Cowtown (1967)In high school I got average grades, but I did a couple of things really well. I consistently scored among the top students in the state in tests on English and Literature, I won a National Council of Teachers of English scholarship awarded to two kids in every congressional district, and I had two poems published in a bogus "college anthology." The net of all this was to make me very desirable to colleges, and I was hustled by such well-known postsecondary institutions as Harvard, Princeton, and West Point. But I somehow blew this golden opportunity, failing to get scholarship help from any school, failing even to get accepted into the schools that were hustling me. I think it was the biographical essays they request as part of application. I can't recall what I wrote exactly -- way to go, memory -- but I imagine I was very full of myself, the Rimbaud of Lake Erie. My mom never looked at these materials, so I could have snuck in something extremely self-destructive. I was a year younger than other graduating seniors because I skipped fourth grade -- so I am relying on the immaturity defense. Sounds better than the insufferable asshole defense. I finally got into the last place I wanted to attend -- the College of Wooster, a Scots Presbyterian college in the Amish country of central Ohio. Because its initials were COW, students called the place Cowtown. On an aerial infrared map of the United States, it would have been one of the patches of ultra-uncool blue. So I went there, quickly fell in love with a great girl named Debbie Leach, whose parents were professors at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio to the south. Debbie was beautiful and wise and she liked my jokes and was a modern dancer and even choreographed a pretty disturbing coffeehouse act to the song "Venus in Furs" by the Velvet Underground, my favorite group. Rowf! How could I not love her? Plus she had a little white kitty, named Vicklebar, meaning "honeybear." The kitty cat was, as many all-white cats are, congenitally deaf. I had a roommate who was an honest-to-god prince of Morrocco, named Farouk Britel. He claimed to be something like ninety-seventh in line to Morocco's peacock throne. Not likely that we would ascend to power, but you never knew. He was a half-height Lothario who terrified all the good Presbyterian girls with his predations. And he frequently gave cultural talks to civic groups around campus and town. So the dormitory was hung with his remarkable native costumes -- royal gowns, and wild goats-hair robes worn by nomads. Meanwhile, I was doing my best to antagonize people. I enjoyed making mischief and being a brat. I styled myself as an Abbie Hoffman type, staging outré anti-war protests, like manning a punchbowl full of cow's blood across from a Navy recruiter in a dining hall. A couple football players whose brothers were serving on ships in the Gulf of Tonkin tipped my table over, splooshing tomato juice everywhere. Another time I carefully inserted 400 copies of a bit of doggerel I wrote, "Old MacWooster Had a War" in the chapel hymnbooks on the occasion of LBJ's national security adviser MacGeorge Bundy giving an address at the school. I truly thought the assembly would open to that page and begin singing "with a moo moo here, and a cluck cluck there," and it would all reflect gloriously on me, and somehow the war would be shortened as a result. The opposite happened -- everyone ignored my inserts and sang the Doxology beneath it, and despite my best efforts the war dragged on. As a freshman I was nevertheless honored with the job of mimeographing the school's daily newssheet, called Potpourri. It was my first editing job. Every night I typed up the next day's meetings and events, and it being 1967 I was allowed to add my own little flourishes, like a peace sign or an epigram or cartoon. At some point I began making little marginal doodles that made fun of the school's athletic fraternity, the Second Section. There was nothing special about them, except that they were bigger than other guys, drank beer, and sweated up more car backseats. But I targeted them as the source of much of the evil in the world, and I lampooned them every chance I could get. As a consequence, the Second Section doofuses plotted my destruction. One of the boys -- one of the two who tipped over my bucket of blood, in fact -- was actually suspended from school for conspiring to kidnap me and take me for a terrifying drive up through his part of northeastern Ohio, possibly abandoning me in a salt mine in his home town of Barberton. But we now advance to the endgame. One wintry night after putting out the newssheet I lay down to sleep. Farouk was out of town, and for some reason I had Debbie's little cat with me, purring on my chest under the sheets. Suddenly, my dorm window broke, and I was rocked by a major KERBLAM! Let me tell you, this was disorienting. I sat up in bed and my head was ringing, Vicklebar trembling in my hand -- even she felt the explosion. The light at my bedside was gone, knocked down and broken. Despite my vibrating head I sensed that the room was full of smoke, and the scent of peppermint. People outside the room were pounding on the door, and the housemaster was fumbling with the master key. When the door opened and flashlights lit up the room, and someone located a lamp that was not blown up, I realized that a bomb had gone off in it. Taking the brunt of the explosion were Farouk's native outfits -- they hung from a wire, shredded and splattered with something white. The splattering was not limited to the clothing, however -- it was everywhere in the dorm room, on the walls, mirrors, books, and bedding. And there were little bits of clear glass everywhere, too. The white stuff was what smelled like peppermint -- Colgate Dental Cream. I was still in a daze, but I figured out what happened. Some guys from the Second Session, to avenge themselves against all the guys on campus like me who were anti-war and anti-jock and anti-Scots Presbyterian, had packed a Skippy Peanut Butter jar with toothpaste, inserted a lit cherry bomb in the middle, and hurled the thing through my dorm window. This is the point in the story that I don't like, because it casts me in a terrific light. Usually, if you have been paying attention, I am an idiot in my stories. I think they "play" better. But in this one, because it involved the Second Section, there was no way I could be the idiot. There is a lesson here for you young readers -- choose your enemies with care. I put on a bathrobe, slipped poor little traumatized Vicklebar under one arm, and crossed the quad from my dorm to the building that housed the Second Section. Entering their main lounge, I stood among a group of guys watching Johnny Carson. Seeing me, one of the group leaped to his feet and dashed out of the room. "Hey, Finley" said on the guys, with a crooked smile playing on his lips, "what the hell happened to you?" A couple of the guys tittered. "Someone threw a bomb through my window, and it wrecked the place," I said. "Gee, that's too bad," said a sophomore named Gene. "You should maybe like get blinds or something." I held up my hand, indicating silence. Then I took Vicklebar out from the bathrobe and set her on a table, on a checkerboard. The kitty looked about her, disturbed and confused. I stood behind the kitten, extended my arms as far as they would go, and then clapped my hands together, a couple inches from her head. She didn't so much as blink. One of the boys gasped. "I just wanted to show you guys what you accomplished," I said. "A beautiful, harmless creature, deafened for life. What a brave thing you did." And I picked Vicklebar up and headed out the door. Halfway back to Douglass Hall, three Second Sectioners caught up to me, panting. "Hey, Finley, wait up" one of them, a basketball player named Cosby said. Cosby was actually one of the few Second Sectioners that I kind of liked -- he had a kind of funny style about him. "We're really sorry, man," Cosby said. And I looked at the other two guys, and one of them was fighting back tears. The kitty cat story really got to him. "Well, what are you going to do about it?" I asked. And I laid out my terms -- they had to clean up the room, save Farouk's outfits, and compensate him for the ones that could not be restored, replace the window, and leave me the hell alone for the rest of the year -- and I would leave them alone, too. They happily complied, and I never told them Vicklebar was born deaf. I was at Wooster a year and a half. By my second year Debbie and Vicklebar left me. Debbie's parents, wanting to escape the drugged out scene in Athens, Ohio, took significant pay cuts to relocate far away to a podunk place called Hamline University, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Because of the pay cuts, they couldn't afford to keep sending her to Wooster, not while they had free tuition at Hamline. When I returned after summer vacation, I was alone, and I missed her. Twice I made woebegone hitchhiking trips to Minnesota to see her. But I returned to Wooster, drifted into another group, dope-smoking hippies who dreamed of a better life than being students in a dorm in a Presbyterian college in the Amish country. At one point we tried to place the following in the classified ads in the back of Saturday Review: Artistic tribe seeks patronage and a place of residence, preferably on Cape Cod, to enjoy the beautiful vibes of creation, and to respond in kind. Send offers to Box 6272. The magazine rejected the ad as being too slummy. How were to know? But the die was cast, as they say before setting out across the Rubicon. Within a few weeks our band of gypsies summarily quit Wooster (without telling our families) and migrated via driveaway cars -- not to the hip scene in Boston or San Francisco, but to Los Angeles, because my dad lived there, and I had witnessed the Sunset Strip scene on a visit there, and thought it would be just as good. It wasn't. My friend Worth and I went out first, driving across Route 66 in a Ford Mustang that had spent a couple nights into Lake Erie, and had spent a year in a parking garage in Cleveland drying out. As we drove west, the car began to shred -- tires, floormats, upholstery, and roof. By the time we got to Santa Monica, there wasn't much Mustang left. We hung around the Strip for a few days. A man picked us up hitchhiking and took us to a Black Buddha session, where everyone chanted nam myoho renge kyo and prayed for new cars. We noticed a continuing theme of materialism in the L.A. version of the Aquarian age. All the hippies had hundred dollar pants and had taken screen tests or were prostitutes. |
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