Love Is A Palindrome, Part V: The Porcelain Beauty

A few days later, the annual Boston PotFest provided me with a sorely needed respite from the Animal House that had become my life, and provided all of my dormmates -- Mark included -- with an unneeded respite from sobriety.


"Dude, let's go!!! We're missing it!!!" Shawn yelled to Mark from down the hall. Our Resident Assistant, Joseph, had organized a field trip over to the Common for this seemingly momentous event, during which the Boston police looked the other way while a gaggle of college students blaze their ways into oblivion. Somehow I doubted that when Joseph interviewed for the position as our RA, he included his years of experience attending PotFest on his resume. Though just talking to him was probably enough to tip anyone off.


"I'm not condoning the actual consumption of narcotics," Joseph told us, as he cleaned his favorite bong in the bathroom sink, a green-purple number with a pair of breasts stenciled on the side. As a junior in college who could legally drink -- not that the converse situation stopped anyone -- Joseph was the envy of our entire floor, except me of course, who instead envied the girl down the hall whose gay dancer/half-brother had toured with Madonna.


"This is purely an observational outing. But if any of you should find yourselves actually partaking of this sociological phenomenon, well, fuckin' rock on!" I was glad he gave everyone permission to "rock on." Otherwise they might have felt hamstrung in their celebrations.


"I'm coming, just have to find Jen!" Jen was the name of Mark's favorite bong, and also coincidentally, the name of his girlfriend back home. If he had to give up one, I'd put my money on the girlfriend.


Mark grabbed Jen and stuffed her in his backpack, along with several shot-sized bottles of Absolut, a portable CD player, and a frozen pizza. I wasn't sure what he planned to do with the frozen pizza, but I hoped that there were no publicly available microwaves on the grounds of PotFest, which seemed to be about as dangerous an idea as free lube at a gay pride parade.


With Mark, Shawn, et al temporarily out of my hair, I breathed a sigh of relief, and maliciously hoped that the police would feel decidedly ungenerous this year and throw them all in jail for flagrantly violating federal law. Though that could result in Mark being expelled from school, and judging by my luck this year, replaced in the dorm room by someone even more distasteful (hard to imagine) and not nearly as attractive (much easier to imagine). So I settled for one evening of quiet, bookended by days of disquietude.


Given that I had sent almost all of my personal effects home, there wasn't much I could do with my free time. Ordinarily I might have used this time to hold a semi-annual stuffed Miss Piggy pageant, and top it off with repeated viewings of my Muppets Take Manhattan VHS, but since I lacked both Piggy and tape, that option was out. In fact, there was almost nothing in the room to play with except myself, and I had been feeling curiously un-masturbatory over the previous few weeks, which was particularly strange considering I was sleeping four feet from a perpetually semi-naked teenage boy.


Though "sleeping" was an overstatement. I spent most nights tossing and turning, vainly hoping that when I woke up, I would be safely back at home on Long Island, or as safe as I could be living in a house with a woman who had the mood swings of an alcoholic without the hangovers. Even in my desperation, I realized that there was something profoundly unhealthy about wanting to return to a home where any blunt object could be suddenly transformed into a weapon, but at least I could be myself there. My mother had long ago given up wanting me to be something I'm not. Mark had yet to learn that same lesson, and this time, I didn't have the energy to teach him. Being invisible is easier than being different.


But perhaps with Mark and the cannabis crew gone for the evening, I might be able to rediscover my love for unconscious mental states, and relegate the previous two weeks to some dark corner of my brain where I stuffed other unhappy events in my life, like the time I dressed up as Pugsly for Halloween in elementary school. Being a bit pugsly at the time myself, my choice of costume wasn't conducive to avoiding repeated eggings by the nasty Slevack brothers who lived across the street. They had their comeuppance, though, when their father was arrested for showing some teenage girls his Pugsly during a high school track meet.


I curled up in bed with my Cape Cod snow globe, which at least gave me something to clutch as I fell asleep. I always sleep better when my hands are grabbing something, usually body parts or stuffed animals, but anything will do in a pinch. I shook the globe and watched the fake snow fall on the kids playing in the water. It was curious that their parents would allow them to frolic in the water when it was snowing outside. My mother wouldn't let me swim after Labor Day, no matter what the temperature. She said there was always a chill in the air after Labor Day. I wondered what meteorological phenomenon caused this sudden and imperceivable drop in temperature, though I suspect even the world's greatest climatologists would be hard-pressed to come up with an answer. Meteorologists have no way of measuring maternal paranoia.


But even if the kids in the snow globe were twenty minutes from pneumonia, they looked happy. I wished I could trade places with them; they seemed to be of hearty stock, they'd do just fine in the real world. I, on the other hand, was as vulnerable as a piece of colored plastic. They belonged outside the bubble, and I belonged inside of it.


My eyes began closing, as I drifted into a world of snowy July days and two-dimensional lives, when there was a knock on my door. I figured it was a straggler from PotFest who had missed the PotBus, so I ignored the knock, because whoever was on the other side of that door didn't want to talk to me, and I didn't want to talk to them.


The knocking continued; potheads aren't usually this persistent, but I chalked it up to desperation. I was about to shove a map to the Common under the door, and perhaps the joint I had been saving for a rainy day, when my visitor spoke.


"Jonah? Are you home?" Damn. It wasn't a pothead jonesing for a doobie (I didn't smoke it, but after a few weeks living with potheads I had the lingo down cold). I threw on a t-shirt and opened the door.

Stacy stood in the hall holding a Tower Records bag. For the first time in recent history, Greg wasn't with her, which meant that either he had found sex or he was currently looking for it.


"Stacy, what are you doing here?"


"I brought the new Streisand CD," she said, barreling past me into the room, though I didn't stand in her way. Her breasts could have taken most men in a throw-down. Years later when she had them surgically reduced, I worried that her upper body strength would decrease proportional to their size, like a female Samson, but I suppose that risk was worth the benefit of being able to enter a room simultaneously with your chest.

"We're listening to it, now!" she unilaterally declared, searching for my nonexistent CD player, which I had also sent home with my father, since I had no music that I would feel comfortable playing in front of potheads.

"You know, I haven't been in your room since we got to college?" There was a reason for that, Ms. Clueless McBoobster. "Where are all the Miss Piggys??? Your room is so boring!"

Good. Mission accomplished.

Stacy found Mark's stereo and inserted the CD. I was surprised his stereo didn't automatically vomit the CD back out.

"Stacy, that's not mine," I objected. I could only imagine Mark's reaction if he found his stereo violated by easy listening. Although I couldn't picture him getting angry, an emotion that requires more energy than it takes to roll a joint, which was more than I ever saw him expend.

"So? My roommate and I share stuff all the time," she replied. I didn't doubt that. In fact, I didn't doubt that everyone else had a more functional relationship with their roommate than I had with mine. Just as I didn't doubt that others had more functional relationships with their parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, acquaintances, pediatricians, dentists, and goldfish.

But since the whole floor was out for the evening, I decided to allow this flagrant violation of my roommate's privacy, even though I suspected that when I was out of the room Mark never hesitated to violate mine. There was a strawberry-flavored condom wrapper lodged between the wall and my bed to prove it. That Jen was one lucky lady.

"So how's it been going?" Stacy asked, violently shaking the snow globe and watching the neglected kids become underaged Polar Bears, as Barbra's smooth silky voice filled the room.

"Ok." I hoped she wouldn't break the globe. I didn't know whether I could get glitter out of the industrial carpeting.

"Just ok?" Stacy began flipping through a Penthouse magazine. Great. Even straight large-chested women were better men than me. "You should come out with me and Greg sometime."

That was unlikely. Greg was surely not the first homosexual I had ever met, but he was the first uncloseted one. Not that he had much of a choice; there are gay men who are effeminate by nature, and there are those who are effeminate by association -- Greg was clearly the former. Which made him a direct threat to my sexual repression.

"Maybe," I answered, noncommittally. What if Greg tried to hit on me? I wasn't physically attracted to him, but maybe he knew some gay voodoo that could get me to undress involuntarily. Isn't that what homosexuals do? Seduce the unwilling? Like sexual vampires? It wasn't a risk I was willing to take. In fact, just allowing Stacy to come into my room and put Barbra Streisand on my roommate's stereo was an extreme risk. If anyone should come in I considered throwing Stacy down on the bed and pretending we were making out to the soft intonations of Send In The Clowns. The thought was only slightly more nauseating than Greg's lisp.

Just as Barbra was achieving inhuman vocal heights, the door opened. It was Mark and Shawn. I didn't have time to turn off the stereo. I didn't even have time to grab Stacy's breasts, and they were always within arm's length. This was it -- the final nail on my social coffin. I prepared myself for the barrage of crude remarks, which I assumed would have something to do with things stuffed up my ass, per usual.

But instead of commenting on my musical tastes or my anal flexibility, Mark staggered over to the bed, propped up by Shawn on one side and another, nondescript pothead friend on the other. Shawn deposited Mark on the bed.

"Hi, I'm Stacy," Stacy said, registering appropriate social cues as always. Mark moaned softly from his bed, while tracing the glow-in-the-dark stars he had pasted to the ceiling in the shape of Jen's name with his finger. Without a word, Shawn plus one exited the room, leaving the four of us -- Stacy, Mark, Barbra, and myself -- alone once again.

Mark closed his eyes, seemingly finding solace in Babs's search for people who need people, while Stacy and I watched him twitch painfully in place, like a muscular but very ill lab rat. The smells of marijuana, alcohol, and pepperoni pizza competed on his body for more nauseating odor (apparently he had either found a microwave, or had eaten the pizza frozen; neither scenario appeared unlikely). He didn't seem aware of his surroundings, much less the easy listening coming out of his stereo.

"Do you think we should do something?" Stacy asked.

"Like what?" I had no experience with drug-induced physical trauma, and I avoided all medical dramas on television where such things might be learned. I couldn't watch a medical show without convincing myself I had every disease on that episode. One time after a particularly distressing episode of ER, I came down with Ebola, Tourette's, and a nasty urinary tract infection all at once.

"I don't know, call someone," she replied, standing over his pseudo-corpse.

"He could get in trouble." The school had a strict no-tolerance policy for marijuana smoking, though apparently not for hiring potheads as resident assistants. I had a friend who was already kicked out of the dorm for smoking pot; she was now living off-campus, with three coke addicts and a budding prostitute. Obviously the school's policy was benefiting everyone, including local drug dealers.

Suddenly, Mark jerked up, turned over, and vomited all over the bed.

The next few moments were a blur. Mark ran out of the room, vomiting as he went. Stacy followed him. I also ran out of the room, but being a sympathetic puker, I ran the other way, gagging as I went. If I ever do have children, I'm going to have their gag reflex removed, or else install a permanent forward peristalsis machine in their digestive tracts to prevent this such occasion.

I ran into the stairwell and down four flights before the gagging stopped, at which point I realized that I had left Stacy alone to deal with my roommate's mess. Feeling slightly guilty, I slowly made my way back upstairs, only temporarily pausing at every landing to slightly gag at the memory of seeing Mark's dinner in reverse. When I got back to my floor, the lingering pizza-tinged air filled my nostrils and almost sent me running back down. But I powered forward, worried that I had left Stacy with more than she could handle, as it was clearly more than I could handle myself.

I followed the trail of half-digested junk food into the bathroom, where I found Mark on all fours, shaking and sweating, with his head falling into the toilet bowl. Stacy stood over him, patting his head with a wet paper towel and urging him not to pass out. Every minute or so he would violently convulse, and Stacy would hold his head to prevent it from knocking against the walls of the stall. The sound of his groans were interrupted only by the occasional warble from the stereo, which in our haste we had left playing before we left the room. At this moment, at least, Mark was indeed a person who needed people. And he was fortunate that one of those people was Stacy, who obviously had some dormant maternal instincts that were just waiting for this sort of opportunity to come out. My instincts were more paternal, which is to say, anxiously detached. I wanted to help, but didn't know how to, so I stood five feet away where I wouldn't get in the way. I wasn't going to save a life, but I wasn't going to take one either.

"Jonah, get me a towel," Stacy ordered. I immediately complied, as any obedient father would. When I came back, Mark had stopped convulsing, and was now quietly crying while Stacy rubbed his shoulders and made soothing noises that I doubted my mother even made when I was an infant. I watched his once masculine body crumple into a pile of weak flesh without even the force of will to wipe the vomit from his cheeks. Just a few hours ago I had envied and lusted after him, so much so that I had transformed myself over the previous two weeks into a repressed mute. Now the envy and lust were gone, and in their place were pity, compassion, and slight disgust.

I sat on the floor while Stacy wiped the sweat off of Mark's body. Every once in a while someone would come into the bathroom, notice the mess, and quickly leave, usually without saying anything. Mark was quiet for a while, and I wondered whether he had fallen asleep.

"I want to take a shower," Mark finally said, to no one in particular, as he staggered to his feet.

"Ok," Stacy replied, helping him up. "You're going to have to watch him, make sure he doesn't pass out in the shower."

"But, but," I stammered. Watch him shower? It felt like a violation of his privacy, like I was taking advantage of him at his most vulnerable.

"But what?" Stacy asked. "Would you rather clean up the bedroom?"

Faced with a choice between watching Mark shower and removing the pizza vomit from his bed sheets, I agreed. Mark began undressing, but it was all curiously mechanical. There was nothing sexual about it, nothing seductive. In my mind, he was still lying prostrate on the ground, quietly begging for help from friends who had abandoned him when he needed them most, only to be replaced by a roommate whose name he didn't know, and his roommate's fag hag, who he'd never met before tonight and probably wouldn't have liked if he had.

As Mark dried off, I remembered my first day in the dorm, only two weeks before. Had it really only been that long? Had it really only been two weeks since I waved goodbye to my mother through a thin layer of green construction paper, since my father had left me with a clammy handshake and forty bucks, since Jonah the rebellious sock roller had been replaced by Jonah the genuflecting shadow puppet? Maybe I wasn't who I was supposed to be, or who everyone wanted me to be, if there was even any space between the two. I certainly hadn't gotten any closer to that person over the past two weeks, though I had surely gotten further from who I was. And all because of a lacrosse stick, a hard stomach, and a field of daffodils. But underneath those washboard abs there was just a scared little boy who couldn't wipe the vomit off of his own face. That certainly wasn't worth bowing to. Not after years of bowing to no one, except the occasional felt farm animal who demanded nothing less.

The next day, Mark woke up early and, without saying a word to me -- not a thank you, not an apology, not even a recognizable grunt -- went straight to the nearest tattoo parlor, which, due to Massachusetts' arcane laws, was in Rhode Island. He wanted to commemorate his near-death experience with the Chinese character for "harmony." While he was gone, I called my father and asked him to bring up all the stuff I had sent home with him.

"You want me to cart a bunch of stuffed animals two hundred miles back up to Boston on my one day off?" he asked, increduously.

"Yes, please," I replied, gauging whether this was an appropriate occasion to whip out the divorced father guilt card. Overplay the card and it loses its potency; underplay it and it loses its relevancy. "Those stuffed animals are my best friends, you know, since the divorce."

The following week, my father arrived with my Muppets VHS collection, Barbra Streisand CDs, and of course, stuffed Miss Piggys in tow. I cleared a spot for one particular Miss Piggy just above our mini-fridge, where she could preside over the entire room with a ham-iron fist. I realized this might mean a battle with Mark, but I didn't mind. You don't want to get Miss Piggy angry. She doesn't care if you have washboard abs. She'll kick your ass just the same.


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Well, that's it. I hope you all enjoyed it, and if you didn't, well, you get what you pay for.