Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle (12 page)

He and I were supposed to be reading about the life of Lao-Tzu and the development of Taoism. Jack was supposed to be writing an essay about the role of slavery in launching the Civil War. Instead, we were listening to the Flying Burrito Brothers' The Gilded Palace of Sin and smoking a joint. I'd never heard anything like the music of Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, and was blown away by the sound. I was stretched out on Chaz's bed, while Andy sat on his with his back against the wall, and Jack sat cross-legged on the floor.

When Andy asked his question, Jack and I looked at one another and laughed. Andy looked at us. "What?" he said.
"We've done it," I said, feeling brave because of my high.
"You guys have girls back home?" asked Andy.
"Nothing steady," Jack said. "Just casual stuff."

Andy nodded approvingly. "Yeah, Linda said I could see other chicks if I want to," he said. "She's really cool like that. We don't tie each other down."

"So, she can see other guys?" I asked him.
Andy shrugged. "Guys. Girls. Whatever she wants."
"She likes girls?" said Jack.

"Who doesn't?" replied Andy, grinning and picking up another beer. "Sometimes she and I do it with other girls, yeah. It's no big deal."

I wanted to ask Andy if he'd ever done it with another guy, but I couldn't. For a boy from a small farm town, he was much more experienced than Jack and I. I was intimidated by what I thought of as his worldliness, so I sipped my beer and concentrated on Lao-Tzu. I was trying to understand the concept of "action through inaction" and was having a difficult time, and not only because the image of Andy, Linda, and another girl refused to leave my mind. I was being asked to think about things beyond my previous experience, and like most first attempts, it was somewhat painful. Even if I hadn't understood my world fully, I had at least not felt awed by it. Now I was being asked to consider points of view that not only had never occurred to me, but which stood in stark contrast to what I'd been taught was true. Andy, apparently determined that if he wasn't going to study, no one was, insisted on continuing the discussion.

"Have you met any girls here you want to hang with?" he asked. Jack shook his head. "I've got too much to think about," he said. "I don't have time."

It was a believable excuse, and one I used myself when Andy asked me the same question. But Andy was not to be put off so easily. "We should get some girls together and really party," he suggested. "You know, get down with some good hash. Maybe mushrooms. You guys ever do mushrooms?"

When we answered in the negative, he promised us that we would all have to do mushrooms, and soon.

"You won't believe the stuff you see," he assured us. "Have you read Castaneda? The Teachings of Don Juan ?" He didn't wait for an answer. "It's fucking powerful, man. It's all about expanding your consciousness. That's what we should be reading, not this bullshit." He closed his philosophy textbook and tossed it onto the floor. "Life isn't in there," he said, pointing at the book, then pointing to his head.

"It's in here. You just have to let it out."

 

All of a sudden he leapt off the bed and jumped on top of me. Ripping the book from my hands, he pushed it aside and rapped on my forehead with his knuckles.

 

"Let it out!" he said. "Come on."

 

I had no idea what he wanted me to do. He was straddling me, looking down into my face and grinning.

He looked like some kind of wildman, all shaggy hair and craziness. He tapped my forehead again, then leaned down and kissed it. Then he was on his feet again and changing the record, which had stopped. It took me a minute before I realized that I had a hard-on. When I did, I was both surprised and frightened. Had Andy brought out that reaction in me? I wondered. Or was it coincidental? I hadn't been conscious of becoming aroused, but the evidence was against me. I looked at him, taking a record from its sleeve and examining it, and the image of him and Linda, naked and rutting, flashed across my vision. Andy's ass was moving up and down as he pumped away at Linda. I quickly willed the thought away. On the floor, Jack was oblivious. He was attempting to roll a joint, and was failing. The pot was falling on the carpet like green snow. Andy, seeing it, sat beside Jack and started to show him how to do it properly while Led Zeppelin emerged from the stereo. I rolled onto my stomach and pressed myself into the quilt on Chaz's bed, picking up my book and trying to focus on the words in front of my face. In that one minute, the comfort I'd felt in Andy's presence evaporated. Helplessly, my body had responded to his, and I felt that I had somehow betrayed Jack. Worse, I realized that I was excited. But why? I had found attraction in men besides Jack, but never had I considered what it would be like to be with them in any real way. Now, closing my eyes, I saw Andy once again, only this time he was pumping himself into me, and not Linda. Meanwhile, he sat beside the boy who had been my lover for more than four years, not two feet away from me, both of them oblivious to my infidelity. I felt sick. My stomach began to rise, and I suddenly needed to be anywhere but in Andy's room. Getting up, I excused myself and left, running toward the bathrooms that were situated in the middle of the hall. I made it into a stall just in time, dropping to my knees and retching. My insides emptied themselves again and again as I relieved myself of the pain knotting my guts. The stale smell of vomit filled my nose, and I threw up some more. Miserable, I flushed the toilet, slumped onto the floor, and began to cry.

It didn't dawn on me—at least not then—that what I was feeling was the pain of outgrowing my old self, of taking those first steps away from the middle rows and toward the front of the classroom. I was cracking from the inside out, sloughing off old ways of thinking and being. The old me was dying, and the new one was trying to birth. That process, though, would take a long time. At that moment, the cool tile of the bathroom beneath my cheek, I only knew that my heart ached.

CHAPTER 12

As September became October, the cool weather of fall arrived, causing the trees to erupt in a riot of red, gold, and orange. Walking to class, my feet kicking at the fallen leaves, I felt that I, too, was experiencing a change of seasons. Ever since the night in Andy's room when he'd playfully tackled me, I had felt uneasy around him. I shied from his touch, fearing it would arouse me again. I avoided being alone with him, and started spending more time in my own room. Jack noticed my reluctance to make nightly visits with him to Andy's room, and asked me why I was reluctant to go.

"I just have a ton of work to do," I told him, gesturing to the mountain of textbooks piled on my desk. It was true that I had a lot of work, far more than I'd ever had in high school. Jack, too, had a heavy load. The difference was that he ignored his. Used to having me write his papers for him, he was unaccustomed to setting deadlines for himself. Assignments meant little to him because he had never before been controlled by their demands. But now, because we were in mostly different classes and because I had more than my own amount of work to complete, he was largely on his own. Still, he didn't worry. My questions about term papers and upcoming test were met with, "I'll worry about it later." But later never seemed to come, and as we entered our sixth week at Penn, the effects of Jack's nightly parties with Andy became apparent. The first indication of trouble was a D on an English test. Having read virtually none of the assigned work, Jack was lucky to do even that well. He fared even more poorly on our first American history exam, receiving an F to my A-. When we compared our results, he fell into a black mood.

"Why didn't you make me study?" he said, as if his failure were my fault.
"I asked you to," I reminded him. "You wanted to go hang out with Andy, remember?"

"Whatever," Jack said, crumpling his test paper up and tossing it into the trash. "History's all lies anyway."

 

"You sound like Chaz," I said, mocking him gently in an attempt to cheer him up.

"Chaz says everything we were taught as kids was made up by the government to make us think they know what they're doing," said Jack. "You should hear some of the stuff he's told me. It would blow your mind."

"Maybe Chaz should take your next history test for you," I commented.
"Why do you hate him and Andy so much?" Jack asked, surprising me with the question. "What do you mean?" I said.

"You hardly go up there anymore. Don't think they haven't noticed. They think you don't like them."

"I like them!" I said. "I just can't hang around up there all the time like you do." "Right," Jack said. "I forgot. You're the smart one. I'm the idiot."
"You're not an idiot," I said. "That's not what I said. I was making a joke."

"It's what you meant," Jack shot back. He picked up his jacket—the letterman one he'd gotten in high school—and walked to the door.

 

"I'm going out for a while. I'll see you later."

He left. Shocked, I looked at the closed door for probably five or six minutes, expecting at any moment that it would open and Jack would come back in. I didn't understand why he'd sounded so angry. A failed test had never been a big deal to him before, so I couldn't imagine that was it. But if not that, then what? Everything had been fine until he'd brought up Andy and Chaz. Was that it? I wondered, my chest tightening. Had he seen or sensed something that night in Andy's room? Did he know what I'd been thinking? He'd never really asked me why I had stopped hanging out with Andy so much. Maybe because he knew. The realization hit me like a punch to the stomach. The last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt Jack. He meant everything to me. He was everything to me. I just wanted us to be happy together.

I waited for over an hour for him to return, trying to read but unable to concentrate. The words on the page kept turning into ants that scurried around in confusing patterns, fleeing from my attempts to make meaning out of them. I read the same paragraph over and over, each time reaching the end without understanding a word of what I'd read. I checked the clock obsessively, thinking that surely hours had passed, but finding that it had been only two or three minutes since the last time I'd looked. Unable to sit still another second, I got up and grabbed my coat from the hook in the closet. Pulling it on, I left the room and the building, heading out into the cold night air to look for Jack. I had no idea where he might be. I had yet to even familiarize myself with the entire campus, so spread out was it that I'd mapped only a small portion. I stood for a moment in the harsh light of a street lamp, trying to make up my mind.

I decided to try the athletic fields. Growing up, Jack had often worked out his frustrations by running, saying that the physical exertion cleared his head. Maybe, I thought, he was resorting to tried-and-true methods of dealing with the anger he'd expressed toward me. Getting my bearings, I walked down the path to the track. It was some distance from the dorm, and by the time I got there, I was quite cold. It was only the 7th of October, but already I could feel frost in the air. I shoved my hands in my pockets and stood at the top of the stairs going down to the track from the crest of the rise on which I was perched. I scanned the area for Jack, but it was deserted. There was no figure moving through the oval of lights, circling around as he tried to run away from the heat inside of him. Disheartened, I turned and walked back the way I had come. As I retraced my steps, I thought about how I would apologize to Jack. I rehearsed the words, choosing them carefully. I played out the conversation in my head several times, until I was sure that it would bring about the desired result, which was the return of peace between Jack and me. I just wanted everything to be the way it had always been.

As I passed Pattee Library, it occurred to me to check inside. Perhaps, I thought, Jack had gone there looking for some quiet. It was unlike him, true, but not out of the realm of possibility. Besides, I told myself, maybe he'd been spurred into action by his poor test result. Maybe, while I'd been worrying and looking for him, he had been safely tucked into a carrel, catching up on his schoolwork. I pushed open the door to the library and went inside. Past the check-out desk, rows of tables set with softly-glowing lamps were positioned before the forests of stacks. Most of the chairs were filled with students hunched over their books, scribbling in notebooks. One or two were asleep, their heads resting on their crossed arms. Again I looked for Jack, but he wasn't there. Suspecting it was fruitless, I nonetheless walked through the stacks, thinking I might come upon him searching for a particular book. I was not surprised to come up empty-handed. Jack's going to a library for refuge was unlikely, but I had no other ideas for where he might have gone.

Unless it was to the most obvious place of all. Feeling ridiculous for not having checked there first, I left Pattee and hurried back to Pinchot Hall. Too impatient to wait for the elevator, I took the stairs. As I climbed to the seventh floor, I again rehearsed what I would say. Probably Jack had told Andy at least something about our fight. If he had, Andy would be even more resentful of me for having avoided him. I wanted to defuse both situations at once, which I planned on doing by pretending nothing had happened. I would just walk in and pick up where we'd left off. I could deal with Jack later, when he'd worked through his initial anger.

In my haste to get to Jack I had hurried, and by the time I reached the seventh floor, I was panting heavily. I walked to Andy's room and paused there, catching my breath. From behind the door I heard the sound of the Zombies singing "Hung Up on a Dream." I also heard muted laughing, two voices, which made me sigh with relief. Andy was not alone, and it was likely Jack he was with.

I opened the door and walked in, a smile on my face and a cheery hello ready on my lips. But I stopped in my tracks when I saw what was going on. Andy was on his back on the bed, naked. Sitting on top of him, her back to me, was a girl I'd never seen before. She had long red hair, which was bouncing against her back as she rode Andy vigorously.

"Hey," I said, unable to stop myself before it came out.

Andy looked up, his eyes dreamy from smoking the joint he still held in his hand. When he saw me, he smiled as if having me show up while he was in the middle of making love was the best thing that had happened to him all day. The girl, too, turned around and looked at me. Her small breasts, the nipples red like her hair, jiggled softly as she continued what she was doing.