Mark Chiusano - Marine Park - Stories

This was when Hayden was living in graduate housing at Brandeis. He had a little room to himself and his own door with a lock on it, and he never put posters up. This was during the period of us-learning-to-be-better-communicators, which was something he felt strongly about.

Hayden had become good at talking about his feelings, even though that was something we hadn’t done when we were first friends. He broke his wrist and was in a cast before high school and I helped him with that, but it doesn’t count. I didn’t talk about feelings with anyone, because Lorris was too young. Hayden lost his virginity to his girlfriend at the same time I did with mine, and we didn’t talk about it until two months after. And even then I didn’t bring it up, just said, me too , after he said his piece — I’ve got something to tell you, man. That was in the stands at Icahn Stadium in the spring, right after Hayden got knocked out of medaling at Cities in the 800-meter run. I’d done the mile, and broke 4:40 for the first time. He had long hair that season, and he was beginning to lose interest in track because of his girlfriend. A few months ago something incredible happened, he said.

They called the place where Hayden lived Grad, capital G , as if it were more than a place but also a state of mind. It was far from the rest of the dormitories and classroom buildings: the main campus was up a winding road at the top of a hill, where there was a corny little castle that someone had built in the 1950s. The type of thing that, at nighttime, looked amazing, lit up with red ramparts and a view of the Charles and the train tracks at the bottom of the hill. But in the daytime it looked like something that someone had built in the 1950s.

Hayden was happy to be living in Grad, as a junior, even though everyone gave him a hard time for it: complaining that it was too far away and that they never saw him anymore, because he always retreated there to his single room and the graduate students with their guitars, reading theory in their beds. He maintained that this wasn’t true; that he, for instance, spent a lot of time in the Peace Room, which was in the place where the dungeon would be if the castle had a dungeon. He took me there once, although he opened the door first and peeked in to make sure no one was inside, because he said that the Peace Room regulars usually didn’t like to be disturbed. Not that I was a disturbance at all, he said. I was a good influence on him, and he thanked me for that.

I’d always wanted to go to school away from home, but sometimes things don’t work perfectly. CUNY takes just about anyone, and they promised they’d be opening dorms at Brooklyn College by my sophomore year. They didn’t, of course. Brooklyn College is the type of place that hasn’t changed since my parents went there — my dad on the GI Bill, my mother looking for a husband who wasn’t Italian — and they didn’t end up finishing those dorms just like they never built the swimming pool that my dad and his Navy friends were always asking for. What were they supposed to do to stay in shape? they asked the administration. The provost at the time was a running guru who had done Boston, New York, and Berlin, enough years after that other war, and he tried to get them to start a track team (they didn’t), or at least go for runs with him all around Brooklyn. They did it once, but what they really wanted was to hit something or be completely covered by water, and running was a pretty poor exchange. I ended up living at home and saving my money, listening to my dad snicker about Brooklyn College. He’d stopped taking classes his senior year, and there wasn’t really an explanation why. Some things just happen. It was a better experience for my mother. If I could stand to, I stayed at the Sugar Bowl after classes until dinner, avoiding watching Lorris get back from school and sit right down to his homework. Eventually I stayed longer and longer, even when I wasn’t taking classes, looking at the captioned TV. I established once that the waitress knew my dad when he used to hang out there. After that she gave me the stale bagels, which I’d take home and let him eat.

Hayden was always trying to get me to come visit, and I did, more often than I should have. Academically, there hadn’t been much of a difference between him and me, though I guess he wrote better essays. My mother said she didn’t think it was worth it to go away to expensive private colleges when we had perfectly good ones here. We do, and what’s the difference in the end, but Hayden seemed to enjoy living away. He said, even up to junior year, people had late-night conversations about the things they were studying, the books that classes assigned. Which sounds like bullshit to me, like one of the brochures that the private colleges send from random places in the South. Nobody was that earnest about it at Brooklyn, though if you kept your head down you could get an education. I was taking my math requirement that semester, even though the professor asked if I was sure I wanted to. I’d been in and out. He said, Are you staying this time? I said I was back for good. It was a survey: “Mathematical Topics.” Sometimes you learn some good things.

I promised myself I wouldn’t spend more than two weekends a month up at Hayden’s that year — though because he was a junior, I was starting to get anxious that I was losing the chance. When we talked about it, he said simply, Literally, whenever. He invited Lorris too, though it was mostly just to be nice. He said we could move a mattress in and he could get me someone’s old Brandeis ID and a copy of his key. I did end up getting a copy of the key, for the nights when Hayden went off with a girl, although those were very rare: because when I was there, he said that it was more important that we spend time together, and catch up; girls would be around forever.

Hayden had taken a class last semester that he said had changed his life. He had started out majoring in business, like his father wanted. His dad studied econ and law in Tel Aviv and was a real estate broker here. But the class, called “Peace, Social Change, and a New Way of Viewing Human Interrelations,” made Hayden switch to sociology. You’d think those would have been difficult, stressful times for him, full of calls home and imploring his mother for support, but Hayden rarely called home, and actually didn’t know too much about how his parents were doing — just like they didn’t see much of him besides the semester’s bill, which they immediately sent up to Hayden. Even I asked if it would be tough to graduate on time with requirements, and he said, Please. It’s Brandeis.

“Peace, Social Change, Etc.” was a class taught by an elderly Iranian man named Yahya, who had converted to Judaism twenty-five years ago. He was one of a whole new host of Brandeis professors who were beginning to wear jackets without ties, and in the winter, under his blazer, a blue turtleneck that had sweat stains seeping from under the arms. You had to write multiple essays to get into the class, and it was only the most talented and dedicated who did — everyone wanted a spot because every other week they went on peace retreats to one of Yahya’s numerous friends’ cabins, in the Berkshires, or on the North Shore, or near Walden Pond. There, they cooked meals for each other, drank pinot grigio with Yahya, and practiced looking into each other’s eyes when they conversed, while they listed one thing they appreciated about each and every member of the class. Yahya wouldn’t smoke with them, but he said that it wasn’t for him to set rules for them to go by, and when, on the first day of class, they put smoking pot into the legal section of their new social constitution, he said that this would be a good experiment in learning each other’s boundaries.