Part Thirteen

From September of 1986 to June of 1987 we lived in an ugly three-bedroom ranch house near the Anne Arundel Medical Center (which now is on the outskirts of Annapolis, but in those days was in the middle of town). I’d like to say that it wasn’t ugly to us, but it was. Even then. Still, we liked it. It wasn’t until the dead of winter that we realized it was a pretty good hike to campus from there. But by that time we thought of it as home.

“We” meant me, Preacher, and a guy named Jerry Philopolis (accent on the penultimate syllable). Jerry had lived across the hall from us when we lived on campus and of all the friends interested in moving out, he was the only one who came up with sufficient funds to do so.

As for school, well, that year was labs. I distinctly remember that. Also I remember that Preacher wasn’t nearly as annoying in his reading habits. By this time my friendship with him had somewhat tempered (but not eliminated) my secret desire to see him fail. Nonetheless when I noticed that he could now read the material as fast or faster than the rest of us, and that he was STILL memorizing giant chunks of it, I was somewhat dismayed. It wasn’t… fair.

I told him this. He laughed. I learned this, he said. I mean I put a lot of work into it ars memoria. I’m teaching Jerry how to do it. I can teach you, too. But it’s hard work. At least it was to me. There’s nothing unfair about that. That parlor trick I do with the muscle-memory? That’s not fair. But this? This is something I worked for.

I rolled my eyes. How about just taking notes? I suggested.

Someday, he said, someone might walk up to you on the sidewalk and put a gun to your temple and say, name the nine circles of Hell. And you’ll regret not having listened to me.

To date this hasn’t happened. So I don’t really regret not having listened to him. I was somewhat annoyed by the fact that Jerry and Ellen and a few other of our friends were impressed enough to take it up on their own, although none of them really stuck with it like he did.

Having our own place should have led to lots of great wild parties… but it didn’t. Not in the least because Preacher insisted on playing Lefty Frizzell when we had people over.

Oh, Jesus, just typing that and I heard the opening lines of “Always Late” just as clearly as if he was here. I’ll have to go listen to some advertising jingles to get the goddamned thing out of my head, now.

We did have a pretty good bash to welcome people back from Spring Break. And Preacher hosted the Mistfit Toys there for Thanksgiving.

But our only real social event was the poker night we threw every other Tuesday. The three of us plus a Misfit Toy named Mark Carlton and another guy named Drew Washington.

Mark was from Winchester, Virginia. Close enough to go home for Thanksgiving. Except that he made the mistake of coming out to his parents in his freshman year. After which he was advised that they would continue to pay for his education only if he never returned to their home.

Drew was from Baltimore City, and one of the few black guys at St. John’s. He was there because of a teacher who helped turn his life around in middle school, a St. John’s alum. I never knew that story until I interviewed him for the archive. Drew wanted to be a writer and poet. Drew had very little aptitude for either, sad to say. Drew, like Preacher, had a freakish gift which he stubbornly refused to use to his advantage – Drew was one of those guys who could multiply six-digit numbers in his head instantly, tell you the square root of 147 without hesitating, thing like that. So he pretended to be utterly disinterested in math. Engineering? Mathematics? Pshaw. He was going to be the next LeRoi Jones. The next Paul Dunbar.

(Late in his junior year Drew would come to his senses. Then he went to graduate school at MIT. And wrote some sort of computer code that formed an integral part of all subsequent “C compilers,” whatever the hell that is. Made an insane amount of money by the time he was 30. Now he lives on an island in the Aegean.)

So every other Tuesday Drew and Mark would show up and we would eat pizza and drink beer and play cards. Nickel ante. Two dollar limit. Real high rollers.

Early in the second semester that lineup would change when Drew got a girlfriend. And that was his own damn fault. Well, actually, it was my fault. Well, no, actually, it was because a girl named Ellen Phamm was able to laugh at a slightly racist joke I made.

I was dreading the start of labs. If they asked me to read the essays of Francis Bacon (and they did) I was fine, but when they asked me to go into a lab and apply deductive reasoning to a chemistry experiment I was worse than useless. So our first day of labs everyone got a lab partner and I was paired with a girl named Ellen Phamm. And I said to her, just to try to break the ice, “did your parents ever tell you that if you were going to have a knife fight, you should hook up with the Italian kid?”

She laughed. “No.”

“Because if there was any sign of a knife fight, I would scream like a woman and piss my pants.”

She laughed again, a little uneasily. “Do you think we’re going to have knife fights in chemistry class?”

“No. But I notice I got paired with the Asian kid and I’m hoping that at least some stereotypes are true.”

She could have slapped me, she could have demanded a new lab partner, but instead she laughed. Which inexorably set in motion… well, shit, now that I think about it, a whole bunch of things, but in the short term, one of them was Drew dropping out of poker night.

Ellen won’t admit it, but I am quite certain the only reason she was at St. John’s was that someone made the mistake of telling her that she shouldn’t go there. Ellen was a genius. Ellen went to medical school at Hopkins after she left St. John’s, got her MD, went to Duke, got her Ph.D. in biochemistry, and is now the research director for a biotech firm called Pharmagra. Works outside of Winston-Salem in the research triangle. She helped invent a sort of genetically engineered potato that makes insulin.

Between her and Drew, my lame-ass National Book Award nomination seems kind of trivial. Plus neither of them pissed it all away like I did.

(And Preacher, who might have had the most “potential” of all of us, accomplished the least. And yet may be the most famous. Go figure. But I digress. Yet again.)

Unlike Drew, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming to his destiny, Ellen knew from age six that she was going to be a research scientist. And she should have gone to MIT or something like that except that Ellen had her future so perfectly envisioned that she anticipated needing something besides science to enrich her life. She thought she might need some liberal arts to leaven the mix. Plus she was so confident of how her life was going to go that she didn’t feel the need to keep her nose to the grindstone 24-7. She knew in her bones that she could take a little time to smell the roses without any fear at all that the odor would prevent her from getting back to work.

So early in the second semester she asked to sit in on the poker game. And we said, no.

Guys only, we said. Stag affair.

Do you hire strippers?

No.

Compare penis sizes?

No.

So why no women?

Just… no women. Guys’ night.

By this time I knew her well enough to know that this would piss her off to no end. If we had said, sure, stop by, and made her endure a few hours of us chewing with our mouths open and telling fart jokes, she would quickly have lost interest. But I (mistakenly) figured, who cares if she’s upset… what can she do about it?

But the next Tuesday rolled around and neither Mark nor Drew showed up. We waited. Nothing. We called their dorm. Nobody had seen them since dinner.

Now what? You can play four-handed but three-handed is no fun at all. Are we supposed to watch Moonlighting or something?

There came a knock at the door. It was Ellen.

You guys are short a couple of players, she said, grinning. Can I play?

What did you do to Mark and Drew?

Can I play? Let me play and I’ll tell you.

You don’t have their index fingers in that sack, do you? I said, nodding toward the bag she was holding. I had seen a few too many Mafia movies.

I brought beer and cigars, she said. Can I play?

Beer AND cigars. Shit. Why don’t you just show up with kryptonite? What college guys can say no to beer and cigars on poker night?

We gotta huddle, Preacher said. We gathered in the living room and left her standing on the porch.

Why not? Jerry said.

I shrugged. She was cute. She was getting me through chemistry. And I was fairly certain I could take her in a poker game.

Oh, I think we have to let her play, Preacher said. I figured we’d just let her fume for a couple minutes.

Has this been long enough? I asked after a few seconds.

Whaddya think? he asked Jerry.

Yeah, Jerry said. I want to see what kind of beer she brought.

So that was how Ellen started playing poker with us.

Seems Ellen’s roommate had a little crush on Drew (at a small college everyone knew everybody). Ellen spent a few days convincing her roommate to waylay Drew as he left the dining hall one evening… oh, say, Tuesday. Has to be Tuesday. Just do it Tuesday! Then she cornered Mark and handed him two tickets to see Culture Club. With the proviso that he not tell us until the next day.

Then a twelve-pack of Anchor Steam and a box of cheap cigars and she was in business.

(Yes, I could take her in poker. She bluffed every single time. I mean, she never folded. Never admitted she had a crappy hand. It was the opposite of Preacher, who almost never bluffed.)

(And yes, just as I would never admit to liking Dry Branch Fire Squad, I would never admit to liking Culture Club. The number of people who will admit to simultaneously liking those two bands is... small.)

So Drew got a girlfriend and started missing poker night more and more often. And Ellen… Ellen could chomp on a cigar and tell a fart joke with the best of them. Three smelly guys and one cute Vietnamese genius-girl. Go figure.

And somehow Ellen became the first real girlfriend I ever had. Go figure again. We were lab partners and then we started spending time together and then there was poker night and then one night we were studying and all of the sudden it was nothing but lips.

I liked having a girlfriend. It did not, at least in my case, turn my brains to mush. As it seemed to do with so many of my friends. It fizzled out towards the end of the year, but it was nice while it lasted.

OK, that’s all bullshit. It turned me into an idiot. I found it stifling. I found it wonderful. I was simultaneously relieved and crushed when we broke up. She told me it was because I lacked direction. Of course compared to her, bullet trains lack direction. She told me I was constantly selling myself short, and never going to live up to my potential.

Echoing my least-favorite high school teachers was not a good way to repair the relationship.

But she was a good starter girlfriend. And in all honesty after we broke up she saw other people, I saw other people, and it was really no big deal. A lot of people split up and say that they’ll remain friends and are big fat liars. But while we weren’t like we were before, we were fine afterwards. Cordial. Friendly, even. We could still joke around. Still spend time together.

It helps that we broke up toward the end of the school year and she was in Santa Fe for the first semester of our junior year… but I’m getting ahead of myself. Again. Suffice it to say that when she returned to Annapolis for the second half of our junior year I considered myself completely over her, and she certainly felt the same way about me.

Now as for Preacher... maybe he was just getting older. Maybe he just had a chafed penis from the whole Ocean City experience. I remember telling him I was going to dump my Trojans stock. Because he flirted, he partied, he danced, but he mostly kept his pants on and looked for someone “serious.”

With little success. He had been very concerned, in our freshman year, that he not mislead someone into thinking that a night with him was going to be anything more than a night with him. He was so successful at portraying himself as a promiscuous piece of meat that in our sophomore year he had a hard time getting anyone to take him seriously.

(I learned this from Ellen, depressingly enough: Preacher apparently had developed a reputation as a “sack man,” a dildo with legs. Useful enough, but not boyfriend material. The part of me that liked Preacher was a little saddened by this dismissive attitude toward the guy – he was smart, caring, fundamentally decent. The small, nasty, hidden part of me that disliked him was a little saddened that even when he was being criticized he was being praised. Is there such a thing as a backhanded insult? As in, “he’s really nothing more than a fantastic lover”?)

Therefore, his two semi-serious girlfriends that year were people who hadn’t known him before.