I know the sun’s not up yet, and I’m winning money at poker even if I’m drunk as a giraffe. Tee Willie has slipped out. It must be very late because all the lights in the dormitory across the way are off. I raise the window and with one of those orange highway cones that make perfect megaphones, I begin shouting at the darkened windows. “Wake up you dope-smoking sheep diddlers!” I call to them. “Rise and shine you hairy-legged fairy queens!”
Mountain grabs the megaphone: “Eat Jesus!” he cries. “Not war!”
Karlo and the Tooley boys are in stitches. The other Andy, the doe-eyed freshman, suggests meekly that maybe it’s too late for this. Mountain and I are still under the impression that we’re being hilarious, which is one of the many downsides of alcohol.
Mountain bellows in his great baritone: “Is that tapioca in your beards, men, or are you just glad I came!”
As we continue to shout clever insults the lights in the windows across the way flicker on, angry faces appear below raised blinds, and a Living Group Advisor, fists balled, is marching in his slippers across the lawn. It’s Clyde. I recognize Clyde. I pissed him off two weeks ago. I don’t like Clyde much. He’s an undeveloped suburbanite like me, except he gets a free room and oodles of arbitrary power simply for sucking up to the authorities. I step out into the hall to meet him. When he sees it’s me, he begins to swear, “Goddamn it. You again, Donahoe?”
Mountain swings out of the room behind me. “Put ’em up, Burt,” he says, curling his fists in a nineteenth-century bareknuckle pose. “I’ll pulverize ya.”
“I’ll expel you, Moses,” Clyde bellows. “Donahoe, you might as well start packing your bags now.”
By now most of the students on my wing are awake, peering blearily out their doors.
In the morning, I’m brought with Mountain, the Tooley brothers, and Karlo before a tribunal called the Citizens Action Review Board, a sort of kangaroo court composed of four LGAs, including Clyde, and led by Deirdre, a hefty nymphomaniac with one contiguous eyebrow, who doesn’t like me because I’m always after her girls, even if I never have much success with them. I would’ve tried Deirdre but I hate waiting in lines. “What do you have to say for yourselves?” she says, wriggling snootily in the fumes of her short-lived reign of importance.
“We’re sorry,” says Andy, who always does the talking. Both the redheads are bowed.
“It won’t happen again,” adds Karlo, who is only months away from graduation and cannot risk antagonizing the academy.
Mountain is extravagantly silent and giving off his usual aura of danger and private amusement.
Deirdre, apparently satisfied with the kowtowing of my comrades, and not yet willing to undertake the task of grilling the likable right tackle of our illustrious football team, now turns to me. “What do you have to say for yourself, Edgar Donahoe?”
I’m not in the mood to give in to this self-important panel of ass-smoochers with their knickers in a knot. Students are all they are, my own people. I’m not normally the rebellious type. Maybe the truth is that I can see I have no future in psychology or law and I am looking for a dramatic way out. Maybe I’m still drunk.
But I say calmly, “Expel me if you like.”
“What?”
Mountain chuckles softly.
“Without truth and beauty, civilization dies,” I say, lifting my head.
“What does that have to do with being drunk at three in the morning and shouting out the windows?”
“America is dead,” I reply. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“You’ve been warned three times already.”
I shrug. “Give me the hemlock.”
“You won’t apologize?”
“No,” I say. “Your smug little gang of four sticks in my craw.”
“Very well,” says Deirdre with a dry lift of that firm and expert upper lip. “We’ll convene and inform you tomorrow morning of your status with the university.”
But I don’t give them the pleasure of their convention. The next day at ten a.m. I drop all my classes in a heroic farewell. I feel like Bolivar liberating the Venezuelans. Some professors urge me to stay, but I’ve suddenly seen the light and the error of my ways and the notion of freedom is ringing in my head like a phone call from the gods. Do you really think I’m going to be a lawyer? I’m too old to be living in the dormitories anyway.
Mountain sticks his big-eared head in my door as I zip up my only suitcase. “What are you gonna do, Johnny?” he says.
I turn about. All night I didn’t sleep, my mind teeming. “I’m leaving the continent,” I tell him.
“Where you going? The island?”
“If I can.”
Mountain, cool-eyed, nods. “How are you going to get there?”
“Hitchhike.”
“I’ll come with you,” he says.
“Let’s go,” I say, my heart swelling.
“I can’t, man,” he groans. “My dad’s paying for everything. I’m a year away from graduating.”
“Well, wish me luck then.”
“Come on down to my room, man.”
“I’ve got to be going. I’m no longer a student here.”
“I just want to play you a song. I’ll give you a ride down to the highway.”
Mountain’s room is furnished in milk crates, cinder blocks, and probably seven hundred record albums. “Well, Deadwood,” he says, extending a hand. “Don’t know if I’ll ever see you again, but it’s been a barn burner.”
“Yes, it has,” I reply, shaking his hand, my stomach falling.
He turns his face away suddenly and clears his throat. “What do you want to hear for your last song at Ho-Hum State?”
I believe he thinks I will choose something rousing and defiant, Ramones or AC / DC, but instead I pick a sad song, “Time Waits for No One,” by the Stones. “Do you remember when they sang ‘Time Is on My Side’?” I ask him. “Well, it didn’t last long, did it?”
“Do you really believe America is dead?” he asks.
“Are you kidding? Have you seen the social pathology index lately? The Goths are standing at the gate, man.”
He shrugs. “Still seems like it wouldn’t hurt to get your degree.”
“You’ll regret not coming with me,” I say, snapping my finger at the air. “Because it’s all coming down, Johnny. You’ll see.”
He drops his head. “I’ll drive you down to
