Almost Like Being in Love (11 page)

3. Get yourself a study group and don’t include him.

This was far more effective. Two weeks of extra-credit reports, theoretical analyses pulled out of my ass as I went along, and other more traditional brown-nosing tactics all paid off when the Psych 101 professor named me the head of group 3. In addition to Charleen, I chose four other students—the one sitting in front of Clayton, the one sitting to the left of Clayton, the one sitting to the right of Clayton, and the one sitting behind Clayton. Now he was getting pissed.

4. Create an event not to invite him to.

That one fell right into my lap when the Boathouse sponsored a dollar-a-brew talent night for any Harvard kid who thought he had an act. Even though I’d never actually performed in front of live people before (except for the boy who still owned my heart), I pulled out the acoustic guitar anyway, along with a set that—if not exactly calculated to give his testosterone a run for its money—would at least force him to pay attention (I hoped). Charleen and I ran off fifteen hundred fliers and handed them out to every professor and every freshman on campus. Except Clayton. He noticed.

5. Whatever you wear onstage, make it tight.

Try a sprayed-on T-shirt, sprayed-on jeans, Reeboks without socks, and no underpants. “You think it’s too much?” I asked Charleen apprehensively, just before I went on. She glanced down for a long moment.

“That depends,” she finally replied. “What are you selling—circumcisions?”

6. Let him have it.

I’d figured on warming them up with a little Laura Nyro until I saw Clayton’s silhouette leaning against the packed bar. There were maybe two hundred people crammed into the joint, but when I kicked in to “Light My Fire” instead, I was playing to an audience of one. And he knew it.

7. Start reeling him in.

Half an hour later, covered with sweat and holding my trophy, I ran into him staked out by the front door. We were face-to-face.

Together at last. Neither of us said anything, but I swore I wasn’t going to be the one to cave. So he didn’t have much of a choice.

“Not bad,” he grunted. I gave him the once-over like I was trying to figure out where I knew him from. Then I shrugged and said,

“Thanks.” And I left.

‚How come you stopped trying to get into my pants?‛

‚Because it was easier getting into Harvard. And my mom said you
deserved to squirm.‛

‚Your mother hates me.‛

‚Come on, Clay! What did she ever do to make you think that?‛

‚She told me so. There wasn’t any guesswork involved.‛

I knew I was making progress a few days later when he bumped into me in the Co-op and mentioned this tai chi class he was taking. He didn’t actually invite me to it, but it was the way he didn’t invite me that got me to go along with him—and to suspect that maybe he’d arranged the whole encounter. (I was right.) And within a week we were sitting together in the cafeteria and seeing Casablanca at the Brattle Theater and having brief but meaningful conversations over fries and cream sodas at the Tasty.

“You ever been whitewater rafting?” he asked hesitantly 'managing to avoid my eyes while he was doing it—which I loved).

“No.”

“Oh.”

But it was the riot that clinched things.

‚Remember our first time?‛

‚Like I wouldn’t? December 7, 1978. Harvard Yard. You were singing

‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and I had a hard-on.‛

‚I didn’t even know you were there.‛

‚The hell you didn’t.‛

Right around Thanksgiving, San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were shot and killed by a twinked-out homophobe named Dan White. By the time we’d gotten back to Cambridge after the holiday (Charleen and I had done the turkey thing in Aryan Darien(, White’s attorneys were already planning an involuntary manslaughter defense by implying that Milk was just a queer who didn’t rate a murder rap for their client. Now, if it hadn’t been for Travis, I might have slept through news like that the same way I’d slept through most of my life before I’d met him. But he was the one who’d taught me about getting mad and getting even—all you had to say to him was “Anita Bryant” and his ears stayed red for three days. Now it was my turn.

“This is bullshit,” I blurted in the middle of Philosophy 108. “What’s this got to do with what’s happening in San Francisco?” The prof, an old guy in his forties who was used to this kind of thing, stopped dead in his tracks halfway through one of Plato’s tired old dialogues and tried to keep it light.

“As it pertains to Ovid?” he asked with his constipated grin and the usual stick up his ass. I could hear a couple of snickers in the amphitheater, but so what? Let ’em laugh. Right, Trav?

“No, goddammit! Those guys have been dead for two thousand years.

Who have we had since then except Eleanor Roosevelt and John Lennon?

Okay, look—” By now I was really getting up a good head of steam.

“There’s straight people and there’s the rest of us. I’m not asking for a new Bill of Rights, but I want some answers. This is Philosophy, isn’t it?”

From the back of the room, a kid wearing an Indiana T-shirt began to clap slowly, and then a guy on the rowing team stood up.

“He’s right,” he said. “Me and my boyfriend got the shit kicked out of us in Marblehead and all we were doing was linking pinkies on the beach. What’s that all about?”

“Yeah,” said another. “The same thing happened to us in Gloucester.”

“Shut the fuck up and sit down,” said a third. “If you don’t like it, go back to Provincetown where you belong.” And that pretty much did it for Plato and Ovid and the remainder of the toga club. By the end of the class I had a B+ in Philosophy and twenty-three freshmen of every orientation imaginable crowded in a circle around me as though Ann Landers had grown a dick. ice going, McKenna. Now what? So rather than own up to the fact that I was an ordinary fraud with a big mouth, I just pretended to be Travis and said the first thing that popped into my head: Harvey Milk had believed in dignity for everyone, so we were going to honor him with the same kind of respect. We’d celebrate his life with a rock concert in his memory, and we wouldn’t stop singing until Dan White found his sorry ass behind bars for the next 120 years. Craig, dude—where is this coming from? As I watched them tumble out of the room with an energy that hadn’t been there before, I turned to Charleen, mystified.

“Uh—what just happened here?” I asked mildly.

“You’re a troublemaker,” she replied with a smirk. “I knew it!”'P.S. I’d been doing the peripheral thing from force of habit and noticed that Clayton hadn’t taken his eyes off of me for forty-five minutes. But for once I didn’t give a shit. Much.(

Charleen squared everything with Harvard, though it wasn’t easy. After they found out what the concert was about, they didn’t want to give us the Yard between Memorial Church and Widener Library—until Charleen began shooting off her mouth about civil liberties violations and de facto discrimination and wouldn’t it be unfortunate if the Boston Globe got their hands on a story like that? (When Charleen puts her mind to it, she can be a bigger pain in the ass than I can.) Within an hour and a half, she had a permit, a stage, eighteen speakers, four electricians, and the phone number of a hunky little math major she’d met in the elevator.

The night of the concert was practically tropical by Boston standards: 41 degrees and dropping. (Of course, had I known I was going to wind up stripped down to my underpants, I might have been more cautious.

But I didn’t, so I wasn’t.( Thanks to Charleen, who’d blabbed to the Globe anyway, we’d lined up eight solid acts from the student body and two real ones: a first-ever reunion of Buffalo Springfield and the eternally subversive prodding of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. 'Let’s face it. How much consciousness were we really going to raise on Craig McKenna and his magic guitar?) I thought it was kind of fitting that our Harvey Milk tribute was taking place in front of a church—an irony that wasn’t lost on the Archdiocese of Boston either. So in response to their hate mail, we gave them a free ad in our program.

The corps of forty-five hundred cheering Harvard kids sardined into the cozy confines of the Yard represented nearly twice the turnout we’d expected (the prospect of free rock and roll inspires temporary idealism in many)—and by the time Buffalo Springfield had brought down the house with “For What It’s Worth,” word had spread to Kenmore Square, where two thousand future alumni from B.U. were jamming the “T” and heading for Cambridge as well. While Grid Tarbell and His Dunster Funsters were blasting John Mayall’s “Room to Move” into flinders, we were joined by another eight hundred from MIT. And the Boston College contingent showed up at the tail-end of my Dylan set—just in time to see me curl my lip into a sneer, twitch my ass, and direct “I Want You” to a well-muscled Travolta lookalike in the front row. (Subtlety, as ever, has rarely been a compulsory part of my act.)

And that’s when it happened.

I was in the middle of my third bow—the glare of the arc lights silhouetting thousands of my screaming public against the stately old ruins called Harvard—when some hothead from the Student Freedom League chose that moment to take the stage and announce that we needed a human symbol to show that we weren’t going to tolerate the violence any more. The only question was who. Then an obviously horny Travolta shouted it out from down front.

“Dylan! Strip Dylan!”

“Yeah! What about Dylan! This whole thing was his idea anyway.” If I hadn’t been preoccupied with a popped E string, I might have had time to react before it was too late.
Sure, sure, Dylan. Jesus, it’s getting cold. If I
could—DYLAN?
! Horrified, I looked up wildly just in time to see Grid and the Funsters pounce gleefully on top of me—and the next thing I knew, my clothes had been yanked off, I’d been doused with ersatz blood

'disguised as Hunt’s ketchup(, and some schmuck from Accounting 108

had chained me to a pillar in front of Widener Library as the living emblem that we’d had our fill of blind justice. Naturally, I was outraged—the least they could have done was ask first. But I also recognized an easy audience when I saw one, so I added a touch of my own.

“Fuck you, Dan White!” I shrieked, to no one in particular. They went nuts. 'What the hell. I hadn’t canonized Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie for nothing.) The effect was electrifying. Nine thousand people holding lit candles for Harvey Milk crowded around us while Graham Nash sang

“Teach Your Children” to my tattered body. If I hadn’t been freezing to death, my hair would have been standing straight on end.

However, by that time word had also reached Jamaica Plain, where five hundred rednecks had piled into their vehicles, carrying bottles and sticks and anything else they could throw. And it only took them nineteen minutes to reach the Square.

The first Molotov cocktail exploded just as we were chanting “Carry On” with David Crosby and Stephen Stills. Thinking it was probably a practical joke, nobody paid much attention until the fire began spreading across the Yard. Then a brick hit someone in the chest and the real panic started. Stills and Nash grabbed their mikes and begged the crowd to stay calm, but by then it was way too late—kids were bleeding, rocks were flying, and Harvard Yard had turned into Okinawa, Part II.

Meanwhile, I was still chained to a fucking pillar in my blue-and-white striped Jockeys and I couldn’t break free. If it hadn’t been for an uncharacteristically ruffled Charleen muscling her way past two truck drivers and a stevedore, I might still be hanging there.

“Good Lord, what have you gotten yourself into now?” she demanded impatiently, attacking the chains. With my body temperature down to 16

degrees, I was in no mood to be ragged on.

“Get me out of here,” I snapped.

“Where’s the key?”

“
What
key?”

“To the padlock.”

“There’s a
padlock
?!?”

Once she’d worked my hands loose enough to slip me out of the damned thing, I grabbed her wrist and dragged her through the mob toward the Mass Ave gate, just as the first SWAT team showed up. There was only one impediment standing between me and my goal: a large individual with a beer belly and a bullet head who was occupying most of the real estate in the Yard.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Fucking faggot,” he replied, smashing his fist into my face. I cocked my right arm back to return the favor—but since he was at least twice my size, what resulted was a significantly unimpressive jab to his left tit which he probably didn’t even feel when he again attempted to eject my lower jaw onto Holyoke Street. I’d barely had time to topple over backward under the boots of eleven different assailants before I dimly heard an unexpected CRUNCH! and a SOCK! and a POW! and a “Get lost!” in rapid succession. And just as I was losing consciousness, I was pulled to my feet by the strongest pair of arms I’d ever felt in my life.

Even without peripheral vision, I knew they had to be Clayton’s and that nothing was going to hurt me now—so I grinned groggily to myself and then I blacked out.

‚I said no. If you start one more riot, we’re finished.‛

‚Clayton, three hundred people are dead, and Reagan’s head is still up his
ass!‛

‚You’re gonna have to make a choice.‛

‚I hope you don’t mean this.‛

“Ouch.”

When I opened my eyes again, I was lying on his bed in Lionel Hall, wrapped in a blanket and trying to figure out which part of me hurt the least. He’d already checked my arms and legs to make sure nothing was broken, and now he was wiping the blood off my forehead with a rolled-up Purdue T-shirt.
Let’s see. The last thing I remember is
—

“Charleen,” I croaked in a panic, beginning to rise. But Clayton pushed me back down onto a pillow that smelled just like he did.