Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

This is the college that began admitting women and blacks in the 1830s?

But nay, this is sport, in the name of which Stanley Royster is kicked off the Cal track team for becoming involved in black politics on campus. In the name of which Sylvester Hodges is prohibited from competing at the NCAA championship wrestling tournament because of the unpardonable offense of wearing a mustache. Rah.

He should have known better.

They pushed on. There was a peculiar sense not of siege exactly but of hollow impermanence. It colored every decision they made. Neighbors who wouldn’t have voluntarily suffered their presence judged them to be “distant.” They marked their calendars for the days when out-of-town friends passed through, Guy and Randi did, marked those square-inch boxes in the brightest red ink. They bought a Bell & Howell projector at a garage sale and found a mailorder place where they could obtain prints of ancient two-reel comedies, so they could avoid watching “moron TV.”

Also, less cozily, out of sheer boredom, Guy began an affair with a town girl named Erica Dyson. Very uncharacteristic, that whole thing. She seemed to think she was pregnant all the time. Randi found out when Guy began a somewhat recklessly recurrent and increasingly compulsive line of inquiry with her regarding the (a) nature and (b) frequency of ovulation. She asked why one day (she knew she shouldn’t, but), Guy answered her with habitual candor, and she went crazy and smashed all the dishes. Period. This is how American marriages stay together out here where the wind has a different sound and smell depending on which direction it’s coming from and that’s the big news of the day. To be honest, Guy was a little more concerned about Erica Dyson than he was about Randi. He pictured her parking her Duster across the tracks at some rural crossing where a freight train traveling at 80 mph would shower both her and the Plymouth into two adjacent fields, over two county lines, into the bailiwick of public inquiry. And the bundle, the potential heir whose likely imaginary presence her hand nervously traced across her detumescent abdomen: What if?

So Guy went to Allen Memorial Hospital that winter evening to get stitches for the cut above his eye that a jagged piece of Corning Ware had inflicted; and he sat in the waiting room of the new wing while he waited to be fixed up, holding an old copy of the Reader’s Digest and turning its pages, composing the unbelievable lies he would tell successively to the nurse, the intern, the attending physician, and finally, later, Erica Dyson, wondering idly how many solid citizens of Lorain County belted their spouses, or slept around, or cheated on their income taxes, or took two newspapers out of the dispenser on Main Street when they’d paid for only one, and as he did these things, he knew that he was approaching the end of his midwestern sojourn, that the ingredients of his real life were being gathered up and prepared for him somewhere out there in the great meanwhile.

A pale boy, a sheen like dewy spider’s webbing the only suggestion of hair on the sides and back of his skull, sat opposite Guy sandwiched between two morbidly obese women. Guy decided that they were his aunts. The boy was the living embodiment of the sort of characterless object that the popular culture had positioned as the representative face of American Boyhood when Guy had been growing up. The boy cradled his right forearm in his left; could it actually be that he had fallen from a tree? The aunts had looked up from the twin pies they were placing to cool on adjacent windowsills and seen the boy topple from the branches of an apple tree, the very one from which they’d gained the fruit to bake the pies, and rushed out, each drying her damp hands on her apron. The two of them, Guy and the boy, stared in frank and open astonishment at each other. The hair, the mustache, the staring eyes, which under the very best of circumstances made Guy look faintly rabid: Even by 1973 Guy was a curiosity. And the boy’s fish belly looks we’ve already rehearsed. Finally, the boy reached up to tug on the nearest broad sleeve.

“Mama … Mom … look, it’s the hippie who’s doing it with Erica Dyson!”

Whatever the pretext, they soon were moving. The university handed him his hat and forty grand. They clumped through the empty rooms, their voices reverberating. They didn’t toast any good times they might have had there. They left things behind, bags of discards and a forwarding address — his parents’ home, a failing motel in Las Vegas — and headed for NYC, an ill-defined trip. Home of eight major professional sports franchises and focus of a world’s derivative gaze. Unfortunately, Guy and his Institute for the Study of Sport and Society did not quite fit in with the steak-and-Löwenbräu ethos of Toots Shor’s. Randi wilted like the houseplants that hung over the rattling radiators. They headed back to the California coast.

Now, a scant two weeks later, Guy is tooling through the streets of Berkeley, the offering of a substantial portion of an excellent zucchini bread seated beside him, the high splenetic clatter of the Bug echoing against the houses on either side of the street. He skirts the campus now, onto Hearst Avenue, and then, spotting the snarl of worshipful traffic outside the church ahead, turns quickly north, heading up into the hills and the stilted apartment buildings that loom above their open carports like the cut-rate imitations of the good life that they are. The real luxury is found on the serpentine turns that this street, Euclid, takes as it approaches its beau ideal — remote and faintly forbidding inaccessibility — farther on.

He passes a wall on which someone has sprayed THE SLA LIVES. Is it an affirmation of the remaining entity or a memorial to the six who were lost?

On the other hand, he’s afraid he’s going to make something of a bad first impression. Not that this is anything new to Guy. But he’s really got to take a shit; the All-Bran has just scoured him out. You hear about people who decline to shit in other people’s houses; Guy is not one of them. Guy will eliminate whenever he feels the interior clamor. He will eat that last pork chop. He will tell you if you’ve gained weight. He will ask how much you make or what you paid for your house. He will provide an honest opinion of your attire. None of which constitutes the violation of a taboo, strictly speaking, but each has a tendency to make people feel uncomfortable; hence the famous “difficulty” for which Guy is renowned.

The Bayview Apartments. Casa Euclid. The Trollmont. The Oaklander. Grizzly Peak Residences. Albany Terrace Arms. He pulls in a couple of doors down from the building where Susan and Jeff are feeding the fish of a vacationing acquaintance. The latemorning air is still and very warm in the sun. He parks facing up the hill and sits for a moment, trying to remember which way he is supposed to turn the wheels; with his VW, it’s not merely for the sake of appearance. He decides he is supposed to turn them facing out into the roadway and works the wheel, audibly grunting. Then he gets out, and, after putting on the shoulder bag, carries the loaf of zucchini bread under his arm as he walks up the street’s oil-spattered margin.

He’s pretty excited about this.

Guy enters his destination via a dank and shadowy grotto where a rank of mailboxes is embedded in a stucco wall, and gratefully crosses into a sunny central courtyard around which the complex forms an open rectangle, bordered on its open side by spare greenery that separates it from its nearly identical neighbor. On this level are the carports, most of which are empty of cars this pretty Sunday but full of other things: beach toys and cross-country skis and cardboard cartons and stacks of newspapers and barbecue grills and cans of motor oil. Above the carports are the apartments, inscrutable behind the identical hollow-core doors and curtained windows that line the tier. He pauses on the uneven ground, looking for number eleven, then heads for a set of stairs that gives every appearance of having been an afterthought.