Hearts In Atlantis (39 page)

Nate's worst failing, as far as Skip and I were concerned, was the collection of record albums he kept carefully shelved in alphabetical order below Cindy and Rinty and just above his nifty little RCA Swingline phonograph. He had three Mitch Miller records (
Sing Along with Mitch, More Sing Along with Mitch, Mitch and the Gang Sing John Henry and Other American Folk
Favorites
),
Meet Trini Lopez
, a Dean Martin LP (
Dino Swings Vegas!
), a Gerry and the Pacemakers LP, the first Dave Clark Five album—perhaps the noisiest bad rock record ever made—and many others of the same ilk. I can't remember them all. It's probably a good thing.

“Nate, no,” Skip said one evening. “Oh please, no.” This was shortly before the onset of Hearts mania—perhaps only days.

“Oh please no what?” Nate asked without looking up from what he was doing at his desk. He seemed to spend all his waking hours either in class or at that desk. Sometimes I would catch him picking his nose and surreptitiously wiping the gleanings (after careful and thorough inspections) under the middle drawer. It was his only vice . . . if you excepted his horrible taste in music, that was.

Skip had been inspecting Nate's albums, something he did with absolutely no self-consciousness in every kid's room he visited. Now he was holding one up. He had the look of a doctor studying a bad X-ray . . . one that shows a juicy (and almost certainly malignant) tumor. He was standing between Nate's bed and mine, wearing his high-school letter jacket and a Dexter High School baseball cap. Never in college and rarely since have I met a man I thought so American Pie handsome as the Captain. Skip seemed unaware of his good looks, but he couldn't have been, not entirely, or he wouldn't have gotten laid as often as he did. It was a time when almost
anybody
could get laid, of course, but even by the standards of the time Skip was busy. None of that had started in the fall of '66, though; in the fall of '66 Skip's heart, like mine, would belong to Hearts.

“This is bad, little buddy,” Skip said in a gentle, chiding voice. “Sorry, but this
bites
.”

I was sitting at my own desk, smoking a Pall Mall and looking for my meal ticket. I was always losing the fucking thing.

“What bites? Why are you looking at my records?” Nate's botany text was open in front of him. He was drawing a leaf on a piece of graph paper. His blue freshman beanie was cocked back on his head. Nate Hoppenstand was, I believe, the only member of the freshman class who actually wore that stupid blue dishrag until Maine's hapless football team finally scored a touchdown . . . a week or so before Thanksgiving, that was.

Skip went on studying the record album. “This sucks the rigid cock of Satan. It really does.”

“I hate it when you talk that way!” Nate exclaimed, but still too stubborn to actually look up. Skip
knew
Nate hated him to talk that way, which was why he did it. “What are you talking
about
, anyway?”

“I'm sorry my language offends you, but I don't withdraw the comment. I can't. 'Cause this is bad. It hurts me, little buddy. It fuckin
hurts
me.”

“
What?
” Nate finally looked up, irritated away from his leaf, which was marked as carefully as a map in a Rand McNally road atlas. “
WHAT?
”

“This.”

On the album cover Skip was holding, a girl with a perky face and perky little breasts poking out the front of a middy blouse appeared to be dancing on the deck of a PT boat. One hand was raised, palm out, in a perky little wave. Cocked on her head was a perky little sailor's hat.

“I bet you're the only college student in America that brought
Diane Renay Sings Navy Blue
to school with him,” Skip said. “It's wrong, Nate. This belongs back in your attic, along with the wiener pants I bet you wore to all the high-school pep rallies and church socials.”

If wiener pants meant polyester Sansabelt slacks with that weird and purposeless little buckle in the back, I suspected Nate had brought most of his collection with him . . . was, in fact, wearing a pair at that very moment. I said nothing, though. I picked up a framed picture of my own girlfriend and spied my meal ticket behind it. I grabbed it and stuffed it in the pocket of my Levi's.

“That's a good record,” Nate said with dignity. “That's a very good record. It . . . 
swings
.”

“Swings, does it?” Skip asked, tossing it back onto Nate's bed. (He refused to reshelve Nate's records because he knew it drove Nate bugfuck.) “ ‘My steady boy said ship ahoy and joined the Nay-yay-vee'? If that fits your definition of good, remind me never to let you give me a fuckin physical.”

“I'm going to be a dentist, not a doctor,” Nate said, clipping off each word. Cords were beginning to stand out on his neck. So far as I know, Skip Kirk was the only person in Chamberlain Hall, maybe on the whole campus, who could get under my roomie's thick Yankee skin. “I'm in pre-dent, do you know what the dent in pre-dent means? It means
teeth
, Skip! It means—”

“Remind me to never let you fill one of my fuckin cavities.”

“Why do you have to say that all the time?”

“What?” Skip asked, knowing but wanting Nate
to say it. Nate eventually would, and his face always turned bright red when he finally did. This fascinated Skip. Everything about Nate fascinated Skip; the Captain once told me he was pretty sure Nate was an alien, beamed down from the planet Good Boy.

“Fuck,” Nate Hoppenstand said, and immediately his cheeks became rosy. In a few moments he looked like a Dickens character, some earnest young man sketched by Boz. “
That
.”

“I had bad role models,” Skip said. “I dread to think about your future, Nate. What if Paul Anka makes a fuckin comeback?”

“You've never heard this record,” Nate said, snatching up
Diane Renay Sings Navy Blue
from the bed and putting it back between Mitch Miller and
Stella Stevens Is in Love!

“Never fuckin want to, either,” Skip said. “Come on, Pete, let's eat. I'm fuckin starving.”

I picked up my geology text—there was a quiz coming up the following Tuesday. Skip took it out of my hand and slung it back onto the desk, knocking over the picture of my girlfriend, who wouldn't fuck but who would give a slow, excruciatingly pleasant handjob when she was in the mood. Nobody gives a handjob like a Catholic girl. I've changed my mind about a lot of things in the course of my life, but never about that.

“What did you do that for?” I asked.

“You don't read at the fuckin table,” he said. “Not even when you're eating Commons slop. What kind of barn were you born in?”

“Actually, Skip, I was born into a family where people
do
read at the table. I know it's hard for you to
believe there could be any way of doing things except for the Kirk way of doing them, but there is.”

He looked unexpectedly grave. He took me by the forearms, looked into my eyes, and said, “At least don't study when you eat. Okay?”

“Okay.” Mentally reserving the right to study whenever I fucking well pleased, or felt I needed to.

“Get into all that ram-drive behavior and you'll get ulcers. Ulcers are what killed my old man. He just couldn't stop ramming and driving.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Don't worry, it was a long time ago. Now come on. Before all the fucking tuna surprise is gone. Coming, Natebo?”

“I have to finish this leaf.”

“Fuck the leaf.”

If anyone else had said this to him, Nate would have looked at him as at something uncovered beneath a rotted log, and turned silently back to his work. In this case, Nate considered for a moment, then got up and took his jacket carefully off the back of the door, where he always hung it. He put it on. He adjusted the beanie on his head. Not even Skip dared to say much about Nate's stubborn refusal to stop wearing his freshman beanie. (When I asked Skip where his own had disappeared to—this was our third day at UM, and the day after I met him—he said, “Wiped my ass with it and threw the fucker up a tree.” This was probably not the truth, but I never completely ruled it out, either.)

We clattered down the three flights of stairs and went out into the mild October dusk. From all three dorms students were headed toward Holyoke Commons, where I worked nine meals a week. I was a dishline
boy, recently promoted from silverware boy; if I kept my nose clean, I'd be a stackboy before the Thanksgiving break. Chamberlain, King, and Franklin Halls were on high ground. So was the Palace on the Plains. To reach it, students took asphalt paths that dipped into a hollow like a long trough, then joined into one broad brick way and climbed again. Holyoke was the biggest of the four buildings, shining in the gloom like a cruise-ship on the ocean.

The dip where the asphalt paths met was known as Bennett's Run—if I ever knew why I have long since forgotten. Boys from King and Chamberlain came along two of these paths, girls from Franklin along the other. Where the paths joined, boys and girls did likewise, talking and laughing and exchanging looks both frank and shy. From there they moved together up the wide brick path known as Bennett's Walk to the Commons building.

Coming the other way, cutting back through the crowd with his head down and the usual closed-off expression on his pale, harsh face, was Stokely Jones III. He was tall, but you hardly realized it because he was always hunched over his crutches. His hair, a perfect glossy black with not so much as a single observable strand of anything lighter, spilled over his forehead in spikes, hid his ears, inked a few stray strands diagonally across his pale cheeks.

This was the heyday of the Beatle haircut, which for most boys consisted of no more than combing carefully down instead of carefully up, thus hiding the forehead (and a good crop of pimples, more often than not). Stoke Jones was capped off by nothing so prissy. His medium-length hair just went where it
wanted to. His back was hunched in a way that would soon be permanent, if it wasn't already. His eyes were usually cast down, seeming to trace the arcs of his crutches. If those eyes happened to rise and meet your own, you were apt to be startled by their wild intelligence. He was a New England Heathcliff, only wasted away to a bare scrawn from the hips down. His legs, which were usually encased in huge metal braces when he went to class, could move, but only feebly, like the tentacles of a dying squid. His upper body was brawny by comparison. The combination was bizarre. Stoke Jones was a Charles Atlas ad in which
BEFORE
and
AFTER
had somehow been melted into the same body. He ate every meal as soon as Holyoke opened, and even three weeks into our first semester we all knew he did it not because he was one of the handicaps but because he wanted, like Greta Garbo, to be alone.

“Fuck him,” Ronnie Malenfant said while we were on our way to breakfast one day—he'd just said hello to Jones and Jones had simply crutched his way past without even a nod. He'd been muttering under his breath, though; we all heard it. “Crippled-up hopping asshole.” That was Ronnie, always sympathetic. I guess it was growing up amid the puke-in-the-corner beerjoints on lower Lisbon Street in Lewiston that gave him his grace and charm and
joie de vivre
.

“Stoke, what's up?” Skip asked on this particular evening as Jones plunged toward us on his crutches. Stoke went everywhere at that same controlled plunge, always with his Bluto Blutarsky upper half leaning forward so that he looked like a ship's figurehead, Stoke continually saying fuck you to whatever
it was that had creamed his lower half, Stoke continually giving it the finger, Stoke looking at you with his smart wild eyes and saying fuck you too, stick it up your ass, sit on it and spin, eat me raw through a Flavr Straw.

He didn't respond but did raise his head for a moment and locked eyes with Skip. Then he dropped his chin and hurried on past us. Sweat was running out of his crazed hair and down the sides of his face. Under his breath he was muttering “Rip-
rip
, rip-
rip
, rip-
rip
,” as if keeping time . . . or articulating what he'd like to do to the whole walking bunch of us . . . or maybe both. You could smell him: the sour acrid tang of sweat, there was always that because he wouldn't go slow, it seemed to
offend
him to go slow, but there was something else, too. The sweat was pungent but not offensive. The undersmell was a lot less pleasant. I ran track in high school (forced as a college freshman to choose between Pall Malls and the four-forty, I chose the coffin-nails) and had smelled that particular combination before, usually when some kid with the flu or the grippe or a strep throat forced himself to run anyway. The only smell like it is an electric-train transformer that's been run too hard for too long.

Then he was past us. Stoke Jones, soon to be dubbed Rip-Rip by Ronnie Malenfant, free of his huge leg-braces for the evening and on his way back to the dorm.

“Hey, what's that?” Nate asked. He had stopped and was looking over his shoulder. Skip and I also stopped and looked back. I started to ask Nate what he meant, then saw. Jones was wearing a jeans jacket.
On the back of it, drawn in what looked like black Magic Marker and just visible in the declining light of that early autumn evening, was a shape in a circle.

“Dunno,” Skip said. “It looks like a sparrow-track.”

The boy on the crutches merged into the crowds on their way to another Commons dinner on another Thursday night in another October. Most of the boys were clean-shaven; most of the girls wore skirts and Ship 'n' Shore blouses with Peter Pan collars. The moon was rising almost full, casting orange light on them. The full-blown Age of Freaks was still two years away, and none of the three of us realized we had seen the peace sign for the first time.