When an editor of my brother George’s alma mater magazine asked him for a favorite school memory, he sent a 10-page narrative. Upon receiving the story, the editor murmured that he had only expected an anecdote just a few lines long.

The misunderstanding was the editor’s loss in that As I Remember It encapsulates an exceptional cast of students ready to change the world circa the 1960s. And what better way for a brash band of brothers to begin than on a road trip the weekend before exams? Thumbs out to and fro, this new wave of writers traversed a patchwork Midwest sampling the good, the bad, and the innocent without reason, only shared weariness. Decades later, readers might recognize a circadian rhythm familiar in its sameness.

AS I REMEMBER IT

By George Wallace

Correct me if I’m wrong, but as I remember it, we would start the evening downtown at Zal (before he became the celebrated auteur, Zalman King) Lefkowitz’s drab and cheerless coffee house he had founded in an abandoned building, where he’d brightened up the place by painting the walls black.   But it was an amazing place for Grinnell.  It seemed so seedy and sophisticated, for Grinnell.  We sat drinking coke (fortified from our private stock) at candlelit tables, eating the large subs on day-old buns, prepared and served by Dan Fernbach, physicist in the making, (someone I had such affection for, that if I saw him today, I would kiss him on the forehead).   We’d listen to Sam Schuman (before he was joined by Julie Newman in song, or for that matter, Nancy Game in life) perform Josh White songs, accompanied by and interspersed with quiet songs on his nylon-stringed guitar. 

And then we, Peter Cohon (before he was Peter Coyote), Terry Bisson, Ken Schiff and I would wander back to the very cool Paul Vandivort’s room, where Paul would hold bull sessions; after all, he was an upper-classman (class of ’63), he was deadly on a pool table (played snooker growing up) and he smoked a pipe (the smell was transformative), bringing his wise counsel to bear, as he sat in a leather easy chair, backlit by an ornate floor lamp while we sat on his bed or desk chair or the floor, and as Schiff put it, disassembled the universe; twisting, stretching and mauling it, before slapping it back in place, good as new.  Schiff was definitely our intellectual touchstone.  This was reaffirmed when he accosted Sheldon Zitner in a hallway, transfixing him with an explanation of Achilles shield from the Iliad, asking him what he thought, to which Dr. Zitner replied “Schiff, get your thermometer out of my ass.”  We were so fucking envious.  What recognition.  To be featured in such a vignette with Sheldon P. Zitner. 

We were all writers.  We believed in Jack Kerouac and the beats.  We aspired to be Bohemians. We believed that we could forge our lives to serve our art.  Everything was grist for our mills.  Our motto was “Res vero ne impedirent, Non impedit rerum veritatem, Non quae impedirent, in veritate.” which according to my four years of high school church Latin is “Don’t let the facts interfere with the truth.”  (Naturally my motto now is “Il dolce far niente.”)  We recited our written stuff to each other.   Some of it was really good.  Schiff impressed faculty members with his fiction.  And Bisson would recite a poem of his that was so vivid and poignant that, even though I didn’t understand any of it, it embodied for me perfectly the concept of “raw talent.”

Slip, Spring is soon forgotten.

Ruth, We must always remember.

She wasn’t even pretty,

So I wrote “Ruth” in the snow,

In the air….

And thus we would spend the night engrossed in highly significant, and oh so brilliant and always hilarious conversation, (there was certainly alcohol and perhaps drugs involved, but this of course I definitely will not remember) ranging over the whole of human knowledge and experience (mainly ours, and of course, we were all well on our way to knowing everything about everything,) until finally we staggered back to our own rooms to get a little sleep before I had to get up to go to my – what the fuck was I thinking when I signed up for it – eight o’clock art class.     

Of course, it seemed perfectly reasonable when one of us suggested that we should visit Vandivort in Missouri, this was sometime after he had left Grinnell to go back to his home there.  Now, in those days (I have always wanted to use the expression “in those days” and why not, after all we are the class of ‘64, a graduating class from almost the middle of the last century and half a century gone by), so, back in those days, Grinnell College did not allow students to have cars, (although it was said that some miscreant students had rented garages in town where they stashed their contraband vehicles) but not so, we four, for we were all student-broke. 

And just how long could it possibly take to hitch-hike to Cape Girardeau, MO anyhow?  We would have an entire weekend at our disposal. True, in those days, there were no Interstates, those varicose veins of the nation that can be seen from Space, in Iowa.  But it was only about 430 miles from Grinnell to Cape Girardeau, 860 round trip.  I, myself, had personally thumbed from Grinnell to my home on the east coast once, over 1000 miles in 22 hours.  So how long could it take three unsavory-looking, college students in the Midwest of Ed Gein, Charlie Starkweather and ‘In Cold Blood’ to thumb to and from Paul’s place?  Well, as it turns out, it took almost 46 hours.

So, bright and way too early on a Saturday morning, with a clear weekend predicted and without the benefit of hindsight, Cohon, Bisson and I (Schiff begged off with pressing work –obviously, he really was the brains of the outfit) were dropped off outside Grinnell on US 63, by a banned car – I don’t remember whose it was (still have your back, Rich Wall) – where we were kissed goodbye by the girlfriends and where, after a short wait, we were picked up by a salesman in a large, late-model, four porthole, dirty white Buick. We had to help him move boxes of files from his back seat to his trunk, and stash his note pads and forms scattered on the front seat into his glove compartment and then ignore the paper cups, bottles, hamburger bags and candy wrappers littering the floor, kicking them around as we settled in.  As he pulled out into traffic, we smiled and waved, and oh joy, he was on his way to St. Louis.

We passed through Oskaloosa at 85 mph, slowing only at Ottumwa, then the home of my future ex-wife who was probably serving tea to Teddy, Mr. Muggles and Miss Pathetica at that moment.  She would have been ten then.  There we picked up US 34, heading east, slowed through Fairfield where we passed block after block of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Jaguars, Mercedes Benzes and a large number of high-end motorcycles (obviously, Parsons College, the institution for reprobate rich kids, before it lost its accreditation and became Transcendental Meditation University, didn’t have a proscription against student vehicles) Interspersed were occasional Fords and Chevys, most likely belonging to the Parsons faculty.

And the whole time, our salesman held a monologue for our benefit.  He spoke of being a salesman for National Cash Register, covering the mid-Midwest stretching from Omaha in the west to Rapid City in the north to Minneapolis-St. Paul down to Davenport-Moline and south to St. Louis and Cairo and back west to Kansas City. “I got a great territory for sales,” he said.  “It’s such a great profession. You should think about it. You go all over the place, stay at nice hotels and eat in terrific restaurants and meet the local folk and really get to know them. You learn about their lives and families and problems. And you make great money.”  He was very enthusiastic and then turned pensive. “I hope Kennedy is good for business. Of course he should be, he’s rich.”

“Yeah, you boys should think about it when you get out of school.  You could do worse.  It’s a wonderful profession.  It’s nothing like that god dam stupid movie, ‘Death of a Salesman.’  I watched it once because I thought it would be all about salesmen.”  We could see him getting worked up.  “But it was really about losers. That guy was a loser.  That guy was in the wrong line of work.  That guy should have left that company years ago and found an outfit with a future.  Like I did.  I quit farm sales and went to work for NCR when I figured out that people are always going to go to stores, and stores are always going to need cash registers, and I am always going to be able to sell them to them.”  He appeared very self-satisfied.  No Willie Loman, him.  “It is tough to have a family and be on the road all the time, though.”  He said.  “Me, I’m divorced.”

We had turned south at Mt. Pleasant on 218, had dropped down until it became US 61, crossed into Missouri at St. Francisville, where we stopped for gas and cokes and nuts (purchased by our driver – St. Francis doing his stuff, I guess) and then rode 61 to the far outskirts of St. Louis.  We congratulated ourselves on our amazing progress.  Only seven hours out and we were already close to St. Louis.  To avoid the city, we asked to be dropped off at S109, a two lane country road far removed from the clogged routes of the city proper.

We got a ride after a short wait from a farmer in a seed hat and bib overalls in a car covered with “Jesus Saves,” “Sinners Repent” and “Born Again” stickers.  He was a preacher who farmed, he told us.  He asked us right off the bat, “You boys accepted Christ as your savior?”  Bisson and I mumbled something, while Peter said that he was Jewish, as if that would let him off the hook.  “Chosen people, eh?” the preacher said.   “You know, son,” he told Peter, “it is never too late to open your heart to the Lord.  I believe the ‘end of days’ is near when you got a papist in the Whitehouse.” 

Then he told us that he knows all about college kids and that fornication was all “fun and games while you’re young and willful,” but that we would pay heavy wages down the road in remorse and regret, and then finally in eternal fire.  We figured he had picked us up so he could tell us that.  And it was sort of true.  Except for sweating a missed period now and then, I did think it was all fun and games.  (I still think it is mostly fun and games.)  Then he sighed at our silence, shook his head and maintained a disappointed and disapproving silence until he dropped us at the intersection of Hillsboro House Springs Road and Glade Chapel Road.  It seemed an intersection way too much like the one Cary Grant was dropped off at in “North by Northwest.”  But instead of being harassed by a crop-dusting airplane, we were jolted by a wooden pole which supported telephone lines, for it had carved into it like Dante’s inscription at the Gates of Hell, “Been here 34 36 38 hours and no rides.” 

“Well, he must have gotten a ride before 40 hours were up,” Terry said.

“Quit trying to cheer us up,” I said.

The road disappeared in each cardinal direction into the distance, the edges of the road, the telephone poles and the yellow center lines converging at each route into dots at the horizon.  “That is called the vanishing point,” I said.  “I have had art classes at a famous midwestern liberal arts college, and there I learned that that apparent vanishing point was a breakthrough in perspective.  Occurred during the Italian Renaissance.  All was flat before then.  Everything looked ridiculous. They invented 3D with that vanishing point.  It’s right up there with their discovery that objects appear smaller with distance.”

Bisson said, “How do we know the vanishing point is apparent?  How do we know that the world isn’t circumscribed by what lays between vanishing points?  Maybe reality disappears at the vanishing point behind us and is continually created as we move towards the point in front of us.”

“We know because I have had art classes, and I was told that it is the illusion of vanishing, not the real thing.  I was told this by a professor with a PhD.”  This went on for a while at Hitchcock Corner with its four distinct vanishing points, one of which included a field with converging rows of corn, whose vanishing points were over the horizon. Then a car appeared at the far horizon, speeding toward us. 

I said, “Look there’s the proof that the Italians were right.  It looks small in the distance and gets bigger as it gets closer . . . and then it gets smaller as it goes away from us, the bastard.”

We sat for a while in silence.  An infrequent car’s appearance would have us scrambling up to hold out our thumbs, as the car flashed by.  Then back to being seated at the side of the road.  Then jump up again.  Back and forth.  Back and forth.

Then we sang the blues.  And why wouldn’t we?

Talk about your woman, I wish you could see mine.

Talk about your woman, I wish you could see mine.

Every time she’s lovin’ she bring eyesight to the blind.

Got my mojo working, but it just won’t work on you
Got my mojo working, but it just won’t work on you
I wanna love you so bad till I don’t know what to do.

T for Texas, T for Tennessee,

I said T for Texas, T for Tennessee,

T for Thelma, who made a fool outta me.

I’m goin’ where the water tastes like wine

I’m goin’ where the water tastes like cherry wine.

Cause that Georgia water taste like cherry wine.

We made up blues lyrics.

            Been on this road so long, it makes me want to cry.

            Oh, I been on this road so long, it makes me want to cry.

           Next time I go see Paul, I’m gonna goddam fly.

One of us figured out that the blues lyrics were in iambic pentameter, and so we sang Shakespeare.

       Will you go on, I pray?   This is the night

            I said will you go on, I pray?  This is the night

         That either makes me or undoes me quite.

And-

            The times are out of joint, Oh cursed spite.

            Oh man, the times are out of joint, oh cursed spite.

         That I was ever born to set them right.

 Later, we stood dumbfounded and unbelieving when a brand-new Cadillac stopped 50 feet up the road.  We ran towards the car, half expecting it to roar off as we approached it.  But it stayed motionless as we climbed in, hesitated momentarily to see that the driver was black, and then thanked him profusely.  As he took off, we realized that it was stifling inside the car.  The driver apologized and said, “Something’s wrong with the air conditioning.  By God, it’s a brand-new car.  If I can’t get it going, I’m going to have to stop and get it fixed, I guess.  You’d think I could get it going since I actually am a rocket scientist.”  The heat continued to pour out.

I was in the back seat, and I tried surreptitiously and unsuccessfully to roll the window down with the power button.  I don’t know whether the power windows also didn’t work, or he had locked out the buttons, but we drove with the fan blowing hot air on us as the driver fiddled continually with the air conditioner controls, mumbling about it under his breath, as if he expected it to spring into operation momentarily and so of course he dare not open the windows in case it did.

“Sorry about it,” he said.  “I have terrible allergies.”  He was on his way to Huntsville, AL after an astrophysics conference in Iowa City.  He actually did work for the Army on the Mercury program rockets, and was working on the rocket which would send a man into space.  He told us he got his PhD at Iowa.  “It’s a fine institution for physics etc.” he said.  “People generally think of MIT and Caltech, but Iowa is right up there.  We’ve got James Van Allen” he said, as if we should know who that was.   “You know, Grinnell is a fine school, too.  If you took the right classes and got good grades, you could get into that program at Iowa.  President Kennedy has made the conquest of space a national priority.  The space race is exploding, and you can get in at the ground floor.  The government is pouring money into it like there is no tomorrow.  And Iowa likes Grinnell graduates.”

Peter thanked him for the info and again for picking us up.  He told our driver that he wasn’t sure that if things were reversed, that if we were three Negro students hitch-hiking, that a white guy would pick us up.

 The driver laughed.  “You aren’t sure?”  He laughed some more.  “Oh man, you can be sure.  You can be damn sure.”  

Finally, he dropped us off and we got out of his blistering hot car, all of us shining with sweat, the cool evening air bringing relief.    We were outside Hillsboro Missouri.

“I think I lost weight.  It was like Cool Hand Luke being put in the box,” Bisson said.  “’I’ll get my mind right, Boss.’”   (And yeah, I know that “Cool Hand Luke” was an award winner in 1967.  So what?  Remember – Res vero ne impedirent, baby.)

I said as the light went golden with the descending sun, “I’m reminded by the reflection off that barn’s tin roof of Rembrandt and chiaroscuro,” once again putting my liberal arts education to excellent use making non-sequitur small talk.

Bisson said, “I didn’t know that Rembrandt was into Brazilian steakhouses.”

“He wasn’t,” I said.  “He was into lite fare.”

We spent the night pacing back and forth, watching on–coming headlights become on-going taillights, until finally with a pink wash across the eastern horizon we got a ride to Festus, MO by a young farm woman, who would have been quite attractive, except she was missing several front teeth.  After another interminable but actually quite a short wait, we were delivered outside Cape Girardeau.  We called Paul and he fetched us to his home.  It was 7:15, Sunday morning.

The Vandivort farm was obviously prosperous, a tree-lined lane leading to a spectacular Victorian house.  We were greeted in the center hall by Paul’s mother, a warm and stylish woman who invited us in, sat us at a large, walnut dining room table set with a silver coffee service, which we attacked and emptied.  She brought us a picture book breakfast of orange juice, eggs, sausage (from their hogs), grits, fried potatoes, toast with butter and little pots of home-made jams, preserves and marmalades, fruit salad with melon and pineapple, pancakes with cinnamon sugar, molasses, sorghum or maple syrup, and lots more coffee.  We ate until we groaned.  She said that the family had already had breakfast earlier, and Paul’s father was off to do chores.  We offered to help with those chores or with the dishes, but she said “Oh, no, leave that to me.  And anyhow, you must be exhausted.”  She offered us beds and we refused, saying that we really had to leave to go back to school. She thanked us for coming and we thanked her for her warm hospitality and the wonderful breakfast.  Paul drove us back to the edge of town, where he had picked us up three hours earlier, and we fumbled out of the car groggy in a food coma.

And then we waited and waited, weary and depressed, which lasted until our first ride.  Jack was a Vietnam combat soldier, a Green Beret who was going home on leave, traveling from Fort Hood, TX to Chicago.  He had left Killeen 11 hours earlier and was hoping to make Chicago without stopping.  His energy seemed fatiguing– he had bought Dexedrine from a friend in San Francisco, had been up since early Friday, his current dose (his third) had kicked in leaving Killeen, and he was afraid his heart couldn’t handle another one.  “But I only get two weeks, so I can’t waste any of it.”

He told us stories of surprise Viet Cong attacks, scary recon patrols in the bush, and boredom hanging out at the firebase.  He told us how alive, how really alive combat made him feel.  “Everything else is just waiting.”  He told of one buddy, “and he was a ‘leg,’” who was supposed to be carrying mortar rounds and C4, but who filled his ammo bag with little brass incense burners he was collecting and chunks of exotic hash that he was smoking.  “That guy was always high, but so was his mortar man, so neither cared that they had no mortar rounds or XOs, just the brass and dope.  They would just sit there, leaning against a tree, with rounds zipping past them and shells going off around them as if they were on a picnic, talking philosophy and smoking their dope.” 

He spoke of gook atrocities and “us doing payback,” calling it “teaching them gooks a permanent lesson and then winning their hearts and minds.”  He spoke of another buddy who would cut the ears off gooks he or someone else had shot. “They were already dead, of course,” he explained.  Then his friend would string the ears on parachute cord and wear them around his neck.  “They would dry out and get real stiff, not a lot of flesh to rot, really, on an ear.” 

Jack said that when some of the guys insinuated that maybe it wasn’t just gook ears his buddy took, naturally it really pissed him off.  “What kind of bullshit is that.  This is a really honorable guy, for chrissake, and a goddam good soldier.”  Turning to us for emphasis, he wandered over the broken yellow line and jerked the car back. We were definitely wide awake now, and freaked and disgusted and revolted.  We thought that it was probably the point of his narrative to freak us out, and it worked. 

  “But that bullshit didn’t stop him,” Jack continued, piling it on.  “He just kept adding ears and it really freaked out the ARVN gooks.  I mean, he didn’t take any of their ears, of course. Ha, ha.  They’re our allies.”  He looked around at us, probably to see how we were taking this.  “He certainly didn’t take any ROK gook ears.  They were tough fuckers, those Koreans.  And they’re our allies too.  Ha ha.”   He kept turning to look at us as he barreled down the road at close to 90.  “Hey, you guys should join up.  President Kennedy has adopted Special Forces.  We are on our way up.  Besides, you’d have a ball jumping out of airplanes.”  

After a while, he stopped talking and a short while later, we watched his head bow and jerk back until, thank god, he finally said, “Hey, do you think one of you guys could drive a little?  I could use some sleep. Be sure and wake me at St. Louis.  And keep it under 80,” as if we would let him sleep on, kidnapping his car and him and driving to Grinnell at 120 miles an hour.  And so, Peter drove as Jack snored beside him.

He left us at the junction of US 61 and SR 141, which was probably the way we should have come on the trip out.  He swore he was fine now, that a little sleep was all he needed to get his second wind and get him the rest of the way to Chi-town. He left us at a truck stop with plenty of traffic, but no rides.  We waited at the stop’s edge with our thumbs out, then walked back to the diner for coffee, then back to thumbs out.  Back and forth as the hours passed.  Back and forth in wired futility.

Finally, Peter approached an older couple getting gas, and explained that we were college students trying to get back to the college in time to take important exams, that our piece of crap car had broken down a ways back and we had abandoned it and gotten a ride this far and could they please help?  They were frightened and unnerved, and finally agreed as if held at gunpoint.  The three of us piled into the back seat, while the elderly guy finished gassing the car, He paid and got behind the wheel next to his wife and a small dog, saying that he certainly knew what it was like to be hard up for money, how little him and his wife had and how they barely got by as it was. But they were always happy to help someone less fortunate than they as much as they could.  And so, Peter offered to pay for gas even though their new, top of the line Olds belied their destitution.  But the man refused with a nervous laugh, saying “You students need to pinch your pennies as much as we do.” 

That small dog that his wife was holding started barking at us, as soon as we got in.  At first, everyone ignored the racket, as though it were possible to ignore.  Finally, the wife started shushing him and pleading with him and apologizing to us for his unwelcoming attitude, “he’s like that with anyone he doesn’t know,” she said.  “He doesn’t mean it.”  The dog continued alternately growling, baring his teeth and snarling, always over-laid with the excruciating barking.  As she hushed him, he seemed to get more frantic, increasing the rhythm of his barking, turning and licking her face and then turning back to us and his rant.  Her apologies too seem to get more frantic, as if she expected one of us would reach over, grab that little fucker and strangle it in front of her eyes.  How very tempting. 

Peter kept reassuring her, that it was all right, that Tennessee Ernie (the curly-haired little monster’s name) just had to get used to us, that he, Peter, knew the pooch didn’t mean it, that he had had dogs too, and they behaved like that at first, and that eventually they came around, and how great it was to have a dog that small and yet that protective of his mistress, and on and on.  And so on, Peter droned soothingly.

So soothingly that, despite the barking, I fell asleep, my head slipping onto Bisson’s shoulder – he was already asleep.  I finally awoke when Bisson stirred, and I felt the car stopping.  The dog was silent. Peter was still reassuring the old couple, but it wasn’t needed.  Tennessee Ernie sat in Peter’s lap, panting and trying to lick him as Peter rubbed his ears.  They were so sorry, but it was as far as they could go.  They said goodbye to Peter by name, wishing him well and luck with his exams, hoping he would get his car back, while giving a perfunctory goodbye to us, and telling Peter how much they enjoyed chatting with him and how sorry they were that they were not going any further and how sorry Tennessee Ernie would be to see him go.  We watched them disappear down the road.  “Well, I’ll be go to hell,” Bisson said, “I think they were close to either taking us to all the way to Grinnell or you home with them, good old Tennessee Ernie Pete.”  It was late, and we were 25 miles from the Iowa border.

A semi hauling toilets picked us up heading for Madison, WI.  “I can take you part way,” the driver said as we piled in, jammed four abreast in the cab.  He wore motorcycle colors and was heavily tattooed.  He ran through the gears with finesse.  We cheered and whooped as we crossed the Des Moines River into Iowa.  We drowsed our way into Mt. Pleasant.  We stopped at an intersection waiting for the green light, when a big ass American car full of local toughs pulled in alongside us.  “Hey beatnik,” one of them called up to me as I sat next to and leaned out the window. 

“Fuck you,” I said. 

“Well, fuck you,” the local said.

“Fuck me, fuck you!  And fuck your mother too while you’re at it,” Bisson said, leaning across me.

With that the light changed and the big ass American car squealed away in a mighty V8 roar. “Yes indeed.  How to win friends and influence people,” the driver laughed.  Then we too lurched forward, with a clatter of gear changes and arrived at the next light and there the semi stopped with much hissing and shuddering.  “Well this is as far as you guys want to go with me,” the driver said.  “You’ll want to go to your left towards Rome and Lockridge,” he said, “I go straight on from here.”

We dismounted from the cab and the truck chugged forward, eventually disappearing with periodic blaps of exhaust.  We crossed the street and started down the road to our left, moving from dim streetlamp to street lamp.  There was not a car in sight.  We sat on the curb.  Eventually, we saw cars in the distance crossing the street behind us, and we saw cars crossing the road ahead of us, their headlights beckoning.  Finally, we saw a car turning onto the street behind us.  We jumped up to hold out our thumbs.  Its headlights found us and shone brightly.  It seemed to be moving very slowly… way too slowly towards us.  It was finally revealed by the street lamps to be the big ass American car, ghosting its way toward us, its mufflers gurgling.  We stood silently, each thinking “Oh shit.”  God, I myself hadn’t been in a fight since high school. 

The car crept up on us and stopped alongside us.  In the pause, I saw that there were five of them, and they looked big and mean.  The one closest to us in front had a dagger tattoo bleeding across his massive forearm.  Then the interior light came on as the doors alongside us – front and back – opened.  The big ass American car sat there with its passenger side doors hanging open, the occupants looking straight ahead – nobody said a word.  Motionless and silent, except for the bubbling of its exhaust.  An oil painting of menace.

And then, before anyone else could move, Bisson jammed himself into the back seat with three of the locals, saying, “Wow, thanks a lot, man.  We thought we would be here all fuckin’ night.”

And so following Bisson’s lead, Peter and I jammed into the front seat with the other two, echoing the yeah, thanks a lot – really appreciate it.  “Been on the road a long time.”

None of us could move, once we had shut the car doors.  We sat there, crushed together, in silence, and Bisson said, “Hey, anywhere we can buy some beer?”

And finally the driver said, “Yeah, I know a place,” and shifted into gear and we rumbled off with a blast of exhaust. 

And we talked and laughed and drank beer and stopped for some more and they drove us the three hours to Grinnell, and we left them with promises to get together, drink some more beer, maybe smoke some dope, and fix them up with college girls, whom they had heard “really put out.”  And as they drove off on their three-hour return trip, we grinned at each other and shook hands and hugged. and stumbled off to our beds, to get a few hours of sleep before Monday classes.

And I woke up, feeling I hadn’t been asleep at all, dreaming of the road unwinding ahead of me for hours, the solid yellow line flickering, trees flashing by in an unnerving strobe, while I sweated on my pillow.  I took a shower, shaved around my beard, dressed and went off to my ‘what the fuck’ 8 o’clock Northern Renaissance Art class, where I slumped down in my seat, head against the back.  And while Charles McMillan, PhD, spoke with soft erudition, I perused the displayed slide of Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Last Judgment” expecting to see someone being hideously tormented while wearing a necklace of human ears.