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Scenes from Hamilton College II: Freshman Year Continued (with cameos from Honey, the Print Shop, and Billy Bragg)

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.

Epigraph:

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 totally recall, but one was Peter Kimber, 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, with Peter Murphy murmuring “sad-eyed pearl and drop lips…”

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

(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…

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My Time at Northern Arizona University Part II: The Other Graduate Students

Note: This is Part II of my series on my time at Northern Arizona University between 1999-2001. This post takes up the other graduate students in the History Department. Part I, Decision and Arrival, can be found here.

NAU — The Graduate Students

The History Building was located near the northeast of campus, and as I mentioned in Part I it was mere minutes for where I was staying in my first year of the program. There was one graduate office on the second floor — a narrow room with four aging computers, a stubborn printer, and more bodies than desks. Some students shared chairs. Some wrote standing up. You could hear arguments through the walls, even with the door closed. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was the whole ecosystem: every thesis, every grudge, every friendship, every theory, all pressed into what was a pretty small space.

Cindy

The center of the room was Cindy. Early thirties, beautiful, charming, half-brilliant and fully aware of her own gravity. She studied the Southwest like almost everyone else in the cohort, but she made scholarship look like a party you had to be invited to. Men tried. None succeeded. She never dated within the department, but she flirted like a form of cultural exchange — a compliment, a smirk, a dismissal, repeat.

A number of us would go bowling from time to time, and when I bowled a clean 200 one night (still my best score ever) she called me Zen — partly for Japan, partly for the way I moved through things without forcing them.

As mentioned, Cindy flirted lightly with all the single guys in the department, and she and Mandiola had a particular dynamic going on. More on that below.

Lance and Gretchen

Orbiting Cindy were Lance and Gretchen, a long-term unmarried couple renting a big place in the low hills behind campus. Lance was military reserve — rigid posture, some money behind him. Gretchen was smart and generous; they held Thanksgiving at their house and the whole department came. It was clear to me, however, that she lived in Cindy’s shadow a fair bit.

Their relationship read like a stable table with a crack underneath. They had been together for a while at that point, though I don’t believe it ultimately survived.

Dave Diamond, Patrick, and Gary

At the other end of the room sat three men who could fill a bar with argument, and did.

Dave Diamond — mid-fifties, blue-collar history etched into him. Fishing boats, oil platforms, mines. He smoked dope daily like other people drink coffee. His thesis was on one apple orchard. Not agriculture policy in general — one orchard. He traced labor, yield, frost, policy, immigration, machinery, exploitation and renewal through a single patch of earth. That was Diamond: narrow focus, infinite depth. He was grumpy in the best possible tradition, and as I’ll mention later hooked me up with a little green from time to time, and I liked him.

Patrick was about twenty-two, a conservative, and worshipped Ronald Reagan. He believed the free market solved more problems than it created. Diamond thought Reagan had gutted the working class and could give footnotes from memory. They shouted at each other constantly, sometimes in the office, more often over drinks— full volume, full conviction — then they would move on like nothing had happened. They weren’t enemies. They were the ongoing argument.

Gary stood between them philosophically but never took the middle. Libertarian, Western-minded, big on personal risk and responsibility. Motorcycle helmets should be optional, ICU bills be damned. A man should be free to crack his skull if he wants to. You couldn’t move him. His logic was dry and clean. I wrote about Gary and his helmet policy at length here, and here is an excerpt:

Later that year Gary’s brother, also a biker, died in a motorcycle accident on a New Mexico mountain. It was a sad day for the department and for Gary. His brother was a biker and a cop, and I happened to walk past the church where the funeral was being held. There were dudes in Hell’s Angels jackets and cops in dress uniform side by side. Gary came by the graduate student office a day or two later. Yeah, he said, a funeral like that is the only time you’ll see bikers and cops side by side. He talked about his brother and how much he loved his motorcycle. I offered my condolences, but then curiosity got the better of me, as per usual.

“Gary, I have to ask, was your brother wearing a helmet?”

“Of course not. He died like he lived, free.”

“Does the accident make you think any differently about helmet laws?”

“If anything, it makes me more opposed to them. The right to ride without a helmet is what makes a biker a biker. Without that, we have nothing. My brother would feel the same.”

The three of them — Diamond, Patrick, Gary — were a triangle of conflict that never quite resolved. I liked them all in different ways and they all added color to the department.

Scott Fritz

Then there was Scott Fritz — early thirties, soft-spoken, spaced-out, gentle. Loved Las Vegas with an almost devotional sincerity. Not for gambling. For cocktails at 3 a.m. in glass palaces of light. He was in line for a major scholarship until Mandiola took it out from under him. I’m not sure what Scott was studying, but probably the American Southwest as well.

Mandiola

Mandiola and I were the outsiders. Not Southwest scholars. He was studying semiotics. I was studying Asia, oral history, and collective memory.

He was born in Chile, raised in LA, carried two languages without ceremony. His mind was fast — too fast in many ways. He had been married, and at this time was seeing P., an English professor who was at NAU on sabbatical. I met her twice; once over pizza with other members of the department and once more. We didn’t like each other at all, which Mandiola found hysterical. That was him: always drawn to drama — either generating it or laughing at it.

He was the loudest voice in the room. His banter with Cindy dominated the grad office for weeks — compliments tangled with insults. It wasn’t romantic. It was force meeting force, and they both held their ground. I also wrote about becoming friends with Mandiola in my piece I Have a Crush on Katie Park of the Bad Moves; here is a little bit of that:

A good friendship, in my opinion, is one where no matter how long you and your friend have not hung out, if you see them it’s as if not a day has passed. With this sort of friend, I’ve found, there is between yourself and them something fundamental shared. It can be anything really. For example, I first met my good buddy when we were both in graduate school in Arizona, and at first I thought he was a total dick. He was loud, interrupted people constantly, and loved being the center of attention. One night we were drinking as a department and he started razzing me there on the street, just casually insulting me left and right. Suddenly I got where he was coming from. This was, in fact, his way of offering to be friends. Once I understood this, I began to give it right back to him. Called him every name in the book. And he ate it up. By the end of the night we were fast friends and have been ever since, because we share an understanding that our friendship is based, in part, on ripping on each other.

Me

I was twenty-four, newly returned from Japan, married but alone in Flagstaff. I ran most mornings, didn’t drink in my tiny freezing room, and wanted to get straight As. And I got them, with just one A- to keep me honest I guess.

Summary

  • Cindy had presence.
  • Lance and Gretchen had the house on the hill.
  • Fritz had Vegas dreams.
  • Patrick had Reagan.
  • Gary had principles made of stone.
  • Diamond had an orchard.

And Mandiola and I — for all our differences — were the sharpest minds in the room, and it is he that I would spend the most time with and remember the best.