One balmy afternoon that first week in Vermont, still stunned at catapulting out of our high-school lives and knowing no one, Matthew and I attended an out-of-doors afternoon talk by Richard Brodeur, the new president of Camden. Brodeur seemed as terrified of the place as we were. Like Matthew’s father, he’d thrown over a corporate career for something more real, and his descriptions of why he’d wanted to preside at Camden sounded a tad defensive. In fact, Brodeur was an efficiency expert brought in to repair damage done by a charismatic and tolerant seventies type. Nobody but us gullible freshmen had bothered to attend his talk.
“There’s a story I like to tell,” said Brodeur. “When I was a boy I used to love pizza, and whenever my father took me to the pizzeria I’d order two slices. And I’d sit and he’d watch me wolfing down the first slice with my eyes on the second. I wasn’t even tasting that first slice. And one day my father said to me, ‘Son, you need to learn that while you’re eating the first slice of pizza, eat the first slice. Because right now you’re eating the second slice before you’ve finished the first.’ And a year ago I realized that I needed that lesson again. I took a look at my life and realized I had my eye on the second slice of pizza.”
The parable wasn’t completely lost on me, though I couldn’t keep from recalling the day Robert Woolfolk and his little friend had tried to mug me for my pizza on Smith Street. I wondered if Richard Brodeur knew of any approach to the problem of the one slice. I suspected not.
Afterward Matthew and I drifted back to the Commons lawn, where, beyond the outermost row of dorms, the mowed rim plunged out of sight-the place was known as the End of the World. There a gaggle of our housemates tapped an early keg. We lined up for plastic cups of frothy beer, against a backdrop of green hills dimpled with sunset shadows.
“What did you take away from that?” said Matthew.
“When you think you’re eating the first slice, you might really be eating the second slice?”
“Something like that. Anyway, it made me hungry.”
This would be a running joke: when he and I began sleeping in late in the Apartment and missing classes we called it eating the first slice. My career at Camden, as it turned out, wouldn’t involve a second.
That week we experienced our first of the famous Friday-night parties. Dorms were provided with a booming sound system, and plastic cups and kegs of beer from the food service-the administration had a stake in keeping its tender wards out of Vermont bars on weekend nights. Camden, truthfully, wasn’t an accidental hothouse, but a deliberate one, an experiment like the Biosphere. So by eleven o’clock two or three hundred of us throbbed in one mass to Rick James’s “Super Freak” on the sticky living-room floor of Fish House, another party dorm only slightly less notorious than Oswald. That easy appropriation of dance-floor funk was a first taste, for me, of something I desperately wanted to understand: the suburban obliviousness of these white children to the intricate boundaries of race and music which were my inheritance and obsession. Nobody here cared-it was only a danceable song. The Rick James was followed by David Bowie, the Bowie by Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, and the OMD by Aretha Franklin. I threw myself into the dance, briefly freed.
A couple of hours later Matthew and I brought two girls back to the End of the World. Now the mowed edge plunged into mist-laced darkness, the nickname explained. Aimee Dunst and Moira Hogarth were, like us, freshman roommates, and suitably punkish, with eye shadow and gelled hair. Matthew had met them in a class on Milton and Blake. We four had talked or tried to talk in the spilling craze of the party, the penumbra of retching and squirming bodies, then ferried our plastic cups of grapefruit juice and vodka out into the chirping dark.
Aimee was from Lyme, Connecticut, and Moira was from Palatine, a suburb of Chicago. Hardly anyone, I’d learned, was really from a city. If they said Los Angeles or Chicago or New York they meant Burbank or Palatine or Mount Kisko.
As a trick of flirting I’d been boasting of my inner-city knowledge, turning discomfort inside out.
“Were you ever mugged?” asked Aimee.
Aimee, like anyone who ever asked me this question before or since, was thinking of a stickup in an alleyway, an adult transaction, a transaction of strangers. She was thinking of Death Wish and Kojak. The nearest I’d come was Robert Woolfolk’s holdup of the drug dealer. That event was beyond explanation.
“I was yoked,” I said instead. “Ever been yoked?”
“What’s that?”
“I’d have to show you.”
They giggled, and Matthew stared, not knowing any more than they did.
“I don’t know,” said Aimee, trailing backward, her footfalls stumbling.
“Okay, forget it.”
“Do me,” said Moira, boldly.
“You sure?”
“Uh huh.”
“It doesn’t really hurt. But you should put down your drink.” We nestled plastic cups in dewy grass. Straightening too quickly, I grew dizzy. The Vermont oxygen was like another drink, a chaser.
“Fuck you lookin’ at?”
All three turned their heads, fooled by my sudden volume and hostility. But we were alone there, at the End of the World. It was the only place I could ever have put on my mummery, my minstrel show.
I kept my eyes locked on Moira. The others were irrelevant. “That’s right, girl. Don’t look around, I’m talkin’ to you. Fuck you think you lookin’ at?”
“Stop,” said Aimee. Moira just stared back, rattled but defiant.
“See, that’s all right. I don’t mean nothing. Come over here for a minute.” I pointed to the ground at my feet. “What, you afraid? I ain’t gonna do nothin’. Just let me talk to you for a minute.” My drunken self was astounded at how well I knew the drill. These words had never come from my mouth.
Moira stepped closer, taking the dare, Bacall to my Bogey. I might have liked to quit already, but the script demanded I play it all the way. There was rage nestled in the script, urgency I’d never tapped.
“See, I’m your friend, right? You know I like you.” I threw an arm around Moira’s shoulders and tugged her close. “You got a dollar you could lend me?”
“Don’t give it to him!” howled Matthew, getting the joke now. Only it was barely a joke.
“No,” said Moira.
Trapping Moira gently as possible in the triangle of fist-elbow-shoulder, I dipped her, as I’d been dipped a hundred times. Not far. To my chest. “You sure? Lemme check your pockets for a minute.” I frisked the front pockets of her corduroys, found bills and plucked them out. Then Moira twisted against me and I took pity and loosed my hold. She sprang back angrily toward the others.
I raised the curled bills. “It’s just a loan, you could trust me. You know we was just foolin’ around, right?”
Moira rushed and tackled me into the grass. I felt the fury in her body at being handled as I’d handled her, a fury I knew precisely, from her side. But she was also drunk and excited and putting our hips back in conjunction. Yoking Moira, I’d also chosen her. A thick shock of sex was in the air-as it had been on the dance floor at Fish House. It was everywhere at Camden, only waiting for anyone to slice off a portion for themselves, and now Moira and I had done so. In all of high school I’d never kissed a girl without long spoken preliminaries, yet here it was simple. When she grabbed the bills in my hand I grabbed her hand and we returned the money to the pocket of her corduroys together, rolling on the wet lawn, kissing wildly, missing one another’s faces, kissing ears and hair. Beyond where we lay, Matthew and Aimee had gone past the End of the World and vanished in the dark.
What I could never have explained to Moira was that the sexual component of a yoking was present before she and I enacted it, was buried in the practice, as I knew it, at its roots.