Don Lee - The Collective

“How come she’s never mentioned him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she’s embarrassed. He’s fucking studying Chinese, man. He’s a rice chaser.”

“A what?”

“California slang for white dudes with a fetish for Asian chicks.”

I was suspicious. I thought perhaps Joshua was interested in Jessica himself and had lobbed a verbal probe to see if there was any reciprocity. Jessica, trying to be kind, might have lied to Joshua, exaggerating the importance and currency of this high school romance. After all, how many of these adolescent relationships survived the separation of college? And perhaps Joshua, after being rebuffed, was now trying to derail my prospects with her.

As we sat at a table for Amnesty International in front of the campus center, attempting to recruit new members, I asked Jessica, “Do you have a boyfriend back home?”

“Joshua told you.”

“Is it still going hot and heavy?”

“ ‘Hot and heavy.’ That’s a quaint phrase,” she said. “Your language can be so old-fashioned sometimes. I hope that’s not indicative of your writing style — or, worse, your morality.”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“I don’t know. I’ve had two boyfriends my entire life, neither of which my parents were ever aware of. What do I know about hot and heavy?”

“You guys still writing to each other, talking on the phone?”

“Some.”

“I want to know something: Do you only like white guys?”

“Joshua told you that? He is full of it. You know that thing he said in class? ‘What they lacked was testicularity’? You know where he got that? He stole it straight out of Franny and Zooey .”

I thought it had sounded familiar, and later that afternoon I would go to the library and confirm that Joshua indeed had lifted the expression — uttered by Franny’s boyfriend, Lane, no less, that pompous little shithead — from page eleven of Salinger’s book.

“Okay, so he’s not original all of the time,” I said. “But you have to give him credit. He says what’s on his mind. He doesn’t give a shit what people think of him.”

“Are you kidding?” Jessica said. “That’s all he thinks about. He’s exactly like you.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You’re always trying to please everyone. You’re quick to adopt other people’s opinions, because you haven’t formed any of your own yet. You’re kind of like this empty vessel right now, a cipher, waiting to be filled up.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, stunned and insulted, while at the same time sensing she might be right about me.

“It’s not irredeemable. You’ll grow out of it eventually.”

“Like you’ll stand up to your parents someday?” I asked.

“I never claimed I had any testicularity,” she told me.

So I turned my attentions to Didi O’Brien, a freshman I’d met playing Ultimate Frisbee. I ran into her in the student union during Seventies Disco Night. There were themed dances nearly every month on campus, none of which Jessica or certainly Joshua would ever deign to attend. That night, as soon as I entered the lounge, Didi pulled me onto the floor for “That’s the Way (I Like It).”

“You look fantastic!” I said. She was wearing a tangerine-orange minidress and white go-go boots.

“You, too!” she shouted, admiring the powder-blue leisure suit I’d picked up at Goodwill.

If possible, Didi was a worse dancer than I was, gawky and arrhythmic, yet wholly unselfconscious, which endeared her to me. We stayed on the floor for two more songs—“Dancing Queen” and “Cold as Ice”—and then coupled for a slow one, “Killing Me Softly.”

“You’re kind of cute,” she murmured. She was drunk. We all were. The drinking age was twenty-one in Minnesota, but booze flowed freely in the dorms, and we always tanked up before going to the dances.

“You’re not so bad yourself,” I said, nuzzling her. She was tall and gangly, with long legs and arms, big hands and feet, but she had a classical air about her, her face strongly angular yet alluring. She was blond, of course.

A few days later, I asked her out to a movie that was playing at the Grandview, the theater half a mile from campus. They were showing Running on Empty , a new film starring River Phoenix as the son of two former Weather Underground — type radicals on the run from the FBI. I figured afterward I could ply Didi with what I had learned about the antiwar movement in my Vietnam class.

But we didn’t end up staying until the end of the movie. Halfway through, I turned to her, and she to me. She was chomping on a piece of gum. I was about to ask if she wanted the rest of the popcorn, and as I opened my mouth she spontaneously spat her wad of gum right into it. Startled, I took a sharp intake of breath, which lodged the gum in my throat, and I started choking. Alarmed, Didi punched me in the solar plexus, which made me hawk the gum out, directly into the hair — a nesty brown bouffant — of the woman in front of us. Didi and I gasped, but when we realized the woman somehow had not noticed the new appendage that had been projectiled into her hairdo, we began giggling, which escalated into a paroxysm of near-pee-in-the-pants guffaws. We were kicked out of the theater.

We went to Dunn Bros Coffee for cappuccinos and carrot cake, and talked. Didi was from Massachusetts, Irish Catholic, and intended to major in math and computer science. Her father, like mine, was an engineer. He had grown up poor in Dorchester and gone to UMass Amherst and then had started a hugely successful company that specialized in hospital software systems. He expected Didi to work for him after she graduated.

“Did you want to follow in his footsteps, or were you feeling forced?” I asked, thinking the story didn’t change much across ethnicities.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m the only one of his kids with any facility in math. I actually like math.”

“You don’t look like a math geek.”

“What’s a math geek supposed to look like?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “probably like me.”

I walked her back to her dorm, Turck, and outside the front door we smooched a little, but it was all rather chaste, without presage of ardor. This might be a dead end, I thought.

Nonetheless, the next Friday we joined a gang of students to go to the Sonic Youth concert at First Avenue, the club Prince had made famous. Macalester was in a quiet residential St. Paul neighborhood, miles from downtown Minneapolis, which usually required two buses and forty-five minutes to get to, but the school had decided to make a semi-sanctioned event of it, offering a couple of vans to transport us to the club, and we all eagerly piled into them, Joshua included.

“This is Didi,” I told him.

“Hey,” he said, barely registering her. “Fucking-A, how cool is this, huh? We’re finally getting off the goddamn reservation. First Ave! Sonic Youth!”

I wasn’t all that familiar with Sonic Youth, or that entire classification of punk rock. Truth be told, before I came to Mac, my favorite musician — I’m ashamed to say — had been Billy Joel.

Sonic Youth was touring for a new album, Daydream Nation , and Joshua ran through the song list, citing the allusions to Denis Johnson, Saul Bellow, Andy Warhol, and William Gibson. “It’s, like, a lit major’s wet dream,” Joshua said, laughing. “I mean, yeah, it’s the most mainstream, commercial thing they’ve ever done, and they’re going to get some flak for it for sure, but it’s still got its subcultural, seditious connotations, you know?”