“I smoke it every day.”
“Uhhhh….That’s what I mean….. I just haven’t had enough time to recover from yesterday’s experience.”
“Federson, as usual, you’re not making any sense.”
With a hint of a grin, the youth reached for a volume from a neat line of textbooks on his pristine desk.
I looked down at my desk and saw several open books piled on top of one another, scattered pieces of paper with illegible writing on them, pens and pencils dispersed among pencil shavings, paper clips, rubber bands, a sock, photographs, and other stuff that looked as if it had been dumped out of a dirty bag. Appropriately, one of the books was open to a chapter entitled The Chaos Theory of Nature, and overlaying it all, like topsoil, was a thick coating of dust. A cobweb dominated the bookshelf that formed the desk’s lower right support.
“Uhhh, when was the last time I worked at this desk?” I said.
“You don’t remember?”
“Well, uhhh, yes, I mean…”
“This morning,” the youth said with the pipe still clenched in his teeth. “You were looking for your class schedule.”
“Did I find it?”
The kid took the pipe out of his mouth, and with a deliberate motion leaned it against the base of his lamp, and turned to his nervous roommate. “Now how in the hell am I supposed to know that? Not only did you lose your class schedule in that mess, you don’t even remember looking for it in the first place. Federson, I want to ace this test, so shut up!”
“OK, but just one more question.”
“What?”
“Have I been acting weird lately?”
“Acting weird lately,” he muttered.
That ended the conversation, and Harry Smykus buried his nose and his pipe in the book. Occasional clouds of smoke puffed up around his desk lamp as he became immersed in calculus. As I remembered, this pipe-smoking child consistently got on the Dean’s List with straight A’s. He read Freud and the Bible as hobbies, and lectured to me about both of them in the coarsest language possible.
I didn’t know what to do next, so I sat at the desk for a few minutes while staring out the window at the beautiful spring afternoon. Soon, a puff of wind ruffled the drapes and brought into the room a whiff of apple pie, and I felt the kind of hungry craving that comes with a youthful body still under construction.
In the 21st century, mirrors were not my friends, but now I hazarded yet another glance at the mirror over the sink. The reflection showed a slender, almost skinny youth who wasn’t terribly bad looking; in fact, he looked pretty damned good, except for that silly mustache. I decided to shave it off.
I took a shower in the plain-tiled bathroom, without any 21st century products like shower gel, body wash or cream rinse—just a bar of Ivory soap and bottle of Head and Shoulders. The circa 1960 nozzle, created in the days before water conservation, sprayed copious amounts of water all over the place I shaved with an old-fashioned safety razor that would cut you if you let it, so I had to be particularly careful.
“Are you going to dinner, ah, Harry?” I asked hesitantly. I was half afraid that this talking specter from my past would dissolve into dust.
“No, man, I already ate.”
I closed the door quietly and made the 30-second walk to the cafeteria, and entered “Mama Lentz”—as we’d called it in the ‘70s—with my student ID, showing me and my silly mustache, which I was still wearing. Apparently I had gotten so preoccupied with avoiding cuts while shaving with the dangerous “safety” razor that I’d forgotten to cut off the mustache. I reached up and touched it as I showed the ID and my fee statement—which proved I was registered that quarter—to the tired-looking girl who was standing at the turnstile and wearing a white uniform dress with the maroon SIU logo above her right breast.
The menu in front of the steamy cafeteria line announced that it was BLT night. This didn’t look good. I had a hazy memory of Lentz food and it wasn’t positive. Furthermore, I was wedged in a line of hairy, blue-jeaned, surly students who didn’t seem to enjoy the Mama Lentz experience either. I looked down at the serving table and saw pieces of soggy toast with X’s of overcooked bacon lying on top of thin slices of yellow-green tomatoes, which in turn rested on top of leaves of wilted lettuce.
The adjacent tray was piled with flaccid French fries, behind which was another girl sporting wisps of blond hair leaking out of her hairnet. She dumped a pile of fries on my plate.
Oh, God.
The line moaned and groaned until it emptied into the dining area. I stood there for a moment, letting my eyes scan the cafeteria, and saw vaguely familiar people wearing outrageous clothing I hadn’t seen for years. One heavily-bearded kid showed the SIU slump while filling a line of five glasses at the machine. He sported the latest student fashion: a US Army fatigue jacket with Air Force wings pinned to the collar, a Marine Corps sergeant’s stripes sewn jaggedly onto the outside of one pant leg, a little green clenched fist stitched on one sleeve, a peace symbol in the belly button region, and a little American flag sewn onto the butt of his tie-dyed jeans.
I noticed something else that isn’t seen any more in American society: Cigarette smoke rose from cheap tin ashtrays on the tables. The smoke combined with the aromas of food cooking, and even the dishwasher odors smelled comforting, in a distant way, and were surprisingly not unpleasant.
I walked to a round blonde wood table and sat down with my usual grimace, but the grimace was wasted because my back didn’t hurt at all. As I was about to take a timid bite out of my sandwich, I became aware of music trailing away from speakers in the ceiling, followed by a tympani roll and a low voice,
“WIDB Carbondale…is…together!”
Then I heard the student disk jockey.
“Ronald Ramjet on together Six, WIDB. Sunny today, high of 80. Cool tonight, low of 50. Right now, 78 degrees. Now, from out of the past, 1970, Mungo Jerry, ‘In the Summer Time’!”
Ramjet had timed his wrap perfectly over the beginning of the song until the vocal began. “In the Summer Time” was my favorite tune for decades, before the song wore grooves into my mind and I could no longer stand to listen to it. But at this moment, “In the Summer Time” sounded…brand new, as if I had never heard it before. My BLT forgotten, I was aware of nothing around me but the music.
Until I spotted Marta dancing to the beat at the salad bar. She swayed as she plucked mushrooms from the huge bowl and dropped them on her plate. Then, her love beads bouncing, she danced toward my table as Mungo Jerry sang about how you can reach right up and touch the sky, in the summer time. She sat down across from me with a lazy smile.
“Groovin’ to the music, Peter?” The scent of saffron incense that clung to her dress made it nice to live once again in 1971…for a moment.
“Oh God, yes! This is….great!” Everyone else in the cafeteria seemed to be grooving, too. Some choreographer had the students eating their food, drinking their coffee, and smoking their cigarettes in time with the music, and a costume designer had made sure that everyone wore huge collars, super-wide lapels, the paisley-ist
