Three
I, Kirby Palmer Stassen, stood last February — sixteen thousand years ago? — at a window on the second floor of a fraternity house, looking out at the curiously warm, mild rain that misted Woodland Avenue. I was wearing a dark-gray cashmere cardigan and gray flannel Daks. I was smoking a cigar. The window was open a few inches. I felt the damp breath of the day against the back of my hand. It was the best layout in the house, a two-bedroom suite, handy to the shower room. I shared it with Pete McHue. We were both seniors. It was a Tuesday afternoon. Pete was spread out on the couch behind me, wearing an old terry robe, plodding his way through an assigned book, spooning all that dead dry stuff into his head where it would remain forever.
I remember that I’d put some Chavez on the machine. I can’t remember the name of the symphony, but it’s the one Clare Boothe Luce commissioned him to write as a memorial to her daughter who got killed in an automobile thing, in California, I believe. If I’d put on the Chavez Toccata for Percussion it would have fitted my mood better, but Pete wouldn’t have gone along with that. On the far sidewalk, headed east, was a dumpy little girl in a red sweater, walking in slow defiance of the rain, hugging books with both arms, her rump jutting, damp brown hair bouncing. I wondered what she was thinking about.
When you look back on the moments that change your life, you get good recall. I was thinking about that good Spanish word Hemingway used a lot. Nada. Nothing. Pronounced with accent on first syllable. First syllable is dragged out, sneered, with a lift of the lips. The d is soft — halfway between a d and the th sound. Naaaada. Truly, Mother, it is nothing. En su leche. And that day, that week, that month of my twenty-second year, the word could have been suitably embroidered across my groin.
My college career made a nice, neat chart. I’d come busting onto the scene as a hotshot from Hill, ready to slay the university, but nobody seemed to appreciate my significance and importance. So I went after them, buckety-buckety. So draw the chart in a nice upward curve from the base line, right up to a peak that comes about the middle of the junior year. Kirby Stassen, large man on campus. Background sounds of continuous applause.
Then sag it off. No more honors. No athletic participation. Maximum cuts, and then some. And, for the first time, I found myself on academic probation. And it was raining. And in the rain was a ghostly whiff of spring. Chavez rounded off the coda and the player clacked off, and let some of the sounds of the world come into the room. Traffic on the avenue. Underclassmen horsing around downstairs.
“It’s all crap,” I said.
“What?” Pete asked vaguely.
“Nada. Zero times zero equals square root of minus zero.”
“For Chrissake, Stass, stop standing around here fingering yourself. Go get drunk. Go get banged. You’ve been a drag for weeks.”
“I bother you?” I asked him politely.
“You bother everybody,” he said, and plunged back into his book.
And exactly at that moment is when it happened. For the first time in a long gray time there was a little queasy wiggle of excitement way down there on the floor of my soul. What the hell was keeping me there? What was the Christ name good of coasting through to a degree, which I could manage to do, and then signing up for that Executive Training Program the old man had all lined up for me?
It is like something going click in your head. I had been part of it — part of Pete, part of the guys horsing around downstairs, part of the traffic on Woodland, part of the strange girl in the red sweater. And all of a sudden, without having made a move, I was on my way. I had peeled myself loose from my environment. Once it was done, in that instant, I knew I couldn’t ever go back. I even had a feeling of nostalgia. Good old Pete. It was as if I’d come back to visit one of the places where I had grown up. I stood like a stranger in the middle of my own life, with that excitement coiling and uncoiling way down inside me, making my breath a little short.
I went up into the storage place in the attic and located my foot locker and suitcases and brought them down to the room.
“Now what the hell are you doing?” Pete asked.
“Taking off.”
“You look like you’re planning one hell of a long weekend, old buddy.”
“As long as they come. I’m off for good.”
“With only four months to go? You’re nuts!”
“I’m off to seek my fortune, sir.”
He went back into his book, but I was aware of him pausing from time to time to stare at me. I was very neat. I would take one suitcase. I tagged the locker and the other suitcase for express shipment to 18 Burgess Lane, Huntstown. I sorted books, clothes, records, and made a discard pile. Four years of frivolous accretion.
“Pete? Come here and pay attention.” He ambled over and saluted. “Please have Railway Express pick these up and ship collect. Take first choice of anything you want in this pile, and distribute the balance among the needy brothers.”
He squatted and pulled out a white cablestitch sweater. “We po’ folk are humbly grateful, squire.”
I shook hands with him. When I left the room he was once again squatting, prodding at the pile. It was my intention to go from room to room and exchange the fraternity grip and bid a sturdy masculine farewell to the brotherhood in residence. But instead I went right down the stairs and out the back of the house, got into the Impala and drove away from there. My checking account was down to about eighty dollars. So, on a slow circuit of the commercial strip next to the campus, I cashed three twenty-five-dollar checks at places where I was known and, ninety minutes after the moment of decision I was clear of the city, singing right along with Doris Day on the car radio as I made a hundred and ten feet a second on the way to New York.
That’s what the newspaper types have kept asking me — how did this all start? How did such a clean-cut, privileged, American youth embark upon such a career of violence? The women — do they call them sob sisters still? — are the worst. They are getting a sexual whee out of it. You can tell from their eyes. To the very best of my knowledge, sob sisters, it started that February day, with rain and Chavez and nada.
It is strange that while I am trying to fit my mind around the enormity of what they are going to do to me — strap me down and turn out all my lights — precious, unique, irreplaceable little ole me — I can still feel intense indignation toward whatever newspaper clown invented that Wolf Pack designation. How banal and tiresome and inaccurate can you get?
It is as though I expected more dignity out of electrocution, which is in itself a drab and tragicomic thing. It is the suitable terminal incident in the lives of people named Muggsy Spinoza — or Robert “Shack” Hernandez? — but seems unsuitable for a Kirby Palmer Stassen. I resent my pending abrupt demise being labeled a Wolf Pack Execution.
Perhaps any attempt to comprehend what they are going to do to me is as footless as a chipmunk trying to tuck a coconut into his cheek. Objectively I know it is going to happen. But subjectively I know the cavalry will ride over the hill, the red-skins will skulk off into the brush, the warden will give me a new suit, a train ticket and a handshake, and I will stride off into the sunset as noble music swells and rises on the sound track.
Another sore point in the newspaper coverage — should I have hired a public relations specialist? — has been the half-ass attempts at amateur psychoanalysis. The favorite conclusion has been to label me a constitutional psychopath. Obviously this takes society off the hook. If I can be labeled as something different — a deviation from the norm — then it is evident that the culture is not at fault. I am sick, they say. I have been sick from the beginning. I hid all my wicked violence behind the bland mask of conformity. I was an impostor. That is the implication. And so all the schools and group adjustment programs and cultural advantages are blameless.