The campus watering hole smelled of body odor and sawdust. Sticky floorboards, sticky bar, two-dollar drafts. The place was packed well beyond the limits of the fire code. A digital trivia game flashed images of leering, topless women with peacock feathers in their hair. I slapped hands with some friends from the writing lab, drunk as hell.
Most of the girls wore high heels and makeup. I gravitated to a blonde in sweat pants and a baggy t-shirt who stood near the back, apparently taking mental notes on the entire depraved spectacle. In five minutes we were debating the merits of socialism as a system of government. David’s bovine haunches approached the bar. I shouted at him but it was like screaming in deep space.
“I mean, in terms of enlightenment,” the girl was saying, “you know, consciousness, it just seems better. You know.”
“Are you wearing sweat pants,” I asked her.
She blew a pink bubble of chewing gum and popped it in my face.
Amy, the girl from the library, appeared next to me. I looked at her and immediately lost my voice. She wore mascara and flesh-colored lipstick that smelled of watermelon, her eyelashes like long, beautiful spider webs. I tried to be clever without mentioning Marx or Engels; stepped on the other girl’s unadorned foot.
“Ow,” the other girl said.
“Hi Amy.”
“You’re kind of smart, aren’t you,” Amy said.
Her breath smelled of fruit punch and rum and her lips were slightly parted, insinuating, planting ideas in my head.
“Are you hitting on me,” I said.
She laughed. It was a beautiful, natural laugh, and at that moment I realized things were going well. Impossibly, shamefully well.
Somebody bellowed. I saw David gesturing at an enormous tattooed guy with a dark, flat face. They couldn’t have been more than a foot apart. The tattooed one was yelling, arms spread wide open as if he were going to swallow David whole. A space developed quickly around them.
“Do you want to have a cigarette?”
“Sure,” I said, and followed Amy out the back door.
In the alley we stood beside a loaded dumpster, shivering. The wind made fast food wrappers scuttle along the cement like wispy crabs. The steel door swung shut and it was quiet. Amy hugged herself and clenched a cigarette between her glistening lips. She didn’t offer me one. Just as well, I thought vaguely. I hadn’t had a cigarette since the ninth grade. She squinted up at the stars, weak and conspicuous in their cramped strip of sky, and let me watch her. Steam from our mouths mingled with the smoke. The minutes crawled by and I tried not to sway.
“I’m cold,” she said.
“Yeah, let’s go in.”
The place was up in arms. Broken glass littered the floor along with what looked like drops of blood. Some guys were shouting at each other and I saw several unhappy faces. David was not in front, by the trivia game or in the bathroom. My vision swam and I shuffled back and forth, putting one foot in front of the other. Amy disappeared entirely. Finally I went outside and found David a block away, sitting on a bench and nursing his bruised knuckles. He looked like a rebuffed shark, a violated predator.
“You great bastard. I hope you won.”
He didn’t respond. His face was closed and wrathful. I bent over and vomited in a bed of shrubs bordering the pedestrian plaza. The whiskey came out in sheets. I stayed that way for a while, leaning over with my hands gripping my knees, spitting into the dirt. David waited, not looking at me. When I was done we began the long walk back to the dorms, uphill.
I talked to keep my teeth from chattering.
“Turn your paper in today?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I think it was all right. Your professor will notice the improvement, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah.”
David’s voice was low and strained.
“Don’t know why I bother. She’s not gonna pay tuition anymore. My Ma.”
“Really? What about your dad?”
Insensitive, I knew, but the nausea was overwhelming.
“Hell, I don’t know who he is. He dumped me on her back when I was born.”
“Shit, David.”
“Goddamn head case. Ma don't even know if I'm in the house. She’s on a lot of medication. Hears voices at night and stuff.”
I was watching my shoes.
“Got to fend for yourself eh,” I said.
For a moment, when I glanced up, I thought he was someone else. He was boiling over, pupils like black diamonds. I cringed from him and almost tripped over a tree root. No one had ever looked at me that way. Finally he scanned the street, though it was late and we had not seen a car in some time.
“That asshole made cracks about my Ma. He don’t know her, but he’s right. About the things he said. So I broke a bottle in his fucking face.”
We kept walking. I
didn’t make any jokes. I remembered David asking me to watch
over him, to make sure he didn’t get into trouble. Rhetoric:
Effective expression in language or speech; language which is not
sincere. Language which is not sincere. It can be assumed that
Brutus, the traitor and rhetorician, advised Caesar on domestic
matters even in the days leading up to his assassination. Western
Civilization, 203.
The rest of the night passed like a temporary death. I woke the next morning hung over and depleted but unable to remember much of anything. My head jangled, full of crashing cymbals. I spent a long time in the bathroom with the lights out, bracing myself on the edge of the sink.
The blinds were down and the dorm room was dark as a grotto. I labored back and forth in my athletic shorts, gripping a glass of ice water. A draft of David’s final essay for his rhetoric course lay on the table. I sat down gingerly and began to read.
My Ma always tells me, Look where you’re going, boy, why you always staring at your feet? Start out with an anecdote, I advised him. It grabs your readers and pulls them in. I said a lot of things but hadn’t realized David was actually listening. She’d also give me lickins sometimes when I looked her in the eye. My Ma did not always use good sense when she is educating her chilren. Poor spelling, poor grammar. The thesis needed to be strong in order for him to have a shot at a passing grade. I believe students are not listened to in this society. Teachers and parents utilise there roles to take advantage of the chilren. I believe this is not right but no bodys going to do anything about it.
David’s class was challenged to choose which group had a greater influence on the nation’s children, schools or the family unit. He chose neither. When it came to taking sides, David opted out completely. I remembered his terrible look from the night before; that hard stare. I placed my glass on the table and continued reading.
It was confusing and he got his tenses mixed up. David wrote with a flawed voice that was actually kind of poetic. It reminded me of my little cousins who lived in Pennsylvania steel country. The essay condemned his own family. It described belt whippings and fist fights with alcoholic relatives. An uncle had forced David, when he was only seven, to watch as the man burned his own wrist with a cigarette. In his mind the public school system was an extension of an alien society, a shadowy force that spurned and mistreated children.
It was easy to let somebody down and David knew it. In a lifetime you received countless opportunities to do damage to other human beings. The methods of psychological torture varied endlessly. But the lasting injustices were small and inflicted repeatedly upon those who did not necessarily deserve them. I thought of the Bangladeshi kid in my study group and the rumors I’d heard.
Finished with the essay, I put my head in my hands. The hangover was a lot worse. Guilt congealed in my throat like a pearl in an oyster’s shell. I took a long shower that did not help at all.
Later that week I stopped by the writing lab, intending to drop off student evaluations. David had left a sticky note for me at the desk. It said he’d been expelled and that he was going to be taking the 2:30 Greyhound out of town. I swore and ran out the door, leaving Dr. Denzie offended, holding a ream of paper protectively against her body.
It was a frantic drive down the hill to the town commons. The main bus route followed the banks of the river and hit one last stop across from the public library before it took the on-ramp to the interstate. In December and May the bus picked up crowds of students, dressed for the season, but today there was only David in his hooded parka, sitting alone under a dirty-looking fiberglass dome. I double parked and left my hazard lights on. David’s square jaw swiveled towards me. I sat next to him on the iron bench and we watched the traffic go by.