What Friends Are For.

After a couple weeks stumbling in and out of cla.s.srooms, I found three professors still fishing for students who were A willing to let me into a cla.s.s on fascism, a seminar on Emerson and Nietzsche, and "The Media versus the U.S. government." The Emerson cla.s.s was taught by an ancient, storybook tweeded professor, who, without a single nod or feint to the sixties, or the march of pop culture since, might as well have been a knight from King Arthur's court teleported to the campus. He had a habit during cla.s.s of galloping his trains of thought off into distant mists-driving his lectures from Emerson's theories on nature to "that d.a.m.ned fool G.o.dfried whose paper was just wrong wrong wrong. Imagine, bringing in Heidegger! Shameful!"

Near the end of September, I sat alone one night in the distant corner of the back room of the dining hall, puzzling over my first writing a.s.signment-a two-page paper, due the next morning, on Emerson's quote "Faith makes us and not we it." The quote awoke as many thoughts in me as if I were reading a recipe for duck a l'orange in Urdu. Worse was the problem that I still had not bought my books. In fact, I still wasn't sure whether Emerson was a novelist and the professor was just reading this idea stuff into the plot or if Emerson had just jotted these big ideas down w.i.l.l.y-nilly. Philosophy, I understood they called it.

In week three, it was still possible to skip merrily through college without books. No one had made an issue of it; I'd even joined in cla.s.s discussion once. But with a paper due in twelve hours and the bookstore closed, a tiny panic began to curdle my edges. Even to those who had done the reading, the professor's ruminations had been so obscure that some speculated they might have been meant for some other cla.s.s he was teaching-or had taught years before. I played with my bowl of "hunter's stew" and stared at the doodles I'd made during the lecture, hoping one of them would sprout wings and turn into a two-page essay.

And then suddenly someone said, "Do you mind if I sit here?" I spat my c.o.ke out into the hunter's stew. These were not words that typically stood the universe on its head. "Do you mind if I sit here?" was no "Friends, Romans, countrymen" nor "The meek shall inherit the earth," "Death to the tsar," nor "The better angels of our nature." The sentence might not even have held up to "I want my MTV," but this was the first time in three weeks at Hampshire that those words had been spoken to me. By a girl, no less. They descended like a thunderbolt hurled from Mount Olympus.

The young woman who faced me had medium-length brown hair, eager brown eyes, and a suspiciously broad smile that made me suspect that I was the victim of a cruel joke. She wore sweatpants and a lightweight overcoat. Stunned, I nodded nervously, and turned back to my Emerson doodles. A few seconds later, I glanced up and saw she was looking at me while chewing on a soggy slice of the dining hall pizza.

"Is that an art a.s.signment?" she asked, smiling bemusedly.

"Um, no. Sort of. Maybe. This is what I took away from my Emerson lecture today."

"Well, at least you went. That should count for most of it, right?"

"Yes! It should!"

Her name, she said, was Dana; she was from Rye, New York. An aspiring photo student, I soon learned. Dana had come here because her brother had graduated from Hampshire seven years before. The school, she said, was "still kinda decent then."

Dana asked why I chose Hampshire.

"Well, there's that progressive education thing. . . ."

"Oh, yeah, I love that." She smiled, with still scary enthusiasm, at me.

"Yeah. It's great." More smiling. Silence. I shuffled papers on the table.

"Do you have any pot?" she finally asked.

"No. I don't."

"That sucks." She nodded. I nodded back. "We should find some, don't you think?"

I actually didn't think so. Perhaps the biggest handicap I had brought to Hampshire, the thing that made me totally unsuited to survive in this ecosystem, was my aversion to marijuana. I had no prejudice against illegal drugs in general (as I would soon amply prove). But pot and I had had a difficult history. As an angst-obsessed high school student I'd often felt I was in a losing battle for my sanity, and marijuana had not been fighting in my corner. I had endured three very harrowing experiences with the grim reefer, the last of which had me cowering in terror on the floor of a Doom Buggy in the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney-land, and had sworn it off for good. There were also the drug's hippie connotations, which made it anathema to my friends at home-half of whom opted instead for hard alcohol and amphetamines, the other half European film. I searched for a middle ground.

If there was one disclaimer that the Hampshire admissions office in good conscience owed its prospective students, it was that marijuana aversion was not a tenable position. Pot was to Hampshire what basketball was to Notre Dame, calculus to MIT, re sume points to Harvard, and what food or oxygen were to the world at large. In the following years, never would I pa.s.s a day without being asked for or offered marijuana. I would spend countless hours nodding my head through discussions of how to deseed marijuana, the different varieties, how to smuggle marijuana in hollowed-out candles, how to get your DEA file, how to tell if your hallmate or advisor was a secret DEA agent, how to spot DEA listening devices around your room, in your backpack, even, most diabolically, it was whispered, stuck to the bottom of your bong.

All this would come in time, but at that moment all I knew was that there was a girl sitting at my table. Speaking to me. Albeit one with a demented grin plastered on her face suggesting we share an experience that terrified me to the depths of my soul. But she was a real live human who was female, no less, and she seemed to be suggesting that our acquaintance should continue after we left this table.

"That would be great," I said, to which Dana continued smiling.

We had to venture all of two feet outside the dining hall before Dana found a marijuana vendor. I forked over ten dollars for my share-beginning to panic that I would be called upon to consume it-and we headed back to her room.

It was the first Dakin room besides my own that I had been in, and I stopped cold in the doorway to absorb it. This s.p.a.ce was so different from my own cold, still unpacked refrigerator-box of a home that I froze dead-my very understanding of the concept of dorm room shattered. I tried to understand what was so fundamentally different here from my room. First-there was that smell-like laundry detergent and soaps and vanilla. . . . And the sheer orderliness! A poster of a couple kissing on the streets of Paris hung perfectly aligned with the right angle of the walls and ceiling. The bed was made, with red and orange quilts tucked in. A giant teddy bear leaned contently against the pillows-grinning the exact same grin as Dana. The desk was set with a chair and little lamp and books neatly stacked. It seemed more like a museum than a dorm room. Was it possible that Dana, or that any human force, had done this?

And then I noticed another difference. There was so much more s.p.a.ce than in my own room. You could dance in the middle of that floor, between the beds. Between the beds! There were two of them.

"Why do you have two beds?" I asked.

"I don't have two. I have one and Sydney has one."

"Sydney?"

"My roommate."

I shuddered, astounded. "Oh, my G.o.d, they gave you a roommate!" I nearly screamed, so profound was the injustice.

"They didn't give me one. I asked for one. Isn't it weird to live all alone?"

I had to sit down to take that in. Plopping on the roommate's bed, with increasing worry I stole glances at her as she prepared her purple bong. She took a long hit from the smoldering tube, coughed heavily, and tried to pa.s.s it to me.

I opened my mouth to explain the latent disease I had contracted on safari a few years back-nothing awful, certainly not contagious, but just something I had to live with, knowing that if it ever came into contact with inhaled marijuana, my vital organs would turn to stone.

The tale was half out of my mouth when the door flew open. With a whoop and a leap, in bounced a girl with a s.p.u.n.ky brown bob of hair, gigantic brown eyes behind frameless round gla.s.ses, and astonishingly, in this campus of baggy sweatshirts and flowing caftans, a dangerously tight yellow sweater. This was Sydney.

"You are not going to believe what Ace just did," she announced, looking me in the eyes without a hint of surprise at discovering a strange guy in a Hawaiian shirt sitting on her bed.

"Who's Ace?" I started to ask when I saw, sauntering in behind her, the rapper/poet I had met on my first drunken night in the J-2 lounge.

"Bo-oy, it was sick," he said, looking at me, betraying no signs of recognition, interest, or surprise at finding me sitting on his friend's (girlfriend's?) bed. I wasn't sure if he remembered our earlier meeting or perhaps the question of whom he was talking to was of so little importance that it didn't merit an eyebrow raise. Sydney raced around the room, hopping up and down in excitement. I looked at Dana, bong in hand, grinning at me still, but with the merest hint of irony in her eyes.

"What was sick, Ace?" I finally asked.

"My man, you should've beeeen there. You should've witnessed."

Sydney blurted, "Ace took the mike at the coffeehouse and rapped for forty-five minutes straight. There were, like, two hundred people crowded around by the time he was done."

I wanted to ask where the coffeehouse was but instead questioned, "What did you rap about?"

He looked at me and suddenly grew very serious. "The streets, boy." He nodded. "The streets of Baltimore."

Sydney came around and patted him on the back. "Baby, you don't have to go back there now. You're safe here."

He pushed her arm away. "But my brothers ain't."

I stayed listening to Ace and Sydney rap until eleven that night. Sydney, I learned, had been a high school drama student and veteran of many Berkshire summer workshops. She'd starred in several of the musical comedy numbers, which she restaged for us. As much as I wanted to turn away from her Pippin medley, the unrelenting tautness of her sweater kept me an entirely rapt audience, crying for encores after each number.

At no point did Sydney or Ace ask who was this person sitting on her bed. A couple times I started to introduce myself and offer tidbits of my own high school drama days, but was cut off and didn't insist. I spent most of the night trying to figure out Sydney's relationship with Ace-she freely jumped in and out of his lap and fished a lighter out of his jeans front pocket but didn't actually kiss him. Dana, for her part, sank into a happier and deeper cloud of marijuana as the night went on. At one point, however, she seemed to catch me gaping too openly at Sydney's sweater, and scrunched up her face to give me a look I roughly translated as Are you weird or something?

As Ace went into another rhyming tale of near-death in Baltimore, I gave up trying to wait him out and excused myself. Slipping back to my room, I acknowledged to myself that the night had been, by all my known benchmarks, completely horrible, but nonetheless wondered how soon it would be okay to reprise my visit.

I sprawled on my pale-green plastic mattress and wondered again what I might have to say about Emerson and faith. I scribbled, "In saying faith makes us and not we it, Emerson acknowledges that some days you wake up and feel like the world is full of sunshine, but many days you just want to go hide somewhere and even philosophy can't really help you." I reread the line, then tore the page out of my notebook and crumpled it up.

Then all at once, I bolted upright; a divine inspiration lit up in my head like a flame. What if I just don't do this a.s.signment?

I tried it on for size, and found it fit like the tan Members Only jacket I'd abandoned in shame two days into ninth grade. Bathed in a contented glow, I sank into sleep.

The next morning, I woke and briefly looked around for the essay on Emerson and faith, before the night came back to me. The bravest and most honest way to deal with the situation, I decided, would be to stay in bed, listening to the Cure's Head on the Door alb.u.m. I stared out the window at the damp autumn morning, trying on for size various excuses for missing cla.s.s, and for not writing the paper. In high school, if I hadn't shown up for cla.s.s, someone would have called my home. And I wondered now from what quarter the hammer would fall. When I finally stumbled to the bathroom, Lonnie and his girlfriend, Stephanie, were standing at the mirror in their matching orange terry-cloth robes. They each gave me, I thought, extrasuspicious looks, although the high volume of suspicion in their normal looks my way made it hard to judge.

I inched out the door onto campus, looking both ways, for I wasn't sure who might stop me and demand to know why I wasn't in cla.s.s. But as I went for lunch, browsed the library, got my mail, played Galaga, it dawned on me that I was free; no attendance clerk was on my trail. The weight of this sank in and I collapsed on a bench in front of the library, next to a girl sitting at a table signing people up for an "Empowerment Weekend in Burlington." I could skip cla.s.s whenever I wanted. I could omit writing papers at all and no one would demand an explanation. The horizons of my world sprang open. I had been living in eighteen-inch black-and-white and suddenly the universe revealed itself in blazing Technicolor across a CinemaScope screen.

I looked around, wanting to share this with someone. The girl at the Empowerment table squinted a warning my way not to approach. Drake was out of town. Ten minutes later I stood in front of Sydney and Dana's door, knocking intensely. No one answered, but lost in thought, I continued gently tapping, almost as though I were absentmindedly whittling away at it. A hallmate pa.s.sed and I smiled, knocking away at the door and building castles in the sky to fill my new life, a land where I might let days pa.s.s without seeing the inside of a cla.s.sroom. And then the door opened.

"Dana!" I said, before noticing that it wasn't Dana but Sydney standing before me. I'd rehea.r.s.ed this moment a number of times on my walk over, planned how I would announce my return to their room. But in every contingency, it had been Dana who opened the door-Dana with whom I'd share my news and tolerate until her roommate returned for me to ogle. But to my shock and horror, the roommate herself stood before me, in a wrinkled G.o.dspell T-shirt and sweatpants, rubbing sleep from her eyes and looking at me in bemused confusion.

"Sydney! Oh, my G.o.d," I exclaimed. "Are you awake?"

"I am now." She smiled ironically.

"It's Richard. I mean, I'm Richard from last night. I was sitting on your bed."

"Yeah. Hi."

"So is Dana here?"

She shook her head.

"Oh, um. Well, that's weird."

She stared at me and continued smiling ironically. Her eyes looked even huger without her gla.s.ses. I fell quiet and rubbed my hand along the door. Started humming "In Between Days" until I finally blurted out, "You know, we don't have to go to cla.s.s!"

"What do you mean?"

"Cla.s.s, it's, like, optional. Like, if you don't go, nothing happens. Same with turning in papers."

She smiled again. "If I didn't want to go to cla.s.s, why would I have come to college?"

The thought had not occurred to me and I gaped dumbly in response.

"Do you want to come in?" Sydney asked, standing back from the door.

I sat down on Dana's very well made bed. Sydney climbed back in hers and pulled a blanket over herself. She leaned over to her tape deck and clicked on a Sade alb.u.m.

"So you guys had a late night?"

"I can't believe you left. It got crazy." Apparently, after my departure, Ace the poet had called up two of his Baltimore friends from down the road at UMa.s.s, and they had all driven over in Sydney's car and spent the night dancing on the roof of UMa.s.s's eighteen-story dorm (the tallest building in the county). As dawn came, Sydney led them all in a thirty-minute version of "Good Morning Starshine," which drew dozens of other UMa.s.sers to join them on the roof. I nursed mixed feelings: The adventure sounded like the worst nightmare I could imagine, yet I raged that I'd missed a chance to hang out with Sydney until dawn.

I sat on Dana's bed for several hours more as Sydney told me stories of summer stock, touring companies, and her plans for the Hampshire College Theatre, which "has some really, really talented people, but no one who connects with what's happening now, the way performance art has completely changed our concept of the stage."

We talked more through dinner, which we took together in the dining hall, and then up at the coffeehouse, where we sat spinning tales of high school productions. Incredibly, neither Dana nor Ace showed themselves. I held my breath, willing both to stay away. However, my glee was darkened by the thought weighing on my mind, giving me chills-just what was Sydney's relationship with Ace?

The confusion was cleared shortly afterward, however, when Sydney dropped a reference to her fiance, who was coming to visit in a few weeks.

"You're engaged?" I asked, incredulous. I had never met an engaged person.

"Oh, yeah. We've been engaged since I was a soph.o.m.ore in high school. I have a ring but I don't wear it. Devon thinks it would put a wall between me and the other students in drama." Devon, apparently, had been one of the drama coaches in her summer company and was still in the city, doing some off-Broadway and teaching.

My first reaction was a tsunami of relief that she wasn't involved with Ace, followed by a second, and even bigger, tsunami of relief that she wasn't involved with Ace. The notion of Sydney in a wedding was so hard to take in that my mind went into shock against it. But as much jealousy as I might have felt toward Devon, Ace had not touched her, and that was the critical fact here.

Platonic friend that he may have been, Ace's presence was no less overwhelming when he and Dana strolled down the bridge together, waving to us. "What up, boyie!" Ace saluted. I sunk into silence for the rest of the night as our foursome drifted across campus. Sometime after three, I finally abandoned the field and slunk off to bed.

For the next week, our quartet seemed inseparable or, from my perspective, un-pry-apartable. Together we wandered the campus and sprawled on the floor of Dana and Sydney's double, Ace and Sydney mugging, Dana grinning, me ogling and brooding off in a corner. In retrospect, given how little I contributed other than resentment and frustration, it is hard to understand why they allowed, even encouraged, me to hang out with them-other than the most obvious answer, that they were nice people and they were being nice to someone who, for his own inscrutable reasons, seemed to want to hang out. At the time, however, the last question in the world that would have occurred to me was why they wanted me around.

In their company, I saw more of campus, but the thrill of discovering new places was tainted by the embarra.s.sment of arriving as part of Ace's entourage. One night, sitting on the lawn, we watched a parade of nonhippie types-kids dressed in black skirts, spiked hair, and punkish T-shirts trooping off down a path in the woods. I asked where everyone was headed.

"There's a band playing at the Tavern," Ace said. "Some fools from Boston. Thrasher band or something."

"Really?" my eyes lit up. "Should we check it out?"

"Not me, palsy. I've got no time for those burnouts." I looked at him. As far as I could tell, he had nothing but time. I considered getting up and going off on my own, but then Sydney said, "Maybe we should call for pizza," and I stayed.

I repeated the adventure of missing cla.s.s several times more, thrilling to find when I returned that the professors didn't even mention my absences and overdue papers.

In the vacuum of s.p.a.ce, stars can burn for eons with no force to oppose them. So, too, in the dark void of first semester of freshman year, infatuations can grow and consume every ounce of energy their host body can muster. But eventually, if not given true sustenance, the infatuation will burn out and destroy its source, and so it happened. Much as I obsessed over Sydney, the cost of trailing after them, hopelessly searching for some kind of reciprocation, became too much, and my infatuation turned to resentment. Little by little, I pushed away from the fire and back into the void. I stopped coming by their room and avoided the places where I might run into them. Dana came by my room and slid a couple notes under the door, but I ignored them and looked away when I saw her with others at the dining hall.

Eventually I went a week without running into Sydney, by which time I had blended back in with the moldings of the dining hall's forgotten middle room and library study carrels. I had even gone to cla.s.s a few times, although once again, I hadn't quite been able to write a Nietzsche paper. When I finally saw her, it was from across the Bridge Cafe. She was with Dana and a guy I had never seen before, who I guessed was her fiance. She waved to me and gave me a confused what's-up-with-you? shrug. I shot back a petulant sarcastic smile and turned away. I wanted to respond but I had no clue what it was I wanted to say, which made me feel worse. And then I felt bad for avoiding them, Dana especially, which made me long all the more not to have to see them. In the galaxy of relationships there are none sadder than those made in the first days of freshman year when people are randomly thrown together and give each other some comfort, but must ultimately part. For the years to come I would see Dana or Sydney across the room at a party or walking toward me down a path. By the end of first semester, we gave no sign that we had ever known each other, but the pang of regret never completely vanished as I watched them go by.

A week later, a fire alarm awoke Dakin House in the middle of the night. Standing outside in my T-shirt and sweatpants, I was for the first time in my life seriously cold, and I wondered how much worse this was going to get. The temperature, I thought, might be in the forties. Had I ever felt the forties before?

A group of hippies had started a sing-along, and soon the whole dorm joined in bellowing "Joy to the World." I slunk away and sat on a ledge, watching a dance circle form in the middle of the quad. I braced myself. Soon the drumming would begin. Across the way, I saw Sydney and Ace crooning to each other, Dana watching them benignly.

Next to me on the ledge I noticed two also sitting out the festivities. One was tall and lanky with a mop of unruly black hair, in blue jeans and a droopy sweater. The other wore a flannel bathrobe and was shorter than I was, with an impossibly boyish face and round gla.s.ses. They both gazed upon the carnival with heart-warming looks and malice. Then I heard the short one say to the taller one, "Do you think the mall is still open this late?"

As the taller one shook his head I stood and stuck out my hand. "You guys wouldn't by any chance be from L.A.?"

They looked at me in shock, like explorers in a distant land might have if, upon prying open an ancient Mayan pyramid, they looked down into a sacred sarcophagus and found their elementary-school cla.s.s picture inside.

"What are you doing here?" the one in gla.s.ses asked me, as prisoners might ask, "What are you in for?"

"Single rooms, you know . . ."

They nodded. "It had the shortest application," the tall one said.

We all stared at the ground, reflecting for a moment on where our paths had led us.

"Is there anyplace to watch Letterman around here?" I asked.

"I have a TV in my room," the one in gla.s.ses said. My eyes widened and I offered him my hand.

Three weeks later, we loafed in Nathan's room as he made a phone call. "I'm sorry to bother you at this hour. Is Anthony in?" Nathan removed his round wire-framed gla.s.ses, wiped them, and sighed. Even making a prank call he radiated seriousness of purpose, quietly demanding respect. "Yes, it is after midnight, but I thought you'd want to know, your cat is in our tree."

Nathan patiently nodded as a voice whined on the other end, before saying indignantly, "You don't have a cat? Well, we don't have a tree!!!" Nathan held up the phone to pick up the sound of Zach and I laughing hysterically, as we heard the voice on the other end shriek, "f.u.c.k YOU!!!! a.s.sHOLES!!"

"He took that pretty well," Zach said after we hung up.