through my blood. My mind was being tickled by teasing fingers, my thoughts slowing as I sank into the warm glow. Jack, too, was feeling it. He settled onto a chair and leaned back, grinning. I looked from him to Andy, suddenly happy beyond words.
“Hey, are you guys into Blind Faith?” asked Andy, jumping up and going to the record player that sat on a makeshift bookcase beneath the room’s lone window. “Have you heard their album? It’s fucking amazing.”
He pulled an album out and showed it to us. The cover photo depicted a young girl, naked, holding some kind of phallic silver airplane in her hand, the head pointed suggestively toward her crotch. Andy laughed. “Fucking amazing!” he said again.
He removed the record from its sleeve, placed it on the turntable, and gently lowered the stylus. Music poured from the speakers placed on either side of the window, a bluesy rumble of guitar.
“Clapton is God, man. He’s God!” said Andy, standing up and swaying as the song burst into life. He took another hit from the joint, shutting his eyes and tilting his head back.
We stayed in Andy’s room all afternoon. When the joint had been smoked down, and even the roach was nothing but a charred nub, we made a quick trip to a grocery store for chips and beer, which Andy purchased without an ID by charming the teenage checkout girl. We went in his beat-up pickup truck, a red 1958 Mercury-100. It had a three-speed automatic transmission, and whenever it would reluctantly move into another gear, Andy would yell, “It’s Merc-O-Matic!” Jack and I found this hysterical, and by the time we returned to Andy’s dorm room, we were all shouting, “It’s Merc-O-Matic!” about every fifteen seconds or so.
Andy’s roommate was there when we got back, sitting at his desk and reading. As promised, he was black. Tall and thin, he wore his hair in an afro. Upon seeing him, Andy let out another whoop.
“Chaz, my man,” he said. “What’s going down? These are my buddies, Ned and Jack.”
“Hey,” Chaz said. He went back to his reading. Looking over his shoulder as I passed, I saw he was deep into Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice.
“Chaz is one of them revolutionary Negroes,” Andy said as he popped open a beer and handed it to me. “What’s that group you were telling me about, Chaz? The Black Cougars?”
“Panthers,” Chaz said, not taking his eyes away from the book. “The Black Panthers.”
“Panthers,” Andy repeated. “Chaz says they’re going to take the power away from white people. Sounds good to me. Let someone else be in charge for a while.”
Chaz turned to look at us. “Damn right someone else needs to be in charge. Do you know for every white man being drafted to fight in Vietnam, three black men are being drafted?”
“That’s because someone needs to take the place of all those faggots running to Canada,” Andy replied. He took another record out and dropped the needle to it. The Who’s Tommy rocked the room. “Hell, those black boys should be proud they’re over there shooting gooks.”
Hearing Andy say the word faggot, I felt my sense of happiness fading. I had no real opinion about the war in Vietnam, and my feelings about the men who went north to avoid being drafted into the conflict were equally neutral. But through the cloudy haze of my high, I realized I was one of the faggots Andy had so casually dismissed, and I didn’t want him to hate me. I looked at Jack, to see if he was having a similar reaction, and was both surprised and saddened to see that he was laughing along with Andy at the joke.
“You won’t think it’s so funny when you’re over there trying not to get your white asses killed,” said Chaz, returning to his reading.
“We can’t get drafted,” Jack said. “We’re in college.”
Chaz snorted derisively. “That’s right. All you white boys are safe in college. How many black men do you think can go to college? Why do you think they’re taking so many of us?”
“You’re here,” Andy pointed out.
“And I worked like hell to get here,” said Chaz. “My momma and daddy worked like dogs to save enough money so I could come here. Didn’t nobody hand me a scholarship or pay my way.”
“Hey, I’m not here free either,” Andy told him. “My grandfather’s worked his farm for forty years and never asked anybody for a handout. Everything we have, he earned.”
“What about your parents?” I asked, noticing he made no mention of them.
“Dead,” Andy said. “Killed in a car accident when I was two. My grandparents raised me.”
That explained the photograph on his desk. And, I thought, probably the hand-stitched quilt as well. I imagined his grandmother piecing the blocks together and quilting the open spaces with painstaking care. What would she think, I wondered, if she could see Andy sprawled across it with a beer in one hand and his dirty feet resting on the top.
I made a silent prayer that neither Chaz nor Andy would ask me and Jack if we were at Penn State on scholarships. Already I feared Andy would end our friendship if he found out about what Jack and I did with one another. I didn’t want to give him—or Chaz—another reason to view us with disdain.
Fortunately, the conversation waned as Andy became more and more drunk. Chaz accepted a few hits from the second joint to be rolled from Andy’s stash, and soon he was laughing along with Andy and Jack as he tried to explain Eldridge Cleaver’s argument for the raping of white women as a way of eroding the dominant power structure. I listened, growing more and more anxious, until finally I reminded Jack that we had a lot to do before our first day of classes began the next morning. Reluctantly, he said good-bye to our new friends and the two of us returned to our room.
“Andy’s great, huh?” Jack said as I made my bed and unpacked the rest of my things.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s a nice guy.”
“I like Chaz, too,” Jack continued. “I’ve never had a Negro friend before.”
“I don’t think they call themselves that,” I said. “I think they’re just black.”
“Oh,” said Jack, halfheartedly putting away some clothes in his closet. “Anyway, they’re both cool.”
I wanted to ask him why he’d laughed at Andy’s remark about faggots. Before I could, he was behind me, sliding his hands around my waist and pushing his crotch into my ass suggestively. “Want to fool around?” he asked.
I almost said no. The combination of beer and pot had made me far too relaxed. But Jack continued to grind himself against me, and slowly my libido wrestled its way through the blanket of conflicting emotions in which I was wrapped. I found myself growing hard, and when Jack slipped his hand down the front of my pants and began stroking me, I gave in. Moments later, we were on my bed, naked, our limbs entwined as we celebrated our first night truly away from home.
We fell asleep in my bed, our joined bodies curled into a question mark.
CHAPTER 11
Many things have been called life’s great equalizer: death, education, subway cars, hospital gowns. I would add to that list the first few weeks at college. It’s during this time that high school students learn that who or what they were back home doesn’t necessarily apply anymore. Now that I have students of my own, I see this every fall, when a new crop of faces appears on campus and the transformations and run-ins with reality begin. The ones who were popular—the athletes and prom queens, the comedians and the simply wealthy—arrive their first day expecting to be afforded the same level of attention they enjoyed just a few short months before. Coming from a place where their accomplishments, abilities, or families were widely known and respected, they see no reason why their privileged status should not be immediately granted in this new setting.
It’s easy to spot these high school celebrities. They come to their first classes smiling and confident, sitting in