Getting Over Jack Wagner (22 page)

As dawn approached, it wasn't good old-fashioned sense that found me having sex with the lead vocalist. This was not my usual timetable. This was about being a) drunk, b) stoned, and c) somewhere way off-campus where I felt strangely and stupidly removed from real life. This was about candlelight and indie rock. This was about the kind of need brought on by hours and hours of excruciatingly patient foreplay. It was what the singers sing about: “night moves,” “sexual healing,” “paradise by the patchouli light.”

I am not belittling the fact that Win's endurance was, by all accounts, inhuman. This was the kind of tantric, Sting-like performance I was sure distinguished the true rock stars from the wannabes. I was considering taking a time-out to call Ashley and gloat when, shockingly, Win began to sing.

“Higmph…mmtram…kmhssh unhhh…”

This was unprecedented rock-star behavior. Win actually appeared to be in onstage performance mode, eyes closed, face dripping with sweat, contorted with emotion.

“Bhyyy…fighl…shmat…mmms…”

I couldn't make out the words exactly. They were a combination of sultry, musical moans and murmurs. At the finale, a shout that sounded a hell of a lot like “love shack,” Win collapsed beside me.

“Whoa.” His eyes were round and close, his voice sleepy. “That was in
tense.”

I nodded, pretty sure this was a compliment. As if sensing the coast was clear, Tony nosed open the bedroom door and lumbered over, sniffing around our heads and setting up camp by our feet. Win kissed me on the cheek and snuggled into my shoulder. As the three of us drifted off to sleep, the last thing I remember was Win's dreadlocks on the pillow beside me. A fuzzy blond pile, like a nest.

The next morning, I woke with regret pounding firmly in my ears. In the distance, I could hear dogs barking. I could smell bitter coffee perking. And there, sitting at his desk, I could see Win: buck naked. He had his legs crossed at the knee and was scribbling in a wire-bound notebook.

I began to panic. This was nothing like waking up on campus. No unseen slip out of a strange room, no guilty sprint across the Quad, no three-year penance of mumbled “hey”s in the dining hall over trays of country steak. On campus, no one stayed naked. No one wrote in their journals naked. No one ever, ever made coffee.

When he saw I was awake, Win waved. “Regular or decaf?”

 

I was living in the '60s. Or, at least, the closest thing to the '60s in the '90s. As it turned out, the majority of people (and animals) at Win's party were residents of the “commune” (Andrew's word), a constantly changing cast of dogs, cats, newlyweds, art majors, dropouts, hammocks, and the occasional yurt. The place had a primal, physical quality about it. Men and women all had long hair and resembled one another. They braided one another, kissed one another, pierced one another with needles and boiling water. Women had unshaved legs and pits. Unneutered animals prowled around like a nature sanctuary. It was suburban Philly turned on its head. I loved it.

Win and I eventually filled each other in on some of the concretes we'd skipped in the backyard. I found out he was from North Jersey. An only child. A music major. His name (which passed the PCT test with flying colors) was short for Winston (after a grandparent, not a cigarette) though that didn't stop Winston Ultras from becoming the commune's cigarette of choice.

“I have a mother,” I volunteered. “And a sister. And a…Harv. He's my mother's, I guess, fiancé.” My mother and Harv were getting married that summer, but still the use of the word “fiancé” in relation to my mother struck me as ludicrous.

“Where's your dad?” Win asked. “Is he around?”

Not since Judy Mitchell's band bash/function had I been handed a setup as perfect as this. It would have been simple, even artful, to launch into my heartbreaking Lou-abandonment soliloquy. But for once, I just didn't have it in me. First of all, I had the vague impression that everyone in the commune had a back story to rival mine: divorces, addictions, treks cross-country with nothing but a bag of raw sunflower seeds and a knapsack on a stick. More important, I didn't feel I needed to perform in order for Win Brewer to take me seriously. Win Brewer, I was catching on, took just about everything seriously.

“He left,” I said.

“Intense.”

And that was that.

“Intense,” I would soon learn, was a crucial term within the commune. Depending on the circumstances, it was capable of carrying all kinds of meaning and nuance and emotional weight. Most commune words were similarly abstract, like
energy
and
place.
It was as if the commune spoke a different language than the rest of the world. Shorter words. Fewer syllables. Hardly any verbs at all.

Curled up at night in the sleeping bag, flushed and exhausted, Win and I would touch base on the
place
we were in, e.g., a
good place,
a
fragile place,
a
complicated place.
We read each other poems from a frayed poetry anthology that was propped beside the bed, Bible style.

Sometimes, Win would get inspired and have to go off and write lyrics in the middle of the night. Hours later, he'd crawl back into the bag and sing them to me softly. A mournful love song about my hair. One about my instep. After I let him pierce my nose, he was compelled to write a lieder cycle.

“I think I'm in love,” I started admitting to people out loud.

“Wow,” said Hannah. “In love or in awe?”

“You mean in-sane?” said Andrew.

“Big dick, right?” from Ashley.

Despite my friends' overwhelming show of support, I knew I had never felt anything like this. With Win, the world was cast in a new light. Everything was deeper, more significant, than I'd ever recognized. Fast-food chains were Communist. Nature was metaphorical. TV was evil. GPAs were totally passé. The more time I spent at the commune, the more my life on campus seemed petty, naive.

By December, I had given up my meal plan. I had abandoned my half-formed plans of studying abroad in Ireland (primarily in the hopes of meeting Bono, who I'd heard sometimes made random cameos in pubs). Over Christmas break, I helped Hannah pack her maximum-twenty-pound bag for Africa—tampons and razor blades and ankle-length skirts. I called Vermont to say good-bye to Andrew, who was armed with tradeable baseball caps and
Let's Go, Spain!

In January, I moved into the commune.

Commune living required some serious sacrifices. No one there ate meat (i.e., no chicken nuggets), listened to major labels (no Sting), or watched television (no MTV). They had no heat, except for a clanking wood stove which required I wear at least two sweatshirts and three pairs of socks at all times. In the dead of winter, having sex or taking a shower was only for the truly hardy.

The commune was a lifestyle of few physical pleasures—a fitting payback, as I saw it, for twenty years of fast food,
Three's Company,
premarital sex, and Easter seasons spent pretending that giving up sit-ups or green beans for Lent actually counted as a sacrifice. In the interest of fitting in, I gave up meat. I gave up fast food. I took up Winston Ultras. This combination of intense health and intense un-health was typical of the commune: shunning red meat while engulfing smoke. I recognized the irony, but had no choice about it. Smoking seemed to be a prerequisite for chilling with the Band.

Identifying Band members was easy. All of them wore loose, earth-toned T-shirts and loose, earth-toned corduroys. Their clothing was generally wrinkled and hopefully mismatched, to convey the impression of having been plucked absently off a bedroom floor. Back pockets were stuffed with guitar picks, drumsticks, or the occasional rusted harmonica (to convey that the wearer was particularly afflicted with “the blues”).

Though when I first saw the Band they were Rocks for Jocks, I found out that name was temporary. In fact, all the Band's names were temporary; this, apparently, was the explanation for why they never went public. No one seemed willing to commit to one name, and some not even the concept of a name (one guy was pushing for an ampersand). This indecision resulted in the Band's spending hours, days, weeks, trying to come up with a solution. Naming sessions went something like this (to be read slowly, with no variation in tone):

“How 'bout Natural Born Chillers.”

“How 'bout Search Engine.”

“How 'bout Amnesty.”

“Wait. How 'bout Anarchy.”

“No. Wait. How 'bout parentheses. With nothing inside them.”

“How 'bout Sexual Assault.”

This could go on for hours. It was an odd blend of the intense and the inert: a roomful of people full of ideas, but unmotivated as sticks. Given enough time, the sessions would evolve into debates about the Band's
mission
or
direction
or
vision.
Invariably, things got ugly from there. Any mention of
vision
was sure to result in a) one Band member threatening to kick out another Band member, b) Band members abstractly apologizing and possibly embracing, and c) the whole gang firing up an amicable bowl on the patch of “Rad.”

 

One word summed up life in the commune: bongos.

Like “intense,” “bongos” was a word with multiple purposes and meanings. It could function as a rallying cry—“Bongos!”—which produced a group of people from thin air, cradling wooden drums between their flowery, skirted knees. Or it could function as a state of being, i.e.:

“What have you been doing?”

“Not much. You know. Bongos.”

By March, I couldn't tell if the steady sound of drumming was taking place outside my body or had actually crept permanently inside my head. This crisis of the inner ear coincided with the realization that I had little or nothing in common with the commune. I wanted desperately to be like them. I was even sure, on some level, I was
supposed
to be like them. But something just never clicked. I didn't contribute to the Band's naming sessions. I didn't respond to the bongo cry. My presence in the house was hardly noticed, except after I got my wisdom teeth pulled and offered my leftover Percocet for general consumption.

In my more honest moments, I admitted to myself that I was just plain bored. So bored I sometimes thought I could actually feel time passing (it has the quality of trying to walk through foam rubber). So bored I started inventing metaphors for how bored I was. So bored I started naming my toes. So bored I realized I identified most with a cat named Nancy, who had a sarcastic meow and who I once saw sprint from the kitchen with an entire veggie burger flapping from her mouth.

I started spending more and more time in Win's sleeping bag, immersed in my English homework: African-American Women Playwrights of the 1970s, Modern Feminist Poets from the Midwest. (At small liberal arts colleges, majoring in English usually meant skipping the classics and going straight for the esoteric.) Suddenly everything I saw seemed a literary symbol for something: death, hope, birth, amniotic fluid. The sleeping bag had never seemed more womblike. I suspected Win's dreadlocks had something to do with original sin.

I wrote long letters to Hannah by candlelight, addressed to a tiny village in Cameroon. I sent Andrew packages of sports clippings, school papers, and boxes of Cracker Jacks. Occasionally, I snuck a taste of life-beyond-the-commune. On Thursday nights, I stole away to the Mrs. Suds Laundromat to watch new episodes of
Friends.
I surreptitiously shaved my armpits. I coerced Ashley into guesting me into the campus dining hall one night, where I downed two plates of country steak. Afterward, back at the ranch, I harbored the vaguely guilty feeling that I'd been cheating on my boyfriend (reinforced by the Band's temporarily changing their name to Carnivore Killers). But, if I was acting differently, Win didn't seem to notice.

One night, Andrew called from a phone booth in Seville (4:30
A.M.
his time, 10:30
P.M.
mine). He was blabbering sluggishly, something about a flamenco dancer named Rosa.

“Eliza,” I managed to decipher from a morass of “z”s. “He doesn't even watch TV.”

“What?”

“Don't deny it.”

“Deny what?”

“You love TV!”

“I'm not denying it.”

“Say it.”

“I love TV.”

“Eliza,” Andrew slurred and sighed, a sigh full of nostalgia and sangria. “You used to be really, really, really, really”—he burped—“funny.”

Against my better judgment, I was back in the army-green sleeping bag come September. I wasn't thrilled about returning to the commune, but was less thrilled about the alternative: returning to campus, where Ashley had (understandably) found a new roommate and (not understandably) taken up with a rugby player called Crazy Charles who swallowed goldfish whole. Over the summer, the commune had changed only slightly. The radishes were growing, sort of. Nancy the cat was pregnant. An RV spray-painted “Why Be Normal?” had materialized next to the barbecue pit. A new crop of crashers was draped around the house, looking almost identical to last year's crashers; or else, they actually were last year's crashers, and had graduated but never left.