THE CRAZY ONE IN THE CAR--episode 13
Going to college 1964-1968
Freshman Year — Spring Quarter 1965
Mr. Alton casts me in the play he’s directing and when I tell him that with track practice I won’t be able to do it after all, he says he’ll work around my schedule. So I’m in a Bernard Shaw one-act. One more way to pack my life so I won’t have time to think. And yesterday, instead of going to Jerry’s room, I worked on a story I wrote in high school that I can enter now in the Sarah Homer essay contest. It’s called Friends. The narrator thinks his friend likes him more than he should so he kills him.
*****
In two weeks we have a track meet at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland.
“I’ll be staying home that weekend,” Jerry says on the walk from Robertson Field. “Gramma says I should ask you to join me.” He looks at me and he smiles almost in slow motion.
“I hope Gramma isn’t too disappointed when you tell her that I won’t be able to.”
We’re outside the theater at Arter Hall. He looks ahead toward Baldwin. “She’ll want to know why.”
“Rehearsal. Passion, Poison, Petrification.”
“She’ll be sorry to miss you.”
I want to touch him, at least put my hand on his shoulder. But I don’t.
“And I have rehearsal right now. So….” I take an envelope from my notebook and hand it to him. Inside is an ink sketch I made of The Campus photo of him clearing the vaulting bar. “Happy birthday.”
*****
Joan Calder is in the infirmary and it isn’t physical. Charlie Hareston says she’s dropping out of school. He says Dr. Whorting, the head counselor or psychiatrist or something, thinks it has to do with her childhood and that whatever it is finally caught up with her. Whatever that means.
At the Winslow Health Center the nurse tells me I may not see Joan. “If you’d like, you may leave her a note.”
Joan, They won’t let me see you. I’m sorry you’re feeling bad, but everybody is hoping you’ll get better soon. Should I write Love, David? I decide on just David. Should I add Downs? I decide on just David.
Tonight in the library, Joan’s sorority sister Jen Wilson tells me that Joan is leaving school tomorrow.
“She’s been incoherent and pretty disturbed.”
“I guess I haven’t seen her for a while.”
Why am I feeling guilty? What am I feeling guilty about?
“She would ask her friends to come in and talk with her and then she’d scream and throw us out, accuse us of prying. She threw her pledge pin at Anne Dourbox and then immediately wanted it back. She’d cry and not let anyone into her room.”
“Jesus.”
“She said she loves Charlie Hareston.”
Ah. Phew. The firing squad just lowered their rifles.
“She’d babble incoherently.”
April 14, 1965
Yesterday, after days of isolation and refusing to see even her roommate, Joan went home. Doctor Whorting says it has something to do with her maturing process and it would have happened regardless. I guess he knows.
*****
At Case, I place second in both the high hurdles and the intermediates. In the highs, Coach timed me at :15.9 and the winner, Bob Davis of Case, was clocked at :16.0, but he dipped his chest over the line first, so he won. In the intermediates, I looked to see where Davis was on the last hurdle and he flew past me. And last week I hit seven of the ten hurdles and fell on the last one. Not sure what’s going on.
Jerry’s mom comes to the meet and in my sweats I join her at the hurricane fence near the pole vault. She smiles and lines radiate from the outside corners of her eyes.
“Jerry tells us you don’t want to stay the weekend.”
“I’m in a play, I have rehearsal.”
She looks to the vault area. Jerry’s up. “Well, everyone is sorry, we’ll miss you.”
He comes down the runway and plants the pole and lifts himself and clears the bar.
“You’re bringing him good luck today,” I say. “He’s upped his game.”
“He’s quiet,” she says, “but he’s competitive.” She’s watching him. “He likes you.”
I don’t stop myself from saying, “Sometimes I wish I didn’t like him as much as I do.” It feels dangerous but I don’t care. “I like him more than he likes me.”
She leans in to make me look at her. “You don’t know him very well,” she says. “He raves about you. He used to rave about Ed Bond and Dan Corse, too, but now it’s just you.”
“He’s so quiet and I like to talk and sometimes I feel as if—”
“He became quiet in high school. He got careful about who he allowed himself to be friends with.” She’s watching him. “He likes you.”
We watch in silence.
*****
It’s Sunday and Mrs. Chortley, the house cook, has the day off so dinner is catch-as-catch-can. Somebody at the stove—tonight it’s Bear—throws steaks in a pan and somebody at the counter—tonight it’s me—dishes up salads and waits tables. The dining room is raucous and loud and from the living room stereo comes the Righteous Brothers: You’ve lost that lovin’ feeling now it’s gone, gone, gone.
“Hey, Pledge, put extra creamy on mine.”
It’s Jerry. He’s back. And he’s dipped his head into the service window between the kitchen and the dining room. He’s smiling so hard he’s almost laughing.
I can’t restrain myself. “For you there’s always extra cream.”
He giggles and somebody calls out, “Hey, the Rag’s getting the special sauce,” and a chorus of hoots fills the dining room. They’ve started calling him Rag.
I take a steak and a salad to him in the dining room. Can he tell how glad I am to see him? “Let’s get a bridge game going, or maybe we could go downtown or something,” and he goes dark. “What?”
He pokes at the salad. “I kinda told May I’d buzz her at six-thirty.”
Ah, yes. May Arlee. He’s been going out with her.
“Well, hell yeah, the woman waits. Okay, gotta get back in the kitchen and make more salads.”
The next morning in my room after English lit, the radio is on and it’s loud and I’m singing along with Herman’s Hermits:
Mrs. Brown you’ve got a lovely daughter,
Girls as sharp as her are something rare.
But it’s sad, she doesn’t love me now,
She’s made it clear enough, it ain’t no good to pine.
He comes to the door—I’m trying not to keep score of how often that happens—and he hesitates in the doorway.
I say, “Did I win the lottery?” and continue singing:
She wants to return those things I bought her,
Tell her she can keep them just the same.
He scowls.“I’m going downtown and I wanted to know if you want to come with.”
Things have changed, she doesn’t love me now,
She’s made it clear enough, it ain’t no good to pine.
“Let me see, is there anything that could keep me from coming with you?”
I have biology lab this afternoon.
I sing loud:
Walking about now even in a crowd, well,
You’ll pick her out, makes a bloke feel so proud.
His shoulders sag and he’s about to turn away and I say, “So yes yes, let’s go downtown and to hell with biology lab and Herman and his hermits singing my favorite song in the whole world.”
He smiles. “Then I’ll give you a present from Mama.” And he hands me a chocolate cupcake. “And there’s five more in my room with your name on them.”
We go down Main Street past the Pizza Villa.
“I never got a chance to thank you for the birthday drawing,” he says.
I can’t help it: “Can I pick the way you get to thank me?”
He kicks a stone into the street. “You never know till you ask.”
“And can I pick when?”
He lets me see him start to grin. “Depends on where.”
We pass the Catholic Church.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says, “that I’ve never had a close friend.” I hold my breath. “In high school I was always in the honors classes and I never saw the athletes or the other guys. The kids I was with in every class thought going to each other’s houses and listening to symphonies was a great thing to do. I used to love homeroom because there were all kinds of kids there.”
I know he’s trying to tell me something but I’m afraid to venture in.
“Let’s go in here,” I say. It’s a men’s clothing store. I try on a wide-brimmed straw hat. “You like?”
“You’d look good in anything.” And before I can say it, “And for sure better in nothing.”
*****
My short story Friends wins the Sarah Homer Essay Contest. Did no one enter the essay contest with an essay? Jerry says I should celebrate by double dating with him and May this Saturday. Maybe I’ll ask Jen Wilson.
On the way to our classes today, we see Bronko at the top of the library stairs laughing raucously as his girlfriend Cookie punches his right shoulder.
“They have so much damn fun together,” I say and Jerry says, “I’ll let you know; May and I are doubling with them Saturday.”
And off he goes to his history class as a depth charge explodes in my stomach.
He who loves the more is inferior and must suffer.
Last week as Bear and I walked to campus behind Murray Hall, through a window we saw Jerry alone reading at a desk.
“He lives in a world of his own,” Bear said. “Everybody’s friend, nobody’s friend.”
There is longing in it.
And Envy. Contempt.
And, yes, goddamnit, Bliss.
The Crazy One in the Car is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a 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.