And I ran, I ran so far away.
I just ran, I ran all night and day.
I couldn't get away.
- "I Ran," Flock of Seagulls
"Check this one out." I palmed the pumpkin in my hand and held it over my head in an Elby's "Big Boy" pose. It was compact, taut, the size of one of those small red playground balls - the nasty ones you break someone's nose with in Dodgeball. I put my beer on the ground, wound back in a discus throwing stance and flung it skyward. It climbed about 40 feet into the air at a Northeast pitch and started its descent 20 feet to my right. "Shit, I shanked it." For moment, I thought it was going to come down on a car parked on the street. I darted for the probable landing zone, thinking I could grab it before it slammed through a window or pulverized a hood, like a catcher leaning over the dugout to snag a foul pop fly. My eye was off - the gourd didn't make the street. It landed at the intersection of an alleyway and the sidewalk, shattering in a splash of seeds and orange pulp spraying out in ten foot radius.
"Nice. Very proud of you!" Harris bellowed back from the porch.
"Just like Clapton's baby!" I shot him two thumbs up and turned to run back to the beer I'd left on the ground behind me. Barely a step later, as I was just picking up my head to look where I was sprinting, I realized I was about to collide head with a 50ish man in a yellow sweater and tan khakis. His wife was walking next to him, uniformed in a white shirt and high-waisted pleated pants, with a sweater tied around her neck. Her tortoise shell sunglasses were pushed back into a bob cut more helmet than hair. I hadn't realized where I was or how fast or clumsily I was moving. I twisted sideways on one foot and nearly fell down trying to avoid them. The man could've helped me; he just had to offer me a hand. He grabbed his wife's shoulders. Their blonde little daughter stopped in her tracks. I reached out and righted my balance on a parked car, smiling. "Sorry." They stared at me, silent... I was getting a voodoo hex from a set of middle aged Polo models. I darted for my beer before they could finish the curse. I didn't need bad luck in these parts. I wasn't even supposed to be here. I'd promised some fairly powerful people around the place I'd "act my age" when I visited. Smashing pumpkins in the street and bowling into visiting parents probably didn't meet the spirit of the bargain. It was 1:00. Proper cocktail hours hadn't even started.
I walked back to the porch. "It's Parents' Weekend, isn't it?"
"Yep," Harris laughed.
"Why didn't you tell me they were behind me?"
"They came out of nowhere," he grinned.
"Right. I have to be careful about shit. I can't get in trouble here anymore." I sat on a step, cracked a beer and watched the parade of parents walking into town for lunch with their kids. The freshmen looked like junior high students, acned, hunched over, hung over, plodding along, listening to Mom talk about how dirty the dorm was. I was in my second year of law school. What the hell was I doing here?
Oh, yeah. Harris was fucking Field Hockey Chick, the one with the impossible body... the one he'd been banging since we graduated. She visited him in Baltimore most weekends, but every once in a while, he had to visit her on campus. When I wasn't running to DC or NYC for a four day weekend and Harris happened to be visiting FHC, I'd drop by campus. This was the first time I'd been back in a while. My last trip, during my first year of law school, hadn't gone well.
I had rolled into campus the Sunday afternoon after Thanksgiving break, figuring I'd stay through Tuesday. First stop was an off campus apartment of a buddy, Nemish. Sunday was a strange drinking day. Some took it off, to detox from the previous week and sort themselves out for another week of damage, particularly the vicious cirrhotic fallout of the week around Thanksgiving, when you'd run into your high school friends in bars at home. Nemish was not one of those people. He was a short, round chain-smoking Indian with a beard and the sort of thick flowing hair used in drawings of God or Zeus. The only way I can characterize Nemish's consumption is to note that his doctor ordered him to cut back due to ill health effects in his junior year of college. Thankfully, he'd rebounded. I put a bottle of Knob Creek on the table in front of him. He put a bong next to it. We went to work.
The timing of what happened the rest of that night is lost in a sour mash and cheap beer fog. I went to Marcy's Tavern, one of the two student bars in town, with Nemish, where I went through the standard toasts given returning recent alumnae. Everybody buys you something. You smile and guzzle some of it. Someone else comes up and hugs you hello. I'd never hug any man hello, but there's a bond between a college senior and a first year alumnus that demands it. You've gone off to battle; he's facing it. When you finish the embrace, you can't find your drink. A waitress picked it up from the table where you laid it... Somebody grabbed it by accident... It's right in front of you but you're too wrecked to realize it. Who cares... Somebody else is buying you another. Things go like this for a couple hours. You stumble outside and head home.
Wait... You don't live here anymore.
I don't recall how or why I got there, but somehow, in the late night or early morning hours of that Sunday night, I stepped into a dingy apartment known as the Shithole, where another buddy of mine named Spalding lived. Spalding was a 6'4 ex-basketball player. He was large enough to be menacing, and was strong as an ox, but was in every regard harmless, polite - downright Midwestern in his demeanor. The man hadn't a malicious thought in his head. Until he drank. On a few glasses of whiskey, Spalding devolved into rabid baboon at freefall speed.
Spalding was one of those drunks who actually went to Another Place when he got loaded, leaving his mind and almost every semblance of his personality behind. Most of us hold onto shreds of ourselves no matter how liquored we are. I've been told I seemed stone sober by people who've talked to me during blackouts. I get louder, more aggressive and looser, but the shift's subtle and gradual. I'm a standard drunk.1 With Spalding, you could pinpoint the moment the drink took over. He'd turn catatonic for a few minutes, staring at something, his eyes obscured by a bowl cut of hair covering his face. Suddenly, he'd stand, shake like a wet sheep dog, grab a bottle of RumpleMinz from the coffee table, shove it in your face and demand you chug four fingers of it. He'd fling trash at the person closest to the stereo until someone put on Stray Cat Blues, swipe the contents of the table across the room, pound it with his fists and shout along with the music at the peak of his lungs - "Bet your mama don't know you scream like that... I bet your mother don't know you can spit like that," adding a "motherfucker!" in the pauses between the choruses.
Spalding was the only male I'd ever met who sat on the toilet to urinate when he was trashed because he couldn't aim for the bowl. "Izzz jusss easier this waaay..." And in all his flailing moments, you never had a clue what Spalding was thinking, who he'd tackle, what he'd knock over... what random song he'd start wailing out of the blue. He'd look at you, but there was nothing in his gaze. His eyes were glossed, empty, rolled back in his lids like a Mako diving in for a kill. I don't know what it feels like, or how or why or what about his constitution allowed Spalding to get where he got to in those moments, but I'm jealous.
I opened the door to the Shithole and heard the unmistakable dialogue of Dazed N' Confused. The room was littered with beer cans, Wendy's bags and stoners draped over filthy dilapidated couches. Spalding screamed and threw me a beer. I sat on the couch. Someone passed me a bowl. The remainder of the movie slid by as it always does, one memorized line to the next... "Behind every good man there is a woman, and that woman was Martha Washington, man, and everyday George would come home, she would have a big fat bowl waiting for him, man, when he come in the door, man, she was a hip, hip, hip lady, man"... "That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age"... "Let me tell you this, the older you do get the more rules they're gonna try to get you to follow. You just gotta keep livin' man, L-I-V-I-N." The movie never gets old. Matthew McConaughey deserved an Oscar for his portrayal of David Wooderson.
Spalding followed Dazed and Confused with Easy Rider, a terrible choice, not in the sense that it didn't fit in that moment, but that it fit all too well... The one/two effect was overwhelming. Oscar winners prattle on in their acceptance speeches about "transcendent performances," "groundbreaking scripts" and "visionary direction." Pap sound bites for Vanity Fair - the oversunned basking in the echo of meaningless fifty cent words. A good movie - a movie like Dazed and Confused or Easy Rider - doesn't enlighten the viewer. Every concept's been sung, written about or dramatically interpreted a thousand times before. Nobody's delving into uncharted territory; we're admiring new wrapping paper for yesterday's points. A good movie - an effective movie - makes you feel small and insufficient.
Watching "Dazed," you're left thinking "Why didn't I write this?" The flick resonates because the scenes are hung on a heavy rope of reality. We all knew people like Ed O'Bannion, Ben Affleck's bully flunking his senior year of high school, or Ron Slater, the more realistic version of Sean Penn's legendary Jeff Spiccoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, floating through high school in an incense cloud. The characters are stylized, but concrete in ways that render them more human than half of the people you pass in the train station or on the highway every morning. Is Wooderson any less a caricature than the hyper-tan "Vincent" in the open collared striped shirt, with the "Growing Up Gotti" Upside-down Broom haircut, barking into his cell phone as he passes you on the Schuylkill Expressway in his five year old, impeccably waxed 325 Coupe?
Watching Easy Rider, you're asking yourself "Why didn't I join the Circus?" Not forever - just temporarily, to find myself. If you turned thirty in the last decade it's easy to feel you were born in the wrong time and place, a dead spot in history... a dim age of apathy, where the larger mechanisms driving us are admitted broken, but the futility of changing them taken as simple fact. The juice of youth in the past was being stupid, uninformed and railing against something you thought was wrong but couldn't prove so because you didn't have the information. Half the battle was proving the forces you knew were lying were lying.
We've all known for as long as there have been newspapers that we're governed by talking heads triangulating between half a country that speaks in tongues and denies Evolution and another half that never met a handout that couldn't be sweetened. In the governance industry, a man who'll tell both sides they're wrong and need to compromise is a fool. The Crown goes to the craftiest marketer who can pitch customized packages of lies to single issue voters. Still, people fought against that in the 60s, clinging to the belief one side was a lesser of two evils. We're past that now, soaked in an asteroid storm of sound bites, off camera gaffes and leaked talking points shredding any notion left that the thing isn't just a craven ego carnival.
In the 21st Century, we accept the government's terminal greed and prostitution as you'd accept grey hair. We have the internet. We have George Allen calling people monkeys on YouTube and Hillary Clinton offering handjobs to union stewards to deliver votes in Iowa. Where the country once convulsed over Watergate and Vietnam, we're plugged into a war anyone who hasn't spent the last eight years in a sensory deprivation chamber knew was predicated on a lie. We slept while 400 silly suits voted to play the biggest hand of Texas Hold-em in geopolitical history. And lost very badly. In the Fallout, the best the Chamber's got is to blame one another and distance themselves from the bet. The Emperor isn't just naked... He's on a webcam, on the toilet, jacking off to pre-teen net porn on his laptop in a solvent-sniffing frenzy. Who wouldn't just shrug at the daily front page mess, give it a "meh," down his coffee and drive to work listening to sports radio? Work puts cash in your pocket, which is all you can trust anymore. Vote? Sign me up for whoever's offering the lowest taxes. Can I do it from my Blackberry?
We all know somebody who took the Easy Rider course, as Peter Fonda's "Captain America" described, "[Doing his] own thing, in his own time," burning a decade or two ski instructing in Idaho or running a parasailing boat off Molokai. He's easy to dismiss on the surface. Too many Dead shows, too much dope... lost, burnt, a Carny in life's Coney Island. "He's a loser." Sounds right when we say it, but we're never quite sure of the judgment. Fonda may have had a point. "It's not every man that can live off the land, you know."
As cartoonish as they appear on the surface, the characters in those movies are real, and if you've lived right, they speak to a lack of care and concern - privileges of youth - the priceless intoxication of which is only realized in hindsight. You can't recapture that mix of freedom and irresponsibility once it's gone, but on a deep psychic level, free of the cheap pragmatism that tells you its loss is a necessary part of life, remembering those liberties and aiming for a day when you'll have them again seems the only dignified course.
Seeing Captain America get blasted from his bike with a half gallon of whiskey and cheap beer slurry in your veins, while the realization you're studying the manipulation of procedure and semantic gamesmanship as a trade pulses in the sober corner of your consciousness, no reaction less than immediate violence suffices... It's like listening to the "Alla Marcia (Allegro Vivace Assai)" of Beethoven's Ninth they always play at holiday parties and not having the sudden urge to fire that thick beveled scotch glass in your knuckles through the closest window, spraying panes into the street as the choir reaches the crescendo... Bending the room to your vision and having everyone fire their glasses through the windows, into mirrors over fireplaces, against walls and into china cupboards... A rapid fire 21 gun salute in perfect time with the crashing cymbals. "Mer-rr-ry Christmas!" Why? I don't know. Blame it on strong art sparking in a cloud of flammable frustration. Some peaks cry for a punctuation most would never understand... Maybe I just love Christmas.
The credits rolled as the camera panned from Captain America's bike, blazing a miniature mushroom cloud of black smoke from the side of the highway. I leapt from the couch. "We should go somewhere. I need to do something." Spalding agreed. We headed north, a long trudge uphill, through three inches of snow, to ____, the only fraternity holding a keg party on a Sunday night.
Walking into a fraternity party as a recent alumnus is stepping into the living embodiment of the bleakest Leonard Cohen dirge. You've only been gone seven months, but the stink of reality carries around you like spoiled meat. You're cooked; graduated - a reminder of a day the glowing sorority pixies and tattered hatters pouring Milwaukee's Best in their gullets dread. College isn't the pinnacle of life, but those comments your dad's buddies chucked at you during your high school graduation party - "I'd give a testicle for one more year..." - aren't just flippant booze talk.
"Let's check out the house." Spalding and I left the party and walked down the street to ____, our old fraternity house. ____ had been boarded up two years before, shut down by the school for a laundry list of reasons best codified in a quote from the school newspaper article on the closing - "inadequate risk management and widespread substance abuse." Truly unusual reasons a dilapidated house full of 19-22 year old males with a bar on its first floor would be closed.
We stood outside in the snow, staring at the brick edifice, a place I'd only known alive, frighteningly so... now dead as rot, collecting snowflakes. We hadn't spoken about why we were going there, but the reason was obvious. "I'll bet the kitchen is still easy to get into." I wrapped my black ski jacket around my hand and punched out a pane of glass. I fished for the lock on the inside of the door for a few moments, felt the bolt and turned it. Click. Entrance.
Spalding pushed ahead of me, through the kitchen and into the dining area. It wasn't the old basement anymore. The murals of smiling sunflowers, Jim Morrison, Jerry Garcia and American flags were painted over in grey/white lacquer. The floor was an office suite, filled with desks, cubicles and conference tables. LED displays from clock radios lit the room. Green and red lights from fax machines, copiers and computers blinked on and off. Neither of us said a word. Spalding strode a walkway to the end of the basement. He turned and stared back at me, then at the floor, a wall, a cubicle. Then the answering machine went over his head. He swung it mace-like, by the power cord, shattering it into the floor over and over. I grabbed the nearest computer keyboard and did the same. I was mid swing, struggling to crack the last remnants of a plastic casing on industrial carpeting, when I saw the lights. They came through a side window, broadcasting my shadow against the back wall of the basement.
"Spalding! Spalding!" He looked at me but didn't process the problem. "The fucking cops dude! Get the fuck out of here!" Maybe he thought I was kidding. Maybe he was so far gone English was white noise to him at that point. Maybe he just didn't care. I'll never know, and he wouldn't remember. I stood at the door for a moment, screaming to him, until I realized I had no choice. The lights were in my eyes and the cops were jumping out of the cruiser. They were running toward me, the lights behind them, obscuring the distance between us. I had to run up a short set of stairs and spin around a brick wall to get loose. The window was closing quickly. I looked back at Spalding one last time. He was pinched. I jumped up the stairs, juked right and cut around the wall. "Hey! Hey! Stop!" A flashlight hit me in the eyes. There were two of them, maybe 10 feet away. Would they split? Would one corner Spalding while the other chased me? Did it matter?
If you've run from cops you know there's an instant at the outset, before the jets fire, when your feet suddenly weigh a thousand pounds apiece. The body seizes for a moment, every synapse in the flight system jacking massive adrenaline rushes into the bloodstream at once. The engine redlines - you feel your pulse stretching your arteries, first in your stomach, then your neck. Your hands go numb; your jaw's a clamped vice; your brain games the next ten moves at light speed. I bolt up the driveway, out to the street, but then what? Do I bolt for another fraternity house, run inside and hide in a random room? Make a dead run straight into the woods across the street? Is the guy with the flashlight fast enough to run a pattern with me? Could I burn him? Why am I wearing boat shoes this time of year?
Thankfully, the drunken mind doesn't vacillate. A survival switch flipped in my head, overriding the strategy exercise. The only thing I recall was my feet in front of me. I shot up the driveway, across the street and straight into a neighboring field - a full on sprint, giant leaps through the snow, pulling my jacket on as I went. I ran straight, never deviating, never looking back. If I turned I'd slide. If I slid I'd buy it. If I bought it I was caught and I wasn't getting caught. I'd never been arrested for anything. I wasn't going to break the streak for some loaded, half-assed lark.
To be continued...
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1 Not including bourbon or the combination of alcohol and substances other than marijuana.
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 8:17 PM