From under the wide branches of the pine tree, we saw them strolling through pools of light across the open field in the middle of the central red brick campus buildings. We didn’t know who they were. We were drunk on a cold spring night and ready to push any limit. I raised the fire extinguisher.
But that’s not how the night started on that Montana college campus during “High School Week.”
It started with the folksinger crying as the auditorium emptied under the heartfelt tones of her best efforts. I felt for her, but I had beer to drink and shit to get into. After all, when a few of us designated to stay at the frat house that week got in line to enter sprawling old house, the man behind the folding table said, “I don’t know what they told you, but you are going to have a good time.”
So we unpacked across the cot-strewn room and gulped a couple beers. The first of the day, but not the week or in life since that first in Roundup at my grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary when the Irish Catholics went to the bars and left the beers and half-drained glasses and cigarettes on counters, tables and floor of the trailer … anyway that’s a different story … okay fine the night both ended and began when I was awakened by my grandparents trying to fuck. But he was still asleep next to me, the great-grandfather a horseman who’d seen wide open plains of the Judith Basin when mountains were the only fences: “Pull your pants up you old bastard!” she said. Squawk of springs. The great old man next to me snorted.
So, yeah, beer. Then the welcoming ceremony that emptied to tears. Then frisbee in the quad. I’d packed for myself and since I didn’t wear underwear — only jeans since I’d forgotten that we’d likely wear gym shorts for some group activity or other — my friend said to me, “Let’s go back to the house. Your missile is making me sick.” At first, for a moment, I felt embarrassment, but also noticed that girls were still looking, so then I felt risqué as in magazines and in movies.
We were supposed to be sitting in on classes and seminars and having group lunches with college seniors in disciplines (what they called it) that interested us, orientation tours of campus. But, of course, we did none of that. We had most of two days and a full night to run wild, and that was exactly what I and several of my friends were going to do. After all, I was never going to college. The possibility never crossed my mind. College was some other world of kids whose parents were doctors and lawyers and bankers. I didn’t have any friends like that and I was already making good money on farms and ranches and for my dad running a front-end loader and everything else that goes with working for a broke outfit with ragtag equipment including hand shoveling for days and days. I drank beer when I wanted and smoked pot when I could easily get some. I had a steady girlfriend whom I would marry and start popping out kids with soon, like my parents did and like my siblings did and like generations before me did. We worked hard and played hard and fucked a lot and that’s how teen mothers are made, just ask my mother.
My friend and I started the drinking slow, just a few beers. It was early afternoon and we anticipated a long and drunken night and we knew how to drink. The twenty-four pack we’d started working on came from the Ma and Pa Shop just off campus. We looked close enough to eighteen to buy beer, but hell no one carded in Montana if you looked more than sixteen anyway.
The frat house we were sleeping in the basement of had plans for a big party that night. So, we wouldn’t need to buy more beer. Apparently, hard alcohol would be served as well. At 5 p.m., several of us skipped the Awards Dinner for those who took the test to get into college. Jane had taken the test and had probably scored highest or close. She always did and she would go to college even though her parents were working class like the rest of us. But she would not go in Montana.
Jane was a friend who sometimes had drinks and sometimes made out, but no intercourse and we all understood. Because of her grades, she would travel far from Billings and Montana. No one wanted to mess with that.
By the time the sun set, we were well lit and ready for anything. The frat boys, puffy white with that look of weights and football pads and moms who doted on them, no calluses, no scarred knuckles, straight noses with a tendency to sniff, seemed to me. But they had free booze in half-gallon jugs.
These rich kids — I assumed people who went to college came from money, because I didn’t know how else or why else one went to college except because they “had money” — they had a great stereo system with speakers on both main floors and in the basement and they thundered out the songs we heard on the radio. None of the punk music Levi brought from California where he and his mother lived on an air base before moving to Billings. Jane, Wayne, Levi and Primo and I kept to ourselves playing darts in the basement. Around ten, the sorority girls showed up. I was told that’s who the plump, fluffy-haired girls were who arrived two at a time down the stairs and straight-legged it to the keg. When I sidled up to the them and smiled at one, she put up a hand and told me they all knew we were high school kids so don’t bother. She smiled though and squeezed my shoulder, but then walked away with a plastic cup full of tan beer topped with a skim of white foam. Just as well. I was only playing around anyway.
I’m not going to lie about later. The dark wood-panel rooms and the red cups and the keg and the male shoulders and female butts were jittery and clouded and the ceiling came down on top of me from time to time, but still my brain was a bright light. I jumped and jumped to the music. I twisted and flung my friends around. Wayne knocked me off my feet into a forest of legs and a few butt cheeks under skirts. I spun to my feet amid the yells and shoves. Levi laughed over the music when a frat boy asked him what had happened and the music pulsed and one girl said I’d better not be a Peeping Tom and then I laughed and said “What the fuck for?” and her small blue eyes got distant and confused. I knew I meant, Why would I need to do that? Her confusion confused me but then seeming moments later as I bounded around the room to a song the music lowered and the lights came up and Jane and Primo were gone and in fact, I noticed slowly, that all the girls were gone. We expected an all-night party, so I felt disappointed.
Then one of the big guys yelled, “Everyone in the hall!”
Through the fog I thought maybe a drinking game or fire drill. I made the door and in the hall, the big blond fucker was pushing boys’ shoulders straight against the wall. I saw I was in the line, the last quarter of the line and stepped out of it. The wall of the long hallway was full, must have been twenty frat boys and then there was Levi, Wayne and I and another five kids from Billings High School behind us. Kids I recognized but never saw outside of school, kids who went home. The blond fucker, who I then saw had an oddly thick light brown beard, shoved Wayne against the wall and held him there digging into his eyes. He slowly released him, and I thought what a dick. He side-stepped toward me, a weird motion that my brain struggled with, but I ducked his hands and stepped into the middle of the hallway. The guy went off balance but caught my shirt at the shoulder and pulled me toward the wall. I jerked away but didn’t hit him, mostly because I was off balance then myself.
“Get against the wall,” he said, assuming I’d misunderstood his directions. “We have a special opportunity for you.” His voice came from just outside the range of fog around me. I resisted his pull. “Get into line,” he said in a deeper, practiced command voice. “It’s going to be an important opportunity. We’re taking you somewhere special. Fall in!”
“I’m not falling in anywhere,” I said and undercut his hand off my shoulder. I moved another step out of line.
“You’re going to miss out!”
“So fucking shoot me.” My mind gelled a bit around a shard of anger, clearing my vision, pulling faces out of the fog and into focus.
He turned away and looked up and down the line, hands on hips, shoulders squared. “He is not a team player! He doesn’t want to learn anything like you do. He thinks its cool not to participate in something bigger than himself. He …”
“What the fuck ever, man,” I said. “Where are you taking them?”
“See! The cavalier mouth of the degenerate.” He faced me. “Get in line and follow orders and you’ll find out.”
He stood a full head taller than me, so I had to look up at a sharp angle when I stepped to him and said, “No thanks.”
“You’re loss, but I bet you’re used to that.”
“What the fuck ever,” I said again and felt like I had missed an opportunity in that repeated statement but let it go and turned away down the dark hall to the stairs. Over my shoulder I heard him practically screaming, “An outcast and alone! No one will have his back. He … ruin …”
I left Wayne and Levi. I didn’t think about it, just pounded up the stairs. Alone at the top and heading for the door, I worried about them a little and felt bad in case I’d messed something up for them that they wanted to get into, but then I made the door and the street lights pooling the world outside and felt alive again and laughed. I ran toward campus. Suddenly, Levi sprinted passed me. I pushed into a full sprint and chased him between cars and back and forth across the street and in and out of pools of light. We sprinted silently, full out, pushing hard, him four then five strides ahead of me. We crossed the street and sidewalk and onto the paths of the campus, pushing and pushing, my arms coming loose from exhaustion, my legs in pain, my chest burning. His legs were loosening too and he dodged left up concrete steps of a big brick building. He hit the wooden door but got the latch too and busted inside just as I hit his back with my shoulder and sent him flying straight out into the hall and onto his chest. He rolled onto his shoulder with a squeak of skin on polished linoleum. I skidded on my knees and hands. Levi yelled, just a roar of body, and stumbled a few steps and then caught his stride again. My knees stung like hell but I trotted after him. Then we were leaping up steps two at a time, anchoring around the corner posts on each landing. On the third floor he left the stairs and ran into and around a class room screaming “Blah Blah Blah Blah!”
In the corner of the classroom with tables that had sinks in each one stood a large fire extinguisher. I grabbed it by the trigger levers and lifted. It was too heavy for one hand outstretched to lift, so I dragged it to me and heaved it into the cradle of my arms.
“Oh shit come on!” I yelled, because I instantly knew what I was going to do with it.
We raced out of the building and into the large square of grass. All the running had cleared my head and focused my brain and vision on what was only right in front of me. An early morning fog had fallen onto campus. We skidded under the low canopy of an evergreen and waited, panting and crouching, peering out through the mist from every angle for anyone who might come close enough. Someone was going to get sprayed. Did not matter who.
Levi hooted low, scampered to me on his hands and knees and pointed to two figures just stepping into a splash of light from overhead. When they got fully into the light cone, we saw it was Jane and Primo. They strolled along slowly, friends, no caressing or hand-holding. Primo had a brotherly kindness about him when it came to her anyway.
They angled right at the tree, as if drawn. Levi and I remained in stealth mode. Waiting. Waiting. Closer and closer. I heard Primo laugh his rounded ha ha ha, polite at any effort at humor. Jane shook her hair puffing out from under a blue-black stocking cap. They turned toward the tree and for a second I thought they must have known we were there … and then they veered to go around the draping branches. That’s when I pulled the pin and fired a great loud burst of powder at them. They both screamed and wailed from within the shroud like a terror had grabbed them. To his credit, Primo came out of the fog first, stepping fast at us, not a run or a jog but like a fast zombie, hands at his eyes, scrubbing and digging at the corners, clearing tear ducts. He wasn’t a violent person nor a coward. He just saw many other paths for a person to take long before the punching and strangling, tearing and ripping started.
“Hey!” he yelled, “Hey!”
I hit him with the powder again, straight in the face. Jane screamed a horse scream. I caught sight of her just behind Primo, now bent double, nearly on her knees in the cloud. Primo waved his arms as if at flies. Levi appeared behind Primo in the cloud of powder and mist of air-borne dew running at him, at me. He must have run around to get behind them. He ran past Jane yelling a guttural human call. Jane sprang forward away from him, like a frog, and landed on her upper should and head. Levi hit Primo with a shoulder-to-hip tackle. I blasted them both and scream-laughed. I crawled for the edge of the canopy, dragging the fire extinguisher with my left hand, crawling on three and laughing through a horse cough. The powder filling my mouth and throat. I rolled onto my back, trying to get a full breath through the powder and laughter paralyzing my diaphragm. Struggling against the weight of the extinguisher, turning my head and body to get under it, I saw Jane retching onto the ground, a primordial film and burst of gel. Looking down my legs, below my feet, Levi had Primo pinned on his side, Primo’s neck in the crook of an arm, legs tied up with legs, tongue jetting out. Primo lashed out with elbows and got his neck free enough to screech, kicking out and back violently now. Levi yelling in his ear, “It’s us! It’s us!” through coughing laughter.
“It’s me!” I cry-yelled.
Primo looked right at me but kept fighting Levi to get free. Levi suddenly let him go, throwing his arms back and rolling to get out of the reach of Primo’s elbows.
“You fucking bastards!” Jane yelled. She gained her feet, hunched, but closer than I had thought. She kicked me hard, hitting my thigh, giving me a horrendous Charlie horse.
“You fucker!” Primo said. “You fucker!”
“You fuck her, you brought her!” I said automatically, my signature comeback. I received a kick to my kidney for it.
“I fucking hate that!” Jane said and fell back on her butt.
“Jesus, what’s a matter with you two?” Primo on his knees, asking earnestly. “You scared the shit out of us!”
“And probably gave us cancer!” Jane said getting to her feet. She pulled a leg back to kick me and I caught her foot in my hands and tossing it up, she fell back onto her ass again.
“Ow!”
“What is going on out here?” A high-pitched voice. “What are you doing?” A woman of college age stood over us. “My god,” she said, reaching down to Jane’s hand, “are you okay?”
I felt flooded with alcohol again, totally drunk this time, like the running and laughing had supercharged the alcohol in my veins, burning my brain. My vision filled with red.
“I saw the whole thing!” A man’s voice, though mid-level, between female and male, not strong or deep. The voice of someone who would run and hide.
“That’s fucking brilliant,” I yelled at him and a similarly dress guy, some sort of team jacket or club coat, as I got to my feet. “Wow!” I leaned at him and knocked a black book out of the crook of his arm.
They both stepped back but the one with hands on hips regained his composure and stared at me. I dropped the fire extinguisher and was about to swing on the puke but someone grabbed my arm at the elbow and pulled me back.
“Calm down,” a woman said. “Just calm down,” she said in an unthreatening, un-panicked tone. I immediately though unconsciously thought of one of my older sisters as she turned me at her face and looked open-eyed right into my eyes, like her, like the one older sister I called “Mom” until I learned the difference. “Enough. Right?”
I accepted her offer to stand back and she stepped in front of me facing the others. “I’m the RA for Jessie Hall,” she told them. “I’ll take care of this.”
I stared hard into the guy (what you call someone neither a man nor a boy but something weaker than a woman but more than a child) letting him know he wasn’t shit to me.
“Come on,” the RA said. “Let it go.”
Of course I didn’t know what “RA” meant. I assumed it was some kind of college code for authority or belonging, like a secret handshake.
“I don’t like the way he’s looking at me,” the guy said.
“So do something about it,” I said, letting the RA hold me back, hand on chest, as a sign of respect for her.
“I’ll call campus security if you don’t calm down,” she said to me. She meant it the same way my mother would sic my father on me when I got too wild. “You’re clearly drunk. Let me take you guys back to your rooms. No one has to get into trouble.”
I remembered the others with me then, though Levi had split while Primo was brushing powder off Jane’s back, the more neutral area of her coated body. She patted at her chest and legs and ruffled the powder off her butt.
“You need to report them,” the mouthy one said.
I focussed on the face lightly whiskered and pale that I wanted, from deep within me, to punch.
“I will,” the RA said. “I will,” she added dismissively.
I wanted to kick and strangle that fucker now that she had picked a side, but she put her hands on my shoulders and turned me away. My Dad had taught me that while some men are violent because they are an open wound, others like us are violent because fuck you. And some women know the difference.
I let her move me.
“Where are you staying? You’re with the high school group right?”
“We are,” Jane said and pointed at a three-story brick building. “I’m in those dorms.”
“I’m in those dorms, too,” Primo said. “Can we go. I need a shower.”
They were not abandoning me. They were leaving me in more capable hands and I knew that, much the way my family of eight kids worked out levels of control on our small farm.
“Yes. Go!” The RA looked up into my eyes. Brown hair, kind big brown eyes. “And where are you?”
“Sigma fucking something or other.”
“Right. Well, I can’t send you back there. That’s where you got drunk, right?”
“Yeah, right. They were lining people up and I took off.” My brain started to turn slowly inside my skull.
“I’ll take you to my boyfriend’s room. He’s an RA, too.”
I still had no idea what an RA was, but I was being comfortably domesticated and didn’t think about it, some sort of authority in her, it wasn’t authority over me just the authority to make things work. “My things,” I said, more of a question. Calmed down by her honest warmth, I wanted to do what she said. I would have slept in the bushes, too, but shelter seemed better.
“Okay,” let’s go. She picked up the fire extinguisher and we walked toward a line of trees. Behind that, another brick building.
Her boyfriend, a big guy with short black hair and glasses, had a book in his hand and other books open on a narrow green couch behind him. He listened to her at the door for a few sentences, that I was running wild and needed a place to sober up, and then he stepped aside. She pushed me in.
“He could use a shower, too,” she said. “How’s the night been?”
“Quiet ’til now,” he said. “Come in …” He paused and looked at me.
“Jake,” I slurred, surprising myself. “Jake,” I said again but slurred the word again. Embarrassed, I looked away from his large head and curly hair hovering above me.
“Okay, Jake. All is well. Come on in. I have an extra room for just this sort of occasion.” He smiled at me, pleasantly, friendly. He looked over my shoulder. “When you get free tomorrow, let’s have lunch or dinner?”
“Of course!” She said.
She reached out and squeezed his arm, and I turned away, embarrassed by her touching him. She let his arm go and turned me to face her with her fingers under my chin. “You’ve had quite the night.”
“I …,” I started, flummoxed by her sisterly sincerity.
“Don’t worry about any of it. No one was hurt and those other guys are doofuses.” She smiled pleasantly.
“We got it,” her boyfriend said. He turned me toward the inside of his room.
All I could hope for was to fall onto a couch or even the floor. These two leading me around wasn’t a contradiction to my earlier resistance, not that I felt. They weren’t laying on a layer of manipulative bullshit, just offering me a safe place. I wanted one.
“I’m Richard,” he said. “See you later, Mary.” He didn’t look at Mary again or lay on another request. He and Mary apparently didn’t operate out of desperate need, like most of the people I knew. He opened an arm inside. He guided me to another door and opened it in front of me. The room had a bed attached to the wall. It became all I could see. “You can get cleaned up in the morning. Just get some sleep now.”
“Yeah. Yeah,” I said, focussed only on the bed as my lights dimmed. “I …” I threw my legs over the edge of the bed and nearly barfed, but swallowed hard against the rising bile, beer, vodka and fire extinguisher powder.
“Whew,” he said as I regained my composure. “Almost lost it there. Okay?”
I nodded and the next thing I remember is Richard entering the bright room, sun coming in the naked window.
“Good lord,” he said. “You better get that shower, Jake.” He tossed a towel at me and dropped the gym bag with my clothes in it at my feet. He pointed at the door and while walking me across the hall to the showers said, “those guys you were staying with are idiots. Said you got scared and ran away, but I know better and they’ll hear about it from the dean.” He left me in the shower stall, drawing the curtain behind him. I heard the outer door close. Still drunk but somewhat to myself I agreed with him just, I thought, for different reasons. They and he were more alike than he and I, but I also thought, as I stripped down, that maybe he thought they were not only stupid for getting kids drunk but also just plan ol’ stupid as in being ignorant of reality.
Under the water, the heat dissipating the remaining alcohol and the hangover genie working her sick magic, I pushed the chunks of my barf off the drain so the water could go down. Three images surfaced in the dark pool of my speckled mental vision as I watched the cubed carrots dance with corn and chewed meat clumps: Jane throwing up in the cloud of powder, looked like just water; Levi tackling Primo, and that guy with the dark blond beard yelling at us in the lineup. Then I thought of the two guys who were cowards, hiding behind Mary while talking shit, and then about the lineup at the frat again and I wondered, hot water plowing into me, what had happened to them. Where did they go? I imagined them being herded into some sort of fenced alleyway like a cattle yard. I’d never know. And would never want to know. Whatever it was, it was bullshit and probably just as stupid as the guy yelling that shit about how I was a loner and wouldn’t ever have any kind of power in the world or a life anyone would care about. I could hear his voice as it edged higher and if I ever met him again I would definitely tell him he was a fucking idiot and to eat shit. I felt relief that I hadn’t gone with them. It was like something out of a bad movie. Didn’t they know they were in a bad movie? Why would they pressure me like that? Why would you ever go along with something like that? How could all those men, years older than me, stand there and take blind direction and commands from some spoiled dickhead, just a guy with some tiny bit of authority from or for what I couldn’t guess other than it was from all those idiots lined up in the dingy hallway, which included Wayne, who I vowed to avoid for fucking ever. Whatever friendship we had was over now. Being afraid was one thing, being a coward was another.
I finished showering and scooped up the solids from the drain with a section of paper towel and tossed it into the garbage. No one needed to see that shit, especially Richard or Mary. When I got back to the room, the door was ajar but Richard wasn’t inside. I grabbed my bag, neatly zipped in the middle of the room. I looked around. His bed was made and books stacked neatly on the desk. He had posters on the walls of symphonies and blues bands, one was cartoon-like poster for “John Lee Hooker at the Holiday” with a year-old date. Another poster was of a sculpture of a woman with the arms broken off, saying “Disarm! Venus de Milo did it!” I didn’t know who Venus de Milo was but it was funny and I knew it meant disarm our nukes, something anyone would know about and that seemed funny and meaningful.
On the bus, Wayne sat away from us, thankfully. I was still too hungover to fight with anyone. But, that he sat apart made me feel even more angry at him, like he’d believed the shit that guy said. Fuck him, I thought. Primo and Jane sat near the back, neither looking down the aisle at me and I wondered about that for a second but then grasped that their awkwardness need not be about me. There were no other seats back there where I could harass them so I hit a seat midway down the bus aisle and Levi slammed into the seat next to me. He punched me in the stomach and I nearly did barf but was empty. I kicked his calf with my left foot and he yelped.
“Man,” I said, “I have to sleep.” And I did.
When I woke, we were coming into Billings on I-90. Oil and sugar beet refineries steaming the sky, the flame boiling out of one thin stack going especially high. The beat up, old farm houses dotting brown fields. Yellowstone River’s cottonwood forest, gray and black, leafless under the sandstone rims. Through the Southside, the houses severely dilapidated and cop cars with lights spinning. Again, that guy with the beard loomed over my clouded mind. Why would he act like that? Why would say shit that stupid? The two dweebs on the quad … I remembered they each held a Bible, like Jesus police telling on people and turning them in to the authorities. But they had not mentioned Jesus to me and that struck me as telling. My family was not religious and my father was a working-class declared-(to me)-atheist. I’d gone to Sunday school a few times one summer when when my mother was trying to fit into the upper crust of ranchers where we had our little three-acre farm and said as much when she had to collect me from the white plank-board Methodist church in town the last Sunday I went because I’d been skipping playing with friends and then showing up just in time for cookies and milk. But then also those RA’s — Mary for sure who said the others were doofuses. It seemed natural to Mary and Richard that I was just a person, nothing special but not an animal to be caged, trapped and barred from others the way all other authority outside of my family had treated me. And then the thought just came to my mind like I’d been working the problem, like the solution to an engine problem that suddenly pops into your brain in the middle of the night: If those fucking idiots could go to college, then so could I.
So, all these decades later, I can tell you that College Days fulfilled its purpose, because I figured out how to go to college and, despite my father’s bafflement and efforts to get me to quit high school and run equipment for him, went to college and even to graduate school. My girlfriend went too. We married and are still together, yes kids happened, as they will, because life is what it is and if you look around, really look, you see that it also opens and opens and opens …
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