ANEW: B.C.Y.: A Novel -- Chapter 3 (working draft)
Episode #3
It’s a new day and time for Episode #3 of B.C.Y.: You’ll have to read from the beginning to get the entire gist but feel free to jump in wherever you are
Preface: This is a serialization of B.C.Y.: A Novel (working title). If you missed the earlier Chapters, you can find them here: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.
Enjoy!
Chapter 3
Reagan won. John Lennon got shot. It was strange, strange times. The month between Election Day and the assassination attempt was surreal. Like all changes in epochs, it was full of bends in the universe.
In the month leading up to the 1980 presidential election, candidates were jockeying around the country, looking for bright-eyed college students to do the grunt work. A guy from Sandusky, Ohio, left school to work for John Anderson, the white-haired savior of Liberalism. Looking like Phil Donahue’s brother, Anderson came on campus that fall to speak at Battell Chapel. I didn’t go, but there were plenty of people who did, including Mark Borshov.
We were all arguing about what a Reagan presidency would look like. I just called him a straight-up racist, which was something I didn’t say all that much. But people tried to convince me otherwise, including Ethan.
“Are you a closeted Republican?”
“What are you talking about, Man? Just because my Dad is a Republican and his father and his father was one, doesn’t necessarily make me one?”
“If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck…”
“But what’s so wrong with being a Republican?”
“For starters, they hate Black people.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Yes, they do. They do. Look, didn’t you hear that Nancy Reagan speech after the Illinois Primary? It was snowing in Chicago, and she was like, ‘Ronnie, I wish you were here. There are so many beautiful white people here.’”
“She only said that because it was snowing not because she was using code words to appeal to the Republican base. You just see boogeymen in everything. Sometimes people just make mistakes. Imprecise language can’t be blamed on blatant racism.”
We’d go back and forth like this. But when Borshov went all deranged and began working for that crazy John Anderson, I just thought these folks were just weird. People were fine until the election season rolled around. Now things were getting heated because they knew Ronald “Ray-Gun” was going to seriously kick Jimmy Carter’s ass and then do what he did to those Black Panthers in Oakland.
“You know what, Ethan, in reality, I know that undercover, you’re really just some Liberal-assed New York commie pinko Liberal. Your father and your father’s father were one, too. You will more than likely be one, too. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and very soon. The South will rise again.”
“You said ‘Liberal’ twice, and I hate ‘Gone With The Wind.’”
Debating with my suitemates was enervating. We took turns being as obtuse and ridiculous as we could. The real deal was that nobody really cared all that much, truly, what you were and what you weren’t. College was like that. Trying on new personas, but these days and this time of year, things got heavier and heavier with the ever-present march to the end of the term. Most days before the election left me feeling just a little more depleted and a little less myself.
In college, the world droned on for hours on end, with seemingly endless debates about nothing. When Mylie left for college, I only had me and Mama. Now, all these voices rattling around inside and outside of me made me unsure of everything. I felt like a penny ski-balling around in a tin coffee can.
The best time we had was in the Commons or the Pierson Dining Hall on the weekend. I’m not sure if I learned much new during that first half year. I liked my English class all right, but the astronomy class was supposed to be a gut; it was no easier than the physics class I took in high school. I failed that course, or I stopped working after the acceptance letters arrived and head turns from my classmates happened. I had this sneaking feeling that I had run out of gas. That my intellectual curiosity had somehow abandoned me. I did nothing for myself, and for this, I began to have a sinking feeling that I just wasn’t up to it: The challenge of college.
It was around this time that my one expression of support just up and left. I came home one day, taking the back way up Entryway B, which I hardly ever did, and found that Abner was packing.
“Hey, Man,” I could see that the usual smile and lightness to his being were no longer evident, “Where are you going?”
“Home, my friend. I know when I’m not wanted anymore.”
“This is the middle of the week, and you’re headed back to Jersey?”
“Yessir, I’m headed out for the territories.”
“What are you talking about? You have the Master’s Tea discussion on divesting in South Africa. You’ll be there for that, correct?”
“No, I’m afraid not. Look, I just got told to leave, so I won’t be here anymore after today. My folks are driving up from my dad’s office in the City to pick me up.”
“What? What did you do?”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“It must have been bad because wasn’t it you who always said that it’s nearly impossible to get kicked out of Yale?”
“Well, I guess I did the impossible.”
“What? I mean, how…” I had no words.
Outside Abner’s window, which overlooked the Old Campus side, the winter light was fading fast. Abner still had that smile at the corners of his mouth, but his eyes were definitely hollow and unreal, kind of deadened.
“Look, Abner, I know that this is going to sound shallow, but we…re, I depend on you for a lotta stuff. Your good counsel alone has been enough to keep me here and not get me sent to the Yale equivalent of juvey.”
“You aren’t bad, just misguided. You have virtually no study habits, and I have to do everything for you. Some of this stuff you will have to do for yourself if you want to stay here.”
I sat quiet for a bit. Finally, I just didn’t know what to say to Abner other than, “This is not good.” Taking in his Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, and Elton John posters on the wall above his bed, which all had corners torn off from repeated hangings and re-hangings, along with a few darts thrown into Elton’s square glasses, I said, “I have a feeling I might be following you soon.”
Abner and I built a relationship on mutual respect. He was the most able to cross cultures than any of the other students my age. Maybe it was because his relatives hailed from Chicago, but I could talk to him easier than any other person that I knew in New Haven. We didn’t go to the SAC parties, or all that many of them, or date Townies, or not that much; we just hung out around the dorm on Friday night and talked about Mayor Daley and Jane Byrne. I could always count on Abner for a discussion of down home politics. Even national politics was of interest to him. I knew very little about the candidates who ran for president other than the fact that Ronald Reagan was “right-wing reactionary” and President Carter looked like Mr. Limpid and John Anderson could be reasonable yet had no chance of winning.
“Say, man. What will you do now?”
“Don’t worry about me, ’S-man.’ I’ll be fine. In fact, I think I will do what I started to do before I came here three and half years ago. I’ll travel around the world.”
“Wow, it must be nice. You get thrown out of school, and you travel. If I got thrown out, I’d have to become a porter on the Amtrak.”
Looking at me flatly, Abner intoned: “How did me getting kicked out of Yale suddenly become about you? That’s kinda messed up, don’t you think? I’m tired of privileged undergraduates, even ones that grew up in the Projects outside of Chicago, making every damned thing about them. Well, Bucko. This one’s on me. I fucked up.”
“You’re right. It’s not any of my damned business. It ain’t about me. I just thought that we had this crazy thing going on called a friendship. It’s not like I slept with your girlfriend.”
I actually was referring to an incident that had happened between two of my suitemates that ended badly. Doug and Mike shared a girl. Only one of them didn’t know. Crap like that happened all the time.
I did what I normally did as Abner started to pull his posters off the wall. I picked up his lacrosse stick and started tossing the ball up in the air, just an inch or two shy of the ceiling. Sometimes, the ball would just graze the ceiling, and sometimes, I’d be scrambling under Abner’s bed, looking for the ball that just dinked off the plastered-looking cottage cheese and the edge of his dresser. We said nothing to each other as he took out the darts from Elton’s left eye.
Out the window, I could see a group of students laughing together near the steps of Wright Hall. There were six of them making a kind of viewbook tableau with their heads thrown way back, frozen in time. There were three males and three females. The bare trees were the echoes of the fall foliage and harbinger of the deep snowfalls to come. The red, yellow, and gold preppy coats immortalized in pictures are what hooked me. That was the image of the school and not the thing itself. Now, my one friend, the guy who ferried me across the Old Campus to this new world, was being turned away.
One conversation outside of politics I had with Abner was about the culture of the school. It wasn’t that long before when Blacks and Jews were excluded from Yale with strict quotas. Abner told me there was a cohort of Black men who were in those early years of a nice-sized group of dudes in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, guys he knew from his older brother’s class, who paid a heavy price for their deciding to become a part of the country’s elite. I had a feeling that my life would change for the better; I’m sure those fore-brothers felt the same way. I’m sure we all felt things would be drastically different for us and our families. But who were we fooling? I’m not sure what happened with Abner, but all I could think of was “complete.” I’m not even quite sure what “complete” meant, but I wanted it more than anything else. Just finish it.
“Can you come back, maybe? Would you want to come back?”
“Look, man. This will take some time to figure out. All I know is that I don’t have any answers for you right now.”
“I get that. I do. I just am left standing out here, totally exposed. Our friendship was like a promise. This was what I came here for. Now that shit is being taken away. This sucks ass, man.”
“Look, I’ll try to get word to you when I figure it all out. I just need to get out. It’s been a tough few days.”
He dismissed me just like that, taking his stuff off the walls and out of his closets, and putting it all in his two massive big Army duffle bags. I sat in his desk chairs until the light faded. Abner finished in the dark. I don’t even remember when he left. He just left. And I never heard from Abner again.
*****
I was dejected for the entire week. Prepping for finals was frightening. I hadn’t even remember taking final exams at my old school. We had them, of course, but these things were worth so much. My English teacher returned one of my last papers on a novel about Montana. Aside from the C+, he seemed to like the direction I had taken. I was actually happy with a C+. This dude graded hard. I just wanted to learn how to write. I wrote what I thought, but my ideas were disorganized. For instance, the Dad in the Montana book seemed underdeveloped to me. I also talked about how the sparse writing represented the culture of the man and landscape. That was my big argument. It was less about the content and more about the style. For most of the books I read, I just didn’t understand what he meant about style. This time, I got it. The paper was a little better than average, but I knew I was headed in the right direction.
I was working on my astronomy homework when the whole campus paused.
“Did you hear?” Alexis from the girls’ room across the hall came in. “John Lennon was killed in New York. He was shot in the back at the Dakota.”
“John Lennon?”
“Dead.”
“Who the hell would kill John Lennon? He’s like Buddha. The Pope. Who would want to do that?”
On the quad side of campus, out of my suitemate’s windows, I could see the wind beginning to rage a bit, gusting and pushing pieces of paper and leaves across the campus. Looking over towards Connecticut Hall, smaller then larger groups of students were coming out of the various entryways across Old Campus, as if on cue, clouds and clouds and swirls of them.
My view settled upon and began to follow a line of students with candles making their way in front of Nathan Hale, heading towards Vanderbilt Hall. You could just tell from the way people now dressed that it was starting to get cold, cold, with the lights bouncing off the cloudy sky. Toward the end of the line of students, I saw the white coat. THE white coat. I grabbed my new, old Nanook parka and ran hard to try to catch up with the candle holder with the white coat, closing fast before the group made it to the Vanderbilt archway.
Huffing and puffing hard, “Hey.”
The blonde girl looked over at me and kept walking with the group, saying nothing.
“Don’t you remember me?”
“I’m not sure if you can tell, but I’m a little busy right now.”
“Vivian, right? From Evanston? You helped me with that cop at Phelps Gate.
“Schaeffer, I know who you are. Remember? You didn’t remember me. But right now, I’m a little preoccupied.”
The group began to form a circle at the back gate near Vanderbilt Hall with their candles. They were real candles and not the battery-operated kind that had popped up all over New Haven in most of the white clapboard houses. The candles flickered in the wind, being lit and relit, with cardboard next to hands so that the wax wouldn’t burn. Some of them footed out having to be relit — skitch, skitch — with a Bic lighter that every other person seemed to have. Those candles and that look signaled New England and Christmas was near, but not this time.
“I know, I know. John Lennon, right? He got killed. Correct?”
The group turned to me like I was defaming the moment. I probably was. It had been a weird month. Reagan. Abner. Now, John Lennon. What the hell was happening here? At this point, I felt so far away from where I had traveled. Not just on the bus from Chicago but in my life. I had never been in a place where I wasn’t known—at all. It was like no one knew me here. Certainly. Certamente. I was trying to connect. No one wanted to or tried to. Even in this sad moment, it felt like we were all on different frequencies.
“Meet me tomorrow at Durfee’s at 4:30,” she said. With that, I was once again dismissed.
That next day, students were understandably out of it. Reading week was beginning, which meant I was flailing. I didn’t know how to study for exams. I had two papers to write and three exams. I should have been studying rather than going to meet some girl at a candy shop in the middle of the day at the start of reading week.
“Hey,” I said, coming into the sweet shop. I saw that Vivian had a glass of water.
“You’re late. I’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes, waiting for you.”
“My class got out a little late, and I needed to…”
“Why are you always filled with excuses and guilt? You start every conversation and every interaction like you did something wrong. Why?”
“I thought this was a date?”
“I don’t date”
“Not like a romantic date.”
“I don’t date.” She looked at me evenly, coldly. “Answer my question.”
“Which one?”
“Look, if we are going to do this…this…if we are going to talk about, whatever, you just need to be straight. You are very talented. A gifted actor. Remember, I saw you at your high school best. But this is college. We are different people or can be.”
“Are you always this blunt?”
“Answer my question.”
“What was the question?”
“Guilt. You. Why do you always default to guilt?”
I looked around trying to think about my lack, my feeling of being on display, looking at the Asian girl buying Swedish Fish.
“I guess it’s because that’s how I have always entered the world. Guilty. Explaining. Making sure that people didn’t react violently, negatively. Then again, I think these thoughts. What’s going through my mind is what my fifth-grade hero used to say. His mantra: ‘I’m just a squirrel in the world, trying to get a nut.’”
“Hmmmm…” She sniffed, taking a big sip of her cup of tea. “Colorful.”
“You think I can’t be serious. I can be serious.”
“Sounds like you are talking to yourself.” Vivian was not smiling. This was serious to her. Why did she even care? I couldn’t figure it out.
“Why is it that you seem to be more concerned about this than I am? The police. My reactions. All of it.”
Vivian took her time and leveled her gaze at the pathway leading out to Elm Street, which was where I was facing. She craned her neck around as if seeing who was in the room. Vivian then faced front towards Old Campus. Across the room, a pair of upperclassmen, both young men who looked like they lived at Durfee’s, papers, notebooks, and drinks everywhere, worked in a thick math book that looked daunting.
“I am the product of two very idealistic people. They helped Dr. King establish SCLC. They were around when Jessie Jackson founded Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, and they marched across the bridge at Selma – the first time – when I was just three years old. We have always been part and parcel of the struggle. In fact, we didn’t even call it the Civil Rights Movement. We simply said, “The Struggle.”
She then looked off into the distance over my left shoulder, away from my sorry-looking gaze. “My problem with you is that you are far too casual. You take this whole thing like we are living at Disneyland.”
“You don’t know…”
“Perhaps I don’t know you, but I know your type. Happy to be here, just wanting to get laid, not necessarily in that order. But those are the two things at the top of the list, am I right?!”
“So, you are now going to lecture at all of the brothers to make them do right by their Blackness?”
“Well, yeah. Actually, not all of the brothers, ‘cause I don’t know them. But you, I do know. Remember, it is not my job to save people.”
I did not know what to make of her. She was not a Viv. She was solidly Vivian. She didn’t want to be made. She wanted to do the world in her own way. As far as I knew, she could have been a lesbian, but she did seem rather intense.
“Well, Vivian, as far as I know, I reached out to you because you did me a kindness. How I was raised, kindnesses are supposed to be acknowledged, if not re-paid.”
“You owe me nothing—neither reparations nor kindness.”
“Would you just wait a minute? This is so frustrating. I try… I have tried like hell to make sure I’m not some nasty guy or that I am shallow or callow or any other word that rhymes or is similar to those two. It’s just…” I had a hard time finding the correct words to express what I wanted to. “People often twisted what I wanted to say or just ran full bore over what I was trying to mean. It’s just that this has been hard and confusing.”
For a guy who spent a lot of time thinking about goodness in the world and politics, I was fresh out of ideas about ways to explain what I meant.
“So, I’d like to start over. My name is Schaeffer. I’m from just south of Chicago from, a small city called Harvey, Illinois. It is so good to meet you.”
“Vivian.”
*****
From then on, we were inseparable, Vivian and I. I guess a lot of people thought we were sleeping together in those days and few weeks. I must admit, I was attracted to her beyond consciousness, but it wasn’t like that. Vivian and I hung out together exclusively. We studied together when I was into studying. I told her about the people I wanted to date. She listened intently but never reciprocated, really. In some veiled sense, she talked about a man whom she loved in Belize.
Coming from Vivian, Belize sounded like one of the most exquisite places on the face of the earth. Her parents were Jewish, although she said that she was often mistaken for a shiksa. She didn’t care. She never seemed to care what people said about her. We were at Cross Campus Library towards the end of reading week, just hanging out, talking trash about our various professors. Some dumpy girl came up to Vivian and said, “You and your kind disgust me with your blonde hair, pretending not to be Jewish, pretending to be down with the Black man.”
“Like Hester Prynne,” I interjected, stopping her roll.
The girl just made a loud hissing noise with her hands balled up at her sides, “Yooooouu! Why do you even put up with her? Why does she even put up with you? You two walk around this place and act like you own it.”
Without a beat, Vivian and I said simultaneously, “We do.”
Vivian added, “Get used to it.”
With that, the girl stormed off, headed toward the soft, comfortable oversized chairs down at CCL.
“Now that was the craziest thing I ever did see,” I said in my best Groucho Marx voice.
“That’s what you get for belonging to a club that would have you as a member.”
Our banter was like that, back and forth, scatological at times, and it looked like it was pissing people off. I realized that I felt better than I had felt since Abner was kicked out of school, since I came to Yale. My grades even showed it after those first few exams.
I broached this with Vivian to see if she could shed some light on Abner.
“Remember that guy who was my RA when I got here? I told you about him? Abner.”
“What about him?”
“He got kicked out, but he never told me why he left. Just one day, he was here, counseling the frosh. The next day, he was gone.”
“I hate that…”
“I know, right? It’s truly Orwellian.”
“Not that. I hate terms like ‘frosh.’”
“You just plow into and say the most random-ass stuff sometimes. I’m unloading my heart to you about my so-called friend…”
“And the next minute, I’m peeing on it.”
“Right. Why do you do that? That’s messed up that you do that sometimes. When I first met you, after our Durfee’s encounter, you did it all the time, but I guess I’ve gotten used to it.”
“Well,” she yawned really loudly, having the librarian at the reserve desk turn around from her shelving to give a loud shush towards us. “Sorry. Like that, see. I couldn’t care less about what people thought of me and how they perceived me as being a bitch or some kind of harpy.”
“Harpy. That’s good. They were the ladies with the lutes and lyres and shit, right?”
“No. Those were the Graces.” She sort of rolled her eyes, gesticulating on how I could be such a jerk – at full volume. “The Harpies were ugly bird women that kept evil-doers honest. That’s me. An ugly bird-woman hell-bent on honesty.”
Again, more shushing our way. I actually could see that about Vivian. My own Greek counterpart might be Narcissus or Telemachus. I actually like Telemachus because I need to find out more about myself. Others, like Vivian and Abner, knew more about me than I actually knew about me.
“When you were little, did your mother ever tell you your birth story?
Vivian perked up and seemed intrigued by this line of thought. “They said it was kind of stupid, but I heard differently.”
“You’re right,” I chirped. “Absolutely. In fact, people who can tell their life’s story, especially their birth story, from beginning to end in one seamless, intelligent stream are considered the most mentally stable. On the other hand, people who don’t know their birth story, or even more, can’t tell their birth story without the fits and starts of their own minds’ interruptions; they are the unhealthiest people, mentally.”
“You believe that,” she said, more of a statement than a question, rubbing her top lip back and forth with her right forefinger. Vivian did this when she was listening and engaged.
“I do. That’s what I’ve read and seen in my limited unscientific research.”
“I don’t know my story,” she looked down to see three tennis balls slowly rolling down the CCL aisle towards the electronic gate, one after the other.
“You mean your birth story?”
“Yeah. Or whatever stuff my parents tell me,” she looked sad for a moment, a bit lost. “They were gone a lot.”
“Okay, this is getting pretty “After School Special.” I know, ‘Let’s put on a show.’”
“And you were there, and you were there, and you.”
We erupted into silliness and laughter. That was our M.O. these last few weeks, with the librarian having to come over this time to tell us to be quiet and to stop throwing tennis balls around the library or be gone.
We looked at each other and burst into a machine gun of contagious, uncontrolled laughter, and with that were summarily dismissed from CCL.
*****
The rest of the term proved to be not so much of a laugh riot. I got mostly Cs and one B-. For some reason, colleges don’t do what your high schools do, getting your parents involved in your life, although they pay the big bucks for not a lot of leverage.
I flew back to Chicago’s Midway Airport on the Friday before Christmas, eleven days after John Lennon’s murder. I took a puddle jumper of an airline, which was only the second time in my life I had ever flown, mind you. This dude must have just gotten his license because he was hell-bent on what looked like practicing five different take-offs and landings through West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. Dude knew he was going to pass his test; He didn’t have to convince me, which had me thinking this operation was like flight school training pilots for the bigger airlines. I had never been so scared in my life.
My mother drummed into me that airlines were big and unreliable. No one I knew from Harvey had ever flown Roanoke Air, even though they were not only on time but also some of the smallest planes I had ever seen.
When I finally got to Midway, my entire family showed up, including both grandmothers and two or three uncles. I thought someone had died when I saw them all there with their signs and “Hoorays!” This was definitely not my family, or at least the family I remembered leaving last August. Who had replaced them, I thought?
We all went out to Glady’s for soul food, which meant embarrassingly slimy and strangely textured food that the older folks loved, but my brother, I, and all of the younger generations hated it. My cousin Bryant was there, too. He was a year younger than me, looking very gaunt and jittery.
That first vacation was about sleep. The first two and a half days back, I slept for a whopping 36 hours straight. I pretty much got up to go pee and went back to bed. I trudged through the neighborhoods looking for some of my other friends, some who had gone off to college and others who were working; it was rather odd. It was like we didn’t know what to say to each other now that we were home again.
I wanted to get on the Illinois Central to meet Vivian downtown, but she got whisked away to one of her aunts in Florida while her parents were at a rally in Helsinki. I’m glad that we were poor and didn’t care about those sorts of things.
*****
[Chapter 4 of B.C.Y.: A Novel drops on December 27th, which is serialized at ANEW every other Friday. Spread the word, read from the beginning: Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. Tell a friend. Drink some water. Take your meds. Pet a dog. See you soon.]