THE CRAZY ONE IN THE CAR -- episode 35
Going to college 1964-1968
Senior Year - Spring Quarter 1968
“David, I have a proposition for you. An opportunity.”
S. E. T. president Frank Watson stands on the landing of the back hall stairs into the Grill, smiling like a bold, expansive businessman whose gregariousness doesn’t conceal his crafty carnival barker soul. He’s the Sydney Greenstreet of the Grill. I like him because he doesn’t fool me. I don’t trust him and that’s part of liking him.
I’m with Bob Khorvack and Brother Bill Barnes, spending as much time as I can in the Grill with my Grill Rat Student Experimental Theatre friends and distracting myself from wounds I don’t discuss.
I laugh and call up to Watson, “And you no doubt are making great personal sacrifices to do it.”
“Not at all,” he says as he comes down the stairs. “I am going to direct Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for the S. E. T. summer season and I want you to play George.”
Khorvack jumps in his seat as if it were electrified. “And who do I have to beat out to play Martha?”
Watson smiles. “That role has been offered to Miss Lynn Garner.”
“Then I must at least be head of the props running crew,” Khorvack says.
I’m lighting a cigarette. “I can’t afford to live here for the summer.”
“You and Bill can stay at my apartment,” Khorvack says and then he assumes his wicked smile. “I’ll come up with chores you can do around the house.”
Bill says, “I’m in,” and Khorvack laughs. “You’ll never be around. You’ll be at Liz’s place.”
“Liz is playing Honey,” Watson says. And to me, “How about if I also offer you the Old Actor in The Fantasticks?”
I don’t want to go home this summer. I don’t want to be in Latrobe when Carolyn gets married.
“How can I resist?” I say and Khorvack claps his hands and says, “Hurrah!”
Later in the day Khorvack and I go downtown to the Hotel Loyal (“Let’s celebrate”) and we sit at the bar drinking gin and tonics.
“What are you doing in the fall?” he asks.
“Trying to avoid the draft. Not thinking about it.”
“You must go to graduate school.”
I tell him about the possibility of teaching at the Kingswood School.
He hoots. “Haven’t you heard?” He’s feeling triumphant.
“What?”
“Mister James J. Duquesne has been relieved of his position at the Kingswood School.” He takes the time to light a cigarette before he goes on. “It was discovered that Headmaster Duquesne was having an affair with one of the senior girls.” He drags hard on the cigarette and blows a sweeping plume of smoke above us.
I’m surprised at how little the news bothers me. But how can I worry about what I’ll be doing several months from now? I might be dead tomorrow. I might be in the army in the fall. I’m looking at my drink. “Somebody opens a door. Somebody closes a door.”
He laughs, says I’m Voltaire or Kierkegaard or Father Thomas Merton or somebody. And he talks and talks and I watch who comes in and who goes out of the Hotel Loyal bar. I’m glad to be somewhere where the customers aren’t Allegheny College undergraduates.
“You’re cruising.”
I look at him and the moment before his face breaks into his open-mouthed, twinkly-eyed marionette smile, he is humorless, even dangerous.
“Huh?”
He twists on the barstool and adjusts his left arm with his right hand. “Oh, pay no attention to me. I shall just sit here and observe.” He rubs the lime wedge around the rim of the glass.
“Whatever it is you’re observing, I am all ignorance.”
I’m telling myself I don’t know what he means, but I’m also pissed at him for noticing it and pointing it out.
“Try to lift the glass with your left hand.”
His mouth opens in genuine surprise. “David! I can’t.”
“Try.”
“It won’t do it.”
“Try it.” I’m staring at him, leaning in a bit, willing him to do it. “Do it.”
And I watch him realize he has to try.
With his right arm he lifts the left arm from his lap and onto the bar table. His right hand covers the left.
“Put your fingers around the glass.”
“David.”
“Try. Show yourself you can. Show me.”
With his right hand he wraps each finger of his left hand individually around the glass. I can hear him panting.
“Can you feel it?”
“David, this won’t work.”
“Lift it. Try.”
“David.”
“Lift it, goddamnit.”
He groans and his left arm twitches from the shoulder to the fingers and the glass moves. He grunts and the glass quivers and he whimpers and the glass clatters onto the bar and ice cubes and gin and a lime wedge spill across the table.
“Oh no,” he says, “Oh no, I’m so sorry.” And he tries to sop up the mess with his cocktail napkin.
The bartender comes over with a bar rag. “Not a problem,” he says as he wipes the table. He looks at me until I look away.
June 25, 1968
Well, I graduated. June 10, four days after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, Nelson Rockefeller came to speak at the Allegheny College commencement. I ended up with a 2.2 cumulative average for my four long years at ole Alleghe. Senior Week was great except I had to rehearse every afternoon for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And this past weekend Lynn Garner and I and Chip Senders and Liz Merser did it. And it was good. Dr. Shafer said it was the best thing he has seen here since Dr. Jules played Willy Loman. I loved doing it and for the first time I really worked at something. I was good and no one was happier than I was.
I got a 1-A draft classification — “available for military service” — and I’ve appealed it for psychological reasons.
Khorvack asked again where I’m going to graduate school and I said, “Probably Nam.”
Bill and I are staying at Khorvack’s apartment. He’s like a combination of five concerned grandmothers and six solicitous girlfriends. It’s beginning to piss me off. I may kill him.
Jerry’s a camp counsellor in Cleveland and on June 21 he showed up here to see the play. The performance had been cancelled — can’t remember why — so he only stayed till 9:00 p.m. I had to work on the set so I hardly saw him. When I was leaving to go to the C.U. he said, “Well, I guess I’ll never see you again.”
Brother Corman was there so all I said was,“Yeah. Well, good-bye.”
And something inside me went dead.
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 perons, living or dead, is entirely co-incidental.