Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost Page 7

  The discussion stopped for a second as everyone looked up at me. I nervously smiled, braced for someone to ask what I was doing there, but they showed no surprise or curiosity about my sudden appearance and turned back to their conversation. “Ox,” a girl pleaded to a frail young man in an overcoat, bouncing anxiously from one foot to the other, “they’re everywhere. They’re in the shower.”

  Ox shook his head. “What’s so bad about sharing your shower? Cockroaches wouldn’t exterminate you.”

  I stood listening, ignored by the group. I looked around the room, strewn with discarded garments, plates of food, and people crouched in every corner. As they discussed them, I saw the walls were alive with a dance of cockroaches rhumbaing happily from floor to ceiling. The music thudded out of a little turntable on the counter. A banner heralded BOB WEINER FOR CONGRESS. On the opposite wall, a framed photo of three Apollo astronauts grinned maniacally. I considered edging back out the door, but at that moment conversation hit a lull and I found the nerve to ask, my voice squeaking with anxiety, “Does anyone know if Meg is here?”

  The crowd turned and looked at me with tired amusement. No one spoke until the one they called Ox, short for Daniel Oxenberg, said, “I’m pretty sure she’s in Boston.” Others murmured agreement. I was about to protest when Jon suddenly tumbled down the staircase at the other end of the room. Stumbling forward, he saw me and said, “Rich. You’re here.”

  “Oh. Jon, hi! How’s it going?”

  “Pretty good. Pretty good. How are you doing?”

  “I’m great.” The conversation had reached an impasse and we stood smiling at each other, Jon’s hulking roundish figure bobbing up and down. The rest of the room watched us, nodding and smiling, as though they might very pleasantly doze off at the spectacle our dialogue presented. Finally, I steeled my nerve and blurted out, “I talked on the phone to some girl named Meg and she said it might be all right if I lived here!”

  At this many started out of their stupor and bolted upright; the cockroaches on the walls danced a bit faster. “Oh, really?” Jon said. “Oh, right. Definitely, you should. For sure.” He gave me a knowing look, like we were acting out a prerehearsed script; I wondered what my next line was supposed to be.

  “It’s just—I’m getting kicked out of Dakin.” The room murmured its approval.

  “Oh, wow. Then you have to live here.” Several nodded in assent and my heart did a little skip, while I remained absolutely terrified and confused.

  “But he’s gotta talk to Susie,” someone said. Others agreed. “Let’s bring him up to Susie.”

  “And we all get to interview him!” a girl with dark bangs said fiendishly.

  At once, the room broke the rust free from their joints and rose to their feet. “Let’s take him to Susie!” Jon turned to rummage through the refrigerator as I was herded up the stairs and into a large bedroom that seemed so different from my dorm room, it was as though I had stepped through a portal into another universe.

  If the downstairs air greeted you with the stench of death, one step into this room and an aroma of thick, stagnant sweetness ran you down like an eighteen-wheeler. The room glowed in a deep purplish-red light, hung dense with willowy draperies and furnished with tattered Louis XV armchairs. A half dozen more people, all of whom appeared on the verge of fading from consciousness, slumped on the floor and in chairs as a scratchy Bessie Smith album played on an antique turntable. The effect was like entering a Gilded Age New Orleans brothel that had been ransacked by a very unmotivated band of Huns.

  On a great billowing bed, covered with cloudlike comforters and rags of old blankets, sat Susie. At the sight of her ironed-out blond hair, and confronted by a face full of makeup sufficient to repaint a medium-sized cottage, I was first roiled by an overstimulation of the senses—as in a room that had been decorated within an inch of its life. But on second glance, a slightly maniacal but sweet and comforting smile lit up her face and indeed the entire room, at once putting me at ease and making me want to instantly confide all my cares and woes to her.

  “Susie,” someone said, “this is Richard. He wants to move in here.”

  “Oh, really?” She sat up. The others around the room stirred slightly.

  “Deb threw him out of Dakin.”

  “Oh, my goodness. Well, then, of course you have to live here,” she said.

  “Is there even a room open?” Ox asked.

  “There’s always a room.” I nodded but found this very hard to swallow. As I came upstairs and looked around, there seemed to be at most two bedrooms downstairs and three upstairs, and there were no fewer than twenty people in the house just at that moment.

  “If it’s too crowded,” I stammered, “I can just, um . . .”

  “Don’t be silly! There’s Steve’s room. Nobody’s seen him for two months. Is he even enrolled next semester?” she asked the room.

  “Was he enrolled this semester?” someone else asked.

  Ox’s head started bobbing uncontrollably as he slowly spat out words one at a time, taking a huge pregnant pause between clauses, his eyes lighting up to savor the many secret meanings. “I . . . got a message . . . from Laura . . . who said she hung out with him . . . in Florida.”

  “What’s he doing in Florida?” someone asked.

  “And she said,” Ox continued, “he was talking . . . about coming back . . . for Ken’s Hermeneutics.”

  “When’s that?” Susie asked. No one seemed to know. “Well, I don’t think Steve’s been enrolled for at least two years. It’s fine, you can have his room.”

  “But he needs to interview!” The crowd had gathered around the bed and pushed in.

  “That’s right,” Susie said. “We need to interview you. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Not at all.” I shook my head, panicking in mortal terror.

  “Good.” She patted the bed beside her, motioning for me to sit down. “Who has questions?”

  People stared at me, or glared at me, in contempt and boredom, I thought. “Do you have a name for your penis?” asked a heavyset girl, standing in the doorway wearing clunky black boots.

  “Oh, be quiet, Jeanie. Can’t you see he’s still just a baby?”

  “Yeah, right,” she spat, seeming indignant with the whole thing. “Okay, then, tell us the names of all the girls you’ve screwed since you got here, cowboy.”

  I looked for Susie to intercede, but she stared at me benevo lently, waiting for my answer.

  “Ummmm . . . I’ve really been focused on my work this semester.”

  Everyone stared aghast, and then in unison broke out laughing. “You’re a virgin!” someone shouted. “That’s perfect.” I turned dark crimson. Jon reminded me, “Don’t worry. Supreme Dicks are celibate.”

  “You are really?” I asked.

  Ox said, “Yeah, that’s very important. And vegetarian.”

  In one corner, an emaciated man with stringy black hair, named Brian, was cutting up lines of cocaine on a full-length mirror that lay on the floor. He looked at me. “I’m sorry,” he said in a tone of great courteousness. “Do you want a line?” I nodded and scampered across the room. Grabbing a rolled-up five-dollar bill and ignoring the fact that flecks of blood dotted the rim, I leaned down and, trying not to be greedy, sucked up the smallest line on the mirror. I bolted upright and felt the shot of blood leap through my brain.

  “Put some on your gums.” Brian showed me how. In seconds I felt excited to continue the interview. And suddenly the idea of moving in here seemed overwhelmingly great. “I really want to live here!” I yelled to Susie.

  In the hours that followed, a cast of thirty or so drifted in and out, taking turns asking me questions. It was never clear who actually lived in the house and who had a vote as the questions flew from every corner. I was asked about why I was being thrown out of the dorm; there were many questions about Lonnie, whom they all seemed to know. Several, rather than asking questions, directed long speeches at me, warning me that if I moved
in, the whole campus would hate me. “There’s no going back,” Ox said. Friar Tom appeared and gave a soliloquy about how the Supreme Dicks were about love, which was violently booed down by the room.

  Sa’ad, a twenty-year-old black man sporting dreadlocks and a blazer with little mod pins and an English accent that came and went, sat down on the bed and asked me what sort of music I listened to.

  “Ummm . . .” I stalled, struggling for an impressive answer. “Bowie . . . Velvet Underground . . .”

  “Of course.” Sa’ad nodded. “But have you listened to anything lately?”

  “I like Hüsker Dü?” I said, more as a question than a statement.

  Sa’ad chortled. “You really listen to them? Don’t you find them completely derivative?”

  I nodded, carefully. “Yeah, sometimes . . . but not maybe their last album . . . ,” I said, wondering what derivative meant. “What do you listen to?”

  Sa’ad fixed a braid in his hair. “There’s some Joy Division I can stand. I used to like the Swans, but I’m getting bored with them. Psychic TV are geniuses, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  I nodded solemnly, praying I wouldn’t be asked to name one of their albums. Sa’ad fell silent a moment and looked me deep in the eyes. “So how long have you known that you’re gay?” he asked.

  “I, um, well . . .” I looked around the room for support, but the others stared blankly at me, waiting for an answer. “I’m not sure. . . .”

  “Oh, stop it,” Susie mercifully interrupted. “Sa’ad thinks everyone is gay.”

  “Are you saying he’s not!?”

  “Of course he’s not. He’s just a nerd! Look, he’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt under his sweater.” I didn’t know if this defense was helping my cause, but I kept silent. The discussion soon drifted back to the house’s celibacy strictures. “It’s Reichian,” Ox explained to me. “It’s important for your orgone energy.”

  Susie disputed this, saying, “Celibacy is just the line they use to get laid. You guys know that sex is the best thing in the world for your orgone.”

  “Susie!” Ox looked genuinely shocked. “I can’t believe you’re saying that. I know my celibacy is very serious.” As the night wore on, everyone seemed to forget about my interview. Once the coke ran out, the crowd thinned as people trailed away or just fell asleep where they sat. The clock on Susie’s nightstand read six A.M., and I was having a very hard time keeping my eyes open as the celibacy debate continued. I sensed that asking if the interview was over or if I had been accepted would be tactless, so I sat quietly and tried to follow the conversation about campus figures I had never met and books I’d never read.

  I jerked upright and realized I had fallen asleep leaning against the wall. The clock read ten A.M. The room was quiet, with several people dozing. On the other end of the giant bed, Susie sat up writing in a crepe-bound journal. She noticed me shudder awake. “Hi.” She smiled. I smiled back. The face that had seemed so jarring twelve hours before now looked like the warmest, most caring on earth.

  “Ummm . . .” I struggled for words. “Is the interview over?”

  “Congratulations. You can have Steve’s room.”

  “But, uh, what if he comes back?”

  “Then you’ll have to fight him for it.” She smiled benevo lently, but with no sign that she was joking. She told me I could move in immediately. I struggled to my feet, realizing I hadn’t eaten since lunch the previous day. My skull felt on the verge of implosion, and when I swallowed, my mouth seemed to be filled with vast quantities of rotting-vegetable-flavored quicksand.

  “It was nice to meet you,” I said.

  “It was really good you found us. You belong here.” Susie turned back to her diary. I beamed at her as I struggled my way down the stairs.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Cold Turkey

  On Thanksgiving I returned to Los Angeles for the first time and my family gathered to celebrate the holiday with the family of one of my high school best friends, also named Richard. In high school, Richard was perhaps the most noted figure of our generation. Typically dressed in overalls, white-collared shirt, and bow tie, he was given to flamboyant spectacles such as the day when he stormed the roof of the administration building in pirate costume and threw tortillas (“food for the masses”) to the campus below, setting off a day-long riot.

  After a semester at NYU, however, his semicrazed, mischievous swagger seemed shaken. His head was shaved and he muttered the phrase “The city, man. It’s real,” over and over. He said he had been arrested by the NYPD for chalking drawings of Ubu Roi on the subway walls and had spent a night in jail. I wondered how both of us had graduated from high school under the illusion that graffiti was a socially and legally acceptable form of expression.

  Richard’s first roommate had been a basketball player who, one night with his friends, brought a semicomatose girl to their room and dropped her on the bed. They were in the middle of discussing which of their group should assault her first when Richard leapt from his own bed and attacked them with his lacrosse stick. The girl momentarily came to her senses and raced for safety, leaving Richard alone with a group of unsatisfied, drunk basketball players, who stopped just short of inflicting upon Richard the assault they had intended for the girl. A week later, the roommate was expelled for attacking a campus security guard. His replacement was a student from Taiwan who Richard nicknamed Homeboy and who spoke no English—at least none directly to Richard. On a couple of occasions, however, Richard had walked into the room and was sure he’d heard him speaking perfect anglais on the phone, which he abruptly dropped when Richard entered.

  “The city, it’s just real,” he repeated again as we drove away after dinner toward Ricki’s house. If we had gone to a normal high school, Ricki would have been our queen. Perched atop a clique of the wealthiest, prettiest L.A. teens, in a just world Ricki wouldn’t have even known our names. But in our world, every year after Thanksgiving dinner, she heard a knock on the door and found Richard and me standing on her front stoop waiting for her mother to invite us in.

  Keeping up the tradition seemed to put Richard in a better mood, carrying him back to his old mind-set.

  “Oh. My. God,” Ricki exclaimed when she saw us. “You are so not here. This is college now.”

  “Now, be nice, Ricki,” her mother tutted. “That’s so sweet of you boys to stop by and say hello. Would you like some pumpkin pie?” We pushed past a slack-jawed Ricki to take our places in the living room. Over pie, we talked about our first months at college and Richard recounted tales of Homeboy, who had taken to feeding the mice that infested their dorm, leaving bits of food around on the floor. Ricki had gone to college in Colorado and was mildly impressed with the fact that the students there were “less judgmental” than people had been in L.A., and she claimed the film program to be decent.

  I tried to explain what I’d been doing at Hampshire, tried to tell them about my new housemates at Dick House/Mod 21, where I’d moved just before leaving, but I couldn’t get out much more than “They’re really interesting people. Like really focused on, like, the arts and stuff.” When I threw out the question “Do you have to, like, go to classes at your schools?” their giggles reinforced my idea that the facts of Hampshire life were better left unspoken here.

  In the days before Thanksgiving I had carried my belongings across campus an armload at a time into Mod 21. After avoiding J-3 for days, I moved under the cover of night, hoping to avoid confrontation with Lonnie and the hallmates. Ox and Friar Tom had offered to come and help. At two A.M. we crept onto J-3. “I can’t believe you live here,” Ox said, looking in awe at the Dakin stairway. “I haven’t been to Dakin in years.”

  “Has it changed?”

  Ox peered through the dim hall light onto J-3. He glanced at Lonnie’s many warning signs posted at the entrance to the hall.

  “I guess there wasn’t any such thing as a quiet hall back t
hen.”

  “I think this hall’s sorta a special place.”

  “Oh, my God.” Ox’s head bobbed up and down and he hopped from toe to toe, as though a surge of excitement was struggling to break through the fossilized layers of apathy he had blanketed himself in. “J-three. That’s where . . . Adrian lived.”

  “Who was Adrian?”

  Ox’s nodding grew more frantic. “Adrian, oh, really. Yeah, Adrian . . . She was a New Wave monster.”

  Friar Tom ducked into the lounge, discovered a tub of hummus in the refrigerator, and brought it back, along with a long wooden spoon. “Be careful, Rich,” he warned. “Don’t let him start having flashbacks to his hippie days or we might lose him.”

  “Her father was the Grateful Dead’s road manager.” He stared wistfully at the door to J-307. “Of course, this was all before I was celibate.”

  On cue, Lonnie emerged from his room, indignant in fluffy robe, hair tied back with a scrunchy. “What is—hello, Tom. . . .”

  “Lonnie! Well well well well well.”

  They stood in silence, looking at each other. “I think they were friends when they were first-years,” Ox whispered. They stared each other down like gunmen preparing to draw.

  Friar Tom drew first. “So do you still do the joogie dance before you go to sleep?”

  Lonnie turned dark red. “Tom, you need to leave my hall. Richard, what do you know about these people? What are they doing here?”

  “I’m moving in with them.”

  I won’t swear that steam actually poured out of Lonnie’s ears and that his eyes leapt from his head, but within moments it felt as though the hall had been enveloped in a cloud of smoke.

  “How—how did this happen?”

  “Just one of those things, I guess.”

  Lonnie exhaled, dropped his head, and looked defeated. “Do you realize who these people are? Have they told you the things they’ve done?”

  Friar Tom grinned broadly and raised his eyebrows. Ox was still studying Adrian’s old door. “At the Limelight, there was a table named after her. . . .”