Wry Martinis (34 page)

The Blue Book was carried everywhere in clammy palms the first two weeks. The number of courses led to a lot of impulse shopping, naturally. Six weeks into Anthropology 43b, Maroon Societies seemed less intriguing than they had at the outset.

Some courses sounded irresistibly exotic: French 91b,
Le roman Africain de langue Frančaise de 1950-1965:
“A critical approach to the novels of Mongo Beti.…” English 29 offered readings in Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Racine, Molière, Goethe, Ibsen, Chekhov, Beckett, Brecht, Vergil, Dante, Cervantes, Joyce: from the
Odyssey
to
Ulysses
. What a long journey that was. I remember my feet propped up on the windowsill in Linonia and Brothers on a wet spring afternoon, magnolia and wisteria blossoms outside in the courtyard, reading Molly Bloom’s last lines, “… he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes”—the feeling of triumph that brought; and the feeling of doom sitting down afterward to begin a ten-pager on “Agenbite of Inwit.”

Skill was needed in choosing a curriculum, and it was only after a few years of practice that one became adept at writing obsequious applications to the vastly oversubscribed Residential College seminars (Dear Mr. Cosell: My fascination with sports broadcasting goes back to the first time I saw you on television.…), or at spotting a good gut.

Guts … no curriculum was well-rounded without a gut or two. It wasn’t until sophomore year that you became really good at spotting one by its description in the Blue Book. There were clues. For instance, the “(o)” next to the course title that meant no exam; the tip-off description, “… intended for students whose interests are not primarily technical …” or, “Enrollment limited to 100 students.” Word of a new gut was passed around as carefully as
samizdat
lest too many find out about it. Some departments offered guts as a way of inflating their budget allocations. For instance, I think there were less than two dozen classics majors each year, but Classical Civilization 32b, Greek and Roman Mythology and the European Tradition, otherwise known as “Gods for Bods,” drew over three hundred, mostly from the ranks of the football team, the hockey team and the
Yale Daily News
. The total enrollment of the Classics Department thus rose greatly, giving the department chairman a reason to petition the administration for more money with which to hire teaching assistants and, presumably, a new professor for The Satires of Juvenal. Thus Yale’s second lesson was learned: Pyrrhonism.
^*

There were pitfalls in choosing a gut. One professor of a course all too famous for being a gut found himself on the first day of classes staring out at hundreds of eager faces. So he announced a twenty-five-book reading list (not counting the
optional
reading), weekly five-page papers, random quizzes, a midterm, final,
and
twenty-page paper. There was a stunned silence, and at the class’s second meeting the number of students attending had dropped to less than ten. The professor kept up the subterfuge for two weeks, until the deadline for course enrollment had passed, and then announced a change in course requirements from the above chamber of horrors to one five-page paper. The true-blue guts of my era were Rocks for Jocks (An Introduction to Geology); Monkeys to Junkies (Darwin and Evolution); TV 101 (Popular Culture); Pots and Pans (American Visual Arts, 1812-1870); Nuts and Sluts (Abnormal Psychology); and Moonlight and Magnolias (The Antebellum South and the Civil War, 1815—1865), this last one taught by the late, great Rolly Osterweiss. The ne plus ultra gut, which set the standard by which all others were judged, was George Schrader’s The Self and Others, Philosophy 49b, described in the Blue Book as an “Exploration of the structure and dynamics of interpersonal relatedness … with particular attention to the writings of R. D. Laing.” One three-page paper on your roommate.

Guts mattered because the Yale of the early seventies was an academic pressure cooker. It may have been hard to flunk out, but it was a lot harder to get to the top, and the job market was at a record low in those days. The first campus-wide controversy I remember, one month into freshman year, wasn’t about Vietnam but rather a plan to cut back on the hours of Sterling Library. There followed such an uproar that it was withdrawn. May Day and the Panther Trial and the strike and the days of Abbie Hoffman were over (thank God), and it was once again important to get into law school, med school or Harvard Biz. A full-page ad taken out by Kodak in the
Yale Daily
read:
Maybe the way to change the world is to join a large corporation
.

All this led to something called
Weenie
-ism, as it was dubbed by a
Yale Daily
columnist. A weenie was identifiable by a bluish skin pallor, a result of overexposure to the fluorescent lighting in the underground Cross Campus Library, thick glasses, pimples, a plastic shirt-pocket guard, a calculator worn on the belt, a shrill, whining lamentation brought on by the loudspeaker announcement that the library would close in fifteen
minutes, and a right arm that automatically jerked upward during classes whenever a question was asked of anyone but him. It was not a pleasant thing to watch them come midterms trekking en masse up Science Hill, reciting aloud their ketone syntheses on the way to Orgo, the Homeric nickname for Organic Chemistry, the premed prerequisite that only the dedicated passed, and that meant the difference between a Park Avenue practice and … oblivion!

This is not to say there were no weenies in the Humanities; quite the contrary Horror stories abounded concerning the likelihood of English and philosophy majors obtaining gainful employment in what was always referred to numinously as Life After Yale. A history teaching assistant mused woefully over coffee once that there were exactly
two
openings for history Ph.D.’s in the country that spring. There were academic skirmishes in the Cross Campus Library: staking out a study carrel before thy neighbor did; hiding Closed Reserve books where no one else could find them. President Brewster, looking more and more like his Doonesbury counterpart, took note and made a speech decrying “Grim Professionalism.” The term quickly entered the Yale consciousness and became a buzz phrase for all that was lowly, bourgeois and mean in human nature. “Grim professional!” replaced “Eat my shorts” as the epithet of choice. The deteriorating situation was not helped when the administration, discovering that something like half of the senior classes were graduating with some kind of honors, decided to toughen up the requirements for cum laude, magna and summa, as well as for departmental honors. The keening of weenies, an unearthly, mournful sound, was heard echoing through the stone courtyards long into the sleepless nights.

There was a girl who studied even while walking between classes; when it rained, she covered her books in large plastic baggies so she could continue despite. When at graduation she was awarded the Warren Prize for the highest scholastic standing and it was announced she had gotten
thirty-six
A’s over the years, she was booed.

At the same commencement, one of the Class Historians said in his address how much things had changed. He told the story of Gertrude Stein at Harvard turning in her exam booklet unused after five minutes to philosophy Professor William James, saying, “It’s too nice a day for taking an exam,” to which James replied, “Ah, I see you understand perfectly the nature of philosophy, Miss Stein.”

“Well,” the Historian continued, “at Yale, during a recent exam, a proctor watched as a student bald-facedly copied off both people sitting next to him and consulted a crib sheet. When it was time to hand in the blue exam booklets, the fellow walked down to the front of the room where the table was already piled high with blue booklets. The proctor confronted him, saying she had seen everything. The fellow looked at her and said, ‘Do you know me?’ ‘No,’ she said, upon which he thrust his blue booklet into the middle of the tall pile of booklets and walked out scot-free.” The Historian concluded his remarks saying that the true spirit of the Yale class of 1976 had been caught by the anonymous scribbler who had written on a stall of the CCL men’s room, “God didn’t create the world in seven days. He fucked off the first six and pulled an all-nighter.”

Mory’s had fired a waiter for trying to organize a union, and Local 217 had thrown up a picket line outside. Mory’s meanwhile had lost its liquor license temporarily over its refusal to admit women. The draft had just ended, the peace in Vietnam that had been at hand finally was—for the time being, and Yale had officially contributed twenty-one dead to the war. The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, looking more and more like his counterpart in Doonesbury, was taking a year off “to assimilate experiences.” Sophomore John Bobusack did seven thousand sit-ups at Payne Whitney to Kostelanetz’s “Light Music of Shostakovich.” Jimmy Carter, Governor of Georgia, spoke at the Political Union, and, according to the
News
, “predicted confidently that the Democrats will capture the White House in ’76.” General William Westmoreland had been prevented from speaking at the Political Union, as had Secretary of State William Rogers, who pulled out when the Yale administration announced it could not guarantee his safety. Drama student Meryl Streep was appearing in
Major Barbara;
undergraduate Sigourney Weaver in
Woman Beware Woman
. The Department of University Health had issued
a warning on the effects of nitrous oxide; Ken Kesey had brought along a tank with him on his visit to Yale, and thanks to a complaisant night watchman at National Compressed Gas in North Haven, who would turn the other way for fifty dollars, laughing gas was very in, despite DUH’s warnings about hypoxia or blowing a hole through the back of your throat. A copy of Thomas More’s
Utopia
was stolen from the vault of the Elizabethan Club. The bursar’s office announced that tuition, room and board for ’73—’74 would probably go to the unheard-of five thousand dollars a year; and it was calculated that every class cut or slept through cost nineteen dollars, a ratiocination that nevertheless did not increase the number of classes attended. Timothy Dwight College announced it would hold an honest-to-God prom that spring. Ann Landers told an audience in SSH 114, apropos of admitting women to Mory’s, “If they don’t want you there, forget it.” Robert Penn Warren retired. Francis Donahue resigned from the
News
after fifty years. George and Harry’s closed after forty-five years. Wes Lockwood, a sophomore member of the Yale Christian Fellowship, a.k.a. the Jesus Freaks, was kidnapped by his parents and subsequently deprogrammed by Ted Patrick, which brought the phenomenon into the pages of
Time
magazine. Several Yale women were raped, ushering in the era of locked gates. The faculty voted to hold exams before Christmas, and an associate professor of theology was charged with having “deviate sexual relations” with a sixteen-year-old boy in a Long Island motel room.

I suppose every generation of undergraduates should have at least one Divinity School scandal. Maybe it’s significant that this one went by virtually unnoticed. Deviate undertakings were scarcely confined to the Div School; they were in fact de rigueur. During spring of sophomore year I participated in my first and only Black Mass—for credit, in a psychology course. We (there were five of us) arranged to hold it in the beautiful little chapel at the base of Harkness Tower. We wrote up a liturgy, complete with a backward Lord’s Prayer, got the right kind of candles, arranged for a female sacrificial victim—she was awfully obliging about it—dry ice, Moog synthesizer, the works. It almost didn’t come off, though, because one of us spilled the dry ice and water all over the chapel carpet and had to borrow a mop from the Branford common room, which at the moment was being used by the Party of the Right
for one of their Homage to Franco or Edmund Burke soirées. They asked what the mop was needed for, and being in a hurry I just explained we were having a Black Mass over at the chapel and had spilled dry ice. They grew quite alarmed at this and were preparing to storm over in their pinstripes on behalf of Organized Religion, but the professor arrived and explained it was all for credit, which seemed to impress them and they went away.

The Tang Cup Competition, for which Timothy Dwight’s best and brightest trained all year long and which involved swallowing eight ounces of beer in less than one second (I think the record was .8 sec.)— I will not go into. But I should mention the Yale Invisible Precision Marching Band, whose halftime shows Woodbridge Hall began censoring after its Salute to Birth Control one game. The alums were apparently unamused when the band assumed the shape of a coathanger and marched from end zone to end zone playing “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.”

Acid use went up precipitously during winters, with some dealers barely able to meet demand, especially when
Fantasia
had its annual showing at the RKO on College Street. The first five rows were usually filled with drug-crazed youth, the rest of the theater with children and their mothers, who were trying to instill in them a love of classical music. Such were the winters of discontent in New Haven.

But the film societies made midwinter bearable. You could go to a movie every night for seventy-five cents and see anything from
Nosferatu
to
A Hundred and One Dalmations. Casablanca
was so much a part of life that the posters didn’t bother to include the name, only the showing time superimposed on a grainy blowup of Rick and Ilsa on the foggy tarmac.
We’ll always have Paris
. A festival of films made by Yalies featured
A Child’s Alphabet with Carnal References to DNA Replication in the Garden of Eden
.

Practically every college had its own film society. Berkeley used to put on all-night festivals showing Marx Brothers and Sherlock Holmes until dawn. Every Wednesday at midnight in Linsly-Chit 101 there was a horror movie, part of the Things That Go Bump in the Night series, presented by Gary Lucas and Bill Moseley. They were very
noires bětes
, these two. Before the showing of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
they presented a skit strongly reminiscent of the
mort par cent coupées
, the method of public execution that disappeared in the twilight of the Ch’ing dynasty, with
V-8 juice splashing all over the same stage where that morning Professor Hartman had lectured on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Those contrasts were everywhere:
L’Incoronazione de Poppea
in the JE dining hall, Daniel Ellsberg next door in the common room. Lucas’s and Moseley’s guerrilla theater of the absurd (they would think me so for putting such a name on it) went on gleefully until they told a reporter for the
Yale Daily News Magazine
that the Bump series audiences were mostly made up of “groyds [Negroes] and fags,” thereby enraging both of those undergraduate groups and making Lucas’s and Moseley’s physical well-being questionable for some time. Moseley called me up at
Esquire
several years later with an idea for an article on cattle mutilations in Colorado. “I’ve become something of an authority on the subject,” he said. I was glad to hear from Bill, even if the article idea didn’t go over so well at the next article idea meeting.