Tufts University - Jumbo Yearbook (Medford, MA)

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I came to this fraternity house looking for comfortable seclusion. Dorm life had made me quite hung-up about my personal bodily functions. I found a house of total strangers led by a strange fat man masquerading as a student and a fraternity president. His name was Leopold, and he ruled with an iron skillet and a constantly smoking cigar, until one day the house was mysteriously fire-bombed. Now it was quite a known thing that Leopold was some sort of magician. The smell of his room was peculiar, and it wasn ' t all coming from the dead frogs he kept in his closet for experiments. Rumor has it that he sat for a solid year masturbating at the tender feet of the Great Phaedrus, teacher of the Mystical Arts at the University of Transylvania. A respected and credible witness had testified that Leopold had made lightning appear in a closed room. When the fire-bombing occurred, Leopold was working in the restaurant where he was head chef. Leopold loved food. Living next to the john, I ' ve had the misfortune of smelling wafts of a mixed aroma of pizza, diarrhea and mouldy fish. The smell would follow him into his gloomy third floor room like Peter Lorre following Sydney Greenstreeet. Two days after the fire-bombing (which caught me asleep with my favorite person, and we made a break naked down the fire-escape), Leopold packed his bags into his ' 44 Nash and headed south, rumor has him in South America, yage country. As he slammed the door he yelled something about shrinking our heads. All of the fraternity rituals and initiation materials and frat robes went with him, packed away in a steamer trunk. Within moments after Leopold ' s departure, the house suddenly came alive. Doors opened, stereos blared, people shouted about the Curse of Leopold and the Death of the Fraternity. We became a close- knit group, all integrating our activities, doing them out in the open instead of in seclusion. There was Limping Crowe, sitting cross-legged in candle light reading ancient philosophical texts; Bad News reading Time Magazine in his easy chair; Bartholomew Martin, a guitar-pickin ' New Englander who ' d travelled far and wide searching for the legendary Blind Umo Mundah, reading William Blake while listening to Bob Dylan; Zukie Bundy, reading Zap Comix while listening to the Supremes; Nelson and Marchetti playing Parchese while Ichabod Osbourne and Leo Di Genero passed joints and beers, waiting their turn. We were known for a while as the Freak Frat until we allowed women in the house for the first time, and we changed the name to Opium Acres , and Spacy with her Dog Jarvis moved in along with Jude and Spotts the tops, and finally a girl nobody knew, a quiet, beautiful brown-haired co-ed named Janis, who in time became my lover... There was a knock on the door. Lover? Can I come in? It was Dorothy. No! You unplugged my stereo to plug in this wretched typewriter, you hid my dope and my Morrocan bongo drums, and you probably threw out my roaches!

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Oh Norman, you look so pathetic, are you tearing out your long lovely hair at the typewriter? She ' d come in anyway, retrieving Norman ' s dope from behind a copy of Moby Dick on the bookshelf, a book she knew he ' d never pull out. She held the meticulously packaged dope out to him, and then snatched it away. Dorothy, don ' t be difficult. Why do you need dope? She was angry now. It ' s this fucking resume, I can ' t write it . . . Depriving me of dope is like depriving a man dying of thirst in the desert a last mirage. I can ' t write this, I gotta write a story instead. Is that what you wrote so far? How can you answer a Want-Ad with that?! She pointed to the paragraphs he wrote after his affress, transcribed above. C ' mon, be serious. Start again, and this time think about ' Career Objective. ' Stupid bitch, Norman thought, doesn ' t know art when she sees it, majoring in Art History turned her into an intellectual elitist snob. However, Norman obediently fed the machine and started a new page, typing his name very slowly, typing his address, thinking about Zukie ' s favorite expression, I ' m in love for the 1,999th time, don ' t you know it ' s gonna last! Then he stopped typing, hooked up a three-way plug and plugged in the stereo, sunny California psychedelic music, and got to thinking about the house and its structure. It ' s built like the people who live in it. All single rooms, yet close together, and everyone gathers at the fireplace. And there ' s a fire-es cape for every room in case of real emergency. Norman would climb out on his fire-escape and watch the sunset over Slumberville. Norman in the last few years has lived in almost every room, including this one, and even one summer he lived on the front porch, with a dirty mattress and a sleeping bag. One morning waking at dawn after a long day of peyote and tapping the power of Pine Hill, rolling out of bed naked in the orange glow with a subterranean Jungian nightmare fading, and searching for his glasses, he walked jauntily naked down the street when the Slumberville Police found him and, after insulting him indecently, dragged his ass homeward and asked to search the room, which was, of course, the porch, and he had to wake somebody to vouch for him and nobody would, and then in the last moment (after giggling for a while) Janis came to his rescue. Janis was a frequent 3 AM visitor when Norman lived on the porch. Bizarre, thought Norman, but wild and satisfying it is to make love in the open air, our groans in tune to the alleycats, snug in my sleeping bags creaking the floor boards or sprawled in the moonlight on the front lawn or upright against the iron train switch or even (once) thumping the shingles on the porch roof. Janis loved the warm outdoors almost as much as she loved, yes really loved, Norman. Dumb I was, thought Norman, all summer loving someone who would change in winter. Janis and Norman would wake together, their long brown hair immersed in their warmth, their bodies smelling of peaceful sleepy cupidity, for a 10 AM summer-school course out on the Library hill. They ' d hold hands under the tree learning about Thoreau and Whitman and Melville, transcending ordinary critical discussions, finding a continuation of those chapters needed to be written about our own lives. 12