New Moon (47 page)

I was heir to the dilemma of Jeremiah Beaumont in Robert Penn Warren’s
World Enough and Time,
as he stared at a picture of a young martyr tied to a post. Sometimes he fancied he might seize her from the fire and from the crowds cheering her agony; other times he imagined jumping in and perishing beside her. But there were also moments when he imagined himself among those who bore the torches and revelled in the victim’s agony. I was filled with similar reciprocal emotions—wanting to be one of the guys, hating them for who they were, identifying with elusive female energy, as Bing Crosby crooned the ancient ballad in my mind,
“Each sweet co-ed, like a rainbow trail / Fades in the afterglow …,”
those sweethearts of Sigma Chi.

The next morning James Hall’s sexual successes were scored on bathroom doors. Names of girls were listed in a vertical column alongside deeds alleged, the guys’ initials or insignias. Leo Marx was aghast, as I described this ritual at our next dinner, but he applauded my solitude. Would that it had been so simple! The world around me was receding at light speed with consequences I chose to ignore.

At Christmas, Ray came to transport me to Grossinger’s. There, donning the prestige of my Amherst jacket with its leather sleeves, I went back to the teen disco, the Nightwatch, where I pursued and befriended a girl from New Haven named Mackey who turned every guy’s head. She had a tight, wiry body and seductive eyes, dressed in black silk (“no underclothes,” boasted an older kid who had danced with her), smelled like mint and leather, and turned down my New Year’s Eve offer: “Sorry. I’m gonna go to New York, find me the corner of a bar, and get drunk.”

Back at Amherst I sank into Ethan Frome winter. I no longer knew what I wanted to happen. At times I pined for Betsy; at others it seemed important just to get out of this place, or at least out of James Hall, to become a full-fledged writer somewhere. Coursework had become meaningless beside the turmoil in my soul.

Horace Mann was a melting pot of intellectual passions. Now I longed for its collegium—lunch gabfests with Berman, Ervin’s interludes of tarot and poetry, even Clinton’s obscene zeal. Except for Professor Marx, none of my teachers showed enthusiasm for ideas. They seemed to delight in creating petty quandaries, then solving them (or not) with self-satirical egos—all so witty and clever. My rotating batch of history and humanities profs were preppy and cynical. One of them responded to any astute questions with lines like “I guess I just don’t know that one” and “You’ve stumped me. Next?” We read Sophocles, Herodotus, Nietzsche, Peirce, Aquinas, Hume, cracked their crypts and exposed their flaws. Discussions featured rhetorical hairsplitting, my own wordy contributions either critiqued or dismissed. It felt more like a cult of wise guys than a university with professors.

Even our lab atmosphere was smug and ironical, with members of the football team constantly forwarded as models to demonstrate laws of nature to the rest of us.

Science had once been a viable alternative to writing for me—a possible career—but I didn’t experience the Amherst version as old-fashioned science; it was one-upmanship in which Amherst men tried to outsmart Newton and Galileo, pretended to reinvent the laws of physics and were given grade points solely for style. My physics teacher ignited the homecoming bonfire with a Rube Goldberg-like contraption.

I stopped going to either math or physics, falling irreversibly behind. They had become another obstacle course.

Generalities are specious, the above no exception, but they approximate a tone and milieu. There was a requisite hipness to most discourse (“fine, fine, fine”—pronounced with breezy, detached enthusiasm). The default posture was to be wry and aloof or you were uncool. My classmates were preparing to be doctors proficiently,
playing hockey proficiently, dating proficiently—generic good guys. Amherst even had a self-satirical slogan—“cowboy cool”—set against Harvard’s pretext of highbrow scholarship. Fancy cowboy hats were a favorite campus garb (though one upperclassman went through the day in monk’s robes and sash carrying a giant flag—a lion’s crest—of one of the German duchies).

I had a few buddies—Marx of course, the poet Al, Marshall the guy whose room was trashed, Syed Zaidi, an Iranian upperclassman who introduced me to Hindu philosophy, and Ken Cousins, a sophomore linebacker on the varsity football team and a poet. These folks and I were united in resistance to the monolith, but I was struggling emotionally too, and at a scale Dr. Friend had presaged.

One Saturday I wrote a description of the party developing down the hall; I named the piece “Elmer the Cow” and sent it to the
Amherst Literary Magazine.
My title was a synthesis of “Elmer’s Glue” and Eeyore the donkey, snow piled on his back (in
Winnie the Pooh
) because he had no home—a blend of self-pity and rebellion:

To my amazement, it was published. The day it appeared I found the pages torn out and nailed to my door, obscenities scrawled on them.

In early February a maintenance crew replaced the marked-up bathroom doors with coated Formica. The only one around by chance to view the demolition, I felt a manic glee as the rune-cluttered
relics got hauled off, likely by petition of Leo Marx. I don’t know what spell came over me, but it wasn’t the first time I did something too dumb and death-wish to believe. With a bunch of felt pens I covered the new doors with grade-school pictures: penguins with party hats blowing horns, baby animals.

That evening a committee of about a dozen from down the hall appeared at my door and ordered me out of my room into the john. There they presented me with Ajax and paper towels and ordered me not to leave until “every surface—every single one—is unblemished.”

“Can’t you let the school give us nice new doors,” chided Jynx, “without polluting them with your porn.” The rest laughed.

Chastened by the quick arraignment and antipathetic mob—how did people always know it was me?—I worked assiduously for an hour, scrubbing the drawings fainter and fainter until they finally dwindled into pale spots. As an inspection crew approved my work, I stood there trying to look contrite. Then I skulked away and closed my door. The knob came off in my hand. My mind raced, sorting options until its own tumblers dropped into place: it had been rigged! I was locked in!

I looked hastily about, as I promised myself not to panic. A crowd gathered and began pounding my door and jeering. These were no amateurs; they had hung a bed out a window. Yet I felt strangely detached. The person they were assaulting
was
an asshole; he deserved this. I sat on the bed dazed, fascinated. Their epithets like my mother’s had no meaning; they were like the roar of a distant crowd.

Then a liquid began to flow under the door into the room. Before I had a chance to think what it was—lighter fluid! A curtain of flame shot up. I told myself that this was part of the prank, that I still wasn’t afraid. I opened the window to get rid of the smoke.

At windows elsewhere in James, kids were chanting for me to jump. I felt a wild surge, like my fury at my brother during our brawls, but there was no way to get at them, even to fight and be beaten to a nubbin. I looked for a weapon and found only my hockey stick. Good enough! Leaning out the window as far as I could I swung away, whacking at those taunting me, driving them
back inside, busting windows. The feeling and sound of the glass smashing was gratifying. Then I could hear, as if far away, Al and Sid arguing with guys outside my door. There was shoving and angry words. Finally they crashed in, pulled me out, and led me down the hall to their room. I sat there insensate, in a kind of shock.

The next morning Dean Esty summoned me to his office. He had a one-sided version of the event and didn’t want to hear a rebuttal. He told me that I would be billed for the broken windows and I was now on probation.

Word of the incident spread rapidly. A group from Stearns, the neighboring freshman dorm, came the next evening to express empathy and solidarity. When I recounted my penalties, to a one they said I should fight back: “Those morons do all that shit, and you get blamed.” They told me that lots of other students, upperclassmen too, were on my side. They offered to circulate a petition on my behalf.

I was grateful for the fellowship, but I wanted to be left alone, to have this unearned fame evaporate at once. I was no hero, no martyr; I had no one but myself to blame. I was crazy dumb Richard Towers from the Martha and Bob Towers household, a jerk who finally got his due. I had been wandering in a stupor, playing asinine pranks and daydreaming, almost forever. It wasn’t gallant or romantic; it was bullshit.

The shouts and flames, the broken glass, had woken me at last: my fantasies of Betsy and “Elmer the Cow” jeremiad were self-aggrandizing delusions.

There was
one
consequence of the mayhem I didn’t hear about for twenty-one years, which is how long it took me to return to Horace Mann after the 1962 World Series.

Mr. Clinton was still there. When a student of his I thought of him as an old man. Yet, after two decades, he had turned surprisingly young again and welcomed me with tenderness and observable joy. At lunch we talked about the years gone by.

“Do you remember when you were locked in your room freshman year at Amherst and it was set on fire?” he asked.

“You knew about that?” I said, astonished.

“Knew about it? Dean Wilson from Admissions had the gall to call us up and complain about our recommending you. He said you weren’t the caliber of an Amherst man. I gave him some choice words. His ears were burning.”

Tears formed at the corners of my eyes. They had known? They had been my supporters? Horace Mann, in all its years of silent complicity and rigor? “I was pretty crazy then,” I confessed, “and I brought it on myself, but still, locking me in the room and setting it on fire—”

“Those prep-school sadists. I know the quality of human being. I told Dean Wilson that. I shoved his piety right back up his ass.”

In the spring I applied as a transfer student to both the University of California in Berkeley and Swarthmore. In April I took the bus down to Philadelphia to visit my old first choice. It was barely spring in Massachusetts, but Pennsylvania blossoms were already on the trees, as boys and girls sat studying on the many lawns. Compared to Amherst’s obstacle course, this was nirvana.

The Dean of Admissions was blunt. “Your grades don’t merit a transfer, and you’re on probation. In any case, we consider Amherst a model of what we’d like Swarthmore to become.”

In little more than a semester I had squandered my entire Horace Mann career.

On my way north I stopped in New York. I went to my mother for solace. She sat in her bedroom as I will always remember her—by the window with her reflector held taut against her throat, looking away from me into the sacred sun. She told me that I was missing classes, to go back to school. She never opened her eyes or put down the silver cardboard. She didn’t want to look at me, she said, until I got myself straightened out. She had had enough of my nonsense. My performance was an embarrassment both to her and to Horace Mann.

Math and physics were a lost cause. But otherwise I did the required work and kept up my coursework. I even had the gumption to try out for freshman baseball, which meant carrying out drills in an
indoor diamond called The Cage. I participated in workouts with two other shortstops (the outfield, where I wanted to be, was overcrowded). Fielding grounders and throwing across the greenhouse sod was as grueling and vacuous as ropes and tires. I was good enough to be on the field with them but not to make the team. So one afternoon I ended a career of competitive hardball going back to first grade, for good this time. “You’re quitting!” the coach snapped when I told him I wanted to switch to intramural softball; he insisted on hearing those words before he would sign my release.

“Okay, I’m quitting!”

But games were fun again. I played center, made catches that had people shaking my hand at lunch, and even hit a few home runs. I finally got to come down from a higher league.

That spring Leo Marx took me to lunch at the Lord Jeff Inn with a friend of his from New York: Catherine Carver, a senior editor at Viking Press. He had advised me ahead of time that she was highly respected in her field, having worked with many famous authors, including Saul Bellow and Hannah Arendt. Her willingness to meet me on the basis of the few English papers he had sent her was an honor. A slight, dignified woman with a mannered voice, she skimmed through the high-school novel I now called
Salty and Sandy.
Continuing to peruse it during dessert and coffee, she asked for my carbon to take back to New York. A week later she wrote:

For the remainder of the spring term I nurtured those words. I had no intention of returning to Amherst.

I also wasn’t returning to New York. My father was paying for college, and we both assumed I would live with him and Aunt Bunny, no fanfare or negotiation required. I had escaped my mother’s realm by surviving it. I had molted at last.