Although he was in the College of Education and probably destined to teach history and coach baseball at good old Dexter High until he dropped dead of a booze-fueled heart attack at the age of fifty-nine or so, Skip by rights should have been in fine arts . . . probably would have been if he hadn’t come from five generations of farmers who said ayuh and coss ’twill and sh’d smile n kiss a pig. He was only the second or third in his sprawling family (their religion, Skip once said, was Irish Alcoholic) to ever go to college. Clan Kirk could visualize a teacher in the family — barely — but not a painter or a sculptor. And at eighteen, Skip could see no further than they could. He only knew he didn’t quite fit the hole he was trying to slide into, and it made him restless. It made him wander into rooms other than his own, check the LPs, and criticize almost everyone’s taste in music.
By 1969 he had a better idea of who and what he was. That was the year he constructed a papier-mache Vietnamese family tableau that was set on fire at the end of a peace rally in front of the Fogler Library while The Youngbloods played ‘Get Together’ from a borrowed set of amps and part-time hippies worked out to the beat like tribal warriors after a hunt. You see how jumbled it all is in my mind? It was Atlantis, that’s all I know for sure, way down below the ocean. The paper family burned, the hippie protesters chanted ‘Napalm! Napalm!
Scum from the skies!’ as they danced, and after awhile the jocks and the frat boys began to throw stuff. Eggs at first. Then stones.
It was no papier-mache family that sent Carol laughing and reeling away from the dishline that night in the fall of 1966; it was a horny hotdog man standing atop a Matterhorn of Holyoke Commons baked beans. A pipe-cleaner wiener jutted jauntily from the appropriate spot. In his hand was a little University of Maine pennant, on his head a scrap of blue hanky folded to look like a freshman beanie. Along the front of the tray, carefully spelled out in crumbled cornbread, was the message EAT MORE MAINE BEANS!
A good deal of edible artwork came along the conveyor belt during my time on the Palace dishline, but I think that one was the all-time champ. Stoke Jones would no doubt have called it a waste of time, but I think in that case he would have been wrong. Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.
10
I punched out at six-thirty, walked down the ramp behind the kitchen with one last bag of garbage, and dropped it into one of the four Dumpsters lined up behind the Commons like snubby steel boxcars.
When I turned around, I saw Carol Gerber and a couple of other kids standing by the corner of the building, smoking and watching the moon rise. The other two started away just as I walked over, pulling my Pall Malls out of my jacket pocket.
‘Hey, Pete, eat more Maine beans,’ Carol said, and laughed.
‘Yeah.’ I lit my cigarette. Then, without thinking about it much one way or the other, I said:
‘There’s a couple of Bogart movies playing at Hauck tonight. They start at seven. We’ve got time to walk over. Want to go?’
She smoked, not answering me for a moment, but she was still smiling and I knew she was going to say yes. Earlier, all I’d wanted was to get back to the third-floor lounge and play Hearts. Now that I was away from the game, however, the game seemed a lot less important.
Had I been hot enough to say something about beating the snot out of Ronnie Malenfant? It seemed I had — the memory was clear enough — but standing out here in the cool air with Carol, it was hard for me to understand why.
‘I’ve got a boyfriend back home,’ she said at last.