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.