The Rules of Attraction (8 page)

“This guy’s O.D.ing,” Raymond said, walking over to the desk, leaving Harry in Donald’s clutches.

“O.D.ing?” she asked, getting up.

Then the doctor on duty came out. He looked like Jack Elam, some old fat guy with thick glasses, mumbling to himself. Donald lay Harry on the floor. “Thank God,” Raymond murmured, in a way that sounded like he was relieved this whole situation was in someone else’s hands and not his. The doctor leaned over to check Harry’s vital signs. I knew the guy was a quack when he didn’t ask any of us anything. None of us said a word. It irritated me that Raymond
and Donald not only made me miss this all-important meeting but also that they were wearing the same long wool jacket I was wearing. I had bought mine first at the Salvation Army store in town for thirty dollars. It was Loden wool. Then the next day the two of them ran down and bought the two remaining, probably donated by someone on the faculty who was going West, to teach in California or somwhere. The doctor grunted and raised Harry’s eyelids. Harry laughed a little, then jerked around and lay still.

“Will you get him into the Emergency room.” Raymond’s face was red. “Hurry. Isn’t there anyone else here?” He looked around, frantic in a practiced way. Like someone who’s worried, but not really, about getting into Palladium or something.

The doctor ignored him. His shock of gray-white hair was unsuccessfully greased back and stiff, and he kept grunting. He checked Harry’s pulse, found nothing, and then unbuttoned Harry’s shirt and placed the stethoscope to his tan, bony chest. We all stood there in the empty hospital. The doctor checked the pulse again and grunted. Harry was moving around a little, a drunken smile on his young Freshman face. The doctor checked for a heartbeat, for any sign. He used the stethoscope again. The doctor finally looked at the three of us and said, “I’m not getting any pulse.”

Donald threw a hand over his mouth and backed into the wall behind him.

“He’s dead?” Raymond asked, disbelieving. “Is this a joke?”

“Oh shit, I can see him moving,” I said, pointing at the rise and fall of his chest. “He’s not dead. I can see him breathing.”

“He’s dead, Paul. Shut up! I knew it. I knew it!” Donald said.

“I’m sorry about this, boys,” the doctor said, shaking his head. “How did this happen?”

“Oh God,” Donald wailed.

“Shut up before I slap you,” I told him.
“Look.
He’s not dead.”

“Boys, I’m not getting a heartbeat or a pulse. The pupils look dilated to me.” The doctor wheezed with the strain of getting up, and pointing at Harry, “That boy’s dead.”

None of us said anything. I looked over at Raymond, who wasn’t looking too worried anymore, and he gave me a glance that said this-quack-is-a-fucking-lunatic-let’s-get-the-hell-out-of-here. Donald was still upset, his back facing us. The nurse was looking over the desk, disinterested.

“I don’t know what to tell you boys,” the doctor said. “But your friend is dead. He’s simply not alive.”

Harry opened his eyes and asked, “I’m not dead am I?”

Donald screamed.

“Yes, you are,” Raymond said. “Shut up.”

The doctor didn’t seem too shocked by Harry’s state and grunted as he knelt down next to Harry and took his pulse again. “I’m telling you, there’s no pulse. This boy is
dead.
” He was saying this even thogh Harry’s eyes were open, blinking. The doctor used his stethoscope once more. “I’m not getting anything.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Uh, listen. Doctor. I think we’re going to take our friend home, okay?” I approached him cautiously. I knew we were in Hospital Hell or somewhere similar. “Is that, like, okay, with you?”

“Am I dead?” Harry asked, suddenly looking better, cracking up.

“Tell him to shut up!” Donald screamed.

“I’m pretty sure your friend is dead,” the doctor grunted, a little confused. “Maybe you want me to run some tests.”

“No!” Raymond and I said at the same time. We stood there watching the supposedly dead Freshman, Harry, laugh. We said nothing. Even though Dr. Phibes kept insisting he wanted to run some tests on “your friend’s corpse,” we finally took the Freshman home, but Donald wouldn’t sit in the backseat with him. It was almost eight-thirty by the time we got back to campus. I had blown it.

SEAN
Today, I hang out, ride my motorcycle into town, walk around, buy a couple of tapes, then come back to Booth and watch
Planet of the Apes
on Getch’s VCR. I love the scene where an ape bullet has made Charlton Heston mute. He escapes and frantically runs around Ape City and as the net closes over his head he is raised triumphantly by The Gorillas and he finds his voice and screams, “Get your stinkin’ hands off me you damn dirty apes!” I’ve always liked that scene. It reminds me of nightmares I had in elementary school or something. Then, when I’m about to take a shower, I find the Duke of Disease (gross grad of 78 or 79) doing his friggin laundry in my bathroom. And he doesn’t even go to school here. Just visiting an old teacher. I have to run after the asshole with a can of Lysol. I get another note in my box after dinner tonight. They don’t say anything really except, like, “I love you” or “You’re Sexy,” stuff like that. I used to think they were jokes that Tony or Getch were putting in my box, but there’s been too many of them to take as a joke. Someone is
seriously
interested in me. My interest has
definitely
been aroused.

Then it’s back in Booth after dinner watching TV in Getch’s room and some tall greasy-haired hippie turned professional-college-student-type named Dan, who had been fucking Candice last term, is there talking to Tony. Anyway, it’s about eight-thirty and the room is cold and I feel feverish. Tony and this guy get into a heated argument about politics or something. It’s frightening. Tony, in a pre-drunken state, is pissed off that his point was lost, and Dan, smelling like some twenty-year-old unwashed rug, keeps referring to leftist writers and calling the N.Y.C. police force “Nazis.” I tell him that I was once beaten up by the city police. He smiles and says, “Here’s a case in point.” I was joking. I feel weird, my body aches. I watch people argue about Nazis. I enjoy it. Saturdays suck.

Now, I’m at the party and I can’t find Candice, so I hang around, by the keg, talk to the DJ. Go to the bathroom but some asshole has thrown up all over the floor and I’m about
to leave when I bump into Paul Denton, who’s walking down the hallway, and I vaguely remember talking to him last night, and I nod to him as I’m walking away from the vomit-covered toilet, but he walks up to me and says, “Oh, I’m so sorry about tonight.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“Did you stay?” he asks me.

“Stay? Yeah,” I say. Whatever. “I stayed.”

“God, I’m really sorry,” he says.

“Listen, it’s okay. It really is,” I tell him.

“I’ve got to make it up to you,” he’s telling me.

“Okay. Sure,” I say. “I’ve gotta take a leak, okay?”

“Oh sure. I’ll wait,” he smiles.

After pissing off the vomit from the toilet seat I head back down the hall and Denton’s still standing there with a fresh beer for me. I thank him, what else can I do, and we walk back to the living room where these asshole frat guys from Dartmouth have crashed the party. I have no idea how the fuck they got onto campus. Security must have let them in as a joke. So these stupid rich frat guys all dressed up in Brooks Brothers come up to me while I’m waiting for Denton to get another beer and one of them asks me, “What’s going on?”

“Not much,” I tell him. It’s the truth.

“Where’s that Dressed To Get Screwed party?” one of them asks.

“That’s not until later,” I tell him.

“Tonight?” the same one asks.

“Next term,” I lie.

“Oh shit man. We thought
this
was The Dressed To Get Screwed party,” they say, really disappointed.

“It looks like a Halloween party if you ask me,” one of them says.

“Freaks,” one of them says, looking around, shaking his head. “Freaks.”

“Sorry, guys,” I say.

Denton comes back with a beer and hands it to me and we all talk. They get really excited when the D.J. spins old
Sam Cooke and one of them grabs a not-bad-looking Freshman and dances with her when “Twisting the Night Away” comes on. It makes me sick. The remaining Dartmouth jerks do a little frat handshake. They’re all wearing green for some reason. Denton’s looking at them closely and asks, “Aren’t you all a little far away?”

“It’s not that far a ride,” one of them says.

Then Denton asks, “Well, what’s it like on the outside?”

It’s pretty weak that Denton’s even acknowledging these jerks but I don’t say anything.

“It’s cool,” one of them says, eyeing some ugly girl. Our student body president.

“You guys are really in the middle of nowhere,” one of the more brilliant ones says.

Denton laughs and says, “Kind of.”

“Hanover’s a real sprawling metropolis,” I mutter loudly.

“I swear this looks like a fuckin’ Halloween party,” one of them says again and they’re pissing me off and okay, maybe it does look like one but it doesn’t give these assholes any right, so I have to tell them, “No, it’s not a Halloween party. It’s the Get Fucked party.”

“Oh yeah?” They all raise their eyes up and nudge each other. “We’re ready.”

“Yeah. Bend over and get fucked,” I find myself saying.

They look at me like I’m crazy and walk off telling me how “perverted” I am. I don’t even know why I bothered to say that. I look over at Denton and he’s laughing, but when he sees that I’m not, he stops. It gets late and Candice is nowhere to be found and the keg runs out. Denton says why don’t we go to his room since he has beer there. And I’m a little wasted so I say why not. I make sure I bring the pot I picked up earlier this afternoon when I was at Roxanne’s scoring for some Freshman girls in McCullough. We leave the party and head for Welling.

PAUL
After we returned from our little excursion to the hospital, I went back to my room and wondered what I should do. I first called Casa Miguel and had Sean paged. He wasn’t there. He had already left. I sat on my bed and smoked a couple of cigarettes. I then went to The Pub, cautiously at first. I didn’t look around the room until I had made my way to the bar. Harry was already there, recovered, getting even more smashed by the jukebox with David Van Pelt. I got a beer, but didn’t drink it, then followed some people over to Booth (it was getting too cold for parties at End of the World) to confront Sean. It was a party, after all.

The party was in full-swing when I got there. Raymond was standing around but I didn’t want to talk to him. He came over anyway and asked if I wanted a drink.

“Yeah.” I craned my neck to look over the dance floor.

“What do you want? I know the bartender.”

“Rum and anything.”

He walked off and then I spotted Sean. From where I stood in the darkened living room of Booth I could see him in the light coming from the bathroom down the hallway. He was standing in the doorway and had a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other and he was trying to kick something off his boot. He saw me for an instant and then shyly turned away. I was feeling guilty about our meeting last night—telling him I had failed three classes last term. I only told him that because I thought he was great-looking and I wanted to sleep with him. I hadn’t failed any classes that term. (Sean later admitted to me that he had failed all four. In fact, I couldn’t imagine anyone failing not only four classes at Camden, but even one. I guess the thought seemed so irrational to me that I found him even more attractive in some perverse way.) He had been coming on to me the night before, there was no doubt about that and that’s all that really mattered. From where I stood he looked a little like a rock star caught unknowingly in a video. Maybe a little like Bryan Adams (without the acne scars, though,
sometimes, admittedly, that can be sexy). I went over to him and told him how sorry I was.

“Yeah,” he said, looking modestly at the ground, still trying to kick something off his boots. I wondered suddenly if he was Catholic. My spirits rose: Catholic boys will usually do anything. “I’m sorry too.”

“Did you stay there?” I asked him.

“Stay there? Yeah, I guess,” he admitted, embarrassed, confused. “I stayed.”

“I’m really, really sorry,” I said.

“Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s okay. Some other time,” he said.

I felt so shitty about ruining his date that a rush of sympathy (or horniness: the two were interchangeable) went through me and I said, “I’ll make it up to you.”

“You don’t have to,” he said, though you could tell he had not wanted to say that.

“I know I don’t, but I want to. I really insist.”

He looked down and said he had to use the restroom and I said I’d wait.

I wondered if we were going to sleep together tonight, but then I tried to push the thought away and pretended to be rational about the whole thing. In the meantime, four gorgeous Dartmouth guys came into the party. When I went back to the keg to get another beer for Sean (if nothing else, I was going to succeed in getting him drunk) they all walked over to him and started a conversation. Jealously I hurried back. When I handed him the beer, almost protectively, the one that was the best-looking went off dancing with the student body president (“The Vagina Lady,” Raymond always seemed to call her). The Dartmouth boys thought that this was the annual Dressed To Get Screwed party and they were quite disappointed that they had driven all the way from Hanover to come to the Camden Early Halloween Ball. They said this sarcastically and I thought it was a little mean. But I asked them, flirtatiously, “Aren’t you all a little far away?”

“It’s really not all that far away, I guess,” the blond said.

“So, what’s going on in the real world?” I asked, laughing.

“It’s cool,” the one with a slight double-chin said.

“The same stuff,” another one said.

“You guys are kind of in the middle of nowhere, aren’t you?” the blond asked. They were all looking at the dance floor, nodding their heads.

“Kind of,” I said.