The next day Stoney and I went to the Math building to talk to Dr. Ladd about the courses we’d chosen. Neither of us had taken any of the prerequisites for anything we wanted to take.
Our suite was four bedrooms in a row with a bathroom in the middle. The four-room suite had been originally designed to be shared by two people who used the inner rooms as sitting room and the outer rooms as bedrooms, but not now. I had the outside room at one end, by agreement with Cisco, and Stoney had the outside room at the other, by luck of the draw.
I swung by Stoney’s room just after lunch and he still wasn’t awake. When I knocked and came in he woke up with his sunglasses on and even in his own room managed to convey a sense of confusion as to where he was. He lit a cigarette and mixed a Bloody Mary before he would let me talk. He had a larger refrigerator than most dorm residents and it had a large freezer compartment with a ten pound bag of ice inside.
“We’re supposed to meet with Ladd at two to get approval on our registration cards,” I said.
“Is there coffee?” he asked.
“No. Get cleaned up.”
“You’re so abrupt, Henry,” he said, but trudged off to the bathroom, drink and cigarette in hand. Because he was in the bathroom, I had to go back out into the hall and unlock the door to Cisco’s room to get back to my own. Stoney showed up at my room about twenty minutes later showered and shaved but clad in a red tee shirt with a Chinese character on the front and a portrait of Mao Tse Tung on the back, faded jeans held up by some kind of knotted macramé sash and rubber flip-flops like you buy at the beach.
“How do I look?” he asked.
“You need a haircut,” I said.
“I’m letting my freak flag fly. Let’s go.”
“No. Go put on a real shirt and some shoes and find a belt,” I said. “You’re not going to a hipster pride parade, we need permission.”
“God almighty what a fucking Nazi,” he said, but he returned to his room and returned wearing an Alligator shirt, a belt, and Weejuns. I’d never seen him wear penny loafers before.
It was only a block or so to the building where the math profs had their offices. Once we got there we passed a door marked “Faculty Break Room” and without saying anything Stoney veered off, opened the door, strolled in to the faculty break room, waved blithely to the middle-aged men conversing inside, poured himself a large Styrofoam cup of coffee, gave the professors a Boy Scout salute, and left, closing the door behind him. He stopped in the hall to take a few sips of his coffee.
“Okay. Let’s do this,” he said, coffee in hand.
Ladd was expecting us.
“Gentlemen!” he said, smiling but without asking us to sit down. “So how did you spend your summer?” Stoney slurped his coffee.
“Mainly on differentiation and integration, but with lots of analytical methodology thrown in,” I said. “She said to tell you we’d covered everything in the Nehari book and went beyond it, although we didn’t go into all the engineering applications with fluids and fields.”
“In three dimensions or two?” he asked.
“Mainly in two, although sometimes that was a two-dimensional mapping of a three-dimensional problem,” I said.
“The what book?” Stoney asked.
“The Nehari book,” I said.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” asked Stoney. “We didn’t use any fucking books.”
Dr. Ladd pulled a green volume off of a shelf behind him and handed it to Stoney. Stoney put his coffee down on Ladd’s desk and took the book with a skeptical expression. “The Nehari book,” said Dr. Ladd, frowning at Stoney’s coffee. “It was quite popular in the sixties, when I was getting my undergraduate degree from Carnegie, where Dr. Nehari was a professor.” Stoney flipped through it, nodding equivocally. He took a sip of his coffee and put the cup back on the professor’s desk. Ladd frowned at it again, and again Stoney didn’t notice. “That book provided the material for a two-year course that I completed as a senior. It was considered quite rigorous. And you gentlemen claim to have learned all of it in one summer.”
“Yes, sir, but in fairness, you were taking lots of other courses, and we were studying just math. All day every day,” I answered.
“This is the right shit, man,” said Stoney. He took out his cigarettes absently and made like he was going to shake one out as he leafed through the book. I took the pack away from him and put it in my own pocket. He looked at me, surprised, then realized I was not letting him light up because it would be rude. He nodded and looked back at the book, taking another sip of coffee. “Remember this fucker?” he said to me, pointing. “Took all day. Oh, yeah. Here’s your old buddy Poisson. That’s us, man,” he said to Dr. Ladd and handed him back the book. Ladd flipped towards the back and stood as if to write something on the blackboard, then decided better of it and sat back down. He shook his head.
“What do you boys want to take?” he asked resignedly.
“Differential Geometry?” I asked. He nodded.
“That would be a logical next step.” He looked out the window and thought. “That’s a very hard course,” he said. “You will be the only underclassmen in it.”
“I’m a junior,” said Stoney.
“Even you, a junior, have not taken the prerequisites. It is all but impossible to do so at this university before your senior year. Some of your classmates will be graduate students.”
“I’m perfectly okay with that,” Stoney said.
“Mr. …” Ladd said, looking at Stoney.
“Jackson. But you can call me Stoney.”
“Mr. Jackson it is extremely important that you do well in this course. I know you have made good grades thus far, but if you fail to do so in this instance I will not approve any further prerequisite waivers for you. Do you understand?”
“Yeah. Sure. Totally. That’s cool. Sir.”
“And you?” he said, looking at me.
“Yes, sir.”
“There are a lot of students who would like to skip prerequisites. I can justify it in your cases because you appear to be unusually good mathematicians and unusually well prepared. But if you fail to produce good marks in this course not only do your own academic records suffer, but I look bad for letting you leapfrog over other, arguably more qualified students. I don’t care if you look bad, but I care very much if I look bad. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Yeah. Sure. Cool,” said Stoney. “Sir.” Dr. Ladd held out his hand for our registration cards and filled them out with the course number and scribbled his initials in the “approval” column. He returned our registration cards and gave each of us one of his business cards.
“Good luck, and tell the registrar to call me if she has any questions.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“Yeah. Thanks, bud,” said Stoney, giving a smile and a kind of abbreviated ear-high Black Power closed fist salute that I’d never seen him use before. We turned to leave and Stoney opened the door.
“Oh, Mr. Baida,” he said. I turned. “You’re interested in physics, no?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Assistant Professor Wolffe, whom you gentlemen know, has gotten interested in knot theory, which no one’s studied in any depth for a several decades. He’s begun to speculate about a new approach to physics in which particles are analyzed as strings. He doesn’t have anyone to discuss it with. An iconoclast like you might understand what he’s talking about. None of us in the Math department can really follow it.”
“Like strings, you said?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s the damndest thing. He seems to tinker a lot with dimensions, too. I don’t really get it, but he’s all excited about it.
“Strings like strings of variables?” I asked.
“No, like thread, or yarn, or rope.”
“I’ll drop by his office and say hi,” I said.
“What do you think of the idea?” Ladd asked
“You know, hard to say at first blush. Doesn’t sound promising to me but I haven’t talked to him.”
“Thanks. I’ll tell him you’re coming,” said Ladd. “Good afternoon.” And with that we left. I gave Stoney his Winstons® back as soon as we closed the door behind us and he immediately fired one up. He also took a large gulp of his coffee, some of which dribbled down his chin.
“Well, that was relatively painless,” he said. “Memorial?”
“Let’s go.” We walked the few blocks to Memorial Gymnasium, where registration was taking place. “What are you taking?” I asked, on the way. He handed me his registration card. In addition to analytical geometry, Stoney was taking a matrix theory class that did not interest me in the least, advanced macroeconomics, a German literature course, and a very specific-sounding European history course. I was planning to take second year Greek, an introductory quantum mechanics course, nonlinear dynamics and an English course on Shakespeare.
“What’s your minor?” I asked.
“Economics, if they’ll let me not take any of the business administration bullshit, but so far the answer on that is no, otherwise German. You?”
“Don’t know. I’m a double major so far, but I think I still need a minor. Greek, maybe.” As we walked through the doors of the gym we were immediately greeted by Toni and Rob. Ah, shit.
“Henry. Finally. What are you taking?” demanded Toni. She was wearing a very small tank top, cutoff jeans, and lace-up tennis shoes. Her hair was tied back under a navy blue bandanna. She was getting lots of looks from male passers-by to which she was oblivious. Rob was in khakis, a button-down shirt and running shoes and could have been a frat boy.
“Why do you care what I’m taking?” I asked.
“Because Rob and I have to take the same courses,” she answered. Ah, shit.
“You can’t take second-year Greek or Analytic Geometry,” I said. “And since when are you interested in Shakespeare?”
“No, she means the physics courses,” Rob said.
“Maybe I’m not taking any physics courses,” I said. I really had no interest in another year of sitting between the two of them.
“Henry, even if you don’t tell me I’m going to find out and we’re going to transfer in. My aunt Angie works in the Provost’s office,” she said.
“Is her last name Cuneware, by any chance?” she asked.
“You know her?” asked Toni.
“We’ve met.” I sighed. No escape. Okay. “I’m taking quantum mechanics and nonlinear dynamics,” I said.
“Cool,” said Rob.
“We guessed the quantum mechanics but not nonlinear dynamics,” she said. “Thank you Henry.” She smiled and they walked off to stand in their appropriate enrollment lines. Stoney watched passively and finished his coffee.
“Who were they?” asked Stoney.
“Rob and Toni. What did you think?”
“Nice knockers,” said Stoney. We stood in our respective lines. When I got to the front of the line, I handed the assistant registrar my card and she made all of the appropriate marks on all of the appropriate pieces of paper. She filled out a schedule for me and handed it to me with a smile, expecting me to move along.
“Can I ask a question?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“So I’m taking the right number of courses, right?”
“Sure. You’re on course to graduate in four years for sure,” she said.
“But I could take more courses if I wanted to?”
“Sure! Nothing but your schedule limiting your courses,” she said.
“So if I wanted to take another course, there’s nothing to say I can’t?”
“No, not at all. You’re a full-time student. You pay your tuition, you can take as many courses as you can fit in!” she seemed happy to pass along this news.
“So will the course on advanced optics and electromagnetism schedule for me?” I asked.
“Sure! Let me check!” She flipped through her schedule cards and smiled, then frowned.
“Okay. So. It will schedule for you, but it’s limited to Physics majors,” she said with a frown.
“I’m a Physics major,” I said.
“Really? As s sophomore?” she asked, and flipped through some cards again. “So you are! You want to take that course?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Sounds great.”
“You know, you keep this up, you’re going to graduate early,” she said, filling out the papers to enroll me in the course.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, you’ll get your credit hours early. You know. Won’t get your four years of college,” she said, smiling.
“You can graduate early?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “You don’t have to go four years,” she said. “As soon as you have 120 hours and 120 points, you can graduate.”
“How do I get points?” I asked.
“Well, if you get a C average or better, the points kind of take care of themselves.”
“So if I double up on my courses I get out early?” I asked.
“Sure!” she said. “But then you don’t get to have your full four years of college. Do you really want to do that?”
“Is there any other Math course I can fit into my schedule?” I asked. She made a finny expression and looked at her catalogue of courses. She scowled for a few minutes, shook her head a few times, then looked at me speculatively.
“There’s this advanced statistics course,” she said. “Eight a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“Any prerequisites?” I asked.
“No. But that may be an oversight. Have you taken some … basic statistics …deal?” she asked.
“Not really. But it’s just numbers,” I said.
“So you’re on some kind of … math trip?” she asked.
“Not really. I just get along with math really, really well,” I said.
“Sure. Okay. Like, I was a psych major because I really liked Oakley Ray’s Drugs and Human Behavior class and really got so much out of it but then I took Cal Izzard’s seminar on the expression of emotions and it was all this looking at Russian actors and stuff and I was so totally out of my depth so I dropped the course and still graduated on time,” she said.
“Sure,” I said.
“So what I’m getting at is that since you’re taking like this enormous … shitload of courses anyway if you get into this advanced stats deal and realize that just maybe you shoulda taken the basic sophomore level statistics course first then you drop it don’t worry ‘cause you’re still like making progress to your degree. And you can drop pretty late. Here’s my phone number. My work one, too,” she said. “I can help you drop it if you realize you’re in like over your head. And there’s like no shame in that because you’re really biting off a lot here. Are you really just a sophomore?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “You can see by my card.”
“Sure. But you seem so confident and grown up. I look at these kids all day.”
“Well, thanks. So I’m signed up for the statistics course and the optics one too?” I asked.
“Sure. Just call me at this number, or one of these numbers, if you want to drop one,” she said, and smiled.
“Thanks, Miss …” I started.
“Julie,” she said. “Miss Julie.” She smiled again and I left. Stoney was waiting by the door.
“What were you doing back there?” he asked, with a complaining tone. “That took forever.”
“I signed up for some extra courses,” I said.
“Cool,” he answered. We walked back to the dorm room.
“So who were those guys again?” he asked, halfway home.
“Which guys?” I asked.
“The physics people. The girl in the Converse low-tops.” I looked at him blankly. “The boy had a good haircut and was in all Brooks Brothers except for the Adidas shoes.”
“I need better clues,” I said.
“She had big tits.”
“Oh. Toni,” I said.
“And him?”
“He’s Rob. She’s crazy and he puts up with it because she’s a nymphomaniac.”
“I see. And you never noticed the way she looks?” Stoney asked.
“Yeah, well, she’s okay. She’s not Melissa pretty, but I can see where people find her attractive.”
“And that whole buxom, tiny tank top, high-cut shorts, long shiny hair, free spirit in a come-fuck-me way doesn’t appeal to you?”
“Stoney, she’s barking mad.”
“Since when did that get in the way of a red-blooded American boy’s sexual impulses?”
“How about mad as a hatter? Mad as a March hare?”
“You know nothing of March hares, Henry. And you’re ignoring the larger point to immerse yourself in details, as is your wont. As is sometimes your wont, I guess.”
“Crazy as a bedbug?”
“You know nothing of bedbugs, either. Think of Rob. Did he ever strike you as … queer?” Stoney asked.
“Queer funny? Queer strange?” I asked
“Queer gay,” he said.
“I don’t really think about that kind of thing a lot. What he thinks and does is his business and none of mine. Plus, I’m not good at thinking through that kind of speculation.”
“No one is. That’s why we all do it. Mother Nature made it fun to think about what other people are thinking. Otherwise we’d never do it and we’d have killed each other off back in the Rift Valley,” he said.
“Yeah well they both act like they’re pretty … engaged, sexually speaking. If’ Rob’s gay he’s doing a pretty good straight imitation to her and to us, isn’t he?” We’d reached the front of our dorm, almost the exact spot where Rachel had kissed me one night freshman year. Stoney paused, and we stopped walking for a minute and he looked at me speculatively.
“You never know what’s going on in another person’s head, Henry. He can look like he’s completely one thing and then he turns out to be something else completely. No matter what you think you know about somebody, you never really know what’s going on in his head. So you can never really be surprised if he does something … unexpected. At least I would never be surprised if … anybody … did something surprising.”
“Are we still talking about Toni and Rob?” I asked.
“Of course. You said it never occurred to you that Rob might be a sword-swallower?”
“No, not at all. He’s fucking Toni morning, noon and night,” I said.
“Even though he has that precious haircut and those precious Brooks Brothers shirts and slacks, so carefully ironed in his dorm room?” Stoney asked.
“How do you know where he ironed them?”
“Those were definitely not professionally laundered. So he had to have an ironing board and an iron in his dorm room,” Stoney said.
“So?”
“Where do you keep your ironing board, Henry?”
“I don’t have one,” I admitted.
“Neither does anybody else you know. Let’s go!” he walked into the dorm. He had his keys out as we approached our doors so we went in through his end of the suite. Milton was listening to rock music at high volume and smoke was thick in the air as though there had been a marijuana forest fire. “Come to papa,” said Stoney to Milton’s joint, and Milton handed it to him.
“Later,” I said, as Stoney took a deep toke.
“Dinner later?” he croaked. I nodded.
I got back to my own dorm room but didn’t have a lot to do. I wasn’t reading a novel, schoolwork was a few days off, I hadn’t bought my books, and I hadn’t bought a newspaper. I sat down at my desk. There was a sheet of graph paper sitting in front of me and I started to idly fill in a checkerboard.
There’s a thing about checkerboards. If you start at just one point and alternate black and white, or whatever colors you like, and radiate out from your one point, you get the familiar checkerboard pattern known to linoleum floors everywhere. If you start with not one point but two, and radiate out from both of them in the familiar checkerboard pattern, half the time they’ll mesh smoothly and unite into one even checkerboard and no one will be able to tell there were two points of origin. The other half of the time, though, the patterns won’t mesh, but collide. The two checkerboards will form two checker boards separated by an uneven wall of light or dark colored squares, depending on how you decide to color them in. If you start from four or five different points of origin, the whole thing becomes more chaotic. The boundaries between the different checkerboard patterns wander around like fracture lines. If you happen to have pens of three different colors, say blue, purple, and black, and you start several checkerboard origin points with each different color, your results are, well, interesting. But the most interesting thing is that the result is not at all chaotic or turbulent. It’s very ordered. It’s just a complicated kind of order. And when you realize you’ve made mistakes, you’ll need to find a red pen to isolate those. So while your friends are smoking dope and arguing about why a carrot is more orange than an orange, you end up with
which may not look like much, but its an interesting way to look at what happens at complex margins that result form consistent application of simple rules. If you’re thinking as you’re drawing, you begin to think that areas of irregularity tend to isolate themselves from each other, sealing themselves off.
There was a knock at the door. It was open, so Cisco walked in nonchalantly.
“Yo,” he said, in greeting. “What’s that?” he asked, looking over my shoulder at my graph paper.
“It may be a representation of what’s going on in small regions of the universe where the laws of physics don’t apply uniformly,” I said, cautiously. I don’t always get a good reaction when I talk about this stuff. “Or a randomly ordered checkerboard.”
“Cool. Dinner?” he asked.
“Sure.” I shrugged. I got up to follow him out. We cut through the bathroom to Milton and Stoney’s side of the suite. They were listening to “Journey to the Center of the Mind” by the Amboy Dukes at ear piercing volume.
“Dinner?” shouted Cisco.
“What?” they shouted back.
“Do. You. Want. Dinner?” he shouted.
“What?” Cisco bent over the turntable and lifted the tone arm from the vinyl.
“Hungry?” he asked in the silence.
“Whoah. Man. That was like, so, kind of, assertive,” said Stoney.
“Action-oriented. Awe-inspiring, like. Cool,” said Milton.
“Do you gentlemen want dinner?” Cisco asked.
“Oh, God, yes!” Milton said. “I’m fucking starving,” he said, as though making a discovery.
“Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Sure. Food,” said Stoney. I opened the door, Cisco turned off the turntable, and we left.
“And you’re saying he wasn’t high when he did that?” Milton asked, as we left.
“Yeah, yeah. He claims he doesn’t do drugs at all,” said Stoney.
“But the album cover has like pipes and things all over it. Hundreds of different pipes,” said Milton, bleary-eyed.
“Fuck! You’re right. Maybe it’s just extremely effective marketing. You know. To, like, make the album more attractive to guys like us.”
“Or maybe he’s a complete stoner who lied in the interview,” said Milton.
“I don’t know, man. You’re accusing a fellow longhair of being a liar. Doesn’t that break some tribal rule?’ Stoney asked.
“No, no. I’m a philosophy major,” said Milton.
“I’m still going with Ted,” said Stoney.
“Let’s put it to a vote,” said Milton. He looked at Cisco, who pitched the butt of his Marlboro.
“Gotta go with Milton on this one,” said Cisco. Milton looked at me,
“Looking at the odds, chances of a lead guitarist in a famous rock band who’s never smoked reefer have to be pretty small,” I said.
“So you’re going with Milton, too?” Stoney asked me.
“Aftraid so.”
“How could you do this to me? I thought you loved me,” Stoney said.
“I do. Deeply.”
“Yet you have betrayed me. How can I ever learn to trust you again?” Stoney asked. We’d reached the dining hall and Cisco held the door open for us. We crossed the hall to stand in the far line, which always seemed to be shorter. Maybe the freshmen didn’t know. We fell into line behind two slender girls wearing skirts (one madras, one denim) and cotton shirts. The skirts were tight through the bottom and Milton was captivated by the view.
“So your Dodgers are still in the hunt,” said Stoney, morosely.
“They’re looking good,” I said. “Pittsburgh’s tough, though.”
“You have a team?” he asked Cisco.
“Braves,” Cisco answered.
“You?” he looked at Milton.
“I tend not to identify with sports teams too much. It seems too totemic. I think.” Milton began. The girl in the madras skirt turned around when she heard Cisco’s voice.
“Frankie!” she said, excitedly. Cisco smiled.
“Hello, June,” he said. She kind of leapt towards him to give him a big hug.”
“Hello…” Milton began, extending his hand to June.
“Muffy! Look who it is,” June said to her denim-skirted companion, who interrupted her animated conversation with someone in front of her in line to turn around, then squealed with delight when she saw Cisco.
“Frankie!” she exclaimed, and gave him a hug. Each of madras skirt and denim skirt took one of his arms and they turned away from us, not intentionally, but to talk amongst old friends. Milton made as if to tap one of the girls on the shoulder.
“Uncool,” said Stoney, stopping him in his tracks. After we’d all selected our dinners and paid for them in the odd scrip that was meal points, the three of us sat at a table for four. Cisco and the two pretty girls had gone elsewhere.
“I am never going to get laid,” said Milton, morosely. We all ate our dinners in silence for several minutes. I had a piece of ground beef that was labeled chopped steak, a salad, and some green beans. “How does he do it?”
“Who, Cisco?” asked Stoney.
“Of course, Cisco. Who did you think I was talking about? Reggie Jackson?”
“Yeah. So despite your pontificating you’re an A’s fan?” Stoney asked.
“Sure.”
“They’re still in the hunt, too,” said Stoney.
“I know. Stay on point,” said Milton.
“What’s the point?” asked Stoney.
“Why girls are always circling around Cisco.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, like, there are, like, some differences between us and him that, like, girls might notice,” said Stoney.
“Anything important?” asked Milton.
“Yeah, like, well, he sorta shaves everyday. He’s got, like a haircut. And his clothes are clean. He wears khakis and shit.”
“Girls don’t care about that kind of stuff,” said Milton.
“What do they care about?” Stoney asked.
“Dick size. Henry, does Cisco have a big dick?” Milton asked.
“They tell me size doesn’t matter,” said Stoney.
“Henry?” Milton asked me.
“Couldn’t tell ya’” I said, a little worried about having this kind of discussion in the campus dining hall.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Henry,” said Milton.
“You know, Cisco and I don’t hang around much. And we don’t really hang out at all naked,” I said.
“I don’t know why you have to be so difficult about this,” said Milton.
Look. I’d like to say that college was sitting at the feet of masters absorbing knowledge, but really, most of college was like this. It occurred to me that the Milton checkerboard might be the one causing the discontinuities, but for that matter, the Henry checkerboard could be, too.
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