My roommate Flusser had contempt for everything I said and mocked me mercilessly. When I tried being agreeable with him, he called me Prince Charming. When I told him to leave me alone, he said, “Such thin skin for such a big boy.” At night he insisted on playing Beethoven on his record player after I got into bed, and at a volume that didn’t seem to bother my other two roommates as much as it did me. I knew nothing about classical music, didn’t much like it, and besides, I needed my sleep if I was to continue to hold down a weekend job and get the kind of grades that had put me on the Robert Treat Dean’s List both semesters I was there. Flusser himself never got up before noon, even if he had classes, and his bunk was always unmade, the bedding hanging carelessly down over one side, obscuring the view of the room from my bunk. Living in close quarters with him was worse even than living with my father during my freshman year — my father at least went off all day to work in the butcher shop and, albeit fanatically, cared about my well-being. All three of my roommates were going to act in the college’s fall production of Twelfth Night, a play I’d never heard of. I had read Julius Caesar in high school, Macbeth in my English literature survey course my first year of college, and that was it. In Twelfth Night, Flusser was to play a character called Malvolio, and on the nights when he wasn’t listening to Beethoven after hours he would lie in the bunk above me reciting his lines aloud. Sometimes he would strut about the room practicing his exit line, which was “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” From my bed I would plead, “Flusser, please, could you quiet it down,” to which he would respond — by shouting or cackling or menacingly whispering—“I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” once again.
Within only days of arriving on the campus, I began to look around the dormitory for somebody with an empty bunk in his room who would agree to have me as a roommate. That took several more weeks, during which time I reached the peak of my frustration with Flusser and, about an hour after I’d gone to bed one night, rose screaming from my bunk to yank a phonograph record of his from the turntable and, in the most violent act I’d ever perpetrated, to smash it against the wall.
“You have just destroyed Quartet Number Sixteen in F Major,” he said, without moving from where he was smoking in the upper bunk, fully clothed and still in his shoes.
“I don’t care! I’m trying to get to sleep!”
The bare overhead lights had been flipped on by one of the other two boys. Both of them were out of their bunk beds and standing in their Jockey shorts waiting to see what would happen next.
“Such a nice polite little boy,” Flusser said. “So clean-cut. So upright. A bit rash with the property of others, but otherwise so ready and willing to be a human being.”
“What’s wrong with being a human being!”
“Everything,” Flusser replied with a smile. “Human beings stink to high heaven.”
“You stink!” I shouted. “You do, Flusser! You don’t shower, you don’t change your clothes, you never make your bed — you have got no consideration for anyone! You’re either emoting your head off at four in the morning or playing music as loud as you can!”
“Well, I am not a nice boy like you, Marcus.”
Here at last one of the others spoke up. “Take it easy,” he said to me. “He’s just a pain in the ass. Don’t take him so seriously.”
“But I’ve got to get my sleep!” I cried. “I can’t do my work without getting my sleep! I don’t want to wind up getting sick, for Christ’s sake!”
“Getting sick,” said Flusser, adding to the smile a small derisive laugh, “would do you a world of good.”
“He’s crazy!” I shouted at the other two. “Everything he says is crazy!”
“You destroy Beethoven’s Quartet in F Major,” said Flusser, “and I’m the one who’s crazy.”
“Knock it off, Bert,” said one of the other boys. “Shut up and let him go to sleep.”
“After what the barbarian has done to my record?”
“Tell him you’ll replace the record,” the boy said to me. “Tell him you’ll go downtown and buy him a new one. Go ahead, tell him, so we can all go back to bed.”
“I’ll buy you a new one,” I said, seething at the injustice of it all.
“Thank you,” Flusser said. “Thank you so much. You really are a nice boy, Marcus. Irreproachable. Marcus the well-washed, neatly dressed boy. You do the right thing in the end, just like Mama Aurelius taught you.”
I replaced the record out of what I earned waiting tables in the taproom of the inn. I did not like the job. The hours were far shorter than those I put in for my father at the butcher shop and yet, because of the din and the excessive drinking and the stink of beer and cigarette smoke that pervaded the place, the work turned out to be more tiring and, in its way, as disgusting as the worst things I had to do at the butcher shop. I myself didn’t drink beer or anything else alcoholic, I’d never smoked, and I’d never tried by shouting and singing at the top of my voice to make a dazzling impression on girls — as did any number of inebriates who brought their dates to the inn on Friday and Saturday nights. There were “pinning” parties held almost weekly in the taproom to celebrate the informal engagement of a Winesburg boy to a Winesburg girl by his presenting her with his fraternity pin for her to wear to class on the front of her sweater or blouse. Pinned as a junior, engaged as a senior, and married upon graduation — those were the innocent ends pursued by most of the Winesburg virgins during my own virginal tenure there.
There was a narrow cobblestone alleyway that ran back of the inn and the neighboring shops that fronted on Main Street, and students were in and out of the inn’s rear door all evening long either to vomit or to be off alone to try to feel up their girlfriends and dry-hump them in the dark. To break up the necking sessions, every half hour or so one of the town’s police cars would cruise slowly along the alleyway with its brights on, sending those desperate for an outdoor ejaculation scurrying for cover inside the inn. With rare exceptions, the girls at Winesburg were either wholesome-looking or homely, and they all appeared to know how to behave properly to perfection (which is to say, they appeared not to know how to misbehave or how to do anything that was considered improper), so when they got drunk, instead of turning raucous the way the boys did, they wilted and got sick. Even the ones who dared to step through the doorway into the alley to neck with their dates came back inside looking as though they’d gone out to the alley to have their hair done. Occasionally I would see a girl who attracted me, and while running back and forth with my pitchers of beer, I would turn my head to try to get a good look at her. Almost always I discovered that her date was the evening’s most aggressively obnoxious drunk. But because I was being paid the minimum wage plus tips, I arrived promptly at five every weekend to begin setting up for the night and worked till after midnight, cleaning up, and throughout tried to maintain a professional waiterly air despite people’s snapping their fingers at me to get my attention or whistling at me sharply with their fingers in their mouths and treating me more like a lackey than a fellow student who needed the work. More than a few times during the first weeks, I thought I heard myself being summoned to one of the rowdier tables with the words “Hey, Jew! Over here!” But, preferring to believe the words spoken had been simply “Hey, you! Over here!” I persisted with my duties, determined to abide by the butcher-shop lesson learned from my father: slit the ass open and stick your hand up and grab the viscera and pull them out; nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done.