The Rules of Attraction

CLAY People are afraid to walk across campus after midnight. Someone on acid whispers this to me, in my ear, one Sunday dawn after I have been up on crystal meth most of the week, crying, and I know it is true. This person is in my computer class (which is now my major) and I see him in the weight room and sometimes I see him at the municipal pool on Main Street, in town. A place I spend what some people think is an inordinate amount of time. (They also have a good tanning salon next door.) I keep my Walkman on a lot this term, listening to groups that have broken up: The Eagles, The Doors, The Go-Go’s, The Plimsouls, because I do not want to hear about the mutilated girl they found cut up in North Ashton (literally torn in half) by something the townspeople call The Ashton Ripper, or about the girl in Swan House who slit her throat in that house’s downstairs bathtub and who bled to death on the night of The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or hear the voices of the town’s incest victims wandering dumbly through the Price Chopper, a place I like to hang out in, a place that reminds me of California, a place that reminds me of the frozen food section of Gelson’s, a place that reminds me of home.

I go to an Elvis Costello concert in New York but get lost on the way back to Camden. I cannot get cable to hook up MTV in my dorm room so I buy a VCR and get videos in a cheap video rental store in town. I buy a Porsche, second-hand, in New York before the term starts so I have a car to do these things. People are also afraid to eat sushi in New Hampshire.

Other things: Someone writes Sensory Deprivation Tank on the door that leads to The Pub. Rip actually calls me from L.A. a couple of times. Someone writes his name in red magic marker on my door. I am unsure if it’s really him since in a tape Blair sent me she was positive that he had been murdered. She also told me that she had seen Jim Morrison at the Häagen Dazs in Westwood. I see this girl, Vanden, for a while, who paints my futon frame black and who stopped seeing me because she said she saw “a spider the size of Norman Mailer” in my bathroom. I didn’t ask her who Norman Mailer was, and I didn’t ask her to come back. Then I hang out with this Brazilian guy but mainly just to acquire Ecstasy. Then it was this Dance major from Connecticut who thought she was a witch. We held a séance around a beer keg and tried to summon the spirit of a Senior who had transferred to Bard. Then the Ouija board was pulled out and we asked it if we could find any cocaine. It answered OWTQ. We spent an hour figuring out what it meant. She left me for a Lit major named Justin. I sleep with some rich boys, with some richer girls, a couple from Northern California, a French teacher, a girl from Vassar who knows one of my sisters, some girl who wouldn’t stop drinking Nyquil …

And I cannot keep my shade open because I have heard the story of why Indians could not settle on the land the campus was built on because the four winds met there on Commons lawn, and some of the Indians went totally insane and had to be killed, their bodies offered to the gods and then buried on Commons. And some say on warm fall nights after midnight, they rise, their faces twisted, bloody, peering in windows, scowling, looking for new offerings, their tomahawks poised.

And in a bathroom, written above the toilet, someone has written “Ronald McGlinn has a small penis and no testicles” over and over. Someone from L.A. sent me a videotape, unmarked, and I am afraid to play it but probably will. I have lost my I.D. three times this term. I tell the person I see in psychological counseling that I feel the apocalypse is near. She asks me how my flute tutorial is progressing. I do not tell her I dropped it and started taking an advanced video course instead.

Someone asks me: “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “What is going on?”

Sensory Deprivation Tank.

Rest in Peace.

People are afraid to merge on campus after midnight.

Indians in a video, flashing on, off, on.

Ronald McGlinn has a small penis …

And no testicles. Dude. “What’s going on?”

“… I’d be safe and warm if I was back in L.A….”

I miss the beach.