Rush: 2112 (1976)

That wasn’t quite the end of our dalliance with the Necromancer, however.  We made one more journey.  Four of us set out, but only three came back.

It was a Sunday night in December, maybe two weeks after the cliffhanger in not-Venice.  Neck had been talking nonstop about organizing another session – I recognized the ego-adrenaline from the days of my own now-abated mastering of dungeons – but we’d managed to put him off with one excuse or another.  Not that hard to do, since half the party was out of town.

So this evening Art, Vito, and I were in the dorm’s common room, watching a football game – a team I grew up liking but whose name I can’t now bring myself to say because, dawg, it’s racist.  Most of the seats in the room are occupied by jocks, of which this dorm had more than its share;  Art, Vito, and I were on a set of couches slightly off in the corner, since Vito and, to a greater extent, I had a proud (fear-inflected) disdain for jocks.  Art was always at perfect ease with them;  he was good at sports, too.   

Anyway, we were our own little group there, trying to play it cool. Then Neck thunders in.  He walks up (in black jeans and a Mötorhead t-shirt), stands right between us and the TV, and shouts, “ROAD TRIP.”  No exclamation point.

The jocks laugh.  At us.  We're red-faced, but we're also freshmen – road trip. 

In five minutes we’re all piled into Neck’s car:  an old turquoise-blue Firebird with the silver firebird on the hood.  A surprisingly muscley car for a Dungeon Master (I thought that even at the time):  maybe Neck was really for real (was what I thought the first time I saw it)(now I thought nothing).

Five minutes after that we’re all fueled up with 7-11 junk food for the late-night drive.  And then we’re on the highway.  It’s only then that Neck tells us where we’re going.  “THE DISTRICT.”  And he doesn’t seem all that happy about it.  Not that we can hear much nuance in his voice over the Anthrax on the tape deck.

LOSC was within reasonable road trip distance of Washington, which was never called that by anybody who lived close enough to know better:  always DC or the District.  Vito was in the front seat;  Art and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows.  Sure, it was close enough, but what was there to do at midnight on a Sunday in DC?  In December?  For nerds?  Case the Smithsonian?

Then:  “Motherfucking Sandy,” muttered Neck.  That we heard.

Ah-hah.  We knew that Sandy had dumped Neck:  we’d all seen it happen.  It had been epic:  a silence louder than bombs (not that any of us would admit to listening to the Smiths – sadly, not yet).  And we knew that Neck still brooded over it, there in his lair at the end of the hall. 

“Is that it?  Are you headed to see Sandy?”  I asked, because I also knew that Sandy lived in DC.  Her parents had a condo in Georgetown.  I mentioned this to the others. 

“Cool, dude,” said Art.  “Is she having a party or something?”

“Motherfucking Sandy,” was all Neck said.  Quiet-like.

“I don’t think it’s a party, boys,” said I, in my best wary-gunfighter voice.

“Then what the fuck do you need us for, dude?” asked Vito.  Who had a fairly short fuse for bullshit.  “A road trip’s one thing, but dude.”

“Motherfucking Sandy,” repeated Neck.

We all fell silent.  An hour passed.  Anthrax turned into Ratt.  (Ratt?  Were they still together?)  We were doing at least seventy on a dark country highway, but hey, it was Neck’s license, not ours.  Still it was good to hit the Beltway, some lights, and enough traffic that the Necromancer had to slow down.

Only then did he speak again.  “MOTHERFUCKING SANDY,” was what he said.

We’d been, as it were, lulled into complacency:  this shook us up.  “WHAT THE FUCK, DUDE?” commented Vito.

“She won’t take my calls.  The bitch.  A year we were together, and now she won’t take my fucking calls.”

“But dude,” observed Art, “you boinked someone else.”

(I swallowed hard at this.  As I say, my interlude with Sandy was barely sandy at all, but we’d been in the neighborhood of the beach, at least, and I sure didn’t want Neck to know it.)

“So fucking what?” theorized Neck.  “So does she – all the time.  We've got an arrangement.  I do it, and she does it, and it’s always been fine before.  That’s the only way we can make it work, this long distance relationship thing.  We agreed on that at the outset – while we’re apart, we can do what we want, as long as we come back to each other.”

The three of us pondered this.  Because it didn’t make any fucking sense.  I mean, let’s count the ways – in fact, Art, Vito, and I did count the ways, later that morning, after we’d parted from Neck and could speak freely.  And this is more or less what we said.  First of all – why would anyone want to cheat on Sandy?  She was fine (this was my contribution).  Second of all – who would really believe a relationship like that could work?  (This was Vito’s contribution – I wasn’t so sure - I always had a deeper hippie-nostalgic streak than the other two.)  Third of all – dude, you said yourself that you can do what you want while you’re apart, but Sandy was on the same campus with you that weekend, and still you had to dip your wick in other tallow.  What did you expect?  (This was Art’s contribution.)  And, finally (all together now) – are you trying to tell us, Neck, that you get laid regularly?

All that was said later.  At the moment, what we did was change the subject a little. 

“Why are we going to the District then, and not Collegeville?”  Art.

“I tried that – I drove up there on Tuesday.  And Wednesday.  And Thursday.  But she wouldn’t buzz me into the dorm, and nobody else would let me in.  You have to have a key.  (Motherfucking Sandy.)”

“So you’re going to her parents’ house?  What makes you think she’ll be there?”  Me.

No answer.

By this time we had exited the Beltway and were in the city.  Neck obviously knew the DC streets better than us – none of us had cars – but maybe not as well as he thought, because we were soon cruising past the Mall.  Nowhere near Georgetown.  "Hey, there’s the Air and Space Museum – man, I haven’t been there since I was a kid.  We should go – road trip.”

Vito.

“What are you going to do when you see her?”  Me.

Silence.

Neck pulled the car over.  He got out.  “Gotta piss,” he was mumbling.  Come to think of it, so did I, and evidently so did Art and Vito.  Super Big Gulps of Dr. Pepper all around.

We were behind the Mall, over behind the Jefferson Memorial, right by the Potomac.  There was snow on the ground – it was colder here than back at school.  Neck tromped off over the grass toward the river.  We followed until we came to a ledge.  There was the Potomac, flowing silently and blackly by beneath us.  A few lights across the way;  all the weight of history and civics behind us.  A clear black sky above, studded with stars.  Silence all around.  No cops to be seen.  And soon four shafts of gold arced gently to join their pollution to that flowing through the nation’s capital.  For a moment – the last moment – the four of us were united in defiant guyhood.  Joking, laughing, hooting.

We zipped up.  Neck was first;  by the time the other three of us had turned around he was halfway back to the car.  And then we saw it – all three of us must have noticed it at once.  The pistol sticking out of Neck’s back pocket.

Art was quickest.  He tackled Neck from behind.  Really skillfully, too – flattened him easily, pinned him in the snow.  I got there next and took the pistol out of Neck’s pocket.

But I’d never held a gun before, and having it in my hand kind of paralyzed me – I didn’t know what to do.  I just stood there, as the world went quiet.  Neck must have been cursing, but I didn’t hear him. 

I looked up from the pistol to see Vito looking at me strangely.  I must have looked just as strange at him.  I held the gun out to him.

Vito took it and tossed it into the river.

Art let Nick up.  Nick was furious.  So furious he couldn’t say anything.  He just got in the car and squealed off.  Actually burned rubber.

Art looked at Vito, Vito looked at Art, they both looked at me.  And then we burst out laughing.  More to relieve the tension than anything, I suspect;  certainly there wasn’t anything amusing about it.  But we were all three of us good suburban boys, lives never touched by gun violence, and even now, even having held the thing in my hands, the whole thing still seemed a bit unreal.

There wasn’t anything more we could do, though.  Nobody knew Sandy’s phone number or address.  No way to warn her.  Anyway, without a gun, what could he do?  That it didn’t occur to us to flag down a cop probably means we didn’t think Nick really had it in him;  that, or we just felt guilty about pissing into the Potomac. 

It was before cell phones;  plus, it was a road trip.  So we spent the rest of the darkness wandering around the District, crisscrossing the Mall, looking at monuments.  We climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to commune with Abe – I pointed out what I’d discovered on a school trip years before, the place in the Emancipation Proclamation where the chiselers made an E instead of an F and had to wedge a rock in so it didn't read EUTURE.  We walked past the ‘Nam memorial, thinking about fathers and uncles.  We circled the Washington Monument, and walked past the Capitol.  We did a lot of walking, but it was cold and we had to keep warm.  Discovered whole herds of monuments nobody’s ever noticed.  Ended up sitting beneath the statue of Queen Isabella outside the Organization of American States for an hour, shooting the breeze, arguing politics (just because we liked philosophy better doesn’t mean we were totally uninterested in the polis and its ways). 

Looking back on it, two things strike me about this night.  The first is how scarce and mellow the cops were.  I mean, three kids wandering around downtown DC at night, plainly drunk (although in fact we hadn’t had a drop), and nobody stopped us.  We barely saw a police:  mainly it was just us and the homeless.  From the perspective of today it’s unthinkable;  but it should have been unthinkable at the time, too, because as we wandered away from Iz’s skirts we saw some street crews cordoning off sidewalks, and much later, over coffee in a McDonald’s, we saw a paper and realized why:  Gorbachev was arriving in DC later that day.

The other thing that I realize is that this night was what cemented my friendship with Art and Vito.  It wasn’t the heroics with the gun – I protest that it wasn’t that at all.  It was that aimless wandering through the marble, bronze, and granite gardens of the capital that did it, and everything we talked about.  Precious little of which I can recall today with anything but sentimental vagueness.  But that was it:  that was when we realized, although without the perspective that retrospection brings, with only the urgency of the moment, that it was us three against the world, us three who could change the world, us three for whom the world was made, and could be unmade, and remade.  That night was our unspoken Oath of the Peach Garden.

Rush: Caress Of Steel (1975)

So I was telling you about doors. Mine, my half (if you imagined our door cut in half, mine was the bottom: only the penitent man can enter), was the Yes birdplane. Vito and Art (they were roommates, in a different dorm than mine) kept theirs blank all year long, mostly because they couldn’t agree on what to put on it. And, like I say, the one at the end of my hall had the dreamy screamer from the first King Crimson album on it.

It was the work of a guy named Nick but called the Necromancer. That is, he wanted to be called that, and insisted on it so darkly that we humored him to his face. But behind his back we called him Neck for short, because he was so beefy that he had none.

Neck was into D&D. Now, so was I, or so I thought: I’d spent nearly every weekend in high school immersed in its arcana, and it was what had gotten me through that three-year purgatory. I felt, and still feel, that I owed my sanity at eighteen to Gary Gygax. I had already learned that Vito and Art concurred, both about me (thanks, dudes) and themselves. They, it turned out, had grown up together in Malvinaton, a town in a neighboring state that had been one of the first planned communities, a full suburb, ready to assemble out of the box, prototype for the one I’d grown up in for sure, and for most others in the country, according to the historians. Vito and Art had felt the same quiet desperation in their subdivision that I had in mine, and D&D (Advanced) was their way out, too.

By now it was December of our freshman year. Vito and Art and I had become fast friends, taking most meals together and hanging out at night and on whatever weekends one or the other of us wasn’t back home getting laundry done and lording it over those who hadn’t yet escaped the burbs. I’d been back to my homesubdivision a couple of times already, and each time I’d gotten together with my high school buddies for a night of dungeon-scouring and orc-torturing. Word was Vito and Art had done the same.

So it was only natural that eventually we try to do it at school. What was unnatural – or maybe not – was that it took four months for us to get around to it. Were we too busy studying? I want to insert a loud scoff here – but honesty compels me to admit that we were pretty diligent about our studies – we were nerds: we wanted to learn, and we wanted to get good grades. Were we too busy broadening our horizons? There was some of that going on, too. Were we reluctant to embrace our previous geekiness? There was some of that, too. We never discussed it, but I think there was a tacit agreement that, as much as we’d loved role-playing geekoiserie in high school, maybe it was a childish thing that it was time to leave behind.

But at the same time, of course, we were reluctant to do that: reluctant both to deny something that had been a part of ourselves for so long, and reluctant to let go of the chance to recreate those good times. So when Neck announced at dinner one Thursday night in early December that he was a Dungeon Master looking to organize a campaign, and did we know anybody, we jumped. Sure, said we: us.

Well, said he: I knew that just by looking at you. But we need more. This adventure calls for at least seven companions.

None of us knew anybody else on campus who played. The Necromancer also pleaded innocent of that sort of social tie: he was, he revealed, a fifth-year senior whose entire marauding party had managed to graduate on time, leaving only him behind. Well, everybody but one. He did know one other guy who played: Cutty Sark…

That made four. Vito and Art lived out of state, so their friends back home were out of the question. It was up to me: I called around among my old high school friends and managed to find three who were up for the drive (in the green and black Pinto, natch) down from ESU to Li’l Ol’ State College.

So it was that at about ten o’clock on Friday night a fellowship of hardy adventurers gathered behind the Sign of the Dreamy Screamer to once again make the world safe for imagination.

By ten fifteen, it was clear that things were going to hell.

The party ended up consisting of eight. There were me, Vito, and Art; my buddies Ozzy, Tony, and Geezer from home; Cutty Sark; and the Necromancer’s Girlfriend.

Neck had decorated his end-of-the-hall room for the occasion: black scarves over the bedside lamps, skull-and-crossbones flag over the doorway, red silk over the overhead light, stubby candles on plastic skulls for ambience, supermarket incense sticks for more palpable ambience, a stack of Led Zeppelin tapes for the most palpable ambience. He had a carved wooden screen, about a foot and a half high, set up on the floor, behind which he’d set up his dice, his notes, his graph-paper maps, and everything else he needed to cast his spell.

The rest of us were scattered around the room, on the floor, on chairs, on beds, with our character sheets, our dice, and our cups. Yes, everybody brought something to snack on (there were Doritos, Twinkies, powdered doughnuts, pretzels, and beef jerky), and a plastic cup to drink out of; we’d pooled our cash and let Neck, who was over twenty-one, make a run to the liquor store where’d he’d procured two cases of Milwaukee’s Beast and three two-liters of Coke. Classic.

And Cutty Sark had brought a bottle of rum, just to screw with our heads.

And he shared it. With a smile on his face.

So why did things go to hell?

Not for the reasons I’d expected. I had, truth be told, been apprehensive about introducing Ozzy, Tony, and Geezer to Art and Vito; my old friends and my new, would they mix? Would I be crushed in some sort of temporal paradox, ripped apart by the torque of worlds colliding?

But they hit it off great. In fact, as the weekend progressed, they ended up spending as much time with each other as with me or anybody else, and ever after Vito and Art kept talking about inviting the Power Trio, as they called them, up for another weekend. It never happened, for various reasons, but it could easily have: that part of the dungeon-spelunking went fine.

They got along well, then, but it was immediately apparent that every single person there had a different philosophy of the game, as it were. It went down something a little bit like this:

Neck: So you’ve all arrived at the Sanctuary Bar in Venissimo –

Art: Is that like Venice?

Neck: It’s not Venice.

Tony: But you already said it has, like, canals and a doge and shit.

Neck: It’s not Venice.

Art: But come on, dude, Venissimo? Score, dude! [Exchanges high five with Tony.]

Neck: Your character stumbles over a barstool and loses three hit points.

Art: What the –

Ozzy: Come on, guys, let him talk. I want to find out what the quest is.

Neck: I never said it was a quest.

Ozzy: Whatever, man. So anyway, we’re in this bar in Not-Venice?

Vito [thoughtfully]: Why are we all there? What’s our background? What are we looking for?

Neck: You’ve all answered a classified ad calling for adventurers without scruples.

Neck’s Girl: My character has scruples. She’s lawful neutral.

Cutty: Scruples, Sandy? You?

NG: Shut up, perv. You don’t even know what scruples are.

Tony: A classified ad? Dude, there weren’t any newspapers in medieval Venice.

Neck: Your character drops his beer mug and it shatters and cuts his hand and he loses three hit points.

Art: Didn’t you hear him, dude? It’s Not-Venice. Hey, pass me another Beast.

Cutty: Come on, Sandy? Have you forgotten Ocean City last spring break?

NG: Shut up, I said. I’m warning you. I’m lawful, but I’m not good. I can kill you as long as I do it by the rules, you know. I can kill you five different ways before you even notice.

Me: What does the bar look like? I mean, paint us the word picture. I want to feel like I’m there, man.

Neck: The land the bar is on suddenly settles three feet into the sea, and you’re all so startled that you hit your heads and lose three hit points. Shut the fuck up or you’ll drown. I mean it.

This went on all weekend. We finally made it out of Not-Venice sometime around four-thirty in the morning, and while our characters were sailing across the Not-Mediterranean for Not-the-Nile-Delta, we all slept for a few hours, to pick it all up again over breakfast the next morning (mostly doughnuts and Dr. Pepper). Most of Saturday we were still on board ship, fighting krakens and cyclones and sirens and multidimensional portals leading to the Ninth Demon Realm of Karn Evil. A very fun place.

Neck had promised that the dungeon proper – the voyage was just a prologue – would involve a pyramid with genies and giant snakes and lots of undead. But we never got there. By the time things disintegrated late Saturday afternoon, we’d just made port and were trying to scrounge up some native guides to take us to the pyramid. It was clear this was going to be Neck’s favorite part – his eyes were glowing as he started introducing the various eccentric ‘n’ ornery non-player characters he was going to voice. That, Cutty moved, meant it was time for a break. We broke, and never managed to put it together again.

As I say, as soon as the arguing broke out I had the feeling it was all going to hell, there in the court of the crimson necromancer. Mind you, the arguing was not at all out of the ordinary for a D&D session. Bullshitting and calling bullshit was what occupied seventy-five percent of every game night, in my experience, so I wasn’t at all surprised when this ESU/LOSC AD&D summit started heading in that direction. If anything I was relieved to see that Neck was having the same problem I’d had as DM.

But here’s the thing: somehow, suddenly it all seemed to have gone south for me. I wasn’t enjoying the arguing as much as I’d used to. I wasn’t thriving on it. In fact, it was annoying me. I realized that what I wanted out of the game (an immersive experience in a romantic and maybe heroic fantasy world) wasn’t what everybody else wanted out of it. I didn’t know what they wanted out of it; different things for each, probably. Thrills? Puzzles? An excuse to party? Vicarious combat? A power trip? The joy of each other’s company?

I dunno.

So, when Cutty moved it was time for a break: He and Neck headed back to the liquor store in Cutty’s old Volvo. Vito, Ozzy, and Geezer, before I even realized it, had drifted into the dorm room next door where a couple of lacrosse players were watching a porno video. Art was asleep on the beanbag chair in the corner by a skull candle. Tony was listening to Houses Of The Holy and didn’t want to be bothered. And Sandy was nowhere to be seen; she must be with Cutty and Neck, although I hadn’t seen her leave with them.

I decided to go for a walk to sort out my head. LOSC is on the banks of a wide, lazy river, and that’s where I headed. It was a bright sunny day, warm for December, and it seemed like the place to be: alone by the deserted docks where all the locals parked their sailboats.

That’s where I found Sandy.

I’d never met her before this weekend, I should note. I knew the Necromancer had a girlfriend, because he made sure we knew, but she went to ESU, so none of us had met her; I’d assumed she was a myth, frankly, and so I’d been real surprised to see her in the flesh that Friday night. She was tall and intelligent-looking, but it didn’t hit you at first because she dressed like a burnout. Long unkempt blonde hair, worn-out Aerosmith t-shirt, faded blue jeans. Not quite the body to pull off the rocker-chick look, and her subdued manner showed she knew it. Didn’t care. Drank a little too much, at least it seemed to me, but what did I know? Two Beasts and I was flying.

She intimidated me, I’ll admit it. But she intrigued me, too. A girl into D&D?

So I asked her how she’d gotten into it.

“I do SCA. You know it?”

“Yeah. I’ve always been curious about it. It seems like the next logical step after D&D and RenFests.”

“Yeah, I’ve done the Renaissance Festival every year since I was eight. I’m a Medieval Studies major. Chaucer and all. I imagine you started with Tolkien, moved into D&D, and then discovered RenFests?”

“Pretty much. I went to my first one last year.”

“What did you think?”

“It was heaven.”

“Is that” – she gestured back toward the dorm – “heaven, too?”

“I don’t know about that,” I allowed. “I don’t know.” I changed the subject. “So you went the other direction – got into D&D through Creative Anachronism?”

“Sort of. I met Nick at SCA, and he’s into RPGs big time. That’s how I started. I’ve only played for about a year. That’s how long Nick and I’ve been going out.”

“I see. And before that was Cutty Sark?”

She shot me a warning look. I bowed under her gaze, slightly. After a moment, she decided it was safe to answer.

“I went to high school with Cutty; he’s a year ahead of me. We were together for four years, plus the first four years of college. Kept it up long distance, you know, with him here and me in Collegeville. I met Nick right after I broke up with Cutty.”

“I don’t know Cutty real well, but he doesn’t seem like your type. I don’t know whose type he seems like – I mean, I never would have pegged him for a gamer in the first place.”

“He just does it as an excuse to party. He only took it up this year, too. He’s a sixth-year senior, you know? All his other friends graduated, and Cutty took it up to have something to do with Nick, you know, while they’re drinking. I don’t think he cares about the game much one way or another; I mean, he was never interested in fantasy or the middle ages or anything like that when we were together. I know for a fact he’s never read Tolkien, much less Chaucer.”

“Is that why you broke up with him – Nick was more your type?”

“It wasn’t that simple, kid. Not that simple at all. And I’m not sure Nick’s my type, either. I may break up with him."

I didn’t know what to say to that. We stared in silence at the late-afternoon sun making diamonds on the ripples in the river.

“You know he’s the second Cutty Sark? Like, he didn’t paint that door. Nobody knows who did, but when Cutty first got here as a freshman, there was a guy living in that room named Brian something-or-other. Everyone called him Cutty Sark because he lived there, and because he lived up to it. Always had a bottle of something in his hand.”

“Sounds like Cutty.”

“It does, too, but Brian was worse. I mean, he was always drinking. He’d walk into a room and you could smell, not the alcohol on his breath, but the alcohol seeping from his pores. It’s a totally different smell, you know. Like pickles. But he was a fun guy – the life of the party, just like Cutty. That’s why Cutty looked up to him so much, as a freshman. Everybody liked to have Brian at their party, because Brian could outdrink everybody, and would do all kinds of crazy shit when he was drunk.

“I’ll tell you about one. This isn’t even one of the wild ones, just a minor incident. He was doing stuff like this all the time. So listen: security at your cafeteria’s pretty lax, right? People sneak stuff out of there all the time? Brian used to keep a salt and pepper shaker from the cafeteria in his dorm room, to use in mixing drinks or on popcorn or whatever. These were the sealed disposable plastic shakers, you know? Like when it’s empty they just throw it away and put out a new one? So one night at a party in Brian’s room somebody sees these shakers and they get them out and start playing with them. And somehow Brian gets the idea of testing how strong the plastic is. So he puts the tip of his index finger on the top of the salt shaker and presses. Well, it turns out it’s not so strong, or maybe he is, but the top breaks, and his finger goes right down through the top of the salt shaker into the salt. But the top doesn’t break off, it kind of shatters in the middle and the plastic shards bend down into the salt with his finger. And they trap his finger in there, like with their pressure. He tries to pull his finger out. The shards cut into his finger, like deep. So he’s sitting there with his finger immersed in salt, trapped in the salt shaker, and the plastic shards cutting into his finger. He’s bleeding all over the salt, and the salt is getting all into his cuts, and he can’t get his finger out. Can you imagine how much that must have hurt?”

“Holy shit,” I remarked, laughing.

“He didn’t feel a thing.”

I kept laughing, but she didn’t crack a smile. “How did he get it out?”

“I don’t know. That’s not part of the story.”

I thought about that for a while. “So what happened to Brian?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t graduate. Academic suspension a couple of years ago. Nobody’s heard from him since. His parents are rich, so no biggie.”

“So he passed the torch to Cutty? He’s Keeper of the Flame, and all that?”

“Yeah.”

“And that’s why you broke up with Cutty?”

She fixed me with a forbidding gaze. “Not exactly,” she said. And that was all she’d say.

We never went back to the Necromancer’s room that weekend. I took her to my room, and she…well, let’s say she taught me a little about Creative Anachronism. We’ll have to draw a discreet veil over the rest of the evening – this isn’t that kind of blog – but I’ll say that we didn’t get into the real Wife of Bath stuff. But I did learn the difference between Venice and Not-Venice that night. And wherever Sandy is, I wish her well: I never heard from her after that weekend.

The whole time, in the back of my mind, I was feeling a little guilty over abandoning my friends, but when we all straggled into the cafeteria for breakfast (me and Sandy separately, so as not to give it away), it turned out that nobody else had gone back to Neck’s room either. First of all, Neck and Cutty had never returned from their beer run – nobody saw them until Sunday evening, after my homesubdivisionies had left. They’d stopped off at an off-campus house party, where they both got laid, which was, there and then, It as far as Nick and Sandy were concerned: she dumped him on the spot. Vito, Ozzy, and Geezer, meanwhile, crawled between different dorm-room parties all night. Tony listened to Led Zeppelin until he fell asleep, and Art woke up at about three in the morning to find the place all but deserted. Puzzled, he went back to his room.

Next time I saw the Necromancer, this is what he said: “Awesome way to start the Quest for the Mummy’s Jewels. Can’t wait until the next session.” But there never was another session. In fact, I never played D&D again.

Rush: Fly By Night (1975)

The first thing I did when I got to college was join the Philosophy Club.

When I’d first visited campus in the spring of my senior year in high school, I had been fascinated by the student-activities bulletin boards outside in the quads, those hedgehogs of stickpins and staples, those rainbows of colored hand-made or cheaply-printed flyers, those cornucopias of stuff to do and things to be. And one of those flyers (pink with sober typewriting and a picture that I couldn’t identify because it had been photocopied fifty times from a newspaper) was for the Philosophy Club.

I wanted to join the Philosophy Club as both a thing to do and a thing to be. The Thing to Be was a Seeker (“I asked Bobby Dylan / I asked the Beatles / I asked Timothy Leary / But he couldn’t help me either,” sang the Who), an eighteen-year-old Searcher for Truth. As a new high school grad I hadn’t yet discovered Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg, but I had read my share of Kurt Vonnegut, and watched the Woodstock movie on PBS.

So, yes, it was a pose, but in my defense that Thing to Be was counterbalanced by the Thing to Do, which was to find truth. I was, at this point, already in an advanced stage of metaphysical confusion, having rejected the Faith of my Fathers for My Own Code, but having grown up just enough to begin suspecting that My Own Code was code for Do What Thou Wilt, which wasn’t quite what I was after. Anyway, CSN/Y sang, “I don’t know who I am / But life is for learning,” and what better place to learn, I thought, than Queen Anne’s Hall Room 301, and what better time than 4:30 Thursday afternoon?

So I arrive, fresh-faced freshman wanting to fellowship with fellow seekers after truth, fellow philosophers (“you may call my love Sophia / I call my love philosophy,” sang Van Morrison). There are about a dozen people there. Some of them clearly know what’s going on (must be upperclassmen) and some of them are sitting quietly (must be other freshmen). I meekly find a seat and open my notebook.

The meeting starts. An upperclass girl stands up at the front, introduces herself as Ruth Loess – she’s only about five feet tall, thin and boxy, long shoe-polish black hair, black-framed glasses (unusual, as this was a good ten years before the Berkeley Look), black clothes – and says that since our faculty adviser Professor Carnation couldn’t be there today she’d be running the meeting. She welcomes the new members, and without further ado (such as asking who we were), gets down to Philosophy Club business.

Which was: organizing a trip to an upcoming anti-U.S.-Central-American-policy rally in D.C.

This was the height of Iran-Contra; certainly I had heard of the Contras, the death squads, the CIA, Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, El Salvador, Somoza, Noriega; I was a fairly well-informed high school kid, and as a good aspiring hippie I espoused leftist positions, and was lucky enough to have parents I could argue with about them. Notwithstanding all of which, I was kind of dismayed to find that this was at the top of the Philosophy Club’s agenda, for a couple of reasons.

First, because in my question-everything mood, I was actually starting to doubt my political convictions. It was becoming plain to me that my high-school radicalism was a romantic pose. Not that I was becoming a Reaganaut, but I was becoming less sure of my own righteousness. I felt like for me, personally, it was time to step back and reexamine, not to march.

Second, and following from that, was this philosophy? I mean, Ruth Loess didn’t ask us what we thought about U.S. Central American policy. She didn’t invite us to analyze that policy’s philosophical underpinnings; nor did she offer any such analysis herself. She didn’t propose we think of U.S. Central American policy as a case study for questions of personal freedom and ethical citizenship. She didn’t even argue that we should participate in the rally. She just assumed that we would, that this was what the Philosophy Club was there for.

Okay, I’ll bite. “Excuse me, when are we going to discuss the philosophy?”

Ruth Loess gave me a blank look. Her veep, Forrest Blackwater, started passing out flyers for the rally. I walked out.

Cut to Friday afternoon, 5:45. I’m sitting in my dorm room, alone, my roommate having gone back home for the weekend. I have Yes’s Big Generator on the turntable: it just came out, and I’ve already listened to it about a dozen times. I listened to it all afternoon, while I was drawing on the door.

Out college had this tradition where students in the dorms were able to decorate their doors – the outsides of them – any way they wanted to. Personalize them. Some kids did, some kids didn’t. Some went all out: there was a door in the all-male dorm with an expertly rendered picture of the Cutty Sark box, one in one of the co-ed halls that had been transformed into an Esher. And then there was the one at the end of our hall that was a full-color rendition of the face on the cover of King Crimson’s first album. It would scare you shitless if you came upon it in the middle of the night unawares – it was infamous on campus – but I loved it. Nobody knew who had painted it: somebody who’d graduated long ago.

My roommate and I in my sophomore year turned the door into a joint project. We kept a magic marker around and asked every friend and visitor to add a bit of graffiti: a favorite saying or doodle. Of course neighboring idiots defaced it, but we kept that too. We saw it as a kind of collective unconscious made manifest. It became a bit infamous, too, and the next year they painted over all the doors.

But that was still in the future. First semester freshman year I was in a room with a virgin blue door. My roommate didn’t seem interested in decorating it, so I claimed the lower half for my own and spent that Friday afternoon with a black magic marker drawing the Yes bird-plane on it.

This is a design familiar to Yes fans and nobody else, because to see it you had to have not only bought Yes albums, but paid attention to the fine print. The cover of Fragile has a Roger Dean painting of a fragmenting green Earth and a strange winged contraption flying around it, looking like a cross between a mythical bird and the Wright Brothers’ airplane. The bird-plane as depicted on the front and back of Fragile is fluid, hard to define, but there was a miniature line sketch of it in the liner notes, a very organized presentation that was to show up in the liner notes of the next seven or eight Yes albums. They used it as a kind of colophon, although it never became as famous as the bubble-lettered Yes logo.

I always thought it was a perfect visual representation of Yes’s sound. It combined elements of machinery – they were a loud electric band sometimes, lots of synthesizers and distortion – with suggestions of organicity – they also had soft acoustic elements, and a strong emphasis on the fragile human voice. It combined utopian sci-fi - a spacegoing aircraft - with romantic poetry - a Bird. And it was a method of transport: if you could just find a way to climb in, oh the places you’d go.

So that’s what I drew on our door. I liked that it didn’t actually say “Yes” anywhere. I wasn’t advertising a band, but identifying with an aesthetic. Plus, I thought it complemented the King Crimson door.

It took me about an hour, and then I spun Big Generator again while I waited for it to be time to go to the dining hall. Alone. I hadn’t made any arrangements to go home for the weekend, and I didn’t know anybody at school yet, and my roommate was gone, so I was facing dining hall alone on a Friday night. I could already tell by the silence on the hall that campus had emptied out. This was not a heartening thought, but I tried to ignore it as I processed the new Yes album.

Halfway through Side 2 came a knock at the door. I opened it.

Two guys stood there. A tall towheaded guy in a blue-and-red tie-dye and a shorter guy with black curly hair wearing a pink Izod. I didn’t know them, but I recognized them: they had been in Philosophy Club.

“Oh,” says the alligator. “It’s you!”

“Huh?” sez I, eloquently.

“You’re the guy who walked out of Phil Club.”

“Uh, yeah. I did that thing.”

“I’m Vito, Vito Brevis,” he says. The other guy holds out a hand. “Art Long.”

I shake his hand, tell them my name. “Sorry I walked out like that. I just wasn't up for that.”

“No, no.” Art. “We’re not Philosophy Club Police or anything. Actually we walked out not long after you did, right around the time they started passing the hat.”

Vito chimed in. “Don’t get me wrong, I hate Reagan as much as the next guy, but I was hoping to, you know, sit around drinking Mad Dog 20/20 and talking about Plato in the cave or something. Not get ordered around by Marxists.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with Marxists,” I say.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with Marxists,” Vito agrees. We all laugh.

“So anyway,” continues Art. “We weren’t actually looking for you, per se. We just saw the door and, well, we’re big Yes fans. Have been since junior high. We had to meet the person behind this door. Did you draw it?”

“He’s playing Big Generator, dude. I’d say he drew it.”

I did, I said. “So you guys are Yes fans, too? I didn’t think there were any here. I thought everybody was into U2 and REM. Not that there’s anything wrong with them, either –”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with them,” they laughed, eyeing the U2 banner my roommate had hung over the doorway.

“So anyway,” says Art. “Come to dinner with us. Let’s figure out this new Yes album.”

“And Marxists.”

“And U2.”

“And philosophy.”

“Dude!”

Rush: Rush (1974)

At this point it’s obvious: it’s all about fraternities.

Which wasn’t apparent at the time, because in my whole life, I’ve only had one brush with fraternities.

Friday night we’d spent on a Dr. Pepper bender, scouring dungeons looking for troglodytes. I was the Dungeon Master, which meant I was the guy who got to improvise reality for the other guys. Without knowing anything about fighting or spelunking, economics or metrics, ecology or meteorology, history, myth, or least of all sex, I got to devise and referee brawls, tunnelings, lootings, surveyings, huntings, stormings, origins, interventions, wenchings, and sundry other meleés. I got to be the man-at-arms, the troglodyte, the hoarder, the architect, the prey, the thunder god, Clio, Alpha, Omega, and all manner of whores. I loved it, and I make no apology for it now.

But we’d had enough of that on Friday night – enough Dr. Pepper, donuts, Doritos, and ELP albums – and Saturday after waking up midafternoon we felt like doing something different. It was April of our senior year in high school.

By this point we all knew where we were going to college. I was heading to a little-known liberal-arts college with an identity crisis, run by the state but with a private name. The rest of the guys, though, were going to Enormous State University.

Somebody, having already had a college visitation weekend as part of the recruitment process, having already thereby gotten drunk once on college beer, suggested we drive down to Collegeville, where ESU is located, and see if we could crash a frat party.

A frat party. This was the late ‘80s and we were American males, so of course Animal House was the ne plus ultra of what we imagined college life to be. A Natty Boh bender, scouring dorm rooms looking for trollops. Let’s go, dude.

So we piled into the green and black Pinto one of the guys had borrowed for the weekend, his parents’ second car, and we made the requisite rear-ending jokes, and set out down Route 301 for Collegeville. We listened to the radio until we got tired of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Cinderella, and then we popped in Led Zeppelin II. When that finished it was Led Zeppelin III, and we hit College Ville around the time they were taking their hats off to (Roy) Harper.

Now what? Start driving around looking for houses with Greek letters on them and mannequins flying out windows, of course.

The guy riding shotgun put in Momentary Lapse Of Reason and while the driver started making aimless turns in and out of main drags and campus lanes and leafy streets the rest of us picked up our old argument about whether this was really Floyd.

The question was never settled, because just as we turned onto a particularly promising looking street and were slowing down to see if we could see magic glyphs over the doors, somebody in a passing car stopped and yelled to us.

“Wanna buy a pizza?” It was a delivery guy, sign on the top of his car and everything. I looked around, and back on the corner was a pizza place. The guy had just left. “Give it to you for ten bucks, a large with everything. I don’t wanna drive all the way across campus.”

Well, it was past dinner time. And this – this was wild, man. Somebody wasn’t going to get their pizza. The delivery guy was pulling a fast one. And look – there’s a Phi over that door! And a Tau over that one! This is it, boys, Frat Row!

We pooled our bills, bought the pizza, pulled over, ate it, washed it down with the Big Gulps we’d been nursing all the way down the highway. It was good pizza. College pizza. Illicit pizza.

And that was the closest we got to fraternity life that night. We drove up and down Frat Row, but: nothing. Just big whitewashed houses with neatly manicured lawns and polite lights in the windows. Greek letters in trinities, sure, but no broken windows, no beer bottles on the driveways, no coeds hanging out of second story windows, no togas. No Isley Brothers. We heard what I would later come to know as Bob Marley’s Legend playing from more than one bedroom window, but always at a moderate volume. Everything looked safe, self-contained, and utterly suburban.

I had then, and have now, no doubt there was debauchery going on somewhere behind those doors. But it wasn’t to be had by us.

We parked and wandered around campus for a while; the ESU bound among us were also interested, it turned out, in learning the layout of the school before arriving there for good in the fall. There’s the library, there’s the chem building, there are some dorms. We tried to get into one and drop in on somebody’s visitation weekend host, but no dice. I’m sure he was partying.

We had fun, to be sure. I mean, we always had fun together. Endless stupid jokes and music talk. We just didn’t make it into any parties. No wenching for us this night. We spent a couple of hours in Collegeville, then on the way out of town stopped at a Little Tavern for a couple of bags of burgers, and then it was home to see if we could catch something raunchy and unscrambled on Cinemax.

I think one or two of the guys actually pledged when they got to ESU the next fall, but truth be told I hardly saw any of them again after that summer. And my school didn’t have frats. So that was the closest I ever got. Pizza.

Which is not to say I never learned about brotherhood at school. Or freedom and equality, for that matter.