of this. Everyone else seems to too. What’s your major? Pre-law. What is pre-law, anyway? It’s anything you want. You just get your BA in something and then apply to law school. In my case I’ve listed my major officially as psychology. I’m a screwed-up, immature, frightened, hypocritical, underweight kid, and here’s some cheap help. It’s also a breezy major. I’ve got classes like Existential Psychology and The Psychology of Creativity, descriptions too choice for a boy with a golden shovel. But I’m also honestly interested in “how people tick.”
Okay, I’m a little old for the dorms, twenty, but my parents are footing the bill and I’ve been slow out of the gate all my life. I didn’t learn to ride a bicycle till I was ten. I didn’t quit wetting the bed until I was in fourth or fifth grade. And I’m not going to mess up this opportunity. It won’t be like community college, where I took every opportunity to duck Political Science or Art Composition and smoke a doobie in the bushes. If I bear down I should be able to finish my degree in three years, after which I will immediately ensconce myself in some woodsy law enclave with low requirements and more hairy, uncompetitive potheads, and pass the state bar by the time I’m twenty-six. My parents will be able to send Christmas cards with cheerful form letters again. Forthwith I will begin suing corrupt industrial giants. I’ll have some money to spend too and maybe finally I can meet a girl who respects me.
Larry, my dormitory roommate, is a kid from Grass Valley who doesn’t smoke or drink. It’s unfortunate I don’t spend more time with him. What a steady influence he would be on me. Not that I don’t try. It’s just that we have little in common. He turns the insides of my eyelids to cotton. His girlfriend is even more boring. How can people be this dreary, and why is it that they never smoke or drink? They don’t even play cards. So it isn’t long before I’ve discovered the Tooley brothers, Andy and Brian, down the hall. A couple of more relaxed and amiably redheaded D – average students you won’t meet. On their door like a big welcome sign is a red triangular warning—Approach with Caution: Party Zone. Inside these refreshingly depraved chambers, Thin Lizzy, Kiss, and Roxy Music boom on the stereo. Pretty special ed. majors with bloodshot eyes drift in and out. In the middle of the cluttered, swamp-smelling floor, like a chalice in a legend, stands a threefoot acrylic bong, smoke lifting in a luscious, perennial magic curl from the mouthpiece.
The rest of the semester is a fog, and my grades start to slide a bit, but I’ve never had more fun or felt more simpatico with a group of lads, especially the Tooley brothers and Karlo, an industrial arts major with a nose like Cyrano de Bergerac, and the bespectacled Tee Willie Cunningham, a big Who fan who actually plans on getting good grades and going to med school, though how he can sit in a murky room for hours drinking whiskey and beer and listening to loud music and expect to become a medical professional is another of the great conundrums of our age. Give him credit. He is usually the first to leave. He mumbles the word “study,” and stumbles out the door. I’m always the last to leave. Sometimes I’m surprised by the sun. Often I miss those preposterously early classes, but psychology is not an exhaustive science. Even the professors seem resigned to the flexibility of a good line of horseshit. As long as you keep using terms such as cognitive and affect, everyone seems happy. Actually, I’m amazed at how much psychology seems to be helping me. I never knew there were so many screwed-up, anxious, immature people in the world. I am buoyed with the security of knowledge that I am not alone.
What really amazes me, however, is how quickly even a thousand miles from home, wearing no swimming trunks or suntan lotion, I’ve fallen in with the same kind of people as always, pot-smoking, card-playing, music-loving, late-night party hounds. Are they really friends or just props for the lonesome ceremony of self-annihilation? But you know, they say that 80 percent of all males in their teens and early twenties are alcoholics. And I love these guys.
The parties come one after the next like the waves on Waimea Bay. One Saturday night Karlo, Tee Willie, the Tooley Brothers, and I have swallowed some magic mushrooms down in the Tooley room. T-Rex is roaring on the box, Tee Willie is ranting about God, Karlo de Bergerac is endeavoring to titillate a special ed. major—when there’s a knock on the door. Knocks are never good. Usually it means a Living Group Advisor and a sinsemilla shakedown. Brian Tooley answers cautiously, peeking out, then begins waving at me urgently across the room.
“What is it?” I say, hopping down from the windowsill, where I have been contemplating anagrams of the abracadabra.
“It’s Mountain,” he says, his wide eyes crystalline, his lips wandering over his face as if he’s about to spray root beer from his nostrils. “He wants to talk to you.”
I step out into the hall. Many say that Sullivan Moses, or “Mountain” as he is generally known, right tackle for the HSU football team (one of the worst college teams in the country), looks like Sylvester Stallone. This evening, however, poor Mountain resembles someone kicked between the legs. Pale and bent with hands pressed to his thighs, his great bulk heaving, the big man seems to be struggling for air. How much of this attitude is attributable to my own warped perception is difficult to assess. “What’s going on?” I demand, closing the door behind me.
He waves me down to the bathroom.
I didn’t like Mountain when I first met him, straddled backward in his chair, grinning big-eared under his ball cap with a puddle of snuff in his lip. I mistook him for a cocksure and shallow athlete. I learned over the next few weeks that he was the opposite—humble, courteous, wry, and uncomfortable around people. I was also shocked to learn that in addition to being very bright, a math major, a chess player, and an admirer of the classics, he was a practicing Catholic.
“I was with Julie up on third,” he says now, his eyes rolling up in his head. He pauses to press his lips together. “And she uses this contraceptive foam and I think, I think it went up my spout.”
It’s disheartening to see such a heroic figure so easily beguiled, but despite strong guilt signals from the Vatican, usually Mountain is to be found in the company of a woman, enthralled as a dog and oblivious to all other pleasure. These cycles usually last about three weeks, after which he will make a brief appearance at one of our poker games or parties and then find himself a new girl to dote on. I’ve pegged him for a mother complex.
Poor chap. I nod, wishing I had not taken the mushrooms. I don’t know why he’s sought me. He must know that I’ve worked in a few hospitals, that I have a passably good knowledge of anatomy and physiology, but this still shouldn’t qualify me. I’m simultaneously flattered and terrified that he would come to me for help.
“I think you’ll be all right, Mountain,” I say, squatting slightly to try and see up into his rolling blue eyes.
“It’s a spermicide, man,” he whispers gruffly, revealing the large gap between his front teeth. His nose, I note, is of significant proportion, more Roman than French, I would say, and crimpedup near the bridge. “It’s gonna scorch my filberts.”
I picture the sperm-killing foam marching in corrosive ranks into his testicles, blinding the young tadpoles, scalding the delicate tubules, and rendering him permanently neuter. I can’t really deal with this right now.
“But it’s designed for sex,” I say, siding feebly, as a good lawyer would, with the manufacturer. “I’ve never heard of anyone having trouble with a contraceptive foam.”
“Yeah,” he rasps, bending over to cup his knees. “You’re probably right.”
“Look, they have to test this stuff,” I add, my doubt accumulating, even if I did work in five hospitals. “It’ll pass, I’m pretty sure. Just give it time.”
“Okay,” he says, gritting his teeth.
I slap him on his broad back.
