Beware of Love in Technicolor (26 page)

“Is that why you’re out here by yourself?” I asked.

“Yup,” he answered, sliding a little closer and leaning his head on my shoulder. “Now, Greer?”

“Yes?”

“Tell me the puking story.”

***

By the time I got to the part where the drunk girl named Sandy was laying limp on the sidewalk in front of Wyndham Hall, sequin dress pulled up over her hips, frat boy companion desperate for a reason, an opening, to flee the scene, Ben was doubled over, laughing harder than I had ever seen him laugh. It was contagious, and it made me laugh, and when I described the scrunched up, it-smells-like-puke-in-here faces of everyone I passed on my long walk to the check-in table of The Pit, he draped his arm around my back, leaned in close, and let loose a howl of laughter so intense I thought we would tumble to the cement pad at the very bottom of the steps, wrapped up in one another.

Instead, he pulled away and straightened himself up. We both pulled ourselves together, me straightening my hair, him just looking perfect there in the dark. Even the dark respected the fact that Ben was so good looking, he deserved to be seen no matter what the lighting conditions. I was noticing that on an acid trip, everything was a magnified version of what was normally comfortable in everyday life. Instead of running from them, from the strong emotions and memories and reactions, I found myself running toward the rush that came with really connecting with someone.

***

Later that night, much later that night, John and I retired to his bedroom. Patrick was passed out in a pile of blankets and laundry on the floor in the closet. We figured Topher had found a similar place to bed down, somewhere on the premises.

I slid
off my boots, and placed them neatly on my side of the bed. I then sprawled out, on my back, with my eyes closed to the ceiling above. John lay down next to me, on his side, facing me. I opened one eye, and looked at him.

“How are you doing?” he asked softly, brushing the hair out of my face.

“I’m good. How are you?”

“Good.”

“Did you have fun tonight?” I asked. I felt like I had barely seen him.

“I did. You?” he asked. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself.” I couldn’t tell if he was baiting me into a specific conversation, or just shooting the shit.

“Definitely,” I said. I turned onto my side to face him. “But it’s not something I could do often, like smoking weed. Tripping is a whole day affair.”

“And most of the night,” he smiled. My vision was still a bit wavy.

“I’m so glad I know you,” he said, taking me by surprise. “Even if we never became more than friends, I would be very upset if I had never gotten to know you.”

“How would you know, if you never knew?” I smiled gently, and gave his shoulder a gentle push.

“Oh,” he stated, closing his eyes and nodding. “I’d know.” He opened his eyes, and grinned like the devil. “You wanna get naked?”

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“No,” he said, with a short laugh.

“Good, because no offense or anything, but my body feels completely foreign and weird to me. I had to pee, for like, three hours, before I could finally remember to go.”

“Empty body,” he said, knowingly. “Totally normal.”

“The sun’s coming up,” I said, looking up. The head of the bed was pushed up against the one set of windows in the room, putting the windows right above us. With a bit of effort, I sat up and kneeled on my pillow. I rested my forehead against the glass, which felt cool and real. John hoisted himself up, and did the same.

I’m not sure how long we remained like that, but we were both drifting along on our own faraway thoughts, when suddenly, and without warning, Topher’s face appeared only inches from ours, backlit by the pale light of the rising sun, on the other side of the glass.

I cried out, loudly gasping for breath as I jumped back at least three feet.

“Holy crap!” John yelped, also jumping backwards, but slightly off-center. He went crashing down on the floor, landing on his back. I didn’t know whether to scream or laugh. Topher was laughing wildly outside. I flipped him the bird. He disappeared as quickly as he had sprung up.

John and I had just crawled back into bed and drawn the blankets up when Topher appeared in the doorway.

“I’m lonely,” we heard him say. He walked toward the bed, noticing Patrick curled up in the closet.

“So that’s what happened to him. I want a nest, too.”

“We thought you found a place to sleep already,” John said with some impatience.

Topher continued to stand over us, on my side of the bed. Since I was still mostly dressed, I wiggled over closer to John, and told him to get in bed. He eagerly dropped his jacket to the floor, kicked off his shoes, and got under the covers.

Topher was still a bundle of LSD energy, and his squirming made me giggle. Though we were lying in bed, sleep seemed as out of reach as reality. I was still tripping, too. Only John seemed able to lay still, and he was not pleased with our childish chit-chat.

“
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas,
” Topher said, barely straight-faced. In the early morning light, I could still only make out a small ring of brown in his otherwise darkly dilated eyes. Tripping eyes.

“
How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know,
” I responded in my best Groucho Marx. Even John laughed, his side of the bed shaking as he tried to fight off a response.

“Damn, you are impossible to stump,” Topher said. He was laying on his back, his arms folded under his head. John had now turned back to us, and was also laying on his back, with me cuddled up to him, uncomfortably close in this chemically-induced “yuck” at being physical, but definitely enjoying the mental gymnastics possible when you let your mind go. Though I had my back to Topher, I was able to turn back to laugh and talk as the thoughts bubbled in a silly way to the surface.

But John only had so much patience for it all, and after a few minutes, for him, enough was enough.

“Seriously, dude,” he said with a huff. “You can’t find anywhere else to sleep?”

“I was perfectly at home in the hammock outside,” he responded smartly. “Until someone started shooting at me!”

“They’re only BB
’s,” John said, annoyed.

“Still, target practice with a hammock underneath. That’s seriously deranged even for you guys,” Topher wriggled and squirmed and could not get comfortable.

“Boys,” I stated sharply. I was starting to feel sleepy and I wanted them to shut up.

“I’m still tripping,” Topher whined.

“So are we,” John said. “But we’d like to pretend we can sleep. Why don’t you go watch TV or something?”

“I don’t want to watch TV.”

“Take my car and go home,” John finally said, exasperation clear in his voice. “Just seriously, get out of our bed.”

“Fine,” he said, sitting up and pulling his shoes on dramatically on the edge of the bed. “But I’m taking this with me.” And he plucked the baseball cap, his baseball cap, the baseball cap I had forgotten that was sitting backwards on my head, off my head. The tactile memory of the band remained. He put it on, facing forward, took his jacket, and sneered at Patrick, who lay snoring in his nest. He looked back at John, who was sitting up in bed now, keys in hand, which he had plucked from the drawer of his nightsta
nd. He tossed them to Topher, across the room. He snatched them out of the air, and though he didn’t want to, he smiled.

"
My mother thanks you. My father thanks you. My sister thanks you. And I thank you,”
he said dramatically as he walked out the door.

“
Yankee Doodle Dandy!
” I cried out, knowing he was laughing as hard as me as he trotted up the stairs and out the door.

After about five solid minutes of acid-laced giggling  about this game of movie quotes we had going, and trying to explain to John how we could both have so much interest in these “awful and boring movies” with no special effects or graphic sex, we conceded he just didn’t get it, on that one. And that we were both over tired and in need of sleep. By the time the sun was fully up, and most normal people were greeting their late and lovely September morning, John’s room was silent. Sleep was dreamless and heavy, and most welcome.

Chapter Fifteen

There are many ways to bear witness to something larger than our own petty, individual lives. One of these ways is to experience October in New England. It is like living in a Monet, like giving lungs to Vivaldi. It is drinking from a witch’s brew of smoky smells and corduroy textures. It is the height of perfection, and gone so quickly all that remains is a sense of it, like a dream you can’t quite recall, but that affects you nonetheless.

October the year I was a sophomore in college passed just as brilliantly as any other.  I was discovering that the two classes conducted in large lecture halls were a complete waste of time. There was no way to take attendance when there was over one hundred students in the seats. As long as I followed the syllabus, did the reading, and showed up for any guest speakers, quizzes, or exams, it was disturbingly easy to get B’s. So I was basically down to a one day week, and I was even phoning it in with my news writing class, my major for
Christ’s sake. My professor noted that I would probably prefer feature writing over covering hard news, and I could not have agreed more, except that I really didn’t even like the feature writing all that much, either. I didn’t want to call people up and interview them, or worse, have to go talk to them in person. It felt weird. I spent most of the semester writing stories she could have no way of knowing if my sources were for real or not. I guess you could say I was taking two fiction writing courses that semester.

On the mornings I wasn’t sleeping until noon at John’s house, I could be found sleeping in my room at Bristol. That was the month I started spending more and more time in my own room, and less time at John’s. There were many evenings when I’d wait for him to get out of his late labs, having been promised dinner or a movie at the SUB. Most of them ended before they began, with a phone call telling me he’d skipped class, just woken up, and was going to stay home instead of driving out to campus.

A phone call if I was lucky. I was dealing with hall phones and a gaggle of freshmen girls again. There were nights when I did not know what happened to him at all, though I soon learned not to fully believe him when he told me he’d see me later, and started doing things on my own.

I spent more and more time with Topher. Lunch, dinner, after-dinner hanging out. Sometimes Patrick would hang out with us and we would find creative places to get high. College Wood became a favorite spot, on the bridge just down from the dam.

“So, what the hell is going on with John?” Patrick asked Topher and me on one such night on the bridge. “He seems different this year.”

“I don’t think the house is good for him,” I offered. “It’s constant chaos, and he’s never been one to practice much self-discipline.”

“Yeah,” Topher began, lighting another round. “But I see Ben and Jared on campus all the time. Aaron is in one of my classes, and he’s always there. Do you ever just bump into John?”

We all sat in silence, passing the pipe, thinking.

“C’mon Greer,”Patrick pushed. “You know him better than us. Does he seem ok to you?”

“I think it’s just John being John,” I replied. I shrugged and thought a moment more. “You know how he loves to be dark. Ben told me he cleans the house in the middle of the night, while the rest of them are sleeping.”

              “And that doesn’t seem strange to you?” Patrick snorted.

             
“Strange? Yes. Abnormal, no way.” I passed the empty pipe back to Topher. “He’s an only child, living with four other guys. I think a transition period is probably pretty normal. Besides, it definitely can’t hurt for that house to get cleaned every once in a while, even if it is at three in the morning.”

***

              Ok. There was a bit more to the situation than I was willing to talk about with Topher and Patrick. Even though I spent four or five nights a week at his house, John and I had sex only once, maybe twice, per week. And we were nineteen years old, with plenty of freedom, birth control, and intoxication. While I heard all kinds of stories about him staying up all night on the nights I was not there, when I was there, he’d fall asleep before eleven.  We hardly did anything but hang out, get high. Hang out, get high.

             
I felt like a failure. I was losing whatever allure I once had for him. I wavered between an all-consuming need to make him see me again, and anger that he could make me feel so weak. On the nights I spent at Cloud 9, I felt like such a girl, like a black hole of need when I saw how Jared and Wayne sneered at my presence. I knew that they gave John a hard time about his girlfriend being around all the time.