(Based upon actual events,)
In the spring of 1964, even a BrandX University senior as hip as me, who had been one of six students not to walk out on Cecil Taylor’s first set in Grubb Hall, did not know anyone who smoked marijuana. So it was a shock when several undergraduates, – primarily Fine and Theater Arts majors, to be sure – were swept up in raids which extended to Cambridge.
BrandX’s trustees were shocked too. What the be-Jesus – or be-Jehovah, the trustees and student body being 85-percent Jewish – is happening, they demanded of Avram Sugar, the snowy-haired, horn-rimmed president for its entire 16-year existence. Sugar, whose greatest skill was fund-raising for his – almost-too liberal – liberal arts baby, felt the need to quell the taint of debauchery which threatened it in the still-stuck-in-the-‘50s public eye. So he cracked his in loco parentis whip across the parietal hours which had made me the envy of some elsewhere-matriculating peers.
Boys could have girls (only “boys” and “girls” were in colleges in 1964) in their rooms on weekend nights until 1:00 AM. (Girls could have boys in their rooms Sunday afternoon, only.) Even this rule was loosely enforced. Some couples practically co-habited. While janitors in these libido-riddled dorms were instructed to search waste baskets for condoms, no prosecutions ever resulted from any gingerly seized evidence. Now Sugar declared that, during visiting hours, doors must be six-inches ajar, and four feet visible on the floor. (Whether two feet and two knees might have complied, as some budding jurists suggested, would have required testing in court.)
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The truth was, the rule change was of embarrassingly academic interest to me. I’d had no girl in my room since Ruth Delhi had dumped me months before and moved to San Francisco with a folk singer she’d met when he’d played the campus coffee house, Chomondoley’s, the only espresso joint in America named for a basset hound. My main interest was getting drunk and feeling sorry for myself. I griped and groped in my journal about finding a “Meaningful Life.” I played lacrosse so I could hit people with a stick. The only class I attended, “The Popular Arts,” showed Duck Soup and required little knowledge beyond that the European circus had two fewer rings than ours but more bears.
You might say I’d had college wrong from the jump. I’d been a kid whose standardized test scores, compared to his grades, merited having “Not Performing Up To Abilities” pre-printed on his report cards. I had been rejected by my first and second choices, but BrandX had been third, and I believed college was mainly about “experience” anyway, and you could gain that anywhere. I picked courses for how interesting their reading lists looked, not whether I had the background for them. (Hence “Chinese Philosophy,” “African Politics,” and “Avant-Garde Drama.”) If Mickey Durst wanted to toss a football around instead of go to Soc. Sci. I, I was available. If Tim Cullinane wanted to bail for a week to attend Mardi Gras, so was my Buick. While my GPA would barely carry me across the stage to pick up a diploma, I had an LSAT score that guaranteed me next steps, even if the best I could say about law school was that it kept you out of the army two-years longer than an MA in journalism.
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At BrandX student protests were as regular as Penn Rowbottoms – without straw hats, and UNM’s Cakewalk Weekends – without blackface. (My favorite – the cause escapes me – involved a cavalcade of cars jamming the campus’s one road in a steady, going-nowhere circle, a civil disturbance no doubt denied today’s undergraduates on environmental grounds.) Now the Student Council voted to defy Sugar by releasing funds so each boy’s dorm could host a party. At 11:00, couples were to pair off, choose a room, and close the door. Liquor was purchased, chairs pushed against walls, crepe paper strung. Hi-fis blared Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly. About 10:30, as sociability was being attained, runners brought word of an emergency meeting. Sugar had announced that if the protest occurred, he would expel Student Council. The revelers/ protesters rushed to hear council president Rick Mowser, whose garment worker parents had sweated for his degree, advocate appeasement. Only Tank Nunzio and I remained.
Tank was short and squat, with upper body strength and low center of gravity. Encouraged by an older brother’s prodding, he had reluctantly become a nose tackle of sufficient quality to attract scholarship offers from Tufts and BrandX. When he heard rumors that the latter might drop the sport, he’d called to accept the offer. It honored its end of the deal and Tank thought, “Great! I’ll never have to play football again.”
Tank’s body rounded. He grew a goatee and affected a beret. His eyes twinkled and his cheeks were rosy. When he raised his car coat’s hood, his resemblance to Friar Tuck was finalized. He and I had bonded after a visit to me in Philadelphia over Spring Break, he’d decided to drop in on an ex- at Bryn Mawr, who, following a tumultuous break-up, had taken out a restraining order against him. When I questioned this wisdom, he explained, “Pamela likes theatrics.”
Police were called. Handcuffs were applied. Fortunately, my father, an attorney, knew the magistrate.
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Once we raised our heads from the Ballentine Ale we had liberated and realized the party had decamped, Tank recalled the Lusitania sisters. Andrea, a music major, and Corrine, a Marxist scholar, lived in the Castle. a towered, turretted, concrete-and-granite dorm, built in the ‘20s by the then-property owner, an eccentric osteopath who’d hosted Gatsby-esq soirees there. Its look and history attracted the freer-spirited coeds. While, as I said, BrandX was a liberal liberal arts college, it had two extremist groups, beer-swilling jocks and bookbag-toting Beats, who both stood apart from a great middle concerned with careers and financial security. During their four years togetherness, these clans had formed a fascination with – and toleration for – each other, leading to co-minglings at dining hall tables and – not incidentally – me and Ruth.
For the occasion, Tank draped crepe paper over his shoulders, and I donned a Lone Ranger I’d brought back from Fat Tuesday. “The night was clear and the moon was yeller,” Lloyd Price sang.
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Andrea and Corrine were surprised. Their floormates were even less welcoming. I can’t recall the exact dialogue, but the tenor was of Invaded Privacy, Interrupted Sleep, Improper Sexual Suggestion, and, most vociferously – it being BrandX – Interference With Finals Prep. The dorm counselor, a grad student in Bio-Chemistry, in nightgown and hair rollers, proved reactionary in social attitude and as devoid of a sense of humor as a bunsen burner.
“I stand before you as Queen of the May,” Tank explained. “It’s a Massachusetts tradition.”
“And I’m his faithful Indian companion,” I said, confusing characters from the mythology of the American west.
We were probably fortunate that iPhones and You Tube videos did not exist at the time.
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Three-hundred-forty years earlier, the merchant Thomas Morton had been arrested by Miles Standish for dancing around an 80-foot May pole with naked young Native Americans. The authorities, terming this “the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians,” put Morton in the stocks, starved him nearly to death, and shipped him back to England.
When called before Dean of Students Shaugnessy, Tank and I fared better. A long-faced man of slumped shoulders and cigarette ash bestrewn tattersall vest, he was relieved to hear we represented no vanguard of the sans-culottes, but were simple wassailers. He placed us on Social Probation and since little of the semester remained, it did not seem an onerous burden.
The next day, his assistant, Biff Gaze, who doubled as the lacrosse coach, asked if there was any reason I couldn’t play in the final game of the season.
“None I can think of,” I said.
“Great,” he said.
A couple weeks later, while we were lined up for graduation, a petition passed hand-to-hand garnered enough signatures for a pledge not to give the school a 25th Reunion gift.
Postscript
The following academic year, a new student council resumed the protest with a class boycott. Hundreds participated. Mario Savio flew in from Berkeley to compare notes. Its resolution left the new rules in place, with an understanding they would go unenforced, more or less restoring the status quo when waste baskets were searched and incriminatory contents flushed. By June, I was one year done with law school and smoking pot with the best of them.
I have carried with me – and clutched tighter to my sense of self – the events that led me to Social Pro than all I picked up in Chinese history, African politics, and 20th century drama.
Duck Soup made me a Marx Brothers fan though.