The Kyoto Kibbitzer

Note: This is the final part of the Hamilton series. Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V and Part VI are available.

There’s something between us
And it’s changing my words

His Name is Alive

After I got back to Hamilton from New Zealand I was in a pretty good place mentally and physically, but re-entering the Hamilton matrix with a side of seniorities would change that pretty quickly. I was set to room with John Innes, Jonathan Cooper (who was also from Washington), and one more guy who I think was also from Washington. I was fine with this arrangement, as I loved Innes and Cooper, but circumstances would quickly put an end to this configuration.

Possibly the very first night I was back on campus I met up with Ian and we went to a party in the woods. There I met L. and maybe also her roommate Kate. Kate and L. were freshman, and L. and Ian were tight, although it was kind of hard to say what the exact parameters of their relationship was. In any case I didn’t know any of that yet, and simply found L. captivating. She was from Russia and I believe her father was related to the diplomatic service in some way, although I’m not totally sure.

This first night there may or may not have been a bonfire, as there were several bonfire parties that term. I remember at one of these several people got super drunk, predictably, and the President of the College had to issue a statement to the school newspaper. He said something like, “after investigation, we believe there may have been alcohol provided to minors in the woods.” May have been. Just possibly. Anyway, that was a different night. This night I met L., hung out with her for a while, and then lost track of her, which can happen in the woods. I spent the rest of the night searching for her, going from quad to quad on the Kirkland side of the campus (where I was set to live) asking after her. It just so turned out that she spent that same night looking for me.

I was so captivated by L., and also Kate and their whole set, that I left the Innes/ Cooper rooms and moved onto Ian’s couch, who was rooming with Miche back on the older side of campus. Innes and Cooper had a whole different set of friends by this time, and there wasn’t going to be a lot of overlap, so I essentially moved out. This was kind of a shitty thing to do, but I did what I did, and another guy who wanted the room just sort of took it over.

The group of people I was running with were basically “co-op” people. In addition to the fraternities and sororities on campus, there was a co-op which was full of alternative types. It was kind of a reverse frat, with vegans, druggies, environmentalists, LGBT folks and the like. At that time in my life I was sort of that ilk and gravitated heavily. One other girl who was around the scene was Nadine. I wrote about her a bit before and will re-print that here:

When I was in university I was trying to hang around some artsy chicks, and was lucky enough to know a few. One day I was hanging out with them and a few girls I didn’t know came over. One of them was called Nadine. These new girls were super cool, and Nadine in particular was so cool as to be a little intimidating. She was from Eastern Europe. I definitely wanted to hang out with Nadine, and sure enough she invited me, right away, to accompany them all somewhere. I hesitated, for some reason. Maybe I didn’t know the first rule of improvisational theater, which is “yes and…” Yes and means, basically, follow the person that goes before you. I would have followed Nadine pretty much anywhere, however I said “I don’t really know you guys,” I said. “Well,” she replied, “this is how you get to know us.”

(The Nadine incident confirms one aspect of my social relations. I’m a Gemini sun with Mars in Leo in my 10th house. I am, basically speaking, not afraid of people. At the same time, I must admit that there is a certain class of beautiful women whom were I to meet them it might take me a second or two to find my tounge. This would include Brit Marling, actress and creator of The OA, Emily Haines, lead singer of Metric, and Kristin Stewart, actress in Personal Shopper. Nadine was not quite in this stratosphere, however she was pretty close.)

Nadine was right of course; I just wasn’t used to making friends quite so quickly. I came to my senses and went with Nadine and the crew. That was a good move.

I find Nadine’s approach to new people fantastic. It can be a little risky to apply it all the time, but in general it’s a good starting point.

It was at this first meeting with Nadine that we all watched about 25 minutes of The Little Toaster, which was the very favorite movie of one of the girls. The Little Toaster is the story of a brave toaster who leads a group of appliances across the country to reunite with the family that left them behind when they moved. The Little Toaster is a trip.

Another girl I met early that semester was Francine. Francine was actually someone I think I met though Innes (Innes and I still hung out and I guested on his sports talk show, as I have mentioned). She was a lesbian, and had a hip-hop radio show on WHCL. Francine kind of hung out with the co-op people too now that I think about it, so I guess there was more friend crossover than I thought. Francine was also a freshman and was really cool. I would later re-encounter Francine when I visited Hamilton after graduation, which I’ll get to later.

One day in the campus coffee shop on the Kirkland side (which I think was new senior year), I picked up a book by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz. I happened to liberate it, and Schulz became my very favorite writer for a time as I read all his works and his biography as well.

I mentioned that Ian and L. had a kind of equivocal relationship, and this is true. I won’t go into too much of the details to, for once, respect people’s privacy, however it was equivocal enough that I felt I could seek out time with L., at least as a friend. I think I came on a little too strong though, because although we did hang out, she also periodically pushed me away. I was listening quite a lot to a band called His Name is Alive, and their record Home Is In Your Head. The band’s leader, Warren Defever, is from Livonia, Michigan, however their record first came out on 4AD in the U.K. in 1991 and was re-issued on Rykodisc in 1992 in the U.S. HNIA is art pop, very abstract and very good. The have a song called “There’s Something Between Us,” and the lyrics go like this: “There’s something between us/ And it’s changing my words/ Please don’t listen/ It’s not what I mean to say.” I was often kind of tongue-tied with L. and I felt a lot like the narrator of “There’s Something Between Us.”

To take a break from all that action, I would take Chris’ car which I mentioned in my junior year piece and drive to clear my head. One day I got stuck in the deep mud on some farm and spent an hour trying to extract myself. I think it was not long after this that Chris finally got fed up and took away my key privileges. This was overdue; I was overdoing it. Nonetheless, I was pretty bummed because for reasons passing understanding I really loved borrowing his car.

I did help L. though with her art class, which I have written about elsewhere. Here is that story, slightly edited from the original.

At university I was a pretty good student, but I was sometimes lazy or preoccupied and didn’t always finish my papers on time. When this happened, I would write, or just talk to, my professor and spin an elaborate tale. My style was not to make anything up, not to lie about a sick grandmother or anything like that, but rather to take whatever kernel or truth applied (for example I wanted to talk a long walk in the woods instead of studying), and build it up. This might sound something like:

“I started working on your paper, and got a good way into it, but then I remembered when we were looking at Thoreau and I got really inspired. I needed to get out of my head and into the woods, just like Thoreau. As I was walking so many ideas came into my head and I just couldn’t help but write them down, and that started to become this whole long thing that kind of displaced your essay. I’m really sorry about that, and I think I can maybe apply some of my Thoreau thinking to the essay and come up with something really good.”

Something like this would usually buy me a week or two. College professors, it turns out, don’t really give a damn and enjoy a good story as much as the next person. So I leaned into this, and, to give myself a little credit, usually delivered on the essay in the end. Anyway, word got around that I was pretty good at getting extensions, and other students started coming to me asking me to write excuses for them. I said sure—the ghostwriter instinct was in place early—and would ask them “what excuse do you want to go with?” They would feed me something and I’d spin a one or two page tale out of it. “Go with this,” I’d tell them, and it usually worked.

There was one female student that I had a crush on and would basically have done anything for. And it turned out that she was taking a class in Art History from a woman professor I had also studied with. This professor was a little prickly, but cared about her subject and liked me for some reason. I knew this, and used it. My girl friend (sadly not girlfriend) was dealing with some personal issues and I had already written a few elaborate excuses for her. The shelf-life on these guys was running out however, and she asked me if I would speak with the professor in person on her behalf. Although I was not currently a student in the professor’s class, I agreed and went to the professor’s office. I went with something like this:

“As you know, my friend ‘L.’ has had a lot going on and has had a hard time meeting her deadlines. She feels really bad about this and knows she needs to get back up to speed with your class soon. I remember well what an interesting and enlivening class you teach, and know that L. feels the same. We are just looking for a little more flexibility so that she get can things sorted out and get all her work done. Do you think there is anything we can do about this?”

Of course the professor said sure, she can have all the time she needs.

I pulled a related move to the extension begging in Political Theory class, which was a freshman class I had to take as a senior for graduating credit. The professor was called David, and he had on-his-sleeve ambitions to be President of the College. He talked about it openly, and regularly, which I thought was interesting. He never made it, but he give it his all.

Now I mentioned I had a bit of seniorities, and this is true. After excelling at Otago, suddenly classes were the last thing on my mind. But for some reason David interested me and I would often go to his office hours and chat. There, he told me more about his political ambitions, and we kind of became buds. To his great credit he recognized that I was a senior moonlighting in a freshman class and cut me a lot of slack. For the final presentation we were assigned a group and it was like 25% percent of the grade, or even more. It was supposed to be an in-class presentation worked on over weeks on an aspect of political theory, and I was partnered with one poor freshman guy who was in over his head with me. I told David we were not going to do the presentation in the classroom, and we weren’t going to do a traditional presentation at all.

Instead, I said we would present on Gandhi’s theory of non-violence through a demonstration. As I mentioned in my New Zealand piece, I had read a lot of Gandhi and could pretty much talk off the cuff. So on the appointed day, I took the whole class to a kind of semi-outdoor amphitheater area and somehow procured a dog and a knife. I rattled on about Gandhi for a bit and then handed the knife to my partner and said “now he could stab the dog with the knife if he was in a dire emergency and starving, but Gandhian non-violence teaches us that even in that circumstance not to use violence.” The whole thing was totally absurd and I was milking my friendship with David, but he gave me an A-, which was pretty much the fairest piece of grading I’ve ever received. I was and remain grateful to David for probably saving my honor roll status and for seeing me for who and what I was at the time.

The actual President of Hamilton at the time was called Hank something, and I thought he was kind of a suit and didn’t like him so much. After graduation, as I have mentioned, I came back to visit and saw Francine. She was embroiled in an issue where someone had allegedly carved an anti-gay slur into the door of an LGBT person on campus, and she and others felt President Hank was not doing anything about it. She took me to a town hall with the President where we staged a kind of protest and I called him out on his lack of action. He replied with a highly hedged statement that between the lines made clear he did not believe the story. This did give me pause, because I had to admit I was just visiting and did not know all the facts. President Hank later threw himself out a window in New York City I believe, so he had so other issues as well. 

Anyway, with the help of David and my advisor I got through the semester and was set to graduate. Mason Anderson visited just before graduation and he and I drove up to Montreal. This time we did not visit a gentleman’s club, but we did drop in at a pub and request the house band to play The Pogues. They kind of laughed at us, but then broke out a decent version of Dirty Old Town. This was the same trip that I got my one and only speeding ticket, driving John Innes’ car “The Grabber.” I got pulled over at the bottom of a massive downhill where the cop was hiding in the bushes. He totally ambushed me and I told him so. “My radar just got checked,” he said, which I’m sure was true but was not the point. Then, it turned out that The Grabber was uninsured, probably as a result of lack of funds on Innes’ part, and I thought I was in real trouble. The cop though waived the insurance thing and just wrote me a speeding ticket–presumably because he knew he had pulled a fast one with the downhill trick. So I guess I got off easy.

At graduation I wore a little purple flower in my hair and a photographer from the local paper took a picture and ran it. Innes says I graduated in linen of course, but that may or may not be true. For better or worse there are a lot of fables floating around about my time at Hamilton.

Overall, I had a good time at Hamilton. If I had had more money I would have liked to go to NYC or Boston, Emerson perhaps, but that would have been pretty useless given my lack of funds. I met a lot of great people, Ian and Jake, Marc Campbell and John Slack, Brett and Miche, L. and Kate, Jen and Jenny, Nadine and Francine, Ann and Rochelle, Jonathan Cooper, and many more. For some high school years are the best, for some college–I sort of muddled through both sets of years but there are many memories that stick with me still. I hope I have done justice to a few of these in this little series.

Dedication: For Hamilton. I was an early decision admit (probably the only way I was getting it), and it wasn’t too bad a decision.

Note: This is Part VI of the Hamilton series. Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV and Part V are available.

They all come and peep through a hole in the wall
Keep the bastards guessing
He likes to take the long way home,
It’s another fine decision

Peter Jefferies

I spent a full academic year, the second semester of my junior year and the first of my senior year, at The University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Otago is a pretty good university, but Dunedin is pretty small and kind of country. Overall, it was a good experience, but I was flat broke and not on a meal plan due to an oversight by I guess myself and my parents. More on that later.

After I landed, I spent one night at a hotel and bought a bottle of wine, for the first time in my life. I was of legal drinking age in New Zealand. I drank about three-quarters of it and was a little hungover the next day. At Hamilton people did not drink wine.

The first few days I was on a homestay in the country with a sheep farming family. The father spent the day watching cricket, and then would rouse and take the sheep out and move them around, with sheepdogs and all. I remember going to a local pub with two of his sons and their friends and we had five or six beers and they drove home. On the drive home they tried to run over rabbits on the road, and roared with delight when they got close. That was a scene.

Then, I went back to Dunedin, and met my roommates who were all in graduate school studying to be teachers. These were Tim, Ho (who was of Maori descent), Sharlene, and Donna. Tim was a musician and there was a large piano in his room. The roommates were good folks, however I think I disappointed them a little because they asked for an American roommate and were apparently expecting someone really flamboyant and loud. I was not that, and kept to myself much of the year. One time though that I lived up to their expectations was when Tim once again said “you’re from Washington D.C.” and I said “I’m not from fucking Washington D.C., I told you before I’m from Washington State!” Tim said to the roommates, “I told you rooming with an American would be fun.”

There were a number of other exchange students from the U.S. there and I got to know some of them a bit at first, but for some reason I was a little standoffish, and we didn’t hang out much after the first week or so. I was back into running, not smoking and barely drinking, although I did go out once with Ho and his Maori friends and got blasted. I would run 8-10 miles a day, sometimes more, and was in training for a marathon.

As I mentioned, my food situation was bad. We had neglected to put me on a meal plan, and I think my parents didn’t even know this, and at first I chipped in what I could to the communal roommate shopping. However, they ate very poor quality mutton all the time and I just couldn’t hack it. Mutton is pretty bad at the best of times, and cheap mutton is awful. So I went off the roommate plan and ate mostly trail mix for dinner. Trail mix, it turns out, is among the best value for money food around. I would buy raisins, peanuts, and carob chips and that’s what I ate at the flat. For lunch I would eat one apricot yoghurt bar and a cup of coffee, costing around $3.50 NZD. I would eat super slowly, taking about 45 minutes to finish the apricot bar and somehow this made me feel like I’d had a meal. I was living on about $7 NZD a day and was hungry all the time. With this and the running, I was also super thin.

At Otago I studied some more literature, and also a lot of Indian History, with a focus on Ghandi. I learned a great deal about Gandhi this year, and found him interesting. One incident I recall was in one class on Buddhism the professor assigned a paper on Zen. I had the bright idea to turn in an empty paper, which I thought would be symbolic, but the professor was a step ahead of me. “Don’t try and turn in an empty paper for this,” he said, “I’ve seen that move before.”

One more interesting thing that happened was when I was invited to the faculty club for drinks by my Australian literature professor. He was in his 60’s and was an Otago lifer. At first I was kind of flattered to be invited, however on arrival it was clear he had other motives. He started hitting on me in a most egregious manner, and it was obvious he had done this many, many times. I had two drinks and politely removed myself. To his credit this had no impact on how he treated me in class, and things went on as normal. I guess it was all par for the course.

The Otago campus was on the north side of town, and the south side was said to be pretty rough. “Don’t go down there,” I was told more than once, “it’s dangerous.” But I thought it couldn’t be that dangerous, so one day I walked down there by myself to check it out. There were a lot of industrial areas and such, and it was a little run-down, but I got home safe just fine. I suspected that “dangerous” in a New Zealand context might mean something a little different than in a U.S. context.

My roommate Sharlene had a friend who just had a breakup and Sharlene wanted us to get together. She invited us both to a party, and sure enough we started making out, under a table as I recall. It just lasted that one night, but Sharlene thought it was hilarious. “They were pashing,” she cried, “pashing away.” Pashing is apparently Kiwi slang for kissing, or maybe it was a Sharlene original.

Sharlene had a stepfather and I visited his house once. He had a nice car and complained on and on about how many tickets he would get from traffic cameras. Traffic cameras were on the scene in 1995. This appeared to be his only topic. He should have driven more carefully.

After the pashing incident, there was another girl who was interested in me. I forget her name, but it started with an M. M. was really into me, maybe because I read a lot and so did she. There was a kind of club place for students with TVs (I remember watching the O.J. Simpson car chase there), and I would hang out there. M. would come in and lob a snickers bar from over my shoulder for me and buy me a coke. This was really nice and super helpful because I needed all the calories I could get. M. wanted to get together, but I wasn’t into it. We did spend a fair amount of time together, at the club and going to the bookstore with another friend of hers.

As I mentioned, I was in good running shape this year and actually went out for a marathon. I was doing great through the first half, but started to fade really bad around the 20 mile mark. I had terrible blisters and pulled my groin and couldn’t imagine doing another 6 miles, so I pulled up. I asked a couple with a car for a ride to the finish line where there were buses, and they gave it to me but made it clear they were not impressed with me packing it in. I wasn’t impressed with myself either, but marathons hurt like hell.

In addition to running, and starving, I also went out for Aikido. Aikido is a Japanese martial art, and I was already well on my way to my Asian Studies minor and was getting into all things Asian. Aikido was taught by a white couple, and this was their life. They were ok teachers, but the atmosphere was just a little culty. Despite my father’s fears, I have never been amenable to cults-like scenes. I stuck with it for a number of months however, and managed to get my first belt.

I don’t remember listening to a lot of music that year because I don’t think I had a stereo in my room, however, one day on the radio I did hear a song I immediately fell in love with. This was “The Fate of the Human Carbine,” by a Dunedin artist called Peter Jefferies. It was spooky and weird and totally captivating. Cat Power would later cover it, and lines from this song serve as the epigraph for this piece.

One more thing that happened this year was that Jenny from Hamilton visited. I don’t think she came specifically to see me, but I’m not sure. I was traveling, with god knows what money, in the New Zealand Alps which are on the South Island there and are really lovely. Jenny and I stayed at a hostel, and hung out which was really cool. That’s the same trip when I went for a walk in deep snow and almost died when the snow suddenly came up to my neck. Deep snow is almost as dangerous as the ocean, it turns out.

Those are my memories of New Zealand. Despite being so broke I had to eat a 45 minute apricot bar, it was a good year and I got really good grades. My academic focus would fall off, however, when I got back to Hamilton, but that’s a story for the next post.

Dedication: For apricot bars and trail mix. You literally saved my life.

Note: This is Part V of the Hamilton series. Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV are available. This post will look at the first semester of junior year.

Tiger lily girl
Standin’ cross-eyed in the corner
Tiger lily girl
Standin’ toungue tied in the corner

Luna

Whereas in the summer before my sophomore year I got in good running shape in order to go out for the cross-country team, the summer before my junior year is a blur. At some point around there however I applied to go abroad for a year. I chose New Zealand, but only after my father rejected Nepal. He thought I might join a cult or something, but he didn’t really have an understanding of my interest in Asia, what it consisted of and what it did not. New Zealand was the next best thing.

I believe I was lined up to go to New Zealand before beginning junior year, so I knew that I’d only be at Hamilton for the first term. Junior year I roomed in Carnegie dorm, which was just across from North, back on the main part of campus near the English building. I lived with Kevin, Brett, and Chris. Brett and Chris I had known since freshman year and Kevin was Chris’ friend from childhood. In the room next door were Ian, John Innes, Marc Campbell, and Miche. All of us were close since first year as well, so it was kind of getting the gang back together. Although we were in separate rooms, both rooms were kind of communal and we all hung out.

The quads in Carnegie were quite a bit bigger than those of North, and the living situation was much improved. People had sort of settled down as well by then, and the situation was much more contained than North. I liked Carnegie and liked my roommates. We were all pretty easy going.

Chris had a car, a blue one, and I got in the habit of borrowing it. A lot. It got so I actually had his keys because I used it more than he did. I don’t really remember where I would go, mostly just drive around and such, but one incident sticks out as memorable regarding the car. This had to do with a girl called Miriam.

I had met Miriam maybe the year before at a dance at Sig. She danced very provocatively, was tall and lithe, and, well, she turned me on. Miriam was from Turkey and had a bad relationship with her father, which was a common topic for her. Although we only saw each other a few times as sophomores I think, we somehow reconnected as juniors. I took her for a drive in Chris’ car and although I had no money I think I managed to treat her to a meal. I was so low on money that we had to get gas and I faked filling the tank and just put in enough to get home. I didn’t want to be seen as skint, although I was.

Miriam talked a lot about her father on that drive, but we talked about other stuff too and listened to Robbie Robertson’s excellent album Music for the Native Americans. I recited her some of my poetry and talked about Leonard Cohen. The drive, sort of a date I suppose, went well enough that I got up the courage at the end of it to ask her out again. She said yes, but said why don’t we do reading dates. “What are reading dates?” I asked. She said a reading date is when she would come to my room and we would read next to one another on the couch, and then I would go to her room and do the same. This was not exactly what I had in mind, but it was kind of interesting, so we did a home and home set of reading dates. My roommates came in during our date and asked, “what in the world are you two doing?” We explained the reading date and they laughed. It was a live and let live culture and I think they were happy if I was happy.

We only had those two dates, and then I lent her the Robbie Robertson CD and never got it back. I saw her again briefly senior year, but the spark had dimmed. Overall, it was an interesting interlude.

One of the big events of that first semester of junior year was the Sega Hockey championship match with Innes. As I mentioned earlier, Innes usually schooled me. He would play the Calgary Flames and I would play the Detroit Red Wings, as I recall. But I was getting better and thought I could take him in a best of set of games. I don’t remember how many games it was, maybe just three, and everyone from the dorm gathered round to watch. It was all tied going into the last game, and then Innes’ water on the elbow kicked in and I beat him in the rubber match, either 2-1 or 3-2. Innes complained and complained, whining that it wasn’t fair, but it was fair and I beat him fair and square. I retired from Sega Hockey after that–why not go out on top?

That year Marc Campbell was deep into Luna’s 1994 album Bewitched, and although I was already familiar with their Lunapark album, Bewitched was better. I fell in love with that album, and the band, and have been a big fan ever since. They are in my top five bands of all time.

Another incident that I believe happened this year was a trip to Montreal with Brett, Miche, and I believe John Slack. Innes did not come for some reason. I rode with Brett in his car, and we spent a day or two there. While there, we visited a gentleman’s club at Miche’s insistence. Now there were wealthy people at Hamilton and then there was Miche. Miche was loaded, from a Cambodian-Swiss background. I knew he had money, but at the club he spent it like water, ordering dance after dance and dropping c-notes left and right. I paid the $15 or so to get in and could afford nothing else so I just stood there, like a dweeb. As a group though, we paid our way that night. I got even closer to Brett that trip and realized how much we had in common.

One other thing from junior year was club basketball. I had considered going out for the Hamilton basketball team as a freshman but chose cross-country instead. So we all played club basketball and Kevin was super competitive. I would always wear a Shane MacGowan shirt with an intentionally offensive lyric on it. I won’t quote it, but you can perhaps look it up. It’s from his first solo record. Anyway, a player on another team told me, “I like you but I don’t like your shirt” (echoing by the way exactly with the Sig alum told me at the freshman Halloween party). But that was exactly the point; I wanted to rile up the competition. We got to the final of the club championship and lost by a bucket. Kevin took this hard.

After one semester I was off to New Zealand, so the next piece will take up that experience. However, one bit of business that needs to be addressed is Jake leaving. He actually left at the end of junior year, and came back after I graduated and graduated himself. I didn’t know why he left, and still don’t. Also, I don’t want to get too graphic in my speculations, so here are some possibilities, humorously rendered.

Speculations on Jake Leaving Hamilton:

So why did Jake leave? Here are some speculations:

i) He left to pursue a quixotic quest to reunite the living Beatles. He always did love them. Perhaps Ringo Starr was involved.

ii) He was abducted by Irish leprechauns. Jake’s last name is Irish, and I think he may have identified with the Irish. Shane MacGowan likely had something to do with it.

iii) He may have been hanging a little too much with ol’ Funky Donny Fritz. Curtis John Tucker had a lot to do with it.

iv) Jake was always deep into British fiction such as P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. He could quote these books from memory to an astounding degree. Bertie Wooster and Charles Ryder definitely got involved.

v) He could have had health issues of one kind or another. The Cleveland Clinic may have played a part.

vi) A woman. There is always the possibility of a woman, man’s greatest weakness. Marlene Dietrich’s granddaughter may have had a cameo.

vii) Could he have been in a cult, and been involved in a group wedding of some kind? The Moonies may have had an oblique role.

Those are some ideas. No doubt there are wide of the mark, however the fact is, Jake left and Hamilton was the lessor without him.

That’s a wrap on junior year at Hamilton. It was a good, but brief term and New Zealand would bring a wealth of experiences, and also the most money-crunched year of my life.

Dedication: For Miriam, with whom I went on three dates. I hope you enjoyed the CD.

to be continued…

Note: In Part I of this series I wrote about my freshman year at Hamilton, focusing on two friends, Ian and Jake. Part II will branch out and cover a fairly wide, and somewhat random, set of memories.

I had an uncle who once played for Red Star Belgrade
He said some things are really best left unspoken
But I prefer it all to be out in the open

Billy Bragg

I have already written quite a bit about the characters who lived in the North dorm freshman year at Hamilton, however there are a few more to cover. First were the first floor stoners. Basmo was a stoner, and he lived on my side of the dorm, but on the other side of the first floor lived the hardcore stoners. This consisted of a quad of guys whose names I don’t recall, and who got baked at all waking hours and played Roger Waters’ Amused to Death solo on repeat. Next to them, in a double I believe, lived Keys. Keys’ actual name was Caleb, but everyone called him Keys because of the six to eight keys he had dangling from around his neck at all times. What on earth did he need all those keys for? One for the dorm, maybe one for a car (although he should not have been driving at all because he was the single biggest stoner in the dorm and perhaps on campus), what else? I can’t imagine.

Keys and I were not that close, but I did see a lot of him because we had the same job, which was in the school print shop. I don’t know if print shops still exist in the same form in this digital age, but back then the print shop was busy as. We held the campus down. There were two slightly older women who worked at the print shop full-time and three of us students helping out. The full-timers were Sally and Deb. Deb was the boss, and she was kind of motherly and kind to the students. Sally was nice too, but she could be tough. She would bark at us when we made mistakes, which was often because we were running large machines that would glitch pretty frequently. Sally was both the little sister to Deb and also the enforcer. I liked them both, even though Deb ended up firing me, which I’ll get to later.

So Keys would come in lit every day and sort of fumble through his work, which consisted mostly of stapling and collating. I was trusted more than Keys, with good reason, so I ran the machines, but I also did stapling and collating. We printed things for professors, menus for the dining halls, the school newsletter, and a bunch of other stuff. The third student was a girl whose name I don’t recall, and she was a super-hardcore feminist. Everything in the world that was wrong was men’s fault, and it was her only topic. She didn’t seem to dislike me so much as just want to lecture Keys and I all through work, which usually lasted two to three hours in the afternoon, about the ills of men. I was, and am, up for a little feminist theory but Keys was no help and I don’t even think he noticed her, so it was kind of just me and her. Serious feminism and collating are, perhaps, not best paired.

I didn’t originally want the print shop job. I needed work, and there was kind of an intake for all working students where you put your first choice. I put library, but didn’t get the gig. John Innes put audio/video and he got it, which meant he often had to get up early to set up videos for professor’s classes. I would not have been good at that. The print shop was more my speed, but eventually it got really repetitive and I started skipping work more and more. I would go walk in the woods behind campus, or just drink coffee with about a half cup of honey and hang around after class. I also improved as a student through the year, and took my English classes pretty seriously so I was spending more time in the library, although still not sleeping much.

My money situation was tight, although not as bad as it would later be during my junior year abroad in New Zealand where it was super tight. I had a little income from the print shop and my parents sent a small allowance once in a while, but I usually didn’t have more than about 15 bucks in my pocket at any one time. What money I did have went mostly to CDs, as many as I could afford. I had a dining hall pass, but the dining hall food was not really my style so I mostly lived on toast and coffee with honey. Then at night people would order pizza from a local shop, but that was too expensive for me so I would get “friend dough.” Fried dough is just what it sounds like–deep friend pizza dough with powdered sugar, and it cost about $1.50 for a big box. Not the best diet, but it was what I could afford.

One time the father of one of my classmates from high school visited for some reason; he must have been in the area. We met for lunch, and when he left he handed me $100 bucks. This was a serious windfall, and I immediately blew it on CDs, perhaps Neil Young’s Harvest Moon and others. My CD collection, although no rival to Ian’s was slowly increasing and I liked it.

Back in the dorm, in addition to the guys I have discussed, there were also girls, who lived on the second and fourth floor. I got to know the girls directly above us on the second floor pretty well, although not many of the others in the dorm. Among these was Rochelle, who was the girl I was closest to. Rochelle was, I think, from New York, and when she arrived on campus she made a big deal about having a boyfriend. This didn’t last long however, and although I didn’t want her to be my girlfriend I did like hanging out with her. She kind of mothered me a bit though, which I wasn’t so into, because I was going to do what I was going to do. I still have her contact, and I believe she might even read this piece! I think I also met Marie Bishko freshman year, and Marie is someone I thought was really cool.

I don’t really remember any us North guys hooking up with the second floor girls, but it must of happened. Another incident which occurred around this time had to do with my roommate B. and his girlfriend from high school. Like Rochelle, and even more so, he made a big deal of his girlfriend and told us all kind of semi-salacious details. Then one day he told us she was coming to visit and he wanted the three of us in the quad to go to a hotel for a night. I told him sure, if you pay, but he said no. He was dead serious but we told him to forget it, so sure enough she arrived and they hooked up while we all pretended to sleep. That only happened once, thankfully, and it still strikes me as pretty odd. He later broke up with her and fell in love with a Jewish girl, but that didn’t last either because he wasn’t Jewish.

I mentioned in Part I that Jake pledged the fraternity Sig. Ian and John Slack also pledged, Chi Psi (I had to Google the spelling). I spent some time at Chi Psi as well as, where I was alleged to sit on the steps in my trench coat, but I preferred Sig. There was another frat called Deke, and that was where the wildest, and the worst parties were. At Deke there was copious amounts of Milwaukee’s Best (the fabled Beast) and jungle juice. The parties were terrible, but there was a pool table which was a bonus. I didn’t drink much at college, mostly because I had no money, but I did drink some at Deke, with exactly the results you would imagine. I believe it was at Deke where Marc Campbell pulled off his famous pacification move. I didn’t pledge a frat, and I was and remain glad I didn’t. Greek life wasn’t for me.

One guy who I believe lived in North was called Gabe. Gabe was super popular at first in freshman year, and he played guitar on the grass outside the dorm. He was pretty good and he would play “Sexuality” by Billy Bragg which was surprisingly popular in 1992. People, including girls, would flock around him, but over time something seemed to happen to Gabe. He ran for class president and lost to a guy called Kerry who was African American. Kerry lived down the hill in a different part of campus, and he ran really hard for the job. I think Gabe’s ran mostly on a music ticket, and although he got a lot of votes I think he came in second. He may have taken this hard, because he kind of faded into the background, or maybe he just changed up his action. I think I voted, but may have voted for Kerry.

As I mentioned, Jake and I saw less of one another once he started pledging, however we still saw each other in English class and in the English building. We overlapped professors, although he knew some I did not. The two best professors in the English department were George Balkhe and Fred Wagner. Balkhe was still in his prime, maybe late 50’s, whereas Wagner was older and I believe in a semi-emeritus role. I wasn’t even sure I ever took a class from Wagner, but it’s been confirmed that I did, Modern British and American Drama, which makes sense. I didn’t much like 20th century American plays, as plays are mostly blueprints anyway. In any case, Mr. Wagner knew me early in the year because Balkhe praised my reading knowledge to him. Jake and I would go to Wagner’s house, also down the hill toward the town of Clinton (the closest town to Hamilton, about a 15 minute walk), and I recall once we played him the song Marlene Dietrich’s Favorite Poem by Peter Murphy, formerly of Bauhaus. The first verse goes like this.

My mother loved it so she said
Sad eyed pearl and drop lips
Glancing pierce through writer man
Spoke hushed and frailing hips 
Her old eyes skim in creasing lids 
A tear falls as she describes 
Approaching death with a yearning heart
With pride and no despise 

Peter Murphy is super underrated by the way, and Wagner liked the song, which just showed how cool he was.

I took a few classes with Balkhe, and we studied poems, and novels–typical choices mostly. I enjoyed these and read most of them, even Faulkner who is really dense. For the ones I didn’t I just faked it. Like I said, Balkhe thought I was amazing because on the first day of class he asked for a list of books we had read and I listed like 200. These were mostly Agatha Christie and John LeCarre and such, but I guess it was good enough. Balhke liked the singer Donovan and the song “Mellow Yellow.”

Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze
Electrical banana
Is bound to be the very next phase

(I later saw Donovan at a new age convention in Boston when I was visiting Ian after college, which I will recount later).

Wagner and Balkhe are both passed away now, so rest in peace to two great English teachers and mentors.

That’s about all I have on freshman year. The last thing is about the featured image for this post, which is the album cover for Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy. I have written about The Pogues quite a bit, but the album I listened to most freshman year was Oh Mercy. After geology class had a break before lunch and would go back and semi-sleep to Oh Mercy. The quad was always empty at that time of day, and this was the best rest I would get. The album still makes me sleepy to this day, and features excellent production from the famed producer Daniel Lanois. So thank you Bob and Daniel.

Dedication: For Fred. And for George–I hope you are enjoying a little electrical banana up there in heaven.

to be continued…