Idiot Wind
It’s a small college on the eastern shore of Maryland, and four of us are renting a house twenty minutes away from campus, on the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a blue raised ranch with aluminum siding and a deck in back, and to us it’s paradise. Ian is a dark-haired, wild-eyed boarding school hellion from New Orleans; Brooks, my roommate from the dorms, is a Cary Grant type from Maryland — Waspy, strangely old-fashioned, friend to all and enemy to none; and there’s Jake, a blue-eyed, curly-haired blond peace monkey who bartends in the summer and plays harmonica and sings in a Baltimore band called The Moonshiners.
There is always a keg on the back porch, and in the fridge piles of lamb chops and choice cuts of beef that we steal from the grocery store in the next town. The stealing begins one afternoon when Ian and I are walking through the meat section. He stops and points to an assortment of wrapped packets of lamb chops and whispers, Billy, c’mon, unzip the pocket on the back of my coat and drop a couple of those beauties in there. Ian scrunches his face with urgency, his eyes bulge, he pleads in his particular way, Jesus, Billy, c’mon, what are you doooin’? and though I’m sure I am going to get caught, I unzip the coat, grab the meat, and slip it in. The coat is an expensive ski jacket with a wide zippered pocket on the back. It holds the meat vertically, and as Ian walks through the store and we check out, there is no sign that he’s carrying our dinner on his back. From that day on we never pay for meat. When we go shopping we take Ian’s coat.
I read during the day, when I’m skipping class — Hardy and Fitzgerald mostly that year, Jude the Obscure a few times. On the weekends I read in my room, the one at the end of the hall, tucked away from the ruckus of the house. There is no one at school or in the house whom I talk to about what I read. I reread Salinger and Knowles and the books of my adolescence. Some of these copies still have Katherine’s scribbles in the margins, and I treat them like museum pieces.
Every once in a while someone has coke or acid but for the most part it’s pot-around-the-clock. Ian has a red Graphics bong he cleans and recleans and strokes like a pet. I keep a constant stash in my room and smoke off a short plastic bong and listen to Rickie Lee Jones and Bob Dylan and when I’m not reading just stare at the maroon-and-brown tapestry tacked to the ceiling. We road-trip up and down the eastern seaboard — Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Roanoke, Boston, New York — to see The Dead, Dylan, Neil Young. Mostly it’s me and Ian, and mostly it’s Dylan.
Brooks is the only one with a steady girlfriend, Shirley, who goes to school in Virginia. I hook up with two or three different girls on a regular basis — all of whom make Ian’s face wrinkle with disgust. Jesus, Billy, what are you dooooin’? he’ll say at the end of the night when it’s clear whom I’ll be taking back to my room. Jake has girls in Baltimore or in town who don’t go to college. We’ll never meet them. Ian will hook up with only one girl that I know of — a girl I have made out with a few times and whom I’ve told Ian I’ve fallen for — and it will be in the backseat of a car on a trip back from Boston while Brooks and I are in the front. We’ll see the whole thing. I’ll be mad and he’ll say he was asleep and didn’t know she was making the moves on him.
One night Jake withdraws money from an ATM and notices a lucky bank error for a sum that makes it seem like a good idea to buy a fresh keg and have some people over. We do and we drink and it gets late and someone notices that Brooks is not with us. Someone else says he’s on campus and we decide to go find him. Ian drives, I ride shotgun, and Jake takes the back. We stop at Newt’s, a grim honky-tonk bar that has all sorts of specials to lure college kids. Fifty-cent beers to get them in the door and tipsy so that they’ll start buying shots. Which is what we do. Tequila. Ian is always several shots ahead of us, but Jake and I are eager to keep up. After last call, we put up stools and chairs and get more free shots. We are all lit in the same way, have the same streaking comet inside us, and agree that heading over to one of the girls’ dormitories is the thing to do. Find Brooks. Drag him home. And so we go. Ian blares “Idiot Wind” in the car and shouts the lyrics, You’re an eeeediot, Babe, It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe. He rocks back and forth against the steering wheel as he wails, and his black hair and red eyes gleam demonlike in the green glow of the Volkswagen dashboard.
It’s at least two by the time we get out of the car. We are roaring drunk from the tequila and there is an unstable voltage humming in each of us. Our breath clouds and shimmers in the freezing cold March air, and we move from the car to the dorm like a three-headed monster hell bent on mischief. We tiptoe through the halls and Ian finds a fire extinguisher to bring along for the journey. He pretends to squirt us and at some point it goes off. Glorious plumes of white cloud billow out of the red canister, which is, in that instant, the most extraordinary thing we’ve ever seen. Ian points his new weapon in the opposite direction, squeezes the handle, and again, a majestic slow-motion miracle blooms out into the hall. Jake and I need to have one, too, so we race upstairs to find two more. Jake finds one and I somehow don’t. They go on to spray each other, the halls, the doors, the floor, a girl who is sleeping. We get split up, but there is a sense that we’re still connected by some invisible electric tether and only a shout away.
I enter a common area where someone has left a nearly finished quilt. Blue and red squares of fabric sewn together in a groovy mosaic. It reminds me of my mother, and the quilt she made me out of scraps of fabric in high school. Without thinking I gather it in my arms and book into the hall. It’s about now that I hear Ian yelling my name. Billeeeeee, c’mon, Billeeeee. Occasionally I hear him bark Jake’s name. Jake. We gotta split. Jake, c’mon. I head back to the hall. Suddenly we all run into one another, and as we do, I see girls coming out of their rooms, shouting. We race for the exit. Someone — one of us? one of the girls? — pulls the fire alarm and almost immediately we hear a siren. The car is parked up behind the bank, and we run through the side parking lot of the dorms and up through the backyard of someone’s house. Ian is in full combat mode and pushes us down behind a hedge and barks in a whisper for us to Stay the fuck quiet.
And so we do. Police sirens, fire engines, and the fire alarm sound through the town while blue and red lights streak around us. It’s now between three and four in the morning and the campus and the surrounding neighborhood are awake. Lights flicker on in the nearby dorms and houses, people pull curtains aside and lean their heads out to see what is going on. We stay there for at least an hour and finally, when things seem to quiet down, we sneak over to Ian’s car and drive back to the house. Brooks is there and has already been called by everyone we know who heard Ian screaming our names.
As we walk up to the front door, Brooks looks at me in horror and says, What the fuck is that? I look down and am embarrassed to realize that I have been clutching the nearly finished quilt the whole time. I’m so nervous the cops are going to show up any minute that I stuff it into a black garbage bag and shove it under the empty house next door.
We stay up that night, get high, worry, and wait for the phone call from school, which comes, and a day later we are thrown out. Jake never comes back. Ian and I plan to go to UC Boulder together the following fall. Brooks moves into a house with friends in town and finishes the semester.