‘Nate, no,’ Skip said one evening. ‘Oh please, no.’ This was shortly before the onset of Hearts mania — perhaps only days.
‘Oh please no what?’ Nate asked without looking up from what he was doing at his desk.
He seemed to spend all his waking hours either in class or at that desk. Sometimes I would catch him picking his nose and surreptitiously wiping the gleanings (after careful and thorough inspections) under the middle drawer. It was his only vice . . . if you excepted his horrible taste in music, that was.
Skip had been inspecting Nate’s albums, something he did with absolutely no self-consciousness in every kid’s room he visited. Now he was holding one up. He had the look of a doctor studying a bad X-ray . . . one that shows a juicy (and almost certainly malignant) tumor. He was standing between Nate’s bed and mine, wearing his high-school letter jacket and a Dexter High School baseball cap. Never in college and rarely since have I met a man I thought so American Pie handsome as the Captain. Skip seemed unaware of his good looks, but he couldn’t have been, not entirely, or he wouldn’t have gotten laid as often as he did. It was a time when almost anybody could get laid, of course, but even by the standards of the time Skip was busy. None of that had started in the fall of ’66, though; in the fall of ’66 Skip’s heart, like mine, would belong to Hearts.
‘This is bad, little buddy,’ Skip said in a gentle, chiding voice. ‘Sorry, but this bites’
I was sitting at my own desk, smoking a Pall Mall and looking for my meal ticket. I was always losing the fucking thing.
‘What bites? Why are you looking at my records?’ Nate’s botany text was open in front of him. He was drawing a leaf on a piece of graph paper. His blue freshman beanie was cocked back on his head. Nate Hoppenstand was, I believe, the only member of the freshman class who actually wore that stupid blue dishrag until Maine’s hapless football team finally scored a touchdown . . . a week or so before Thanksgiving, that was.
Skip went on studying the record album. ‘This sucks the rigid cock of Satan. It really does.’
‘I hate it when you talk that way!’ Nate exclaimed, but still too stubborn to actually look up.
Skip knew Nate hated him to talk that way, which was why he did it. ‘What are you talking about, anyway?’
‘I’m sorry my language offends you, but I don’t withdraw the comment. I can’t. ‘Cause this is bad. It hurts me, little buddy. It fuckin hurts me.’
‘What?’ Nate finally looked up, irritated away from his leaf, which was marked as carefully as a map in a Rand McNally road atlas. ‘WHAT?’
‘This.’
On the album cover Skip was holding, a girl with a perky face and perky little breasts poking out the front of a middy blouse appeared to be dancing on the deck of a PT boat. One hand was raised, palm out, in a perky little wave. Cocked on her head was a perky little sailor’s hat.
‘I bet you’re the only college student in America that brought Diane Renee Sings Navy Blue to school with him,’ Skip said. ‘It’s wrong, Nate. This belongs back in your attic, along with the wiener pants I bet you wore to all the high-school pep rallies and church socials.’
If wiener pants meant polyester Sansabelt slacks with that weird and purposeless little buckle in the back, I suspected Nate had brought most of his collection with him . . . was, in fact, wearing a pair at that very moment. I said nothing, though. I picked up a framed picture of my own girlfriend and spied my meal ticket behind it. I grabbed it and stuffed it in the pocket of my Levi’s.
‘That’s a good record,’ Nate said with dignity. ‘That’s a very good record. It. . . swings’
‘Swings, does it?’ Skip asked, tossing it back onto Nate’s bed. (He refused to reshelve Nate’s records because he knew it drove Nate bugfuck.) ‘”My steady boy said ship ahoy and joined the Nay-yay-vee”? If that fits your definition of good, remind me never to let you give me a fuckin physical.’