Though it seems that weeks of unceasing drizzle would have washed it clean, the concrete awning in front of A Dorm retains a malodorous mix of cigarettes, pot, sweat, and mold. My scholastic responsibilities for the week complete, I’m waiting for Janie and Meg, a friend from her coordinated studies program, who is going to drive us to Vancouver for the weekend. Meg’s boyfriend lives near the University of British Columbia in a large group house that apparently has room for Janie and me to crash for a night, or nights. I’m not sure whether we will be returning tomorrow or the next day, but I don’t care. Travel usually makes me anxious, turning my stomach into a garrulous, complaining demon, but I’m looking forward to a day off or two. I can’t entirely avoid schoolwork though, so I’m bringing the book we’ll begin discussing on Monday—Country Music, USA, by Bill C. Malone—as well as my guitar and a Gershwin songbook I’ve been using to work out chords to some jazz standards. But I’m ready for an adventure, my first trip to a foreign country.
When I ran into Janie outside the CAB yesterday, she asked if I wanted to tag along on the weekend getaway. The pace of her coordinated studies program, The Individual in Contemporary Society, has been more intense than she had imagined, and she’s craving a break. She missed Stokely Carmichael’s speech Sunday night after spending the morning at a three-hour lecture on “Team Building and Systems Analysis” and the afternoon at an elementary school near Aberdeen, where her “team” was studying rural education. The speech and the ensuing ruckus had been the talk of Red Square all week and she told me she was initially sorry to have missed it. But after a week of tendentious arguments breaking out with no warning in random corners of the campus, culminating with the fevered denunciations of Carmichael and defensive statements from his supporters that dominated the school paper yesterday, we were both ready for calm and the anonymity bestowed by a strange city.
A beat-up, light-blue Volkswagen Bug decorated with sunflower stickers pulls into the drive and Janie rolls down the passenger-side window, greeting me with a drowsy smile. I heave my backpack into the rear seat and pull my guitar in on top of me. There are two suitcases piled behind the driver’s seat, leaving little room for me and my guitar, but nothing is said about putting anything in the trunk.
“Lucas, this is Meg.”
“Hi.”
“Hey.”
“Thanks for letting me tag along. I haven’t been anywhere in weeks.”
“Not even into town?”
“Not since the first couple days of school. We had a retreat at this old fort on the Olympic peninsula last weekend, but it almost felt like an extension of campus.”
“You’ll like Vancouver. I don’t know what the weather forecast is for the weekend, but it’s often sunnier than here. Perfect for sun-deprived Californians.”
“Sounds great.”
“Do you have your ID?” Janie asks. “Driver’s license? They’ll ask at the border.”
“Ah, I didn’t think about that, but yeah, it’s in my wallet.”
“And you’ll need it if you want to drink, which will be our first stop after the border,” Meg says. “Oh wait, how old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“Me too,” Janie says.
“Bummer, I didn’t think about that,” Meg says. “The drinking age in BC is nineteen. But that’s OK. We’ll pick up some beer and take it back to the house. We’re meeting Tommy at a bar near the university after his field hockey practice, but we can find someplace nearby to grab some chow.”
As we pull onto Driftwood Road, the main connector between the dorms and the Evergreen Parkway, conversation ceases. Besides the brief conversation that resulted in my inclusion on this trip, I haven’t talked to Janie since our arrival three weeks ago, but after our initial niceties she seems unsure how to bridge the difference between her relationship with me, a pre-Evergreen friend, and Meg, who looks to be a few years older and has a somewhat forbidding nature—not unfriendly, just matter of fact, stolid. She’s pretty, with mahogany-brown eyes and a pert nose, but her hair is short and severely cut, and her greeting lacked a smile.
“Hey, isn’t that Bernie?” Meg says, as we reach the turn for the Parkway, pointing to a scruffy guy across the road with an olive-green rucksack on his back and his thumb in the air. “Should we offer him a ride?”
“Where’s he going to sit?” I ask, confused about Meg’s generosity when there’s barely enough room for me on the backseat. She ignores my question and pulls across the parkway, stopping next to the vagabond.
Janie rolls down her window and Meg leans across her, saying, “What’s the good word, brother?”
“Hey, chickie-poo.”
“Where you headed?”
“Portland, you?”
Relief that I won’t be sardined with the potentially pungent stranger all the way to Vancouver relaxes the shoulder muscles that clenched with Meg’s offer.
“North. Off to tickle the main squeeze in Vancouver and show these Northwest newbies a Canadian good time,” Meg says. “Sorry we can’t help you out.”
“It doesn’t look like you have room for me anyway,” Bernie says, nodding to me, and I’m pleased that the disheveled nomad standing serenely in the rain has more spatial awareness than my companions.
“We could give you a ride to the freeway,” Meg persists. “That would get you a little farther along.”
“Thanks, but I’ll have better luck here. There’ll be plenty of folks headed out of town for the weekend. And this way I’m more likely to get a ride with a ’greener. At the highway, I’d just wind up in the back of some redneck townie’s pickup or something.”
“Suit yourself,” Meg says, sounding disappointed.
“Good luck,” Janie says to Bernie as we pull away.
I refrain from asking Meg where the hell she thought Bernie was going to sit, but instead ask, “Do people really hitchhike in the rain like that? If he’s going to Portland, couldn’t he take the shuttle into town and then catch the Greyhound?”
Meg gives me a dismissive look, but says nothing.
“Hitchhiking is pretty common around here, I think. Right, Meg?” Janie says. “But, yeah, it would make sense to take the bus if you’re going all the way to Portland.”
“People hitchhike all the time,” Meg says. “I avoid it, too many creeps around, but the guys don’t need to worry so much. It’s usually easy to get a ride. When the weather is good, I’ll sometimes hitchhike into town to save money on gas. Most of the local jokers with pickup trucks will let you jump in the back for a few miles. That way you don’t have to talk to them, and they can’t get their hands on you. It’s better if you’re hitching with someone, of course, the buddy system, you know. You’re less likely to get a groper, or worse.”
We drive in silence for a while down one of the rural roads between Evergreen and the Westside. I’m content to gaze at the lush greenery passing by outside the VW’s smudged rear window. Evergreen is truly “out in the country.” Old two-story farmhouses appear at irregular intervals, most of them set back from the main road down long gravel-and-mud driveways. Some look as if they’ve been standing for half a century or more, partnered with weather-beaten, moss-covered barns that appear not to have served any agricultural function for a generation. A few extended yards host impressive gardens that rival those at the Organic Farm. In the side yard of one sizable, multi-story house with a wrap-around porch, a large teepee has been erected. I’m about to remark on this cultural anomaly—“Didn’t the Plains Indians live a thousand miles from here?” “Wouldn’t Northwest natives have had living structures more suited to the local climate?”—when Meg reaches to the eight-track tape player in the middle of the dashboard and engages the cartridge protruding from its jaws. The staccato trumpets that herald Jimmy Cliff’s “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” the leadoff song from the soundtrack to The Harder they Come, burst abruptly into the air. Although Meg’s Bug is not new and doesn’t appear to be in great shape, it has a decent stereo system, and the music makes conversation superfluous for a while.
Meg appears to have mainstream musical tastes, and I’m glad that the Carly Simon, America, and Jim Croce tapes strewn at my feet are beyond her reach. We enter downtown Olympia after ten minutes or so, passing the Spar diner where Janie and I had eaten a few weeks ago, and after Jimmy Cliff sings “Many Rivers to Cross,” Meg pulls out the tape and reaches for another at her feet. The sounds of Elton John’s New Orleans–style piano intro to “Honky Cat” announce a change of scenery as we pull onto northbound I-5. But once again we are allowed only a truncated version of the album. The soaring slide guitar at the end of “Rocket Man” seems to remind Meg of something and she removes Honky Chateau from the eight-track, replacing it immediately with David Bowie’s Hunky Dory. We pass an exit for someplace called Puyallup and Meg starts singing along. Janie and I join in on the chorus exuberantly: “Ch-ch-ch-changes . . .”
The singalong, with Janie and Meg bopping playfully in their seats, finally breaks the ice, and Janie turns to me and says, “Didn’t you say you saw Bowie last year?”
“Last spring, yeah, the Spiders from Mars tour.”
“He was in Seattle a year ago,” Meg says, “but I couldn’t afford a ticket.”
“Too bad,” I say. “I’m not a big Bowie fan, but a guy I know was working for the promoter and snuck me in backstage. The show was great. His band was on fire, especially his guitarist, Mick Ronson.”
“You were backstage at a Bowie show?” Meg says, her eyes lighting up, seemingly impressed. “What was that like?”
“I wish I could tell you. I didn’t have a backstage pass or even a ticket stub, so I scooted through the backstage area and out into the arena before any security guards or uptight roadies noticed me.”
“Emily passed on that one, I assume,” Janie says.
“Yeah, she doesn’t like big rock shows.”
“Who’s Emily? Your girlfriend?” Meg asks.
“Sort of. A friend . . . a girl, er, woman . . . someone I went to a lot of concerts with. Someone I go to a lot of concerts with.” Why am I getting defensive?
Meg looks at Janie, raising her eyebrows.
“Have you heard from her lately?” Janie asks.
“No, but it’s only been a few weeks. I’ve written her a couple of times, but no response yet. I don’t really expect anything, you know. I’m sure she’s busy.”
“She wrote me,” Janie says. “I got a letter from her last week.”
“What?” I say, unable to hide my surprise and consternation. “I didn’t realize you were that close.”
“We’re not. I was as surprised as you. I figured she’d written you, too. She asked about the bus ride, wanted to know how it went, spending twenty-four hours with you—spending the night with you.” She laughs.
“Yeah, right. Real funny.”
“This is getting interesting,” Meg says. “I didn’t know you guys were shacking up. That’s good, though, because there’s probably only one extra bed at Tommy’s house.”
“We’re not shacking up,” I say, trying to disguise my irritation. I know they’re just teasing me, but I don’t like it.
“We’ll manage,” Janie says cryptically, and I decide not to respond, hoping the conversation takes a different turn.
The uncomfortable silence is filled with Bowie’s acoustic guitar and fey, winking voice, accompanied by the music-hall strings of “Kooks” and its strangely apposite lyrics: “Will you stay in our lovers’ story / If you stay, you won’t be sorry.”
I can’t tell if Meg or Janie are tracking the lyrics, and I’m tempted to ask Meg to play the Jim Croce tape at my feet instead, but Janie notices that we’re passing the first exit for Seattle.
“How far is the border?” she asks.
“Another couple of hours.”
“Are we stopping anywhere beforehand?”
“Hadn’t planned on it. You hungry? We’ll get better food in Vancouver. You do know I want to get there in time to meet Tommy for dinner, right?”
“Yeah, I just thought . . .”
“Oh, what? You have to pee? Not a problem. There’s a club right off the freeway at 45th, the Rainbow. They’ll probably be open. You can get some munchies there, too, if you’re hungry.”
The weather improves as we approach the Canadian border. The sun has come out and the sliver of Puget Sound we can just make out from the freeway is glistening: jagged bolts of pure white light leap from the deep, roiling blue of the waves. A sunset is taking shape above some distant shadowed mountains on the other side of Puget Sound, but a bank of burly, charcoal-gray clouds threatens to deny us the pleasure of an atmospheric light show, a twilight clash of fire and frost.
We pass a sign for Canadian Customs and Immigration, and I quickly check my wallet to make sure my driver’s license is where it should be. Two lanes are open, and Meg picks the right one, half a dozen vehicles separating us from the border guard’s booth, enough to awaken the growler in my stomach. As if reading my mind (or sensing my anxiety), Meg says, “We’ll be fine. Don’t worry, but don’t volunteer any information. Just answer any questions they ask and don’t elaborate.” We already made sure that none of us had any pot or other contraband in our bags when we stopped in Seattle.
“Good afternoon, young ladies, where are you headed?” the border guard says, his eyes twinkling, his hair white with years.
“Vancouver, sir.”
“For how long?”
“Just the weekend.”
“Are you both American citizens?”
“All three of us, yes.” He finally notices the presence of a male in the back seat and becomes more officious.
“OK, let’s see your IDs. And your registration, miss.”
I pass my driver’s license to Meg, who frowns as she takes it from me.
“California, huh?” he says to me, after looking over all three IDs in silence. “Is that all yours? That guitar and those suitcases?” He doesn’t let me answer. “That’s a lot of stuff for a weekend trip. Looks to me like maybe you just hopped in the back seat up the highway there. You didn’t pick up a hitchhiker now, did you, miss?” he asks Meg.
“No, those two suitcases aren’t Lucas’s, they’re ours,” Meg says. “The trunk was full.”
“And what’s in the trunk?”
“Just, you know, the usual stuff, some camping gear—tent, Coleman stove—a bunch of old clothes I keep meaning to take to the Salvation Army. I was in a hurry this morning and didn’t think to clean it out before I picked up my friends. You can look if you want.”
“I know I can look if I want. Do I tell you how to do your job?”
The fabled Canadian bonhomie disappears. He looks sternly at me again and says, “You’re not one of those commie draft dodgers, are you? We’ve got enough hippie riffraff coming up here as it is. We don’t need any more lazy lowlifes.”
“No, not at all, sir. I’m a student at Evergreen State College, in Olympia. Do you want to see my college ID?”
After contemplating my driver’s license in silence for another minute, he suddenly loses interest in us and hands our IDs back to Meg, saying, “Welcome to Canada,” already looking past us to the next car in line.
An hour later, Meg pulls into a parking spot down the street from the bar where we’re meeting her boyfriend. I throw a coat over my guitar case before joining Meg and Janie on the puddled sidewalk.
“We made it,” Janie says. “A foreign country. A first for you, right, Lucas? You’re an ugly American now.”
“Not so ugly,” Meg says, offering me a smile, her first.
It’s nearly eight o’clock, and I’ve been hungry and grumpy since we crossed the border, but a café adjoins the bar, so we won’t have to go elsewhere for food, which lightens my mood considerably.
Janie and I grab menus and seat ourselves at a spacious booth at the back of the café while Meg heads into the bar to look for Tommy. When they return, it’s clear that Tommy has been putting away the local brew for a while. He is American, and a jock: boisterous, loud, and aggressively macho, but “all in good fun,” of course, the kind of guy who made my adolescent stabs at organized sports a nightmare.
“Hey, the hippies are here. Love the hippie chicks, don’t you, Bob?” he says to a well-oiled mesomorph who has trailed him into the café. “Gotta love a sister who doesn’t need a bra to keep her titties up. And all that underarm hair, shoulder snatches? Mm-mm. Makes ’em smell like they just finished fuckin’, ya know?”
“Tommy, what the hell?” Meg feigns shock, but seems to be enjoying his sexist nonsense.
“I’m kidding. Give me a break, sweetie. Hello, I’m Tommy,” he says to Janie as he slides into the booth next to her, shaking the hand she has offered and then leaning over to kiss her cheek and take an exaggerated whiff of her hair. “See, what did I tell you?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Meg says. “You behave, or I’ll sleep with Janie tonight.”
Tommy pretends to be chastised, scooting away from Janie in mock embarrassment. He looks across the table at me. “Hey kid, why so serious? You need a beer. Oh, right, you’re too young. Ha! Well, we’ll fix that later.”
“I’m Lucas,” I say, extending a hand that is ignored by Tommy.
“Good to know, sport. Hey Bob, have a seat, we can all squeeze in here.”
“Thanks, but I’m going to head out,” Bob says. “Merrilee will be expecting me.”
“Ah, the call of the wild pussy whip. I can hear it cracking from here.”
“Fuck off!”
“You fuck off!”
“No, you fuck off, hoser!” Bob’s vocabulary and accent places him as a native. “Anyway, I’ll catch ya on the flip side, mad dog,” he says to Tommy with a grin and a high five before turning to leave.
“Bob is one of Tommy’s teammates on the UBC field hockey team,” Meg explains.
“Everything OK here?” A waiter has appeared, concerned perhaps that the loud stream of obscenities is disturbing the café’s other customers.
“We’re good,” Tommy says. “But I’ll bet these hyar ’murricans want some grub, dontcha?” he says to me, cracking himself up. He’s the only one visibly amused by his mangled rural accent, and I begin to regret my decision to spend the weekend with strangers, but I say calmly to the waiter, “Can we see a menu?” I glance at Janie to gauge her reaction to the infantile brute at her side, but she just rolls her eyes and smiles gingerly.
Tommy suddenly jumps up from his seat, saying, “I’ll be back.”
“Are you going to eat?” Meg asks him as he’s walking away.
“Nah, I had a burger in the bar before y’all got here,” he says, turning to face Meg and walking slowly backward toward the bar. “Figured these ’greener friends of yours would all be vege-ma-tarians, and I didn’t want to have to endure the animal-rights lecture.”
“Don’t be alarmed. Tommy’s harmless,” Meg says to us with a smile, as her boyfriend disappears into the bar. “He likes to make people feel uncomfortable just to see how they respond, see if they can take his crap. Or at least that’s his excuse. The guys on the field hockey team tell me he’s constantly making fun of Canadians and even field hockey, though he loves the sport and is kind of a star up here. I’ve heard him say he thinks field hockey is for sissies, and that he only took the scholarship to avoid the draft. Of course, he’ll also tell you he would be happy to join the Army but he doesn’t want to fight a stupid, colonialist war for a prissy fascist like Nixon.”
Tommy returns from the bar as we’re finishing our meal, his arm around an attractive woman at least ten years his senior who is holding a bottle of sparkling cider. She’s mildly embarrassed and appears sober. Tommy, whose voice has returned to a normal volume level, says, “Meg, this is Anna. I told you about her, right? She works at that clinic in Nanaimo that helps out indigenous Canadians. I thought you’d want to meet her.”
Tommy’s demeanor has changed since he left. He pulls up a chair for Anna and sits down in the booth next to Janie again, this time maintaining a respectful distance. I’m tired and I zone out when the conversation turns to rural education. The women chat amiably, Tommy miraculously transformed into a quiet, genial, and considerate bystander.
When we arrive at Tommy’s house around eleven, we discover that there is no private room for Janie and me, that we’ll be sleeping in the living room. Tommy has driven his own car back to the house, and when we walk in, he’s laying out a foam pad and sleeping bag on the floor. Pillows and blankets are piled on a sofa, and the low humming sound and faint smell of gas or kerosene signals that the heat has just been turned on.
“You won’t mind the floor, will you?” he says to me with a leer, as if he expects both Janie and I to wind up there. “We’ll see you in the morning. Start the coffee if you’re up first.” Meg has disappeared upstairs, and Tommy follows before either of us thinks to ask where the kitchen, or bathroom, is.
“Are you OK with this?” Janie asks as a door closes upstairs. “It’s a little early to be calling it a night, but they’re probably anxious to . . . you know.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I say, referring to what we both imagine is in progress on the second floor. “I’ll manage. Tommy’s exhausting though.” His rude exuberance had returned after Anna left, but we got a short reprieve in Meg’s car on the drive back to the house.
“Meg said he was, uh, ‘extroverted,’ but I didn’t expect anything like that,” Janie says.
“This could be an interesting weekend. It’s kind of early. Do you want to, I don’t know, take a walk or something?”
“That would be nice, but maybe not a good idea. I don’t exactly know where we are or what this neighborhood is like after dark. We’ll have time for a long walk tomorrow. Meg says there’s a big park and beach nearby. I feel like reading now, anyway. Is that OK? It’s been a long week.”
“Sure. I brought a couple of books, too, so I’m good.”
“You can play your guitar if you want. It won’t bother me. I’d like it.”
“Thanks. Maybe I will.” But I take Country Music, USA out of my backpack and lay the sleeping bag out on the foam mat.
“We can share the couch,” Janie says. “I mean, until we’re ready to go to sleep.”
I sit at one end of the sofa; Janie, reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, at the other. After a while, she turns and extends her legs lengthwise along the couch, sliding her butt down into the cushions and placing a pillow beneath her head and her feet on my lap.
“Do you mind?”
“No, of course not.”
But this doesn’t help me concentrate on my book. I’m reading a chapter on the origins of country music that is illuminating, and disturbing: “Of all the southern ethnic groups, none has played a more important role in providing songs and styles for the white country musician than that forced migrant from Africa, the Negro.”
Forced migrant? Seriously? The tepid euphemism for the brutality of slavery is troubling, but I continue: “Although Negro songs and styles have moved freely into white country music, Negroes have not. One of the most striking characteristics of country music has been the almost total absence of Negro performers.”
I’m still not used to the word “negro.” “Black” and “Afro American” have been the preferred terms for a while, “negro” being a little too close to its offensive cousin, which, as I feared, appears a page later, like a nameless shade, its downcast eyes ringed with wheels of flame:
“The enduring influence of Negro instrumentation is attested by the fact that among white country performers the most complex guitar styles are known as ‘nigger picking.’”
Jesus, I hope not. Gabe had called bluegrass “redneck music,” and now I’m thinking he may not be far off. I check the copyright date on the title page: 1968. Not that long ago, but maybe racial enlightenment has been slower to come to chroniclers of the post-antebellum South than to, say, Southern California beachfront liberals. I remember that 1968 was the year Martin Luther King was murdered, the year Nixon was elected, the year that the segregationist George Wallace got nearly ten million votes in the nationwide presidential election (and almost eight percent of the vote in the North).
I continue reading, hoping that the book sheds some light on why black musicians had no interest in music that borrowed so heavily from their “songs and styles,” but references to “negroes” soon disappear, and my attention flags as the author talks about musicologist Charles Seeger’s idea that there are two forces at work in the promotion of American music: the “Make America Musical” contingent and the “Sell America Music” commercial agents.
My interest in this scholarly account of the early history of country music wanes a half hour later, and I yawn a little too obviously. Janie says, “Yeah, I’m about ready for lights out, too.”
She slides off the couch and heads toward the bathroom, returning a few minutes later with a nonchalant “your turn” as she switches off the overhead light. A lamp atop the upright piano in the corner is now the sole source of illumination in the room. Having removed her shoes and jeans in the bathroom, she drops them next to her bag, from which she pulls a pale-blue cotton nightgown. As I rise from the floor, where I’ve just managed to free the rusty zipper on Tommy’s sleeping bag, she pulls her shirt over her head, revealing that, as I had guessed earlier, while we were reading together on the couch, she is not wearing a bra. She tosses the shirt blithely onto the pile of fallen garments on the ground, slips the nightgown over her head, and bounces onto the couch. I take my time retrieving the toothbrush and washcloth from my backpack, but she ignores me and pulls the blankets up to her chin.
The momentary flash of nudity plays like a loop of samizdat film on the blank walls of my brain as I walk down the hall to the bathroom. This is the first time I’ve seen a girl’s breasts in the flesh. Janie’s are small, taut, and pinkish, and I’m more than a little aroused. I quickly pee and brush my teeth, imagining/hoping that she is waiting for me in the front room, but when I return, the lamp on the piano has been extinguished. Despite the feeble light, I find my bed without stumbling over anything.
“I may get up early and go for a walk if the weather is nice,” Janie says. “Do you want me to wake you if I do?”
“No need. I may be up early, too. If so, I’ll join you.”
“OK, have a good sleep.”
The foam pad is comfortable, but sleep does not come easily. Janie’s nonchalant dishabille has stirred the blood in my brain and loins. I wonder if she meant anything by it. She couldn’t have been expecting me to climb onto the couch with her; there isn’t enough room for two prone bodies. But could she be thinking about joining me on the floor? She may just be uninhibited, comfortable with her own nudity, a sign of trust, perhaps. But she could have brought the nightgown with her to the bathroom and avoided flashing me. She can’t be unaware of how the sight of her naked torso might affect me, especially as we prepare to sack out in neighboring beds. Could I, once again, be blind to some cues I should be picking up on? Signals that most other guys would understand intuitively? But her earlier comment about “spending the night together” on the Greyhound had been the only flirtatious thing she’d said or done all day. She seemed tired, as she had mentioned more than once, and not really engaged, either with Meg or me. Hoisting her clothed legs onto my lap could have happened at any SEA School or LRY party. And while her semi-nude display might be interpreted as an act of seduction, it could also simply be a matter of exhaustion and confidence that I wasn’t going to jump her.
As these thoughts tumble across my frontal lobe, every sound that emanates from the aging house in the night makes me glance her way, half expecting to see her clambering down from the couch or looming shyly above me. Since no approach is forthcoming and I’m still wide awake, I wonder whether having sex with Janie would be wise. She’s certainly attractive (I can now affirm that in almost all particulars), and we get along easily, if superficially. But we have little in common. In the three weeks since we arrived at Evergreen, we’ve rarely crossed paths, despite living in adjoining dorms, and I haven’t seen her at any of the movies, lectures, or concerts I’ve been to. I know nothing about her musical taste, and our preferences in literature seem to be split by gender.
I finally fall asleep, but wake a short while later when two of Tommy’s roommates barge noisily through the front door, their slurred voices accompanied by the cloying stink of beer. A nearly full moon now shines through the transom window at the front of the room, illuminating the rolling landscape of Janie’s sleeping body. The blankets have slipped from her naked legs and I lay transfixed by gentle curves of skin covered in pale, delicate, microscopically thin thread-lines of hair. But my eyes soon succumb to fatigue, and the next thing I know, Janie is brushing water from her coat as she quietly closes the front door behind her.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Sorry, did I wake you? I went out for a bit, but it started raining.”
“It’s OK. I’m awake. What time is it?”
“Almost nine. You looked completely out when I got up.”
“I didn’t sleep so well. Someone came in around, I don’t know, two maybe?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear them at all. Do you want coffee? I’ll go try to scope out the caffeine scene. Unless someone else has beaten me to it.”
“I haven’t heard anyone.”
We spend the day exploring northwest Vancouver. The drizzle lets up late-morning and a beautiful fall day emerges, crisp and clear. Meg gave Janie suggestions for nearby things to do last night, on the drive to Tommy’s house, which is good because when we finish the light breakfast we’ve scavenged, coffee and granola, there is still no sign of Meg or Tommy, or any of his roommates. We take a long walk through Jericho Beach Park, which is more manicured, sylvan, less primeval than Evergreen’s campus, with well-tended gardens, conveniently placed benches, and a wider variety of trees and foliage than the proto-rainforest of Evergreen’s forested surroundings.
The air is cold and clean at the beach. The wind gusts from the north and the sand near the forest eddies when tiny landspouts appear, swirling and whirling, spitting detritus at us. After an indolent stroll along the beach, we head to the bohemian urbanity of West Broadway, where we have lunch at a vegetarian café a few blocks down from where we had eaten the night before. After lunch, we wander without direction for a bit until Janie finds a pay phone outside the Varsity Theater, which is showing American Graffiti. She calls Meg, who tells her to be back at Tommy’s house by seven, so we decide to check out the movie, though I’ve avoided seeing the popular paean to mindless nostalgia, as I have no interest in the current craze for fifties doo-wop and frat-boy rock ’n’ roll.
We’re about a half hour early, and after getting popcorn and Cokes, we settle into a pair of cracked vinyl seats at the back of the theater. Janie has been quiet for much of the day, politely listening to me describe the scene on campus after Stokely’s speech and talking a bit about The Individual in Contemporary Society (or TICS, as she calls it) at lunch, but now she opens up.
“Thanks for coming up here with me. I’ve been kinda bummed the last couple of weeks, and I thought getting away from campus might help, but . . . I don’t know. Anyway, I’d be near suicidal if I didn’t have anyone to hang out with today.” She laughs, but cheerlessly. “I should have known Meg would just want to hang out with Tommy. Maybe we can find something fun to do tonight.”
“What’s going on? Why are you so down?”
“I don’t know exactly. I miss my family . . . my friends, none of whom have written me. My mom wrote, but mostly just to complain about how much my grandmother has been annoying her, and tell me about some new blouse she bought. You know, I was also enrolled at UC San Diego, and I think I might have made a mistake coming up here. But my parents have been fighting so much the last year, I just didn’t want to be around it anymore. I didn’t want to have to go home on the weekends and holidays. But I feel out of sync here, I just . . .
“Everyone I meet is so serious and committed to ‘making a better world’ without any idea of what that means. And I just can’t seem to connect with anyone. Like with Meg: she’s probably one of my best friends in TICS, but here she invites me to go away for a weekend, and then just leaves me alone for a Neanderthal. OK, a handsome Neanderthal, and I mean, I understand she wants to get laid. Maybe that’s what I need, too. Maybe you should get me drunk tonight. See what happens.”
I laugh and say, jokingly, “If that’s what it takes,” but I immediately regret it. She doesn’t react.
The movie starts and Janie hoists one leg over mine, slumping in her seat, as Bill Haley sings “One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock, rock,” but she returns to an upright seating position as the characters gather in the parking lot of Mel’s Drive-In, and we watch the rest of the movie platonically.
After the movie, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would, it’s still sunny out so we continue wandering, stopping at a bookstore and the Salvation Army, where I pick up some cheap wool socks and long underwear, which I’ve been told I’ll need for the Northwest winters, though I’m skeptical that it’ll ever get cold enough for me to resort to the coarse hillbilly undies.
On our way back to Tommy’s, we stop in a coffee shop and I get a chance to read the day’s Vancouver Sun, the first real newspaper I’ve seen since I left home. I had hoped to catch up on Watergate, but the political news is focused on Nixon’s nomination of Republican congressman Gerald Ford to the vice presidency, replacing the recently departed-with-his-tail-between-his-legs Spiro Agnew. Ford is the House minority leader, but I don’t know much about him, and the Sun assumes that Vancouverites don’t either. The coverage focuses on Ford’s days as a star football player at the University of Michigan, as well as his World War II naval exploits, membership on the Warren Commission, and tepid 1966 protest of Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War, to which Johnson had responded that Ford had played “too much football without a helmet.” Nice.
There is a small article announcing that “the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has upheld Judge Sirica’s August 29 order for Nixon to release nine tapes.” This seems like fairly serious news, but is delivered matter-of-factly by the Sun. I’m no expert on the US judicial system, but news like this would seem to warrant further analysis. It may be but one step in a long, complicated process, but a federal court ruling that requires Nixon to turn over secret tapes within a week to Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, appeal the order to the Supreme Court, or reach some sort of out-of-court agreement with Cox is a big deal. I mention this to Janie, but she’s engrossed in her new book, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, and she has returned to her private, semi-distant self, the personal revelations in the movie theater forgotten.
“You all ready to go?” Meg says when we arrive at the house a little after seven. “Tommy made some sandwiches we can take with us. I already ate, so I’m good to drive.”
“Uh, go where?” I say.
“Back to Evergreen. We need to be back for that field trip tomorrow morning, right Janie?”
“Damn, I forgot.”
“If we leave soon, we should be back before midnight.”
The back seat is roomier on the return trip; Meg has made space for my guitar and a suitcase in the trunk. For the first half of the journey, Janie and Meg chat easily in front, ignoring me, and I’m happy to be left out of the conversation, which mostly revolves around Tommy and one of Meg’s previous boyfriends. I pay attention now and then to see if Janie says anything about her romantic life, past or present, but she says little about herself, instead choosing to pepper Meg with intimate questions I’m a bit embarrassed to overhear the answers to. After stopping to use the rest room and stock up on carbonated caffeine at a gas station north of Seattle, Janie takes the backseat, attempting to make a bed of it, and closes her eyes, leaning her head against her suitcase, with a sweater for a pillow. In the passenger seat now, I get Meg to talk for a while about her high school years in Corvallis, Oregon, but her prosaic memories inspire few follow-up questions, and she’s incurious about me, so the last leg of the trip ends in silence.
It’s nearly one o’clock when Meg drops us in front of the dorms. Janie has been asleep for the last hour and looks startled when Meg wakes her, uncertain for a minute where she is or why. When I say goodbye and turn to walk to my dorm, she grabs my arm and pulls me to her, planting a wet, sloppy kiss on my lips. But it doesn’t last long, and without looking at me, she picks up her bag and heads for A dorm.