ANTHONY HUNTINGTON
FRIDAY NIGHT AT THE CAMPUS
a true story
Hommage pour James Joyce
—Ah, it's a scandalous shame for you, Stephen, said his mother, and you'll live to rue the day you set your foot in that place. I know how it has changed you.
—Good morning everybody, said Stephen, smiling and kissing the tips of his fingers in adieu.
(from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
"Do you have an oil pen?" the young man asked his mother.
"Try the cup near the telephone. What do you want it for?"
"There's a punk cabaret on tomorrow night at the refec and I'm going z la mode," he called.
The young man came back with a dried-up oil pen, spread his T-shirt flat on the table and drew.
"What are you doing it for?" continued his mother. "I thought you said punk was dead. You're not going in for that stuff are you?"
"No, mater," the young man explained. "Punk is dead and New Wave has sprouted from the ashes."
His mother placed a small pile of finished clothes beside his hand. She reached down and spread out the shirt to read what he had written.
"What's this? Chaos rules ok?"
"Yeah, chaos, entropy, anarchy."
She turned back to her work. "I'm sure I don't understand."
The young man stood before the bathroom mirror, fasten- ing the ragged T-shirt he had emblazoned with slogans to a bright red, black and white singlet. He gathered up the loose sleeves so that the shirt hugged his chest, then, satisfied, closed the tin of
safety pins. With comb, water and Spray and Stay he tried to make his hair spiky. The best he could do was a bushier than usual mess that hung over his forehead and fell down onto his skull when he removed his fingers.
Finally, he hitched up his jeans and went out to his parents.
Definitely no belt tonight.
"Are you warm enough? You don't want another cold, dear."
"No, I'm warm enough."
His father looked at him from behind his half-empty plate.
"I thought you were going to cavern the cheeks a bit."
"I decided against a white face when I saw what Mum had."
"Have you got enough money?"
"Yes, I had lunch at home today."
Pause.
"What t . . ."
"Late," he said, almost spitting it out. "The show doesn't start till eight and not really until after nine. It'll be three or so before it wraps up, I guess, so don't wait up, okay?"
He knew his mother thought he had been with a girl on Monday night when he had arrived home at two a.m. after the Union movie of the week.
"Have a nice time."
He pecked his mother on the cheek and went out to the underpowered, gurgling Suzuki hardtop he would rather not drive. The commercial radio station was peddling pap so he slammed in the illegal copy of The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.
He fastforwarded into the 1975 version of 'Anarchy in the UK.' Tonight, now he needed acid and sharp edges, broken glass music.
When he got to the campus in the bush he pulled up at the college where he had talked with that young woman for hours on Monday night. It had been very illuminating, even educa-
tional. He had heard the answers to questions that had been passengers for years. Most of all, he remembered what she had said after he had talked himself out and she had started to open up.
"You might want to. . ."
"Sleep with your boyfriend?"
He had seen her thinking about what she would have to say.
"Yeah, you might want to but what your parents have told you stops you. Maybe not what they have said but what you know they would think. You think about what might happen and no matter how much you might want to, you just can't."
And he had just looked at her. So that was it.
The yellow headlights picked out a line of panties drying for the morning. He slowly went inside, his body very tired. The young man was conscious of how he looked and kept his eyes down, denim sandshoes cuffing the spare carpet in the staircase.
Knocked several times on the door. No answering small voice. Try the knob. Locked. Damn, she must be out with him.
Okay, that's cool. He turned left away from her door, noticing that someone else was home further along the corridor, the court in session. Their talk stopped as he went past their door but he didn't look in at them. He reached out for a song to sing but none seemed to fit, beginning after beginning dying on his lips. Okay, try the other side of the corridor.
Try B's. The door opened and he exclaimed. B's things were piled into cardboard boxes. She must be moving out. He felt surprise, then anger at her not telling him, then pain because he would not be able to talk to her so often, if at all.
S opened her door at his knock, dressed in a white terry towelling gown. Without a word she folded her legs under her- self on the corner of the neatly made bed.
"And how's Tony keeping?"
For a while he just sat and looked at her, then his eyes fell and he said in a tired voice, "You know, breathe breathe, pump pump."
Pause.
"Did you know B is moving out? Do you know the story?"
"She got the part-time tutor's job at St. Anne's. K and MJ are helping her move in there tonight."
Yeah. K and MJ. K was a redhead.
"There goes somebody else I could talk to."
"You've still got me."
Pause.
"What's the matter with you, Tony?" and her voice cared.
"I'm tired, S, morally, physically, and spiritually tired."
"Spiritually?"
And he gave her the don't-ask-me-what-I-mean look.
"Woman troubles, right?"
"Is it ever anything else?"
"Who is it this time?" with a sad laugh in her voice.
Pause.
"I don't know. It's just that every bird I'm involved with is more interested in someone else and that gets hard to take some- times, like tonight. S is out with her man, D is running around with some Scotch burk, and J, you know J?"
"The blonde a few doors down?"
"You got it. I'll tell you a little story. I wrote the first story and the one character I could see was the princess. The others were shadows, she flesh, I could just see her."
S wasn't smiling any more. She could tell what was coming.
"First day out here last year, Vice-Chancellor's address of welcome, morning tea on the lawn afterwards and bang, who's walking towards me?"
"Your princess."
"My princess, and you can guess what happened."
Pause.
"Foolish, aren't you?"
Yeah, but I couldn't help it. My word made flesh and all
that, what else could I do? I just don't know what to do now.
She's got this boyfriend, she's wanted to marry him for years but he won't be in it. Mongrel comes down and stays with her for days at a time, sleeps with her. Fat bloody chance of me getting anywhere in that situation. Besides, I haven't said a civil word to her. I thought she would burn me if I spoke, so I didn't, and haven't.
"What am I going to do, 5? What the hell am I going to do?
I'm just so tired of everything. I don't seem to be going any-' where, I feel like I'm a train in an endless subway."
"Hey, pal! How old are you?"
"Nineteen in September."
"And you've written what?"
"Nearly two hundred thousand words. Let's not talk about my writing, okay? I'm sick to death of talking about my writing."
But five minutes later, he had still more details of stories, poems, novels yet to find a publisher.
Pause.
"I'm going to talk to her tonight, S. I'm gonna put her straight."
Many times he had thought of talking to J and forgotten about it because of her boyfriend. Tonight seemed different. It didn't matter that her friends would be with her.
Suddenly he was full of energy.
"I've gotta go. I want to read some critical stuff on Jimmy Joyce of old Dublin Town before I go over to the cabaret."
He stood and left. Just short. of that doorway he stopped.
The young man breathed deeply, felt how jittery his body was. Get it together.
Her friends were still there. They would make him feel un- comfortable, but he would burn if he walked past. They shut up as he filled the doorway. The young man ignored them to speak to the blonde, but she had already said, "Hello." Her voice was much deeper than he had expected.
In answer he nodded, feet shuffled back and forth. One arm leaned against the side of the doorway.
"You might have heard I've written a few things."
No reaction at all.
"Did the first novel when I was in Grade 12, started the first draft then, anyway. One of the characters was a blonde Princess." He could feel her friends looking blankly at him, nudging and giggling. She wasn't, although she did wear a slight smile. He just couldn't look at her eyes. Carry on, keep going, you're committed.
"Out of all the characters, she was the one I really had a clear image of. Then the first day here and there she was."
"Guess that explains a few things, right?"
The tone and inflexion of his voice had slid all over. No- one spoke, waiting for further confessions. If he stayed he would go on, if he left he would kick himself for months. To help things, he didn't know what he wanted from her.
"Why are you dressed like that?"
"Ah, heap big cabaret at the refec, Kimasabe. Heap good band. You going over later?"
"No, I don't think so."
Then he did look at her, held her face instead of skating over it, and felt himself blush.
"I'd better be on my tangled way. Got some reading to do."
Again, no answer.
He almost walked out then he spun around and stammered at high speed, "Would you like to read my manuscript?" She didn't understand and before she could ask him to repeat what he had said, he cut her off with, "No, you don't want to read it.
You wouldn't want to read my stuff."
"What makes you say that?"
"You wouldn't like it."
"Have you written much?"
"Two novels, thirty thousand words of short stories last semester, some poetry. Did you see the last two Magnus Tauri?"
"What?" and they laughed at his too fast delivery. Proles.
"The student paper. Did you see the last two issues? I had a short in the first and a poem in the second. I'll have a poem in the next. Try and catch it.
"I've really go to go."
"See you. Take care of yourself," and he was gone, his body stinging from the encounter. Too much talk, too much bragging about his petty accomplishments for idle praise.
He got into that ridiculous car, parked it near the refec, and walked to the library between the lights beneath the tunnel of pruned trees. Only two other students were in the library. He lay down uncomfortably and read about Dubliners and Joyce.
He remained on the floor until he finished what he had set himself to look over.
As he walked out of the almost empty building, something made him run faster and faster until he was sprinting out through the automatic doors, driving his soft, unfit body between the trees. Close by, he could hear the band's PA playing fill-in tapes.
Damn, hadn't started yet. 8.30. Where to go?
He decided.
Her room was full of people waiting to go over to the refec as the college's contingent for the night, dressed in all sorts of weird gear. A had on a mini skirt, a tight sequinned top, fluffy white slippers and black fishnet stockings. Her hair was dragged into a lopsided pigtail.
The young man stood in the doorway, for a few moments, but no-one saw him. He saw one of the guys on her bed reading one of the Heavy Metals he had loaned her, but A was chasing some jewellery and calling to her girlfriend next door.
He turned away from the lively room towards the dark phone booths, his feet swinging heavily as he stepped down the stairs in the path that connected A's block to the dining room.
Behind him, he could hear his name called and someone remark
"There goes a real punk." He passed an unfamiliar girl lotussed on the edge of the lawn and sat several metres past her under a phone. As he sat he looked at the other blocks, the trees, the is- lands of light the town made in the night.
A few minutes later he went back to A's room. Just as he walked in she said, "I'm vacating my room now, so it's outski
time, everyone."
"I dreamt you would say that," he said, but she was talking to somebody in the corridor.
The young man walked after the group towards the refec.
They capered and downed as he walked solemnly along with his hands thrust in his pockets, shoulders slumped.
He started to whistle the melody from the title track of Billy Joel's The Stranger. By the time he had reached the first repeat he was out of tune, so he shifted to humming then back to whistling. The group arrived at the entrance as he finished.
Inside, the refec was mostly empty space between maybe fifty people while the PA played XTC. A tall, thin figure on the other side of the mistreated parquet floor waved and he went over.
"You made it, huh?"
The young man nodded. He was tense, but the first inklings of the excitement to come were beginning to stir.
Suddenly, he leant close to his friend's ear and told him about talking with J, and what the high powered poet had said last week.
"Hell, if he'd said that to me, I'd be happy, not mournful like you, you bastard," said his friend.
"Yeah, there's that. But think. I've got these people telling me I'm going to make it big and on the other hand I've got to just do the day to day grind."
His friend nodded. "I'd believe. If you're going to be a great writer, to hell with this shitheap and be a great writer. Forget about reality."
Easy, easy, watch it.
"I can't do that. There's no guarantee I'd be a success. I might never sell a novel. Then where would I be?"
"That crowded creek."
"Bludger," and they both laughed.
The young man still could not believe that he had spoken to J tonight. It would have been the last thing he would have expected. From here, the only thing was to hope that she read the poem, took it to heart, took the hint, tossed in this other guy and got the hots for him.
Later that night, after the young man had had a couple of dances with and without partners, he stood near the door and shook his body in time with the band. Several times the young man had seen A and her friend dancing with two guys who ex- pected to sleep with them tonight.
It was as he was listening to the band that something happened to him. They were doing a heavy metal/punk version of an old Fifties doowop song with falsetto harmonies and scat chorus when the guitars pumped up the rhythm and the young man's brain ignited. They went straight into the Pistols song he had taken as his own anthem, "Anarchy in the UK," with that line about knowing what he got. His body exploded. He moved towards the stage, screaming the lyrics, body straining on tip- toe, fists raised so far that his spine complained. Around him, bobbing people watched his progress, but he didn't care. He reached the foot of the stage and bounced up and down, reaching, screaming, typhonic guitars battering him painfully from the amplifier stacks on either side of the stage.
As suddenly as the song possessed him, its spirit withdrew leaving him feeling lost and foolish in front of everybody. He knew a lot of them thought there was something actually wrong with him. The hell with it. He moved outside and bought a drink.
As he was surveying the crowd for someone to accost, a hand touched his back. Conditioned by years of jibes and vic- timisation he spun around, thinking of using the can as a club.
It was only a girl in a loose white dress.
He could see the fright at his upraised arm as she asked if she couldread his T-shirt.
"Entropy?"
"Entropy, chaos, anarchy, revolution, insurrection."
With each word he felt as if he were a lie with his bourgeois jewellery and the rest.
"You're really into it aren't you?"
"You got it." And they laughed. "Hey, do you wanna dance later?"
She backed off in a cloud of words he didn't catch.
Just then his friend reappeared and they got to talking about the immaturity of a lot of people who came straight out of school.
"I was over at B's room at Mark's last week and K was there too. I was sitting in a chair, and started to write a bit of poetry. Of course, she had to have a dig at me. 'Oo, the art fart all of a sudden.'"
"Jeez, she's a pain."
"You said it." The young man took out his wallet. "I've got what I wrote here, if you'd like a look at it."
Regression Back to the egg.
Back to childhood.
Back to memories and regrets.
Back to passion.
Leaves against horizons, an emptiness inside.
I have had many icons, pure crystals of desire.
Faces all turned away
soon as they touched my flame.
"You will, of course, recognise the first line."
Later that night the young man was contorting solo as the band churned through something unfamiliar. The strobe con- verted everything into disjoint stop-motion flashes and he was disoriented. The floor wasa packed mass of writhing hot bodies, leaping, swinging bottles, staggering, collapsing, couples throwing their bodies together, leaning against one another. And the song went on and on.
From nowhere he felt a body touching his back, rolling against him. It was the girl who had looked at his T-shirt. The
two of them danced, he rubbing his body against hers, he feeling her breasts, he getting an erection, he crawling on the floor while one hand imprisoned her smooth anide, he feeling all those fatty places.
The band finished to a partisan roar of approval, leaving them alone, two instead of one, in a gap in the crowd with their ears ringing.
"That was obscene, I mean really foul," she said, avoiding his eyes.
She had looked pretty damned eager when he had been rubbing her up. He tried to talk but she came back with non- commital answers. In the end she just drifted off.
After the cabaret finally broke up the young man sat in his car and watched a fellow student get into that of the shapely lab assistant in his most troublesome subject.
Two guesses where he's going to end up tonight.
The young man fired up the Suzuki's cold engine and pumped the pedal against the stall. Realising he wouldn't get anywhere tonight he decided to toss it in and go home. It was 1.15 ack emma.
At the traffic lights the lab asgistant's car pulled up along- side. Feeling like an interloper, he watched his classmate lean across and kiss her, then hurriedly wind down his window and spew. He remembered that she had nice tits.
At home, the front lights were on and the young man put the Suzuki into the carport, locked the gates and moved slowly through the house turning off lights, shut doors, quietly removed his shoes, painfully leant above the toilet bowl until he passed water. He ended up having some cider. He had left the question- able T-shirt in the car, the safety pins in his jeans.
For some time he lay in his bed, looking at the dark, feeling the drift towards sleep, playing back and debating with himself whether Man was a tape recorder or not.
At last, he slept.
In the morning the first thing his mother said was a protest about his not whistling low as he came in. That way she knew he was home safely and not wrapped around some lightpole.
