Chapter 2
We went into the book store. It was crowded, since it was the beginning of a term. I fumbled out my list of required texts, while Gordon busied himself among the new paperbacks. He never bought texts, he told me smugly-he took them out of the college library, and if they weren't available in the library when he wanted them, he just forgot about them.
Eighteen minutes later I had parted with seventeen dollars sixty-two, and was the proud owner of a thick stack of tomes dealing with psychology, zoology, and contemporary civilization. The first two items looked dull, but then all my pre-med textbooks did. My parents were figuring I was going to be one hell of a doctor some day, maybe up there in Hudson where I could tend to the locals for the next eighty years. All the time I was home in the summer they never caught on to the fact that four years in New York would louse me up forever so far as living in Hudson was concerned, and besides that I didn't want to be a doctor anyway, I wanted to write plays for TV or somewhere.
"You got all the books you need?" Gordon asked.
I nodded. I was just about out of cash now, until the next check came through from my folks. It was like dangling by the neck from an umbilical cord, but what else could I do?
"Let's go get those beers," I said.
Gordon led the way and, clutching my textbooks, I followed him through the mob and out onto Broadway. We walked down to 214th Street, crossed over, and entered the dank musty darkness of the West Side Bar, student rendezvous and purveyor of what to me is some of the dreariest-tasting tap beer this side of the Mississippi.
It was early; the place never filled up until seven or eight. Right now there were a couple of decrepit drunks at the bar and a few thirsty students at the tables.
"My treat," Gordon said airily. He dumped a quarter and a nickel on the bar, took the two beers, and led the way to a booth in back near the pinball machine.
I deliberately set the tone for the session. "Here's to Carol West," I toasted. "May the project meet with speedy success."
"I'll drink to that!" Gordon exclaimed. He did, and when he put the glass down, it was almost empty. I took a gulp out of mine. The stuff was acrid and tongue-curling. I think the deans pay the barkeeps to serve a special mixture to under-grads, figuring to cure them forever of beer-drinking that way.
We gabbed for a few minutes about our courses and how tough they were. I wanted to get down to more basic matters, but somehow Chuck was in an abnormally academic mood. He chuntered on and on about some crock of a contemporary drama course he was taking, and how he was going to have to read reams and reams of Ibsen and Strindberg and Clickhov and those guys.
"What gripes me is that there's no way of faking it," he moaned. "Damned prof gives a weekly quiz on characters and quotations. You can't bluff that. I almost feel like dropping the thing."
"Why don't you?"
"I need the points. Besides, this Carol West girl is a drama major at Chesley. I need to be an expert on the subject. See?"
I saw. Gordon's technique, taken purely as technique, was something definitely worth making note of.
He tapped my clipboard, which lay on top of my books. Indicating my ill-fated Knave essay, he said, "What's this thing? You writing term papers so soon?"
I felt my damned peach-fuzzy cheeks reddening. Good thing it was so dingy in there. "That's just a thing I dashed off for Knave-sort of an essay, like."
"Mind if I read it?"
"Yes. Don Hammer thumbed it down." I realized I was trembling. I took a slug of the poison this bar claimed was beer and bravely said, "It's about sex. Hammer rejected it because he thought it showed I lacked experience."
Gordon was quiet for maybe half a minute, eying me with a sort of squint. Then he grinned and said, "Okay. I won't read it, then. Damned if I'll be a partner to your humiliation by having to agree with him."
I could have kissed him for that. Instead I snagged a passing waiter in a dirty white jacket and ordered a couple more beers. This time I made sure to order bottles. They come sealed up, so there's no chance they'll taste as rotten as the tap beer.
The waiter brought two Schlitzes. I gave him a buck and got two dimes back, which struck me as exorbitant. But I didn't say anything. I quaffed beer until I felt calm and loose, and said, "I think I got a problem."
"We all do. What's yours?"
I drummed nervously on the table. With even this minute quantity of beer in me, I felt ready to let my hair down and bare all to Chuck Gordon. He was only a year older than me, but his cynicism made him seem terribly ancient. At that moment he was-well, Freud might have said a sort of father-surrogate.
A defective neon light buzzed droningly. I said, "I'm looking for a girl."
"There's a whole schoolful of them behind that green fence on Broadway," he said, meaning Chesley. "And four million more roaming around loose in New York."
"I'm looking for a special girl."
"Special how?"
"One who'll sleep with me. That's how special."
Now it was his turn to drum on the table. He looked troubled. I wondered if I'd said too much, maybe. The current collegiate ethos requires, I had found out, the stiff-upper-lip technique of aloofness. John Donne to the contrary, each of us tries to be an island.
"Let me get this straight. You want a girl who'll go down. Is that it? Hell, how horny can you get?" Suddenly his eyes widened. "Burnside, don't tell me that you're a-that you haven't-that you're cherry!"
I nodded miserably. "Uh-huh. Precisely."
"Keerist! A hulk like you, six feet tall, nearly twenty years of age, and you haven't exercised your manhood as much as once! Keeris!"
I wished he would keep his voice down. I began to wish I hadn't come in here in the first place. This confession of my own ineptness shattered what little was left of my poise and inner calm, and I reached desperately for the Schlitz bottle, knocking it over and dumping a torrent of brew on the floor.
I grabbed up the bottle before all its contents had run out. Gordon's dry raspy laughter hit my ears. The waiter came over to mop up. Gordon said to him, "Johnny, you got a spare gal for my friend here?"
I kicked Gordon hard under the table. But the waiter showed very white teeth and said, "I got a couple, but ain't none to spare. Let him go find his own!"
He moved off, chuckling. "Why the hell'd you have to say that?" I asked. "This thing is serious. If I knew you'd make fun I'd-"
"Okay," Gordon said. "So tell me a few things. You got a car?"
"Nope."
"And you're not a fraternity man, either."
"Uh-uh."
He scowled meaningfully at me. Chuck Gordon was good at scowling, with those thin lips and the cynical glint in his eye. "No car, no frat affiliation. Hell, Burnside, you can't go to bed with a girl in the middle of the street. Not even in Macy's window. Did you ever think of that? You need a place-you can't bring women into the dorms."
"Maybe they'll change that. The poll they took-"
"Is so much damned wishful thinking. No, Burnside. You'll have to move out of the dorms if you want sex. Get yourself a room in one of the residence hotels around 214th Street. A man who lives off-campus has a certain bohemian glamor about him. And it's a place to use, Burnside."
"Maybe you're right. But my parents-"
"They don't need to know! Hell, a hotel room will set you back ten dollars a week, and you can save money by cooking for yourself instead of eating out. How much you paying in the dorms?"
"Two ninety-five for the year."
"Hmm. Knock out June, July, August, half each of May and September-figure thirty-six weeks to the academic year. That's three sixty hotel rent. Only sixty-five more than you spend now. You can make up the difference by cooking. Take my advice-get out of the dorms now."
I thought it over. To my innocent mind there was something evil about living in an off-campus hotel. But Gordon had a good point. "Maybe I'll do that," I said. "Yeah. I'll move out."
He smiled. Then, after a pause, he said, "Tell you what else. You free tonight?"
"Why-yeah." , "Good. Meet me around nine and well go down Broadway and pick up a couple of chippies."
I gulped. "You mean-prostitutes?"
"I sure as hell do. Floozies. Tarts. Hookers. Call 'em whatever you want to."
"Will you know where to find them?"
"Have faith, my son. Are you game?" I thought it over. And my legs started to shake. It was all so simple, the way he put it. Just walk down Broadway and pick up some whores. And no complications. I could get rid of my bothersome virginity for a mere five bucks.
I took a long gulp of beer and said with a courage I did not feel, "Okay. I'm game." "See you at nine, then-in the Quad." He stood up. "I gotta get back to the Daily office now. They'll be making up the issue soon and I want to be around."
We emerged from the stale beer atmosphere of the West Side Bar into the equally stale air of Broadway. We stood outside the bar for a couple of minutes while Gordon thought out loud about Daily. He was planning the campaign that would bring him the post of Managing Editor when the newspaper held its elections next April. He was coldblooded-calculatingly ambitious. Not at all like me.
"That paper really means a lot to you," I remarked.
He looked at me. Deep. Quietly he said, "That's another thing for you to learn yet. There's got to be something you can hang onto. For me it's the Metropolitan University Daily. The rest of college is so much jazz-but Daily's real to me. See it, Burnside?"
Slowly, I saw. It was the first time I had ever heard Gordon sound sincere. Something had crept out from behind the slick mask. He was so damned sincere I didn't know what to say.
He broke up the silence suddenly. "Quarter to five. I'd better be in the office. See you at nine. And don't chicken out, hear?"
Then he was gone, scooting across Broadway and narrowly avoiding getting run over by a bilious little green Renault that was steaming northward. He vanished into the gate near Adams Hall. I stood by myself for a minute or two, envying him. I thought that Chuck Gordon held all the aces. He knew all the rules of the game. I fumbled around by guesswork-He fitted in, one of the lucky few. I envied his easy grace and his natural line of patter and his ambition, and most of all I envied his cheerful amorality. My small-town upbringing kept getting in the way. Hell, I wanted to be like Chuck Gordon just then!
I stood out there in the fading sunlight of that September day while dust-motes danced around me. For some reason my home town drifted before my eyes. I got a vivid glimpse of Hudson's main street on an August afternoon, with dirty-faced kids lollygagging around waiting for the movies to open, and openshirted farmers sipping cokes in a drugstore. And while I stood there dreaming nostalgically, along walked a riving ghost of that very place. Fred Lambert, Metropolitan '65. My townsman.
Fred sported a bristly brand-new crewcut, a charcoal gray suit, an inch-wide necktie sprouting from his button-down white shirt, and the gloomiest look I'd seen on anyone since the last time I looked in the mirror. Lambert and I had suffered through high school together in Hudson, and we had come to Metropolitan together. But we saw very little of each other except on chance meetings like this one.
"You look as bleak as I feel," I told him. "You just flunk out or something?"
"Too early in the term for that. But I got troubles."
When Fred Lambert talks of troubles, that means only one thing. "Don't tell me you're in love again?"
"Deeply. Miserably. Woefully." He has a way of being flip even when he's suffering, a trick I've only partially learned. He said, "I'm on my way to the library. Walk over with me and I'll tell you all about it."
This is always happening to me. I find myself standing around doing nothing, and people come along and ask me to walk them here or there so they can tell me their troubles.
There was a frozen little silence. Sudden nastiness made me say, as we moved at a brisk clip up Broadway, "I can remember your first love. Tessie. I remember how astonished you were when she tried to seduce you back or McMan-nery's barn."
"Don't stir up the past, Jeff. Anyway, it was back of Hannebrink's silo."
"And you ran away."
"I was young and tender in those days. But let me tell you about this girl."
I guess I was nasty because I was so tense about the chippie-session Gordon had talked me into. "Sure," I said. "She's six feet three and plays hockey on the Chesley varsity. You're depressed because you want her to quit the team before she has her teeth knocked out, and she refuses, placing hockey paramount before your love-"
"Shut up," Fred said coldly. We turned down 214th toward the library. "Let me talk."
"Okay," I said guiltily.
"This girl's a Chesley girl. Intelligent, lively, good-looking. And stacked." "Frosh?"
"No, she's in our year. A clean, unspoiled girl. No hardened old sinner." Fred sighed. "I think she loves me."
"So what's your problem?"
"I understand some junior is after her. A real slick operator. Jeff, I'd hate to have some fast-talking guy get hold of this girl and-"
I sucked my breath sharply inward. Afternoon shadows were descending and I felt doom closing. "Fred, what's your girl's name?"
"Carol. Carol West. She's a drama major."
"Oh," I said numbly. Why did things always happen this way?"
"You know her?" he asked.
"No. No. I guess I was thinking of someone else." I closed my eyes for a second, only a second, and thought of poor naive romantic Fred contending with slick Chuck Gordon for the favors of Carol West, and I felt heavy with pity. Fred was heading for trouble, and I was getting myself entwined in a complex situation that was bound to end in pain for someone. I felt so sorry for Fred that I almost stopped feeling sorry for myself for a minute.
"You know, you're awful damn quiet all of a sudden," Fred said as we turned past the tennis courts. A couple of shorts-clad Filipinos from one of the graduate schools were socking the ball back and forth with enormous speed and gusto.
"Just thinking," I said. "Brooding over the tragedy of human existence."
"You never used to be like that in Hudson," he said.
"See what a Metropolitan education does for a man? I'm turning into a philosopher in my old age." I decided to give it to him straight. "Fred, Chuck Gordon of Daily introduced me to your darling about quarter to four this afternoon. She was sitting over in the Quad waiting to grab a reserve book."
I started to enter the library, but Fred whirled, caught the sleeve of my jacket, and dragged me down next to him on one of the benches near the entrance. The stone bench was cold. I wished I had been merciful and kept my mouth shut.
"Gordon introduced you to her?"
"Yeah. He was trying to make time with her, but she wasn't having any. When we walked away he was denouncing her for her purity."
I didn't know people could go pale that peculiar gray-faced way. Fred did. He bowed his head in a defeated slump and said in a dead voice, "Chuck Gordon's just the guy I was worrying about. They say he's slept with every girl on the seventh floor of Morton Hall."
Morton is one of the Chesley dormitories. I said, "He didn't seem really serious about Carol. Too much of a challenge for him-I think that's what he said. Yeah. Something like that."
Fred looked squarely at me. "That's a rotten stinking lie, Jeff Burnside. But thanks. Thanks for it anyway." He shook his head woefully. "Now I feel devastated. Now I feel utterly shattered. I knew there was some lousy junior interested in her, but why did it have to be him?"
I socked Fred lightly in the arm, anything to get him out of his shyness and killing sense of inferiority. Tactic 106a, Stout-Fellah-and-All-That. "The hell with Chuck Gordon," I said. "He's got a fast line of patter, but a girl like Carol will see right through him in a flash. She's perceptive. She's intelligent. Hell, I might almost work up an interest in her myself, if-"
Poor Fred nearly turned green. "Jeff! You-"
"-if it weren't for the fact that my dear townsman Fred Lambert had staked out prior claim," I finished neatly, avoiding another catastrophe. "Come on. I'm freezing out here. You want to go into the library or not? ' "Okay."
We moved down the long shiny corridor to the College Study, where dozens of my fellow scholars sat cudgeling their brains even though it was five-thirty now and approaching mealtime. This was the early-season academic push; it would fizzle out soon enough.
By now just a hard core remained in the library. The commuters, the day students, had long since embarked on their subway journeys home. The men in the library almost exclusively bore the trademarks of the resident student; the khaki pants and dirty white buckskin shoes, the blue wool sweaters and button-down white shirts. Commuters tend to dress drably in suits and ties and such. They live drably, too. Not at all like a college man ought to live.
Fred got a couple of thick books from the shelves and we slid behind one of the tables. He opened a volume of Aristotle, but I could see that his mind was very far from the Nicomachean Ethics at that very moment. He was stewing about Carol and the chances of Gordon cutting him out. I couldn't blame him for worrying.
I made a stab at reading my contemporary civilization book, since I had thirty pages to cover before tomorrow's 10 A.M. class. But I wasn't in a studying mood either. I kept looking forward to the experience that was ahead of me tonight. I wondered what it would be like. I wondered if I would goof things up.
I hoped not. A strange exultation filled me. If everything went okay, tonight I was going to become a man.