Sputterpub's Blog

I didn’t expect to be living alone my senior year but so it goes. Ronnie and I already faced our domestic incompatibility, and Chaz and I still aren’t ready to share a home. Or Chaz isn’t ready. His reluctance about the next step has me looking seriously at our relationship now. Or maybe it’s the imminence of all the next steps – “real life” or whatever they turn out to be – that has me reassessing everything.

I like my little studio apartment. It’s on the quiet side of campus. I read Swift and Austen. I enjoy my time alone but I have to get out once a day at least, interact with others even if I don’t know them, or I’ll go batty.

I have a heavy writing assignment this weekend, so I’m not getting out much. But sometimes it doesn’t take much.

I worked all day yesterday and finally got myself shod and out of my apartment around dusk. I figured I’d walk across campus, find food, maybe see Chaz later.

As I was entering the campus I ran into Peter Pelham.

I recognized him this time. His hair was shorter, like when I first met him, and there was something so familiar about his posture that I felt my heart jerk and my face flush.

“I think we met when I first came here,” I blurted.

“I know we did,” he answered. “But that was a lifetime and a half ago, for me.” He was unlocking his car as he spoke. It was a clean yellow roadster and it looked new to me. “Can I give you a lift anywhere?”

“I’m out for a walk,” I said without considering alternatives. “I needed a break from a day of writing.”

“Well I’m still good at that,” he said. “Care for company?”

I think I smiled. He put his bag in the front seat of his car, relocked the machine and began to match his stride to mine.

It didn’t even surprise me, the way we connected again. There’s some kind of chemistry between Peter and me, but I’m older and wiser now, and I don’t think we can be a couple. There’s something about him that’s flighty.

But there’s also something interesting. Peter seems to be an example of crime that paid. After we walked for an hour or so, finding food as we wandered, we ended up back at his car, and I accepted that lift. He took me to his place.

Wow. He’s perched near the top of the hills, with a great view. His sound system is peerless. In the course of the night he confided in me some. There’s no way he’s as candid now as he was then, but I guess that makes sense. One of the lessons Peter says he learned is discretion.

He reported that those prison weekends left him with nothing to do but homework. He pulled his GPA up more than a full point during his jail term. He also had lots of time to consider his errors. When he was released and he returned to dealing, he started doing business carefully, conscientiously, professionally even. He only dealt with customers he knew well. He didn’t work with referrals. And he planned his exit from the industry; Peter applied statistics to his own venture and made a bright-line determination about when to get out.

It took him less than a year. He earned enough to buy his car and his stereo, and he graduated with a decent transcript. Peter’s father is so pleased he’s helping with rent on the hill place, assisting with placement in a job with a future.

He took a weird phone call this morning, before driving me home. It wasn’t a woman (and I’m not jealous anyway) and it wasn’t his dad. If I hadn’t heard otherwise I would have suspected it was a customer. But he told me he’s retired from his life of crime.

I wonder.

Ronnie and I faced the divergence after our sophomore year. We live separately. After Ian flipped out and left the Pelham program, Ronnie was single for awhile. Now she seems to have settled into something with Prof. Pelham’s colleague. Horace is old enough to be Ronnie’s father. Sometimes I wonder if he’s her way of continuing the Program now that she’s upper division and has had to make room for the new crop of freshmen. Sometimes I think it’s all about her unsatisfactory history with her father. Anyway, I understand they’re enjoying Don Quixote together (the Smollett translation). I’m weirded out. I’m reading Salinger and Wilde.

I’m still with Chaz. We maintain separate places (my studio apartment, his room in a shared house) but we spend most nights together. I still read, he still programs, and we seem to be less compatible, but we continue to smoke weed so we rarely fight. We have to find a new dealer.

Pip got busted, big time. Coincidentally the arrest happened right after I finally met him and immediately before I realized who he is.

He’d become somewhat famous for his neat baggies and elegant horticultural comments. His were buds of beauty, seedless and with flecks of red or gold hairy fibers. He was working part-time as a projectionist in the avenue movie house and I hear he spent the moments when he wasn’t setting reels packaging his product and taking customer messages. As Chaz says, he just let it get out of control. He wasn’t vetting the friends of friends of his regulars and it was just a matter of time before he did business with a narc.

It was a scandal. As word spread the connection was made: the son of Professor Pelham was in jail. It was all Pelham in the local news, and then Peter Pelham, and pretty soon I understood that Chaz’s dealer was my lost lust.

I don’t know when or why Peter became Pip. It was hard to get any facts at first, what with all the rumors about Pelham child psychology (how could a boy from such a background go so wrong?) and tax bills (there was a persistent story that the state was going after Pip/Peter for some old $100/ounce tax on the books, instead of for possession and sale).

But we got together with a collection of old buddies last night, and I think we have it as straight as we’re going to. Pip/Peter is going to jail, but it’s county jail and it’s kind of a part-time lockup. We hear he will attend classes during the week and sleep at his parents’ house. If I understand the arrangement, he’ll be spending weekends in jail for the rest of this year. And Chaz has found a lesser but adequate source.

By the end of our first year, Ronnie and I are ready to move on from the dorm. We are still best friends but our paths have diverged. She is so into the Pelham program (Dryden’s Aeneid) that she wants to spend even more time with her fellows. They seem almost like a cult to me; you have to belong to the group to get their references, and you have to understand their references to be considered one of them. When Ronnie isn’t meeting with them it seems like she’s reading things for her next meeting with them.

I on the other hand am wasting my time and loving it. I chip away at required courses, academically, but my first years away from my parents’ home are all about being on my own, away from my parents. I try every drug I encounter (carefully, almost scientifically: reading up on its constituents and effects, blocking out the right time (night or daylight) and arranging for an escort if it is hallucinogenic) and most of the guys. I dabble in student activism but turn away from all the consensus-building (I never did well at working with others).

Maybe Ronnie and I shouldn’t have remained roommates after our first year, but there’s an inertia to strong friendships, a set of habits that sometimes links folks during periods of what would otherwise be estrangement. We get on each other’s nerves in our small apartment, and we seldom have a genuine connection. But we will survive our differences. In fact, I am so nocturnal and she is up with the birds, studying all day, living clean and forever brushing her teeth – except for the lack of storage space it’s almost like living alone.

Soon we’re managing to share the place four ways, most of the time. Both Ronnie and I settle into relationships. She has of course selected a fellow Pelhaman; Ian is slight, curly-haired, armpit-bearded, myopic, and apparently brilliant. He pronounces his name with a long “I.” My lover is Chaz. He writes code and wins at most games. He is big and surprisingly steady. He makes me laugh.

Ian and Ronnie tend to study when they’re in the apartment. Study or cook. They’re trying to read all three volumes of The Divine Comedy (Sayers’s version). They’re down for the night by 9 p.m., so Ronnie and I agreed to give them the bedroom. Chaz and I sleep in the living room, usually from about 3 a.m. to 10, and they try not to disturb us when they come through at dawn, to go to their seminar.

I’m starting to get into school. I did nothing but required courses last year, but now I’m spending time with Classics people, learning Greek of all things, and I’m with Chaz, and I’m not partying as hard. We still smoke weed. In fact, there’s a new dealer in town and we’re getting better stuff lately. I haven’t met the guy – even with all the advances it’s still the man’s job to score the hooch – but Chaz seems to like to buy from Pip.

The buds are beautiful. Pip obviously spends time grooming his product; everything is nicely packaged and details are provided, like provenance for art. Chaz tells me Pip is a tall, Afro-topped white guy, apparently enrolled but not very. Pip doesn’t use what he sells. He characterizes himself as a proud peddler, motivated by two ambitions: he wants a state-of-the-art sound system and a Porsche.

I always put aside what I’m doing when I smoke with Chaz. I get the most out of the experience if I’m not simultaneously reading, translating, or working a puzzle. Lately I’m into Vonnegut. I had to give up Heinlein after Stranger. Peter was right about that; early Heinlein was genuine and fun but later on he yelled too much.

We each run smack into a Pelham on our first day of college. That family forms something of a unified theme for Ronnie and me.

In Ronnie’s case the meeting is intentional. She’s taken by what she reads of the Pelham Seminar Program in the course catalog so she goes to the introductory meeting and listens to the man himself. Professor Ernest Pelham believes that the humanities should be delivered by the great books and discussed in Socratic seminars; the four dozen students who will be admitted to the program will each devote two years to it, and fulfill all lower division liberal arts requirements.

My best friend likes that unified approach. Me: I’m more into ala carte course selection. If I’d wanted that kind of guiding I would have chosen a small school.

So Ronnie goes to hear Prof. Pelham, and I attend a little class in the Oriental Languages department that has nothing to do with oriental languages. It’s the only 1-unit course available in Letters & Science, and it is famed for requiring just one thing from each student: a book report, on any book.

I think my schedule needs that unit. I carry a paperback copy of Stranger in a Strange Land into the small lecture room. I don’t know then that it’s the last book by Heinlein I’ll enjoy. But that’s just one of a myriad of things, a plethora even, that I don’t know.

Fifty minutes later, exiting the classroom where nothing happened (really: a mixed group took the desks and waited 25 minutes for the instructor, who then introduced himself and had each of us stand, state our name, show or tell the book we intended to read, and sit), I am approached by a lanky guy who turns out to be Peter Pelham.

“How do you like that book?”

“I haven’t started it yet. But I’ve always liked Heinlein.”

“So far.”

By the time we’ve exchanged those sentences, he is pacing beside me, and we are approaching the entrance to the lecture building. Without commenting we take the same path and walk together.

We don’t talk about books. Peter asks me questions about me, and describes himself as a life adventurer, born and raised around the campus but destined for farther things. He is supposed to be enrolled and two years ahead of me but he is taking time off. He says he popped into the OL class hoping to get an idea for a book to read, but he is delighted to meet me instead.

I am charmed. I like his height, the length of his limbs, the way his blue eyes seem to want to laugh. I like the way his brown hair curls and the shape of his fingernails. I’ll never know what he sees in me; if I did, I might make it last.

We walk all afternoon. I skip dorm dinner but we grab cafeteria Chinese food at an Asian “hofbrau.” I almost miss dorm lock-out. I am kissing Peter in the stairway near the side entrance and I think it is only my virginity that sends me into the dormitory as the doors are about to be locked for the night. The kissing is amazing, the temptation is strong, the fear only prevails by a little.

Our relationship lasts four days before it is interrupted by what he describes as a necessary trip to LA. We walk, we talk, we kiss deeply. I admit his hands everywhere by the third day. He wants to put his mouth where his hands have been and I am sorely, heatedly tempted; who knows what the course of my sexual development would be, if he puts off this trip?

As it is, I have four memorable days, and I miss him more than I want to after he leaves. He sends one postcard, sweet and sexy and suggestive. But it postpones his return, for reasons he doesn’t specify in the small postcard space, and then I don’t hear from him again.

I talk about him to Ronnie. She’s my best friend and my roommate. Her full name is Veronica and she’s as far from the Archie Comics character as she can be, except for her dark hair and Episcopalian religion. She’s the only Veronica I’ve ever known.

Ronnie is enraptured with the Pelham program, reading Pope’s translation of the Iliad, and I don’t even know Peter’s last name. It isn’t till I receive the postcard that I learn it and I don’t make the connection then. But I’m getting ahead of myself.