Of Wolves and Men

I HATED him like I had never hated anyone before. Hate at first sight, like a wolf and a hunted man meeting in a broad field at night, hackles up, eyes ablaze. I flashed my teeth in response, "Hello."

"Hello," he confirmed, with a polyurethane grin. "My name's Ron Smithies, from the Lawrenceville School."

He then ignored me and headed for the girl.

"Hey, Barbara, I've got these tickets to the symphony tonight. Dandy time. Let's go."

"No, I don't think so, Ron; David and I are going to get some ice cream after we move this desk."

"Oh, c'mon, what's more important."

Enter to grow in rage. RAGE The kind of rage that makes you want to bomb banks, smash parking meters and kill important people. Powerful, beautiful rage.

"Why don't you help me up the stairs with this desk, Ron?" I asked tonelessly. "I'll take the top."

And so the weak, scrawny, tweed-clad willow took his bottom end of the desk, and tried to follow my brisk pace up the stairs.

"Hey...slow down, huh?" he pleaded. The wolf was now treading familiar woods, full of scent and semen.

"C'mon, gorilla-face, slow down..."

Barbara laughed.

"Oh wow, your friend here is a real pizzaface, what a hunk..."

He was struggling under the side of the desk in the center of the stair, uttering his own brand of condescension: "apebreath, banana boy, wop, grease ball, pizzabrain, vegetable-peddler;" he was pulling all the plugs on a last ditch performance to maintain grace. And I was unable to respond, my own vicious and maligned thoughts were tripping over each other, filling my mouth with cotton candy, my head with the stuff of insanity.

"God, Barbara, he's strong, but he sure is ugly."

I loosened my grip, and let the desk slip out of my hands; its full weight tumbled down on Ron, taking him totally by surprise. Down the stairs he rolled, limb over limb, flailing and silent; the desk mashed his head against a corner of the wooden rail, ripped his expensive IZOD shirt. A docksider moccasin flew off his foot. Bleeding from the mouth, he pulled himself up in a huff. He fetched his docksider and put it back on.

"Great guy, Barb. A real star," he said through his heavy, haughty breath. "Don't count on me being seen with you," he said to the girl, rushing down the stairs to catch his symphony. The wolf merely licked his chops and wandered back into the woods.

I went to public high school, you see, and this first week I had met more than one peer who called me a "pubie." Not that I had anything against "preppies" when I came here; I thought they were all wealthy, groomed kids who wore sweaters and tweed. But it was much, much more than that, this irrevocable division of the races, battle of mentalities. No, not all preppies are bad. No, not all pubies are good.

FROM THE TIME my parents dropped me off with all the other parents and all the other college boys and girls, the great expectations had begun to crumble. I had never felt so strange since my mother turned me loose on the first day of kindergarten.

And back in my room--my own room and vehicle of existence--the boxes full of ME lay waiting to be unpacked. Stereo first, all the other stuff later. Posters and signs to tell everybody who passed the door of Daniels 216 who I was. Who was I?

Less than 24 hours and I had overdosed. Less than a day and I was already experiencing displacement, shock, and near hysteria. To hell with all these pretentious status-seekers, purveyors of polite dinner conversation, academic bon vivants who transformed Beethoven and Marx into props for a daily song and dance.

ENTER TO HOWL. That night, he approached me with all the zeal and impulse of a new American spirit. Little Joe was naked and bold, still dressed in the irreverent street rags of adolescence; he shed Harvard's illusions of grandeur and specialty with every step. The world of people and events wafted about his presence far-removed and unimportant. HE was the moment, ignorant and unconcerned with the vague promises of the future of the past.

Besides that, he walked like a duck and took a lot of drugs. There was his high school girlfriend, pretty and clinging after his every step; there was the guitar which he was struggling to play, and the home-made stereo which demolished thousands of records. He was an incongruous blend of toughness, wit, frustration, recklessness, friendliness and zeal. Lots of zeal, all of it poorly channelled. He wanted to be a rock and roll star, you see, but in the end he wound up being himself. Lovable, but dangerous.

Back to the night. Where the wolf strains his eyes and sneezes through the dope smoke. The man opens the door; expanding clouds of pot smoke tumble out into the hallway two doors down from the senior tutor's apartment. The man enters the party. A panorama of naked wolves raise their hungry and wondrous eyes to him. It is dark and they are all seated on the floor, forming a circle and passing the pipe with an ambience of mysterious ritual. They toke and laugh and smile nervously as they apply their peripheral vision; some just roll back their eyes beneath closing eyelids and fall back on the floor with only the ceiling to reckon. Little Joe and his girlfriend preside over the ritual sitting on the bed, filling pipes and rolling joints and popping pills, wandering into the music and eventually into each other's affection. Somehow the room is filled with chatter, most of it superficial. People don't fall into each other's laps, but I keep hoping that someone will fall into mine.

This circle of wolves had one thing in common: it was their first night at Harvard. Fifty years hence, the room would remain intact; but this peculiar amalgamation of souls would never come to rejoin--perhaps only later in heaven or hell. But between freshman year, heaven and hell, each would come to love and be what the other sitting beside him would hate and despise. The only thing they all had to cherish at this tiny joint in time was their strangeness, and in time it would all diffuse.

As time sucked everyone into various activities and social circles and fields of study, there was only one constant: Little Joe. While most could be described as Crimson editors, or soc stud nerds, or Advocate poets, Little Joe remained a stereotype unto himself. Little Joe was playing his guitar too loud last night; Little Joe put a hole in the wall while practicing his kung fu; Little Joe smoked too much last night and wound up in Stillman Infirmary; Little Joe shaved his head just for kicks the other day. Just for kicks. For Halloween.

Halloween. That whole year seemed like Halloween. Halloween brought on the worst outbreak of freshman parties since freshman week. And the costume parties continued all year long.

He shaved his head, shaved it absolutely bald. His short, street-stubby from was now even stubbier, looking like one of those skin-heads out on the night for some good "Pakibashing."

Then he put on nylons, a dress and a stuffed bra, and finally the wig. He was a saucy hooker on his way to a Halloween party with his girlfriend--a hooker as well. They bounded down the stairs with all their playground energy and they encountered the infamous and repulsive Harvard apparition of drunken preppie-jocks. There they were, Little Joe and Rhonda, their slap-happy presence blazing through a clumsy mob of drunken, tuxedoed pretension.

"Heeeeeeeey, faggot," the preppie-jock slurred. Gales of black laughter.

Little Joe stopped still on the bottom step and looked up at these spectres, his ebullience and gaiety sucked back into tense reproach. The wolves positioned themselves at the top and bottom of the Currier House steps, huddling into their packs; a couple and a mob.

"What did you call me?"

"A faggot. So what," the preppie said indignantly. "You sure look it."

"You can't call me that. You fight me, pig," Little Joe retorted, obviously taking the whole incident far more seriously than his enemies. "You meet me here at midnight and I'll beat the shit out of you, you understand? Little Joe ordered, and the men across from him agreed with amused nods.

Too bad, I thought. This was the American conflict I had prayed someday to see: little guy in drag wheeling and kicking and crippling his clean-cut detractors, nylons ripping, wig flying off onto the ground, neck-ties shredded and doffed underfoot.

Little Joe went back to his room and prepared for the battle, shedding his clothes for t-shirt and jeans. He practiced crotch kicks into his door and smashed light bulbs with his Chinese numchuks. He took up his boxing gloves and pounded the tree out in the House courtyard for half an hour. "I'm ready," he sighed.

He awoke his roommate and summoned him to accompany him in case his enemy brought "friends." Little Joe's roommate was Big Joe, and Big Joe was 6 ft. 11 in. and 245 pounds. Big Joe told his roommate that it was all so silly, all these wolves grinding their teeth over an ill-founded sexual speculation. But he went anyway, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

Little Joe stood perched at the top of the steps and kept his eye open for a mob of black ghouls to come prowling out of the darkness with whips and chains. He waited half an hour. An hour. An hour and a half. And then he kicked at the asphalt as he had been doing all his life and retreated to his room.

He found his enemy sitting in the House lounge with his latest honey, Barbara of my green past. Barbara was giggling and laughing at her scrub-clean mate when Little Joe cuffed him on the back of the neck and told him to apologize. This time, the wolf sent the man scrambling up the tree, tottering uncertainly from a limb.

"What for?"

"You know what for. Apologize or fight me."

"Why should I apologize--it was just a comment."

"Look...I don't know what the trouble's about, but I don't see why I should apologize...I don't see any reason..."

"Oh eat it out, you fuckin' preppie wimp," Little Joe blurted and stomped away to his room where he would play Ramones and smoke dope until he was lulled to sleep.

IT KEPT rolling, on and on, like a juggernaut out of control. Traumas and ecstasies and illusion and disillusion, friends and lost friends, and then I heard someone call it "an emotional roller-coaster." While the most certain and directed subjects approached the maze with unswerving confidence and determination, others cried when they had to decide on their field of concentration, on their course selections, on what play they would audition for, on what publication they would "comp" for.

The wolf was still scrounging around the square with his friends looking for some raw meat, though, and his trustful scent brought him to the frenetic source of his curiosity. PCP was the freshman craze in certain Harvard Yard circles, and lots of it was being eaten. This was the stuff that high school health classes warn you about nowadays, but only three years ago it was an unknown frontier. Animal tranquilizer. The stuff they feed to sick and maimed horses before they are put out of their misery.

Little pink or purple pills, we ate them after mid-year exams with all the snow collecting dirt around the Square, between the jaws of pressure and frightening independence, pent-up wildness careening off the inner walls of confused, lateadolescent minds.

We played ping-pong after the chemical lunch. We were just getting off. The ground slipped lower and lower, until I was standing on ten-foot legs. The ball darted about leaving traces of its circular form, and when I went to hit the circular form, the ball slipped by me. I told my arms--commanded them--to hit the fucking ball, but they just laid numb by my side, dead. My legs went limp, and I quit the ping-pong game.

When the old wolves know they are about to die, they sneak back into the woods and find their territory, the land that is especially theirs. To find my bed, I coped with an elevator wall, and the carpeted interior of my dormitory which made loud noises when I walked upon it. The walls of my room swirled around and around, dilating and breathing, their bright colors and strange poster faces lulling my consciousness--the face of Jim Morrison peered in on me from an album cover, still and refracted, inviting me to his morbid dance with a grim smile and doll's eyes.

I wrote my will. Left everything to my little brother, and told him not to be so stupid. Mother was right. These drugs were kicking in my brains, and they had won. All those queer movies, they must have been right. I was dying. I looked out the window and saw that it was night. When I looked again, it was day. I called the phone company, and they said it was day. Then I looked a little closer and noticed a construction crew working out on the street. With mean jackhammers and hard, old faces, they penetrated concrete and dredged up sludge. Scrubby, spotless students passed them by with remarkable direction and oblivious, vacant expressions. They continued like a stream of mosaic colors, and the noise became louder; orange cement mixers whirling and turning and the tools spitting out their dense, metallic noises; they got louder and louder, so loud that I blocked my ears and worried that my neighbor might come to complain about the stereo again. But it was real.

ENTER TO GROW in wisdom. Never take your steps for granted, young man. Look too far ahead of you and you'll walk off a cliff and break your ass. Hard. So you take it a step at a time, and don't look back until you finished the trail and it's time to digest some food. Look over your shoulder too early and you'll see a great gray blur and you'll git too dizzy too quick and fall 300 feet to the icy ground.

"When he starts to see beyond the pages of his books, he's likely to walk into walls and lose his directional capacities for a while," I overheard Dr. God mumble. "But we've discovered2