(Sarunas Burdulis, Creative Commons)

-Kris Kristofferson, in a song famously covered by Janis Joplin right before she died

“Pleased to meet you / Hope you guess my name.” 

-The Rolling Stones, “Sympathy For The Devil”

Fall/Winter 2009: (Nobody pushes fog, it moves directionless of its own accord)

I.

Ben sleeps against the window, a strip of light shooting through the end of the curtain past his feet.  On his back his chest rises, his head thrown against the pillow exposing his throat like someone entombed, given death’s safety.  Asthma works against his breath but he never snores.  The stale beer smell permeates from the closet, where roughly ninety dented cans crowd and spill out from their thin silver boxes beneath my hanging clothes.  The dresser with our lamp is limed with dried froth.  

I’m waking up.  It’s eleven o’clock on a Tuesday and my alarm clock sits useless on a pile of shirts and pants that reaches my eye level from bed like a pile of garbage.  The curtains provide us with a feeling of permanent dark, a deepness that could last twenty-four hours and all that would change is the strip of light.  When my uncle came to visit on parents weekend he said, “It’s like a cave in here.”  My bed is blue and I don’t have any sheets.  I use a blanket to separate my bare back from the plastic rub of the mattress.

The hotel overlooks the pool and the major city street leading to the Staples Center.  When it rains the slanting water comes at our long window in line drives and I stand, sort of in calm power, envying the people in cars in a strange way, thinking about the endless expanse of outside.  Sometimes Ben and I both kneel on his bed, faces pressed to the glass, looking down on sunbathing girls, passing the afternoon.  “Never seen her before…must be a guest.”  He’s from Texas and has never known many people like me.  

My computer blinks from the desk.  Pictures of Johnny Depp and Kurt Cobain, both smoking, puttied on the wall, giving a sense of warmth to tobacco, you don’t smell the smell.  When friends come and go, they look at the altar and smirk. 

Leaning over myself, my head is all hair and mucous.  Shirtless and sort of sweating, greasy, sticky though I shower every morning, it’s the first thing I do.  My red towel hangs in the bathroom on the door everyday like a toothbrush or latchkey.  If I let it crumple it stays damp.  It collects whatever’s on the floor—loose hairs, shoe dirt—like a hardened sponge.  In high school I showered at night, the last resignation, having to get up early in the morning and be driven.  By the time I’d fall asleep my hair would be dry.  Here it’s important to start new every day.  No one tells you to do anything.

II.

Campus in the sun, and I always wear pants.  Black sneakers with the white rims loosening from the fabric.  Pants become sort of an alternative napkin, my fingertips rubbing off on the front of the pockets.  At lunch the crowd comes from class and the gym, and I fill my plate from two of the four or five feeding stations.  

The sweat forming I feel making a rind with the shape of my waistband.  The people, in and out, plates, trays.  The sterile feel of cafeterias.  Girls with salads and then a large dessert, red from a jog, hair plastered to their scalps and coming loose like straw from the ponytail.  A lot of them seem to have the same personality.  They want to sell sex without being obvious.   

Skipping class puts you in two different places at once.  Your body and immediate mind follow the doors and lines right in front of you.  You’re polite to the cashiers and men holding the door, work shirts on, coffee-stained teeth.  Hands in pockets, taking deep breaths, you feel like you look how you feel.  The soreness in my joints is endorphins unreleased, collecting in sinews, I feel like I wouldn’t be able to lift my arms.  Like spider webs live in my shoulder cuffs.  I eat by bending my elbows.  

Your chest collects the foliage of shit, dammit, you’re soft, you’re an idiot and a fool, and then covers it with just go tomorrow, from now on I will go, nothing was even happening today.  And if there was something happening today, a quiz or an important discussion, then there’s plenty of time left in the semester, it’s October, and you settle down to your food and consider what else to do with your selfish day. 

III.

Every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the walk across campus moves to the fact of comfort.  My mother was a graduate and doctorate student in psychology in the eighties, working in the same building where I now have class.  She took intakes for students who were hearing voices in their heads in the quiet of their apartments, who started to scare their professors and become lost in mumbles.  At school there’s a rule that if a roommate kills him/herself, anyone who lives in the same dorm or apartment gets straight A’s for the term.  

Every once in awhile you hear stories, of friends of friends coming home to a gasping body swinging from a tie or belt, of screaming and grabbing, of not telling anyone and pretending it never happened.  Roommates who come home from being date raped, lock themselves in the room, text that they think they’re going to hurt themselves.  You think of all the sharp things in female bathrooms.  And then the cynical afterword—why’d they stop them, they could’ve had it made.   

I cross campus to the building to take a writing class.  Right across from the track and tucked next to a temporary dining hall, lobby humming with the vibrant color of the Coke vending machines.  Everyone who works at the school looks wide awake and all the students look half dead.  When I’m early I sit in the cafeteria and silently watch SportsCenter on a muted screen with my legs stretched and splayed, my sinus passages thick and heavy.  I drink tea from the Starbucks and peer over at the clock every two minutes.   

The teacher is a woman in her thirties who works for CBS and just finished her Masters degree.  When we go around the room sharing bits of our essays I notice that she’s smiling.  Our chairs make a big oval around her.  My attendance this early in the day says something about the stake I’ve made in her attention.  

Later, after lunch, in the afternoon sun, I go to an ethics class in an air conditioned basement room, the T.A. smiling maniacally as we file in, like a curly-haired pumpkin, the professor calm, nice, smart, straight from Berkeley, slightly uncomfortable.  Everyone has that sigh once they sit down, finally out of the heat.  

There’s a blonde girl in my section who has a child, she takes the train and bus to school from an hour or two away.  She’ll still find time to do all the reading.  The teachers defer to her on sensitive issues, nod thoughtfully as she wades through material that has nothing to do with breastfeeding or baby food.  Sitting next to her, I feel like my life doesn’t mean much.  I show up and write in my notebook, producing the literary equivalent of doodles.  The slideshow of healthcare against the screen over the whiteboard, someone slightly new sitting next to me every day.  I can stay on top of things because all it takes is interesting thinking.  

These become the only two classes I want to attend.  At the end of the semester I have A’s in both, somehow, thankfully. 

IV. 

2 o’clock I’m crossing Jefferson Blvd. to sit on Sinead’s balcony with my feet against the stucco wall.  Her roommates are watching reality television on the LCD projector, short sensationalized documentaries about girls who do porn to pay for school.  Unless we keep the sliding glass door shut we’ll be enveloped by giggles.  

I move past the screen with my head ducked and my body folded at the waist and meet her outside where she has a Marlboro Light 100, a long cigarette, lit and tumbling from her mouth.  She lets the ash collect in a tilting column like she’s been lost in conversation with someone.  She doesn’t have shoes on so her feet are kept above land.    

On my way over I passed by the hall where my Spanish class was entering its second hour.  When I go I usually spend the five-minute break we get in the middle outside talking with an ROTC guy who’s failed the subject three times.  He’s tall, shaved head, a film major, spends his weekends in the mountains, cigarette dangling from his mouth, pretending he’s about to die.  “Everyone, everyone smokes when they’re in the field.  It’s not considered smoking.”  More than any other vague acquaintance I see him around so many times.  At the movies, at meals, at parties and sporting events, and we never say anything to each other.  It’s strange because he’s twenty-three or so and about to graduate, we shouldn’t be going to the same places.  

It seems like he doesn’t get much support from his parents.  When he mentions them it’s like about another world.  Some of his girlfriends have tattoos and are all of mixed ethnicities.  He wears long coats, swoops his arm around them like he’s a man with money.  All he ever talks about is himself.

V.

Later, in December, I’ll be standing on the bluff in the quad at night during the week.  The last Thursday before finals so the marching band comes through campus, stopping at different fundraisers, playing in front of the libraries to release steam for everyone inside.  They play standing in the fountains. 

I’ve been in the old library for four hours working on my final writing project, a paper on madness and obscenity.  I’m able to write with purpose, despite Sinead showing up halfway through, sitting across from me and whispering, going outside every half hour to smoke.  After I finish I say goodnight and start heading home across the grass, pausing to be enveloped by my soundtrack of brass fireworks.  Like I just finished a really good workout. 

VI. 

Our class is meeting at a Mexican fast food restaurant to gather and eat for free, on the writing department’s tab, before we have to attend a mandatory lecture together for an assignment, a real bore.  

I’m the first one there.  My professor is sitting at a table, chewing gum and looking at her phone with her elbow resting on the corner.  I hold the door for someone.   

Walking up, nervous, I sit down and we talk for a few minutes.  Her demeanor is different here, kind of chilled out, it’s different in each situation.  She stares at me for a couple seconds too long, like she’s gathering details for a theory, like a doctor.  Another student missed class this morning and we wonder if he’ll show up.  

“I know you guys don’t always have good reasons for not coming to class.  I was in college once, I get it.”

VII. 

All my life I’ve been relaxed by the idea of sleeping next to somebody in bed.  When I go to meet Max I’m thinking about how in college people don’t like to spend the night unless they’re passing out.  They’ll leave you at six in the morning, when the sun is just up, if you haven’t been to sleep yet.  They’ll cross the street disheveled, drunk with fog, in yesterday’s clothes, and spend the rest of the day in their own sheets.  You’ll hear them leave after saying how silly it is for them to do so, and then barely be able to stay in bed. 

Max and I are getting milkshakes right around dinnertime.  He’s an architecture major so he never sees anybody very much.  I haven’t seen him in a month or so, he’s been so wrapped up in stencils and critiques, spending weeks in a fluorescent basement with ground-level windows.  Since September he’s gained some weight.  Hair collects on his cheeks in little curly-cues, he hasn’t shaved much in his life.  We grab a green table outside and complain. 

The student-run coffeehouse has events almost every night of the week.  The campus radio station has a booth set up by the door and hip-looking people are clustered together and laughing.  A girl from my Spanish class, a theater student, springs in front of me like she’s been looking for me all day.  Once in class she talked about her Valium prescriptions, her need to talk herself down from the elevator of fear.  It was the one time she wasn’t screaming while speaking, sending her voice above all others.

“She’s been asking if any of us have seen you!” she explodes, and throws her arms like she’s presenting a gift.  “No she hasn’t,” I say.  “Oh yes she has, she asked today.”

My mother talks about how people with problems like to create problems for other people so as to feel less alone.  It’s taking pain and throwing it around the room, lassoing the collective calm.  I hate this girl for talking to me. 

VIII.

The writing teacher sets up one-on-one appointments for the class during each stage, as we’re in the middle of each assignment.  My big out for life is that I’m going to be a writer.  Failure has a lot of purposes in art.  And you’re allowed to stay inside and drink all day with an excuse, your hair matted, tired all the time.  It’s seemingly easier to contain multitudes.  I wait outside the room on an old cracked yellow plastic chair, the ones from elementary school.  If you peed on them they could still be used the next day.  

My teacher is always dressed like she’s going to lunch with an old friend, sunny and smart.  She shows an interest that’s speaking a language.  She knows Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, the importance of the edge, but she’s right in the middle.  She can love these books and still be a stable person?  I couldn’t understand.  It was disproving my thesis.  It was challenging my way of life.  I feel like the other students come and go and miss something huge. 

After the business of rough drafts is over the pressure largely leaves the room.  When she asks me what I want to do with my life it seems odd it wasn’t already obvious.  Maybe it was.  I feel like she understands how many different parts there are to life, how nobody sees me all at once, how no one should.  The eclipse of shadow and light.  She’s crossed me on campus while I’ve been sitting with Sinead on a bench, gave me a knowing look, like she forgave me and wasn’t going to tell anybody. She couldn’t tell you details but she sure knew the context.  I was slouched like I had all the time in the world, like I always am, startled and relieved at the same time.  Her arms were loaded with bags, her day was finally over.  

I put a hand through my hair and keep it there while I respond to the desk.  A few strands waft to the pages below, land and rest shaped like huge C’s.  “You know, a writer, a novelist, poet, journalist…I want to do it.”

--“You will,” she says, smiling.  “You will.”    

And as cliché as it is, it was a magic moment for me.        

IX.

When I’m permitted to leave I carry my books and papers with me in my hands and then stop outside at a table to put them back in my bag.  The downing sun makes twilight seem like a combination of Halloween colors, mixed aural paint.  People are all on their way home.  While I was inside my mother texted me.  I call her to tell her how my day went. 

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