Tufts University - Jumbo Yearbook (Medford, MA)

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“Norman? Are you dreaming? Dorothy ' s perfumed breast pressed against his ear. Aren ' t you gonna type your age? Okay, put on another record, I can ' t function without music. And he typed, neatly, 21 and sat back in despair. Jefferson Airplane filled the air with a hopeful compromise. Dorothy went downstairs to make coffee, and Norman lit a curiously thin joint. He began to type Career Objective when he heard the song Volunteers and tore out the paper and stuffed the machine and began to write on his own. He wanted to add a chapter to the Fester P. Gazotsky legend he ' d been keeping for the last two years. Last year the campus boasted about the First Annual Fester P. Gazotsky Spring Festival, and most everybody wondered who Fester P. Gazotsky was, since he hadn ' t shown up for the festival in his honor. Norman, who ' d organized the whole thing as a joke on the campus and as a special project for Folklore Class - to create one ' s own folklore (He got an A for it), sheepishly denied that he ' d made the character up. I ' ve been receiving letters, he ' d claim, and add more chapters to the biography that he wanted to put in the Archives. (The truth is that Norman and Bartholomew had dreamed up the name while sitting for hours in the extraterrestrial energy of Mescalito perched high atop Pine Hill.) This chapter, titled with a bizarre philosophical statement by P. T. Barnum: There ' s a Sucker Born Every Minute! — tells of Fester introducing Barnum to laughing gas at the turn of the century. Fester P. Gazotsky had experimented with the gas for some time, comparing notes with his friend William James, diving into the unknown depths of the mind, finding a brilliant array of organisms evolving in patterns living off pure light in the depths where Reason sees only deep, incomprehendable water. Fester dived too deep - and P. T. Barnum seized the opportunity to sell trips to would-be mind divers — Laughing gas, the eighth wonder of the world! Laugh at the world, laught at yourselves! And laugh they did, and many laughed at their silly selves all the way to the funny farm. And they laughed at Fester, who, when demonstrating the gas, dived too deep and forgot to come back, and spectators told of how he wandered off into the crowds, showing all the symptoms of amnesia, and never to be seen again. And they laughed when Barnum, then a trustee of a small-time college, paid the college a lot of money to change its name to Fester P. Gazotsky ' s middle name: Pufts University. Norman was typing and Fester, thirty-five years old amnesiac Zen lunatic that he was, found himself pounding at the gates of American Literature — when Dorothy burst in giggling with steaming coffee. What ' s so funny about a cup of coffee? Norman asked, annoyed. Nothing, she said, straight-faced, and then started giggling again. Marchetti and Nelson were having a shaving cream fight, and Jarvis got covered! Jarvis yapped at Jude, and her cat Witney started eating it, and Spotts joined the fight and Limping Crowe hooked up a hose to the hot water and sprayed everybody, and the downstairs is all wet, and then they all decided to take a bath at once, and they all are cramped into the tub, and they ' re all having an orgy, I think. 13

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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

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Norman lit another joint and started typing again, but Dorothy had now stopped and was holding Norman ' s resume - C ' mon, finish it. You once told me you could do anything, she said, looking at him with cold eyes. If you could do anything, you could get this resume right and get yourself a job. Her look was defiant, victorius, not a look he knew in summertime, a definitely winter look. Norman looked away, remembering that time on the hill, when he told Janis he could do anything — Anything! I can write a novel. I ' m gonna write a novel! I ' m gonna publish a few short-stories, you ' ll see. And I can write poetry. I won ' t run away again. No more in the wilds of Utah, Montana . . . I ' m gonna write you a poem right now — and he did, one of his best, entitled Anything! I can do . . . Well, Norman? Dorothy had softened, but he hated it when she used that tone of voice. Is that part of your Fester book? Yes. That was all. Good, she resumed, Now you can do your resume. And she stiffly sat on the bed, taking out a textbook. Don ' t you wanna read it? asked Norman, pensively. Maybe later. I gotta finish this Art History. Norman turned away, feeling sorry for himself. There was a time when janis couldn ' t wait to read something he ' d written. I love this, she ' d say while she read, It ' s your own fantasy, yet it ' s somehow true, and it ' s funny, even ... And Norman would keep writing, all night long on dexedrine and then stumble into a morning class red-eyed and stubbled. All day he ' d rewrite the scenes, finding new dialogue at parties, in hallways, in class, and his writing talked to some people. It ' s a Chautauqua, something a traveling teacher of Indian myths would preach throughout the countryside, sometimes they were the only messengers to carry information to remote tribes, Limping Crowe would say. Norman! Dorothy ' s angry again. Okay, okay, meek lamb that he was, and he lined the print to the inescapable rule of the typewriter. CAREER OBJECTIVE he typed in block letters, underlined for dramatic effect. Then he stopped to think, and he freaked. For the first time in a long while he noticed his image in the mirror as he sat at the typewriter. What do I really want to do with my life? Who shall I be? What shall I write, ' freelance writer ' or ' bum in the park ' ? (Back to a time before Janis, before Fester, when questions had to be answered and you got off your ass and quit your factory job, running from city lights and confusion, running down highways and up moun¬ tains to camp like a hermit naked in the wilderness, living on peanut butter and visions of nirvana, and running away again, this time from solitude, and searching the highway for signs of the Lost Hobo of Rte. 30, last seen in Wyoming several years ago. Three cases reported a hitchhiker claiming to be the Savior and then vanishing before their eyes in their back seat, and all drivers now are wary of hitchhikers especially ragged freaky Christ-looking geeks. And you reached the city and found delight, lived on the street filled with love and wonder and no impulse or direction — just a lateral drift. 14