Don DeLillo - Americana

In junior year I met Ken Wild. I left my room one morning, late for class, and was going down the stairs, past the second floor, when I heard music, the deep bounce of a tenor saxophone. I stood there a moment, listening, then went down the corridor. The sound was coming from a record player turned up to what seemed full volume. A husky young man was sitting on the edge of the bed, forearms on knees, head faintly nodding. He was wearing red and black boxer's trunks, an Everlast trademark across the elastic band. He looked up briefly, cracking open a big grin, and waved me to a chair. About ten minutes later the record ended and the tone arm swung back.

"Coltrane," he said.

Wild was from Chicago, an ex-marine. We spent the rest of the morning listening to his records. I felt this music had been in me all along, the smoky blue smell of it, mornings in Paris and cat intestines spilled on Lenox Avenue. I pleased myself by thinking, as white men will do, that some Afro-instinct burned in an early part of my being.

Wild and I were friends from the beginning. We argued, kidded, sparred with open hands, and committed the usual collegiate blasphemies of word and deed, using as our text the gleeful God-baiting of Buck Mulligan in the first few pages of Ulysses. That was our sacred scroll and we regretted that there had been no gray Jesuits to darken our childhoods and none now to swoop down on us with deathmask and Summa.

Both of us wrote poetry. I enjoyed strangling the words and trying to get them on paper still living but when I failed to finish what I had planned to do, or even to begin it, I was less than seriously troubled. After all I had my camera. But Wild went at it with total commitment, all or nothing, sending no envoys out to treaty with failure. We joined the school's poetry society so that we could stay away from their meetings and have our memberships revoked and then found a rival society. But we never bothered.

We used to go through anthologies, loving and hating all fierce gigantic talent. It was the loose image we picked out and petted, little boys in a lion kennel. Wild would go into a fine frenzy at these sessions, turning pages, jumping from book to book, shouting out the beatific phrases, and we would spin off into storms of laughter at the joy and wonder and misery of those lines. We tried to write with jazz and wine. But I guess I would have been better off in bed with Wendy Judd.

People dream of money and love. It was Wendy's ambition to be hired as an extra in a big-budget Technicolor movie. She had no illusions of stardom. Fragmentation, the settling of a myth into the realism of its component parts, had come to the West quite early, and Wendy was a native Californian. She would have been satisfied to get the back of her head in a movie, her revolutionary fist raised in a Bastille crowd scene. She spent a lot of time with Simmons St. Jean, who taught film theory and criticism at Leighton Gage. Simmons was only thirty or so but he tried to come on like the post-accident Montgomery Clift, a hollow echoing man. He worked on his pallor the way the rest of us teased our suntans. At the same time he tried to let his male students know that for an old man he was doing all right with the girlies. Since I majored in film and since Simmons considered me the man to beat for stud honors, we had a certain wary interest in each other. Our discussions were full of small-arms fire. Wendy Judd and I had coffee with him one day.

"I'm just fascinated by you kids," Simmons said. "I was with one of my students the other night, the other evening I should say, girl named Pamela something, and I was virtually in awe of her unselfconsciousness and total lack of provincialism. Her quiet command of her own feelings. You kids are so wonderfully free and open. You have none of the hangups I had in college. It's a beautiful thing to see."

"How come you look so tired and beat-up all the time?" Wendy said. "Not that it's not attractive."

"I'd just as soon not talk about myself. I've exhausted all hope of defining who or what I am. Perhaps some time, Wendy, if Dave permits, I'll tell you the story of my life. But for the time being I'd much rather listen to you two talk about yourselves. One of the many pleasures of teaching at a place like this is the uninhibited exchange between students and faculty. There's really nothing like it anywhere in the country. Dave, what kind of thesis are you planning this year?"

"I'm shooting it in the desert, Simmons. It'll be almost pure imagery. A small shade of meaning for those who crave it."

"I thrive on imagery. It seems to have a laxative effect."

"David showed me the thing he made last year," Wendy said. "Wasn't it wild, Simmons-all those reflections and shadows?"

"He didn't like it," I said.

"I wouldn't say that, Dave. It had its moments."

"He said it was meekly derivative. He mentioned, I believe, the early Kurosawa."

"The prenatal Kurosawa would have been more like it," Simmons said. "I'd dearly love to pursue this further but I've got a class in ten minutes. My freshmen tend to get anxious if I don't show up on time. Father figure and all that."

"I'm going that way," Wendy said.

"I thought you and I might drive over to the lake," I said. "Why don't you come along, Simmons? We never see you at the lake. We look for you, Wendy and I, but we never see you."

"I've got a class to get to. Which way are you heading, Wendy?"

"We're going to the lake," I said. "If you don't have a bathing suit, Simmons, you can borrow one of mine."

"I'm sure you have enough swimwear for a brigade of lifeguards, Dave, but I'm afraid I'll have to take a rain check on that."

"It's not raining."

"You can use some sun," Wendy said.

"You have to get out there and cop those rays, Simmons. You're spending too much time in the dark."

"I console myself with the thought that nothing very interesting happens in well-lighted places."

"Pow," Wendy said.

Having secured the more essential of victories, I did not dispute the loser's right to get in the last word. Everybody knows how much solace the older generation takes in saving face.

Although there were no athletic teams at Leighton Gage, we were probably more serious about sports than the average student body. But we played games of a different kind-non-team, swift, dangerous. One of the important things money buys is speed. Speed and a glimpse of death. We drove sports cars and motorcycles in informal competition, rode beach buggies over the desert, raced motorboats on the artificial lake near the campus. Several students owned planes and if you were friendly with one of them you could go up to L.A for party weekends and on the return flight test your desire for an early poetic death. The force behind these activities was essentially spiritual. There were many injuries, several fatalities, and we reacted to these with professional dispassion. That's something money can't buy. But either you learn it or you go back to baseball.

Page Talbot's father bought her a fiberglass runabout for her birthday and had it sent out to the anti-lake about a mile north of the campus. She painted it lilac and yellow and planned to install a bedroom canopy until somebody talked her out of it. The first time she asked me to go sailing, as she called it, the outboard fell off and while we waited for someone to tow us in we sat there drinking beer, drifting in small circles, relatively content, pretending we were on an Arab dhow lazing through the papyrus slogs of the Sudanese Nile.

"I made it with Ken Wild last night," she said.

"I didn't know you knew each other."

"We didn't."

"Well I don't want to hear about it."

"He's nice really."

"Did I tell you I'm thinking of getting married? I met this girl back home last summer and we've been corresponding. She's in London now touring the epitaphs. I've been thinking of popping the old question."