted thing—-let me die. Please. I can’t stand the thought of being like that.
*****
APRIL I DON’T KNOW WHAT
DAVID DOWNS,
I’M SO DAMN MAD AT YOU. I HOPE YOU’RE AT SCHOOL WHEN I GET BACK OR I’LL COME LOOKING FOR YOU. YOU’RE THE ONE WHO SENT ME HERE AND I WANT YOU TO KNOW IT. TO HELL WITH YOU.
Love, Joan
“Phone for Downs. It’s female!”
“Hi. It’s Joan.”
“Joan! How are you? Where are you?”
“I’m happy and I’m coming to school this weekend and I want to make sure to see you.”
“Yes!”
“Saturday? Noon?”
“I’ll be in my room. Call up from outside.”
“My father’s with me. I can’t talk. I’ll see you then.”
Saturday at noon Joan calls from the street and from the window I see her standing with her father. He looks like a banker. I wave and she waves back. I go outside and she introduces me to him and then she says, “Well, what do you want to do?” and he says, “I want to go downtown right now.”
To me she says, “Do you want to go downtown?”
“With you, Joan,” he says. “We can see him later.”
And so later, I meet them at the gate to Brooks Drive. He waits there as Joan and I walk down Main Street past the chapel and then cross the street and come back up.
“I told him we went to the Crow House and made sassafras tea. He yelled at me and said it was probably drugged.”
“Wow.”
“I told him I’d only kissed three boys here. You and Charlie Hareston and Bill Ditte when he pinned me in the Phi Delt passion pit.” A sudden, deep breath. “He yelled at me. He thought I’d lost my virginity.”
I stay silent. He’s a fuck.
“He wanted to know if I was smoking and he said that everyone was just using me.”
“Jesus.”
She says she loves me, she says she’d never kissed anyone the way she kissed me. She says that though she clung to me and though she kissed me, all the while she was trying to prove something to herself. She looks at me and smiles her u-smile. “In the hospital I kept screaming, ‘I’m a homosexual! I’m a homosexual!’”
Across the street her father is waiting. “Joan. Now.”
She looks at me with her hopeless resignation look and she hands me two envelopes.
“These are letters I never sent.”
She crosses the street and they walk down Brooks Drive.
April 29
Dear Dave,
My father is buying me a new car and I’m going to drive around and relax and see all the beautiful things of America. I have loved only two things in the whole world—you and my family. When I go to Europe, I’ll give you my radio so you can hear the beautiful songs that I will listen to.
Love Joan
April
Dear Dave,
This is the last letter you’ll get from me in a long time. I’m coming back to college so I can look you straight in the eyes and forget you. I’m going to take a tranquilizer so I can slap you. I’m going to be a perfectionist in art. The note you sent me was lousy. Do this, please:
Read Love, Sex, and the Teenager.
Go see Doctor Whorting
Get out of Allegheny, it’s too good for you.
I’m so angry at you because you would not fall in love with me, when I was damn well in love with you and you knew it.
GORRY DETAILS
Strapped me in bed for one week
Tons of shots
I have to take tranquilizers now
I’m hell to live with
I have so many bruises
I can swear now
they sent people in to see me, as if I weren’t a patient
I’m in love with you—THAT’S HELL
I look like a kid and guys are ogling me and I’m tired.
NICETIES
I’m going to be an art major and I’m getting a corvair (black with red interior) I’m going to use the $200 I have saved up. I realize what wonderful parents I have. I’m going back to Europe and I’m going to forget you. When you want to remember what I think of you, just hum
JUST YOU WAIT HENRY HIGGINS
GOOD-BYE FOREVER
I HOPE
Joan Calder
P. S. I’m sooooooo tired.
*****
Coming down the back stairs of the house slowly, I’m reading a letter from Carolyn: I notice that you no longer sign your letters ‘Love.’ I will because I still do, and from behind he puts his arms around my waist and rests his chin on my shoulder, turns his mouth to my ear. “Mmm, it’s been a long time.”
I’m not going to faint or collapse on the stairs but I’m glad he keeps talking.
“Are you studying tonight?”
“I am.”
“In your room?”
“Indeed, what’s up?”
“Mind if I study with you?”
Does he know that this is like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?
“I have a long speech prepared to persuade you to study with me, but I know it wouldn’t do any good if you didn’t want to.”
“I’m very easy to persuade,” he says. His arms hold tighter. “By the right person.”
He suggests we go to the dorm and lie in the sun. He brings two beach towels and we spread them on an embankment outside Baldwin. Cut-offs, shirts off.
“I’m not going to have time to date this summer,” he says. “Working out with weights three days a week. Softball once a week. Water skiing and swimming as often as possible.”
“I’ll have a job and Carolyn is going to Europe for most of the summer.”
He’s lying on his back, his eyes closed against the sun. He sings quietly: “Mrs. Downs your son gives me a hard on. Boys as fine as him are something rare.”
Can he hear me shrieking?
“But it’s sad, he doesn’t love me now, He’s made it clear enough, it ain’t no good to pine.”
He lifts his head from the towel. He’s looking at me.“Walking about now, even in a crowd, well, Your pecker out, Makes a bloke feel so proud.”
He giggles and he rolls onto his stomach, wagging his invisible tail.
I make an appointment to see Dr. Whorting.
*****
Is my meeting with Dr. Whorting the first time I’ve been inside Bentley Hall? The hallway is narrow. The floorboards creak. There have been too many coats of off-white paint on the walls and the baseboards and the crown molding. It is old. I go to the end of the hall past administrative offices and up the narrow staircase and back along the second-floor hall to a small waiting room. A few minutes later the door opens and Dr. Whorting invites me in. He has thin sandy blond hair and pale pink skin and pale blue eyes. His lips are thick and they sag the way Alfred Hitchcock’s do. His suit is a bit baggy and it’s that color that isn’t either green or grey and the jacket is open and the brown tie hangs out. He sits at his desk and I sit in the chair on the other side of the desk.
I’m nervous. I’m scared. I have no idea what I’m going to say or how to start or what I’m hoping will happen here. He asks how I’m feeling or how I’ve been or what seems to be happening or something and I tell him that I love Allegheny. That my classes are interesting. That I’m glad I pledged a fraternity. I tell him about my visit to Allegheny last year and how I fell in love with the campus and applied for early decision. And then, I’m not sure how it happens, I’m telling him about Whitney and how poor we were. The company house. No hot water. A coal stove in the kitchen. Outside toilet. Why am I telling him this? And sleeping in the same room with Jane and in the same bed with John and how he hated me and how I had to sleep against the wall to avoid touching him at night so he wouldn’t hit me. I think I’m surprised to hear myself say that in Whitney and in Lawson Heights I never felt that boys liked me, that I was always better friends with the girls and that made the boys like me even less. And I start to cry and I tell him about my father and I say that I think I can never be liked because I can never be known. That I can never be wholly part of a group no matter how much the group thinks I am. Like the fraternity. I can’t bring my whole self to my fraternity. And I’ve never really liked anyone completely because I’ve never felt that I could be liked completely. But lately that’s changed. I find myself liking someone so much that I think it’s becoming a problem and I’m afraid of what it might be leading to.
I’m talking quietly, but I’m crying and my guts hurt.
Dr. Whorting asks his secretary to give me a couple of personality tests. Or attitude tests. Or aptitude. I don’t know, I’m hearing it all through tears and throbbing temples and anguished, choking breaths.
The Crazy One in the Car is a work of fiction. Names, characters, paces, 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.