LIT HOUSE MEMORIES

Lit House Memories REFLECTIONS ON WASHINGTON COLLEGE’S LITERARY HOUSES

Richmond House • Dorchester House • O’Neill House

Editor Sarah Gearhart Consulting Editor Eric Lorberer Design James Dissette

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Lit House Memories

Introduction

The Way We Were FOUNDER AND FORMER DIRECTOR, LITERARY HOUSE

about their poetry. It was at the end of that reading that he read for the first time I think his now celebrated small poem “Weather Report”:

Light wind at Grand Prairie, drifting snow.

Low at Vermillion, forty degrees of frost.

Lost in the Barrens, hunting over spines of ice,

The great sled dog Shadow is running for his life.

All who hear—in your wide horizon of thought

caught in the cold, this world all going gray,

pray for the frozen dead at Yellow Knife.

These words we send are becoming parts of their night.

I stole it from John Milton, the 17th century English poet. “First, to find out a spatious house,” he writes in his essay, “Of Education.” I always liked his spelling of “spacious.”

When Stafford finished, the students rose from their seats en masse and gave him an ovation. I thought to myself: these young writers need a home of their own.

As Zeus would have it, Richmond House, located at the far end of the campus near Buildings and Grounds, was available and I asked if we could use it: yes.

What happened next?

And that was it?

When I came to Washington College in 1970, I invited William Stafford, the Library of Congress Poet (now the Poet Laureate) to give a reading and hold manuscript conferences with our student poets. To my astonishment, a hundred students showed up for the reading, and a dozen or so signed up to talk to Stafford

Almost. It turned out we needed a student club and a faculty sponsor. There was a form to fill out with the signature of the sponsor (that would be me), the name of the club (The Writers Union came to mind because I had been reading Russian poetry), and a student President.

But since we didn’t exist, we didn’t have a President. I

How did you get the idea for the Literary House?

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thought about making one up: Emma Woodhouse, Molly Bloom, Jake Barnes, but as I was walking across campus I saw David Roach, one of the students who had been at the Stafford reading.

—You want to be president of the Washington College Writers Union? I asked.

—Sure, he said. There was a blank page for members’ signatures, and off Dave went in search of fellow writers. A day later he returned to my office with more than a hundred names.

—We are, he said with the smile of pride, now the largest student club on campus.

Later, we had that list framed and it, along with literary posters, memorabilia, plaques, and letters from writers world-wide (including Katherine Ann Porter, Elizabeth Bishop, Vera Nabokov, and a post card from Allen Ginsberg) became part of the College’s living literary legacy on the walls of the O’Neill Literary House.

In your mind, what is the legacy of the Literary House program?

It resides with the students and what they did when they were at Washington College, and what many of them have done after graduation. I thought the Literary House should provide all students with what Henry Adams called “an atmosphere of learning,” and provide the poets and writers and playwrights among them opportunities: opportunities to give readings, publish magazines, hold literary contests and colloquy.

Most of the ideas came from the students: my job too was to fund those opportunities and see that the students got what they needed for their projects to succeed.

In those days there was a course in Freshman Creative Writing, so one of the first organized readings we had was the Freshman Reading. At the end of each year there was the Senior Reading, and in between at Christmas there

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was the Foreign Language Poetry reading where faculty and students read a poem, first in its original language, then in a translation. Afterwards, we had a party. Well, in truth, after almost every thing we did, we had a party.

One year the Freshmen organized a Freshmen Literary Colloquy on the Beat Poets with the students reading sections of “Howl” and “Coney Island of the Mind”, along with Gregory Corso’s “Marriage.” They also showed the film Holy Communion, the amazing movie about the Beat poetry reading at Sir Albert Hall in London. As it turned out, by the time those Freshmen were Seniors, Allen Ginsberg arrived on campus for a reading, followed the next day with Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlofsky leading students around campus and into Chestertown to levitate buildings. That first Freshman Colloquy led

to others on other subjects: Political poetry. Erotic literature. We put their posters on the walls.

I remember one day the poet Tarin Towers came to my office to ask if the Writers Union could use the house for a Poetry Slam. They’d have to move furniture and roll up rugs, but the place would be back in order by morning. I wasn’t sure what a poetry slam was, but yes.

And true to Tarin’s word, the house was in good shape when I came to the office, except that Edith Warton (the resident cat) had been TFO (Totally Freaked Out, Tarin explained) and bolted. She didn’t come back for three days.

You said something about contests and student publications.

Well, yes. There was the Rejection Slip Contest (won one year by the poet and playwright Mary Wood, later a member of the Board of Washington College and for whom the front room of the Literary House is named), the prose writers vs. poets strip volley ball game on May Day; the Beacham Prize (a letterpress chapbook of poetry or prose printed by Mike Kaylor, our Master Printer, who also conducted workshops in letterpress printing); the poetry post card awards; the Writers Union award; the Writers Theater; the senior Fellowship Rooms (each named for a different American author); the Broadside poetry series (20 student poems a year photocopied and posted throughout the campus); The Washington College Review; and the Underground Magazine project where I’d give students money and let them use the Lit House photocopiers—or the press room—to publish their own magazines. Pat Attenasio published Crack and put up posters all over campus saying: Get Free Crack at the Lit House. Douglass Cater, then President, was amused but had to pretend he wasn’t. Many of the students who published these “underground magazines” went on to careers in editing and publishing. Neil Bolton, now a first rate New York magazine designer, published a magazine called Go. Lee Ann Chearneyi, who went on to be the Managing editor of G.P. Putnam and then Ecco Press (and founded her own publishing house, Amaranth), was one of the first editors of the Washington College Review. David Lamotte went into publishing, as did Sarah Gearhart and Sarah Hamlin. One year a newspaper did a story on our student magazines and by their count (I didn’t keep track) there were seven of them. I like to think these young editors got their start—and their affection for literary endeavor—at Washington College.

Is it true that the Washington Post called the Lit House the Carnegie Hall of Literary Readings?

Yes. We even put the quotation on a T-shirt. But it wasn’t just because of the Literary House, it was also the generosity of the Sophie Kerr Committee. They would let me use their funds to match National Endowment for the Arts grants, and between the two pots of money we could bring very accomplished poets and writers, both American and International, to campus. Over the years we got four or five NEA or Maryland Arts Council grants and our students met with more than twenty Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, and four Nobel Laureates. It was quite a parade and some astounding readings and events: Edward Albee spent well into one night showing the drama students techniques of staging; Joseph Brodsky and his translators gave readings from Russian and English; our own John Barth read from his novel Letters, just then published; one of my teachers, Katherine Ann Porter, recited a story

<Edward Albee spent well into one night showing the drama students techniques of staging.> of hers. Anthony Burgess came from London, and the week before he arrived we showed his movie A Clockwork Orange. Later, the screenplay writer and director Walter Bernstein was on campus to show his Woody Allen movie, The Front; and the party afterwards was special.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the founders of the Nouveau Roman movement came; the poets Marvin Bell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Wilbur, John Ashbery, John Hollander, Gwendolyn Brooks, Diane Wakoski, W.D. Snodgrass, James Tate, and Henry Taylor all held manuscript conferences with our students, taught workshops and gave readings, as did James Dickey—but Dickey was drunk and only read one poem, then more or less passed out. And this was before the party—which he attended in spite of himself.

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Indeed. She was invited because of the students. One day two or three African American students (and they might have been half the population of the African America students in those days) came into my office and asked if we might invite a black writer to campus. Sure, I said. I knew Gerry Barrax and Gwendolyn Brooks and thought I could bring either­— or both. But the students wanted Toni Morrison. I doubted we could afford her,

--The Washington College Literary Award, he said.

--We don’t have a Washington College Literary Award.

--Then we’ll make it, he said.

And he did. We offered the first Washington College Literary Award to Toni Morrison and—again, at President Cater’s suggestion—created a scholarship in her honor. She dropped her fee, came to campus, met the student who would get the scholarship, gave a reading, had lunch with the four or five African American Students, and accepted the award, which was a letter-press

but didn’t say so. I told them, I’d check it out, which I did through a contact I had at her publishing house: her fee was beyond our reach. Enter: President Douglass Cater who, full disclosure, was always something of an unindited co-conspirator to my Literary House schemes.

When I told him the problem, he suggested we not offer her money, but an award.

--What award? I asked.

Broadside from her novel Beloved. Students of literary history will discover Toni Morrison’s vita lists The Washington College Literary Award along with the Nobel Prize she got the following year. We put the Washington College Literary Award plaque in the O’Neill Literary House and had it engraved with names of the other fine writers who, over the years, received it: Richard Wilbur, Israel Horovitz, John Barth, William Warner, Howard

And Toni Morrison?

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Nemerov, Mavis Gallant, and Galway Kinnell. On the walls we put the framed letter press Broadsides of those awards. A house of our own, a tradition of excellence.

Tell us about the upside down posters on the Lit House walls.

One night I came back to the Lit House to catch up and noticed the poster of a recent visiting writer was turned upside down.

—He was a jerk, said one of the students when she saw me looking at it.

—Very “jerk-worthy,” another student said.

I came to understand that while the writers we had on campus might give a good public reading, in some cases (a very few to be sure) they failed in the larger part of their task at Washington College: workshops, class visits, and (most important) the individual manuscript conferences. I never knew the criteria that got you admitted to the society of Jerk-Worthy, and in at least one case there seemed to be a disagreement because a poster would one day be right side up, then upside down. To settle the matter I took it to my office and hung it there: sideways.

But about Gordon Lish, the fiction editor of Esquire, there was no disagreement: he failed so badly in so many ways, the students turned his poster to the wall and it was only after those students had graduated (I now confess to them) that I turned Gordon back around (but still upside down) because he had brought to our attention the splendid fiction of Ray Carver.

What about your career?

What about it?

Your literary career.

their collective literary achievements a tapestry for themselves and for Washington College: Peter Turchi, publishing his novels and stories and running the Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State; Chappy Bowie and The Conservator’s Song, his award-winning poetry collection; Robert Burkholder, now a celebrated professor of English at Penn State; Kathy Wagner, the poet who, as Associate Director of the O’Neill Literary House was, like Douglass Cater, a co-conspirator in many projects; David Beaudoin, Baltimore’s fine poet; Christine Lincoln and Sap Rising, her collection of short stories; Erin Murphy, perhaps our most prolific poet and essayist, with five collections of poetry, including Distant Glitter to be published next year; the magazine editors and journalists Mary Ruth Yoe and Sue DePasquale (who started the Collegian); the poet Katie Degentesh; our award-winning fiction writer Sarah Blackman; the poet and celebrated book designer James Dissette; Eric Lorberer,the energetic literary entrepreneur (then and now) who runs Rain Taxi in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the novelist and award-winning teacher Craig Butcher; the fine fiction writers Honor McElroy and Elizabeth Rollins; Greta Jee, the poet who taught us all that haiku was more than syllabic poetry; Tricia Bauer, who wrote Poetry in Japan and Elsewhere, an astonishing haiku sequence;and BB King (not the singer), but our Robert King, the fiction writer, who was first student from Washington College admitted to the famous Iowa Writers Workshop. And my guess is that we’ll soon hear from Mike McGrath, among the best writers we’ve ever had at Washington College, a writer’s writer, also admitted to Iowa, but now in the MFA program at the University of Virginia. They, and hundreds and hundreds of Washington College literary students like them, are the legacy of the Literary House Programs.

The campus doesn’t have enough space for their commemorative statues, so weave on, all of you—now in my wide horizon of thought.

Well, I published a novel in those days, short stories, book reviews for the Washington Post and literary essays.

You shouldn’t coach baseball unless you’ve played baseball. But our students were my career, if what we mean by that is where I took pleasure from my work. Pericles wrote that our legacy should be what we weave into the lives of others and not in commemorative statues. The sound coming off this prose might be heard as me patting myself on the back, but it is applause for all those students who contributed to the Washington College Literary House programs and, in the process, made of

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1907 Map of Chestertown, Maryland

INTRODUCTION The Way We Were: Interview with Bob Day

BOOK ONE: RICHMOND HOUSE

Richmond House Redux by Marty Williams ‘75

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The Clarence Darrow of Western Kansas by Bob Burkholder ‘72 A Literary Luncheon Party by Mary Wood ‘68

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Don’t Mess With Texas by Marty Williams ‘75 21 Ginsberg and Me by Leslie Kitchen Rock ‘77

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A Richmond House of the Mind by Peter Turchi ‘82 The Fall of Richmond House by Tamara Dubin Brown ‘82

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The Last One at Richmond House by Natalie Brown McKnight ‘84 The End of Something by Peter Turchi ‘82

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Richmond House Redux MARTY WILLIAMS ‘75

I like to compare the mood of Washington College in 1970 with the promotional photo sent out to me by the admissions office when I was a high school senior in Farmers Branch, Texas.

Beneath those pendulous elms there was a shaded shot of a stately and rectilinear Smith Hall.

Surely, I thought, this is what college is all about: it was a place where, beyond even the wise and practical matter of avoiding the draft, you could escape from the world.

This promise of seclusion prompted the only vow I ever kept while in school: I would not read a newspaper for four years.

The freshman class of 1970 found Washington College punch drunk and hung over from the last years of the anti-war bash, full of bearded saints and scruffy mamas and the never ending blare of rock’n roll. Any brick surface not covered with ivy was smeared with graffiti. We were told tales about vigils, debates, canceled classes and faculty unrest. Kids talked funny, ingested mind-numbing quantities of dope and tended to congregate moodily at various places on the campus. That year there was a tent city out in front of Somerset Hall where boys and girls encamped for days on end, grinding hashish, playing their guitars, copulating, cooking food over fires. From the quadrangle, the scent of marijuana would drift up to your room, where you might be trying

to solve a math equation or read Troilus and Cressida. You begin to wonder if it was possible to get an education here. Oddly enough, just as the sixties had reached their zenith, new things were about to happen at Washington College that would provide a partial answer to that question. Among the aspiring student writers who formed a confused minority amidst the politics and drugs, the time was ripe for a young Kansan named Bob Day and his special brand of influence.

Like me, Bob was new on the scene in 1970. He had journeyed just as far: starting as a graduate of the University of Kansas, he had completed the M.F.A. program at Arkansas, written much of his first novel, The Last Cattle Drive, and had come “Back East” to be Washington College’s first creative writing teacher. He pulled into town wearing blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a hunting jacket.

Beneath him, sporting Kansas plates, was a soon-to-be beat up red jeep. He had a Labrador retriever named Rebel, who he told us, was professionally trained and was obviously better behaved than the student. I envied Bob his easy western image. Beside a Hermes typewriter in his office he kept a two-pound Maxwell House coffee can full of twelve-gauge shotgun shells. A vintage Winchester model twelve-pump leaned against his bookcase.

Bob wasn’t just the new creative writing guru on campus; he was the Sheriff of Literacy. And it wasn’t long before he began to cook up all kinds of literary schemes.

Bob had acquainted himself with the large sums of money that could flow from the Sophie Kerr fund. He started the Broadside series to publish and distribute student work: bright squares of red, blue, green, and yellow poetry began to paper the campus. In the spring of 1971 he, Danny Williams, and I also discussed the possibility of a creative writing magazine financed by Sophie

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and other donations. When I got back from a summer in Mexico, Bob and Danny had agreed on a format, and Danny, as editor, published the first issue of the Washington College Review in October. But Bob’s biggest coup that first spring was the acquisition of an old house on the southern edge of the campus for the recently-founded Writer’s Union.

Actually, Richmond house, as it was christened, was an awful dump. It was a three-story, dry rotted, white clapboard house that had been owned by a local black doctor and sat under a catalpa tree, on a little peninsula beside the Psychology Building and in front of the Maintenance Plant. In its new incarnation, the house served three purposes. First, it provided an office for Bob Day, downstairs in what must have been the doctor’s receiving room. Second, it became the headquarters for the Associated Writing Program, a national organization of graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs.

Whatever good AWP did for America seemed embedded in the person of Kathy Walton, its Executive Secretary, a flinty blond from Texas who had been a classmate of Bob’s at Arkansas. Third, and most important as far as I was concerned, Richmond House became a student residence. Selections were made informally; most of us given rooms there the year it opened, 1971-1972, had been in Bob’s Creative Writing Workshop, and all of us were male.

I remember the first time that I walked back home after morning classes: Richmond House looked like a big ugly saloon out on the prairie. There was a defiant Dodge City spirit about the place in its early years. Sheriff Day rode in and out on his jeep, while Miss Kitty Walton read our stuff, bought us beer, patched up our fragile egos, and generally presided over our incessant arguments.

The fact was, we weren’t at all sure how to behave. To live in Richmond House was to admit that you wanted to be a writer. In other places, like the Spanish House, the students were merely expected to practice indoors. But at Richmond, there was a tacit competition going on all the time: who read the most, who wrote the best, who could run up the biggest bill at Marty Kabat’s bookstore. Many nights Bob rounded up a posse and we would ride out to the Tavern to talk about the Main Thing. Sometimes those late-night “talks” were settled with our fists.

Who were these Richmond cowboys?

Bob Burkholder, a senior and aspiring poet, who bore a striking resemblance to John Updike, lived on the

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third floor. Before the Maintenance men constructed a new entry in the second semester, Burkholder was forced to pass through a second floor bedroom—mine—to reach the attic stairs. To those of us who had come from the squalor of a dormitory the previous year, the inconvenience was minor. Burkholder’s attic room had dormer windows, wooden floors gently sloping gallery walls—plaster, not the institutional cinderblock—and once you climbed up there you enjoyed some privacy.

For a variety of reasons this arrangement suited him. He had transferred to Washington in his junior year, and he was more disciplined than most of us. Mainly he was determined to get what he wanted: to win the Sophie Kerr Prize, get married (he was engaged to a girl back home in Hagerstown) and attend graduate school. He accomplished all three, though he was badly distracted once. In the spring he fell in love—not with a student, but with a very attractive woman from town. At first, he and the lady were as discreet as a Chinese poem. But pretty soon Bob must have felt his careful plans falling apart, and one night when he got drunk he told a few of us he was miserable. Somebody suggested we write a short story about it.

Burkholder’s best friend, David Beaudoin, lived with the rest of us down on the “bunkhouse” floor.

Dave had a thatched hut of red hair on his head and was always eligible for the Biggest Beard on Campus award.

He favored blue denim duds – bright with patches – and wore tinkers’ jewelry on his hands. In a pair of sturdy boots he would hike around the campus making friends.

He was probably the most genuinely well-liked person in Richmond House. But he suffered all kinds of cruelties from the rest of us who lived there – we tampered with his homemade yogurt, tore up his room, made fun of his poems, pushed him around. Burkholder even slapped him one night out in front of Hodson Hall. Somehow all of our meanness didn’t seem to affect Dave. I now think that he was past much of the awkwardness the rest of us felt in our self-appointed roles as writers, that what looked to us like weakness was really compassion.

Danny Williams lived across from Dave and was, fortunately, a close friend of mine. No one picked on Danny Williams: squat, mean-tempered, always at war with some girl, Danny was so strong that he literally broke down his shoes and pants walking around. He carried a full course load, including Bob Day’s Creative Writing Workshop, edited the Review, and was working on a long poem in blank verse. Each morning he would

jump in his Volkswagen and motor the two hundred feet to Smith Hall for class. “Saves time,” he said.

Much of Danny’s time was spent on the Review. The first issues were printed, front and back, in exceedingly small type on a stiff yellow sheet the size of a political poster. The whole layout resembled a giant aerial photo reduced to microfiche. There was always the urge to fill the Review with our own stuff, to make it a Richmond House brew. To his credit, Danny gathered suggestions from students, (what about an article on how to import dope from Katmandu?) and faculty (what about an essay on opera?), held editorial meetings, bounced ideas off Bob Day, kept his options open. Gradually it was decided that the type must get larger, the articles less long and tedious.

Bob talked the Sophie Kerr Committee into giving us extra money. By spring we had agreed that the following year we would have a new format and a regular newspaper printing.

At spring break, Danny announced that instead of going home to Philadelphia, he would stay on in Richmond House: writers needed time to write, and he was still grappling with his long poem. When we returned from break, however, we found that Danny had succumbed to ennui.

The absence of all pressures had paralyzed him. So bad were his boredom and loneliness that he had purchased a model at the drugstore – one of those plastic German tiger tanks that you glue together in thirty-nine steps.

Years later, when I had left the lawyer’s office after my divorce, I bought a model P-51 airplane. It helped.

My room was next to Danny’s and we shared the glassed-in porch that ran the length of the second floor.

Only a sophomore, I was the youngest resident of Richmond House, and I relished my place among grown-ups and my freedom from dormitory life. If I wanted a new book to read, I could drop downstairs and browse through Bob Day’s office; if I were hungry at dawn, I could fry up a hamburger. I was even allowed to keep

a pet – a black mutt with the not very original name of Puppy Dog. My room itself had an atmosphere of ‘almost visceral filthiness’. During our student jobs in Maintenance, Danny and I had swiped various pieces of furniture from around the campus, and I had decorated in early Cain Library. The smell of the desiccated wallpaper blended with the odor of dirty clothes and dog. Among a rainbow of Broadsides and books on my library table, the coke cups that I used for ashtrays were traps for flies. Against one wall I had lashed two dormitory beds together into a not too subtle double. This bed had a big fault running down the middle, and everyone made hideous metaphorical fun of it.

There were of course, other than literary matters to learn in your room at Richmond House. One night I brought a very special girl to mine – someone I had met at the funeral of Peter Chekemain, a good friend who died in the fall of ’72 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A few weeks before his death, Peter had moved onto our porch—he needed a place because he’d recently split up with his regular live-in girlfriend. Like Romeo, Peter was already infatuated with a new girl he’d just met in Jersey.

Aside from her looks, what impressed Peter about her was that on their first night together she had presented him at dawn with a man’s cashmere sweater. Now here she was in my room, come to collect a dreary memento, for the sweater still hung in my closet. As she settled herself on my bed—glancing a bit uneasily at a gooey Venus-fly cup —I felt as though I’d found a lovely sailing sloop aground in my own dank marsh. From beneath the bed Puppy Dog thumped her tail approvingly. While we sat holding hands (should I shuck my loafers, or maybe that would be too obvious?), I heard how she had met Peter, about his last glorious night with her at Skidmore College, about how she wanted to become a fashion model—did I read Vogue? Everything that I shall ever know about the lure of fashion, and the probable causes

<I remember the first time that I

walked back home after morning classes: Richmond House looked like a big ugly saloon out on the

prairie. There was a defiant Dodge City spirit about the place in its early years.>

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of Peter’s death, I learned that night. Listening to this beautiful but vapid girl, wanting her very much, but not wanting her, I had the odd sense of inheriting a shameful truth about myself, secondhand. Pretty soon my feet fell asleep.

Probably a few people around campus wished that I was so easily silenced. There was a weighty atmosphere of conflict in those days; both young and old were trying to shoulder the Big Load. Such effort produced a lot of posturing and some really awful writing, some of the worst of which was my own. It seemed to me then that an encyclopedic knowledge, of subject as well as style, was required to write well. Lacking both, I soon got frustrated. The only writing I did that was halfway intelligible was in scathing reviews of my fellow students when they published a yearbook or put on a play. In this way I learned the real origin and worth of Criticism.

Or, of course, Richmond House was more than just those of us who lived there. Besides the famous and notso-famous writer who would drop by after their readings at the college, various people were pulled into its orbit.

One winter a flashy English professor named Bob Neill—whose eventual fight for tenure drew the support of many of us—came over and took an office beside Bob Day. A new student writer appeared in a muscle car: Bob King, B.B. as we called him, was a war veteran and wrote cynical tales about Vietnam. In 1971 we first met a shy, gangly girl named Sarah Gearhart, who left the following year for the University of London and then returned to edit the Review. Angelo, a sort of street saint who would later die on a climbing trip in the mountains, used to pop in and ask us when we were going to publish something meaningful. I met my first wife, Pat Mauser, when she showed up one day to take a student job with Kathy Walton. I could mention others, whose only anonymous fault was that they were someone else’s friends.

In 1973-74, the authorities at Washington College were kind enough to let me take my senior year abroad at Manchester College, Oxford. Upon my return, I lacked two credits needed for my B.A. degree, so I enrolled for the fall semester and rented a house on High Street. In the year that I was away both Richmond House and I had changed. There were women residents in the house now and I wistfully noticed their female handiwork: curtains lined the windows, there was crockery and lace in the kitchen; gone were the derelict sofas on the front porch where we drank beer and railed at the passersby.

The yardful [sic] of fast cars was replaced by a bicycle rack. The quality of the Review was clearly improved and

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there were one or two writers around Richmond House who were quietly superior to the ranch hands of two years before. My own comportment had improved, too, after a year at genteel Oxford (“the ultimate Back East,” I had enthused to Bob Day), but I missed the bravado of my old buddies. Danny and Burkholder, B.B. and Dave were all gone now, off to Europe or graduate writing programs. Here I was, after five years, the longest living self-proclaimed student writer in the history of Washington College. Quite clearly I had outlasted my time. Like green fruit, my feelings about Richmond House tasted immature, and I wished I could get out of town. *** I graduated, got out of town, got a job, got older, and thought very little about Richmond House. One day last summer I received a note typed on Washington College stationery from Kathy Wagner, asking if I would like to attend the dedication of the letterpress room at the new O’Neill Literary House. At the bottom was a penned message from Bob Day, who suggested that I was not yet forgotten around the college. At first I didn’t dare reply, and the letter sat on my desk at work among the things that I read now for a living. After twelve years it felt a bit awkward to drop by Chestertown and answer all those questions about where I had been, what I was doing – did I still write? Twice married, up to my neck in business, I was finally now fully in the grasp of the world, which had waited so long to catch me. Not until the first fall storm chased away the summer heat, and I recalled what it was like then, on a cool October morning, dawdling on your way to class, did I re-read the letter and decide to go back.

At the O’Neill Literary House party, I learned that Richmond House had been torn down in 1982, the lot left vacant, with only the old catalpa tree still standing.

Bob Day had carted off much of the memorabilia and thus created a shrine: fifteen years of college literary life compressed into a remarkable array of posters and autographed photos in every room of the new O’Neill House – the scaffolding of a tradition now in place. Here the famous jostled for space on the walls with the college’s student writers. Among the playbills and old announcements of poetry readings, I spotted, like Most Wanted posters, several faded Broadside poems by Danny and Burkholder­— and even, I think, an old Review with my own name.

The clarence Darrow of Western Kansas BOB BURKHOLDER ‘72

Richmond House is a place no more. Since 1982 it has been a memory, a ghost. When I and a few others who would move in that first year gathered in the summer of 1971 to paint the building that Bob Day had somehow finagled from the college administration, it was very much a place, although it was a bit ramshackle, closer in proximity and feel to the maintenance sheds that were its neighbors than to the college across the road. But even when it was a place, Richmond House was really more a collection of personalities, happenings, and adventures.

When I think back to that first year, I don’t really remember the house itself that much. I remember people, of course, and think of them still surprisingly often.

But I also remember moving, riding, never being still for very long. I don’t know how many of us living in the house had read On the Road—I’m sure I hadn’t in 1971—but that first year in the house was one whose story might have been, like Kerouac’s novel, best written on the paper roll of a player piano. I remember the joyrides in Bob Day’s Jeep, a red CJ-6 that Bob left at the house a lot and that got driven recklessly but joyfully by some of us on the now developed fields north of campus. It was parked one night, rather famously, by Marty Williams in the courtyard of the Miller Library, a feat that deserves to be enshrined in some collegiate-prank hall of fame.

We rode to nearby fields owned by corporate giants whose names I didn’t know to hunt squirrels. We rode to Rock Hall to eat crabs. We rode, nearly every night, to the Village Tavern to drink pitchers of draft beer or, if the money was short, to buy a one-dollar six-pack of Munich, a sort of strangely greasy beer, as I remember it, packaged in aluminum cans so thin they could be used for nose wiping when the beer was gone. And we briefly moved Richmond House one cold and cloudy March day in 1972 to New York City, to sit by the pot-bellied stove in McSorley’s Ale House where e. e. cummings wrote poetry, to visit Strand Books, and to go to the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. What a glorious day-trip that was.

The Greatest Richmond House Road Trip of that year, though, was the Great Reckless Driving Trial of David Beaudouin.One Saturday morning, David had to drive to Newark, Delaware, to the university, to take some sort of test, I think. But he was not real comfortable driving a car with a standard transmission. Without a car himself, though, his only transportation option was Bob Day’s aforementioned CJ-6, which David drove, standard transmission be damned, and turned over on its side just across the Delaware state line. A State Policeman cited him with reckless driving and issued a court summons. Someone, I don’t remember who, went to

<That’s all well and good but I still find you guilty.>

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pick up the shaken but uninjured Beaudouin and bring him back to Richmond House. That day, or soon after, Bob Day volunteered to represent David at his trial in Newark. When David expressed concern, thinking that a guilty plea might be the least troublesome course, Day told him, “I’m known as the Clarence Darrow of Western Kansas.” Bob assured David with considerable confidence that his acquittal was in the bag.

The afternoon before his evening court appearance, David, Bob, and I drove to Newark a bit early. I’m not even sure why I was there, maybe to be supportive or to witness Bob Day’s prospective judicial triumph. To David’s dismay we parked in downtown Newark and stepped into a restaurant near the courthouse to discuss literature and, oh yeah, the trial. For some reason we had cocktails, and I think that both Bob and I drank a martini or two. It seemed like the sociable thing to do.

When it was time, we moved our party to the courthouse and soon discovered that David’s case would be heard by the honorable Judge Rash. We didn’t need the OED—one of Richmond House’s most treasured possessions—to grasp the irony of it all, although the judge himself seemed impervious to it.

Judge Rash started the trial by calling to the stand

the State Policeman who responded to the accident. The officer detailed in a very organized way how David was going too fast around a turn to negotiate the turn safely and so he tipped over. Then it was Bob Day’s turn.

He proceeded to give a surprisingly long and reasoned defense of David by challenging the very definition of reckless, arguing, I think, that recklessness was something that could only be the product of intent and that poor David, unfamiliar as he was with clutches and such, certainly did not intend to go too fast and to turn Bob’s red CJ-6 on its side. Judge Rash listened intently, and when Bob was finished, he looked at David and said, “Well. . . that’s all well and good, but I find you guilty.”

So much for the blindness of justice; it was also apparently deaf and rash to boot. That was a bad day for Richmond House and for the Clarence Darrow of Western Kansas, but a day I won’t ever forget.

Faulkner wrote that the old see the past “not as a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches.” For me, now, that year at Richmond House, my last at Washington College, is just such an open field, where events are undistinguished by chronology and more recognizable by the ways they flower in my memory.

The back somersault, the kip-up— And at last, the stand on his hands, Perfect, with his feet together, His head down, evenly breathing... ~James Dickey, “Performance”

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A Literary Luncheon Party mary wood ‘68

“Would you like to invite James Dickey to lunch, during his visit to Washington College?” asked English Professor Bob Day. It was the spring of 1972, before Dickey had been televised nationwide reading a poem at Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, but after his novel Deliverance had become a best-seller. Bob mentioned Buckdancer’s Choice, Dickey’s acclaimed first book of poetry, and other honors, sparing me the shame of having to admit I’d never heard of the man.

We arranged that the luncheon would take place on the day after his evening reading. Bob wanted to include two writing students, one of whom, afterward, would drive Mr. Dickey to Friendship Airport.

Giddy with the reflected glory in which my bucolic social life was about to bask, I rushed to my tattered copy of Strand’s Antholog y, which had often rescued me from gaps in my knowledge of contemporary poetry.

I read the strange, strong, beautiful poems. “The Performance” was an elegy for an airman friend who liked to do handstands. He was captured by the Japanese, decapitated:

And the headsman broke down…

And if some other one had not told him, Would have cut off the feet.

“Heaven for Animals” is another elegy. Some say this is an apology for hunting. I don’t agree. It is about hope. Dickey holds his words just this side of sentimentality:

Here they are. Their soft eyes open.

If they have lived in wood, It is a wood.

If they have lived on plains, It is grass rolling Under their feet forever.

The person who wrote these lines sitting at my table!

How the conversation would sparkle. I then read Deliverance. A faint warning bell sounded in my head, but the canoeing scenes were splendid.

I invited my elegant friend Lynette Nielsen, who was on the board or about to be on the board of Washington College and who had heard of Dickey, also Bill Thompson ’70, a winner of the Sophie Kerr Prize, who was working at the Centreville Record-Observer, and my husband. “I know you’re not big on poetry, but this guy is one of the leading poets in our country today, and you have to eat somewhere, so you might as well come home.” His law office is in Centreville, ten minutes from the farm. “All right,” he said, polite and resigned, as he has often had to be with me.

Lynette and I drove up to the reading in Hynson Lounge the night before. Along with everyone else we waited and waited until a scuffling sound was heard, and up the aisle came Mr. Dickey herded by a phalanx of nervous members of the English faculty. They were helping to hold him up, I learned later. Nicholas Newlin, a gentleman from his old-school tie to polished shoes,

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was chairman of the department. He rose to introduce the speaker. I wish I could remember what he said. I am sure it was a gem of understatement, irony and vague alarm.

The poet rose, propped himself on the lectern, and slurred out an unattractive series of images having to do with adultery, a motel room, rumpled sheets, and then he sat down. There was a long silence. Five minutes, at most, had passed since his introduction. Dr Newlin looked at his watch. “Mr. Dickey, would you care to read

some more?”

“No.” The next morning as I was bustling through lastminute hostess things, the telephone rang. It was Bob Day, sounding harassed. “Mary, you don’t have to go through with it. He’s been on a terrible tear.” Figuring that something had to be done with the poet and his hangover until plane time, I said that they might as well bring him here.

My other guests arrived first. I briefed them on the latest developments. We sat and made polite, apprehen-

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sive chat. Then the college cars rolled up. There was some noise as my guests negotiated two steps, the screen door, the front door.

The eminent poet swayed in the doorway, arms holding the jams. He wore vaguely Western clothing, and his eyes looked like oysters. “Ah bin a bayud boy,” he announced, aimed himself at the sofa, put his leather cowboy hat down over his eyes, and passed out.

In a whispered consolation, Bob and I hustled Danny Williams, the student driver, into the kitchen and dished him up a plate of food. Meanwhile, back in the living room sipping sherry, Sarah Gearhart, the other student, and the rest of us made light, though rather stiff conversation, whispering in order to keep the sleeping poet safe in the arms of Morpheus. When the driver had stoked up on enough food to sustain him through his coming ordeal, Bob approached the sofa.

“Well Mr. Dickey,” he yelled in ringing tones, “Thank Mrs. Wood for the nice luncheon. It’s time to catch your plane.” With considerable hoisting, the poet was propped up on his feet and, as he stumbled out the door, tipped the cowboy hat and said politely, “Thank you ma’am. I had a real nice time.” He was poured into the car and off they rode.

We sighed in relief, poured out another round of sherries and went into lunch. Bill Thompson says we ate shrimp salad, Sarah thinks chicken. Lynette has left us for Heaven for Artists, as has Dickey, but he wouldn’t have known as he never had lunch, and I don’t remember. Just as we were ready to begin my husband arrived.

“Sorry to be late,” he said looking around the table, and asked, “Where’s the poet?”

Don’t Mess With Texas: A Mother’s Plea This letter was found in the Presidents office corresponMARTY WILLIAMS ‘75

dence during a routine filing.

November 10, 1971 Dear President Merdinger: Thank you for responding to my last letter and for taking my call the other day regarding my son Marty Williams. His father and I agree with your suggestion that the thing to do for a boy with such high spirits is get him into the Naval Academy and we thank you for your offer of assistance. We have always thought he would make a better flag officer in the Fleet than pretending to be some hot-shot writer.

Now as regards the various bills for damages, at the college we have prayed on this and concluded that Marty owes you a goodly sum. But we feel he has been incited to bad behavior by one Professor Robert Day and his merry band of brothers in this place called the Richmond House. We didn’t raise our boy to act like a yahoo day and night, which is what has happened since he fell under the spell of this Bob Day feller.

At first our little Marty was thrilled to live next to Bob Day’s office with his own kitchen and access to food and drink. He really admired Day’s dedication and joy de vivre. He took the boys off campus for pep talks and more. He kept a Winchester Model 12 shotgun in his office in case Marty needed to go rabbit hunting. But we soon sensed the worm in this rotten apple and I think it was Day’s wife–Tennessee, or Dakota, or whatever state she calls herself. Tight blue jeans I’m told. Now our little Marty has seen a few buns in his short life (Texas buns, Sir!--as in Don’t Mess with Texas) but you know a time to hold ‘em and a time to fold ‘em! What with the Sweetie Pie this and Sweetie Pie that from her own husband, how is a young feller going to keep a level gaze?

I think that is what happened to Professor Day’s book. Marty

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is alleged to have shot out of a tree in front of the Richmond house. Now when books can fly I will admit that my little wing shooter can pluck them from the sky – but he ain’t no book assassin. And as for wrecking Bob Days jeep in the portico of the Miller library – he grew up driving on Texas dirt roads and probably never saw a portico before. Really the last straw though is this allegation that he published broadsides making fun of his faculty. From what I’ve heard Marty revered his mentors in the English department – just the other day he said that the decline of Western Civilization began with the loss of Professor Bob Neal. (You ever hear of this feller?) And he said that cute little button Nancy Tatum was undoubtedly a personal friend of William Beefeater. And Nick Newlins’ lectures on spirits would give you a warm glow all over.

But I digress. Not only was this Dakota Day a factor, but more women hovered over my boy at the AWP offices. Does anyone even know what AWP stands for? Awful Women Professionals? Always With Psoriasis?

Angry White People? Ever talk to those gals in the office. Dressed up every day for a house full of boys who can barely shave! I only hope those vulnerable young men have enough sense to avoid the nearly daily temptation of all those females in the house.

Marty confessed to me that he could not concentrate on his studies what with the sounds of high heels and the smell of beer in the trash cans and the sight of pages of the Oxford English Dictionary floating in the front yard like autumn leaves. He just couldn’t take it.

Enclosed is our check for damages.

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Ginsberg And Me LESLIE KITCHEN ROCK ‘77

As I grow older, I find memory sorts itself into two groups: “flash memory” and the rarer “video memory.”

These are my terms; I suppose there are technical terms.

Flash memories are my regular memories. I remember a glance or a face or a scene. Many are from Richmond House: Nancy Tatum’s grin (yes, she grinned) at our first “Richmond House Dinner” (upon being served stuffed peppers), and Norman James’s back as he walked toward his last tennis match. Video memories are short movies in my mind. I have only a handful of these. Most are of loving moments in my life, and a few are stupid indignities from my childhood. But one stands out from Richmond House: It is spring – either 1976 or 1977 – and Allen Ginsberg is visiting us. He is wearing a soft yellow windbreaker and is talking to someone near the kitchen. I leave Richmond House, on my way to somewhere, and jump down the front steps.

Suddenly, someone is running out of the house behind me-- it’s Mr. Ginsberg’s partner, and he runs in the opposite direction from me, a banjo in one hand. He’s going to what was then called “the ghetto block,”the corn-crib-looking tenements south of Richmond House. The partner stops, positions himself and begins playing furiously on his banjo. His music seems to engulf him; people begin to emerge from tenements on the other side of the street, grinning shyly at first, then laughing and nodding. The scene suddenly erupts full force. People are singing and dancing to the music, staying all the while on their side of the street. Their dancing becomes contorted, hysterical, almost like lightning quivering. Red and blue bandanas flash.

Mr. Ginsberg brushes by me walking, then trotting, then run-

ning toward his partner. The two finally stand together on their side, and seem to dance as best they can – sort of hopping, actually, -- the other side dancing and flashing limbs like wind-up dolls gone berserk. Meanwhile, I am a wide-mouthed idiot. I look at Rich-

mond House; it is deserted. I want to run in and grab someone to watch the joy unfolding. It’s too much to watch alone, I think: the sights, the sounds, so many people going wild in two minutes of life.

There should have been TV crews, or movie cameras, or something to preserve those moments.

There was no one but me. So I turned away, setting out again on my way to somewhere, mumbling lines from Ginsberg’s own “Howl” as best as I could remember: “….They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!”

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A Richmond House of the Mind PETER TURCHI ‘82

Richmond House had taken shape before my classmates and I arrived in the fall of 1978. The letter from Vera Nabokov was already framed and proudly displayed; dozens of reading posters already covered the walls, a few notoriously hung upside down; books and gravity had bowed wooden shelves. Not long after we arrived, Hemingway cried; the house was so decrepit that when anyone flushed the upstairs toilet, water trickled down the wall, behind the poster of Papa.

I may be speaking for myself, but I’ll say we felt late to the party; we were soon led to understand that Richmond House would not be ours. When it was razed, I wrote an article for The Elm called “The End of Something,” which tells you something: that I assumed everyone who cared about Richmond House would understand that I had borrowed the title of one of Hemingway’s stories, in part because of the weeping poster; and they did. Writing saturated our lives.

It’s difficult to point to one day, one event, one reading that defines the magic of that place—in part because by “that place” I don’t mean Richmond House, the building (or the front porch and lawn, where we spent many hours, and where I saw a man’s finger knocked out of joint so that the top section bent nearly perpendicular to the rest), or Dorchester, the New Dorm, which was, for us, its antiseptic (but functionally septic) substitute, or even the Rose O’Neill Literary House, which I’ve had the opportunity to work in and speak in and envy. Neither is “that place” Washington College, good as it was and has been to me. To my mind, Richmond House/the

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writer’s dorm/the Literary House was a creation only tangentially related to any physical space.

The myth had been established before we arrived, but we saw it confirmed again and again: when Gwendolyn Brooks read at a church in town; when C. Michael Curtis, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, met with us individually to discuss our stories; when John Barth came by for lunch; when Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky howled and sang and played and, yes, Ginsberg, for a moment at least, passed his eyes over our undergraduate poems; when John Ashbery made a pass at one of our

<The myth has been established before we arrived.> friends; when William Gass paused long enough, before accepting his hamburger, to sign a paper plate “to the cook”; when Donald Hall read in the Sophie Kerr Room of the library; when we talked about Sophie as if she were some friend’s kid sister; when we drove a visiting writer to Delaware in a college car, endangering her life as we sped to make up for lost time; when we unembarrassedly asked another to play wiffleball with us, and he said yes; when we persuaded the publisher of the county newspaper to print a broadside on sandpaper, and he agreed, and nearly ruined his press.

But if I have to pick just two memories, they are these: racing downtown to pick up an armful of blue t-shirts customized with letters that spelled out “Nabokov’s Dozen,” the name for our wiffleball team, which sometimes had nine members, sometimes a dozen, sometimes fifteen; and watching Nick Nappo type out, not for the first time, a paragraph he admired from Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. I was anxious to get those shirts because by that time I was no longer a newcomer, I had found my way into the group of writers who formed one of the best writing programs I’ve known, which was not an academic program of any kind (not a minor, not a major, despite the fact that it was everything to us); I’ve always been both literal-minded and sentimental, and for one afternoon I wanted us to look like a team, though of course anyone who knows writers knows that ultimately they insist on fielding teams of 1. And watching Nick

Nappo re-type what Jerzy Kosinski had already written and typed and re-typed, and which already had been printed and reprinted, I was tempted to laugh; but Nick pushed up his glasses and patiently explained that typing the words helped him understand the sentences better, helped him feel them. I feel fairly confident neither of us used the word syntax, and what he was talking about wasn’t an issue of grammar, anyway, it was about finding ways to inhabit the sort of prose we wanted to write.

Several years later, working to finish my first book, I pulled out four final paragraphs of novels I admired and re-typed them. I was sitting in a room on the second floor of a modest attached home in suburban Chicago, but I was also in Richmond House.

I have tried to create annexes to Richmond House everywhere I’ve taught. I know I’m not the only one.

And you are free With a ghastly freedom.

You are the beautiful half Of a golden hurt. ~Gwendolyn Brooks, “To Be in Love”

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So blue trains rush by in my sleep.

Blue herons fly overhead.

Blue paint cracks in my arteries and sends titanium floating into my bones.

Blue liquid pours down my poisoned throat and blue veins rip open my breast. Blue daggers tip and are juggled on my palms.

Blue death lives in my fingernails. ~Diane Wakoski, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Blue Mondayâ&#x20AC;?

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The Fall Of Richmond House TAMARA DUBIN BROWN

‘82

In August of 1980 after hauling my school supplies and clothes up two flights of stairs into Washington College’s writers’ residence, my parents—out of breath and quickly edging toward their car—asked the obvious question: “Why? Why do you want to live in this dump and still pay the same tuition?” So let me explain. Already slated to be Richmond House’s final academic year, this hallowed institute of questionable repute, brimming with quaint squalor that attracted student writers like males to Minta Martin, would cease to exist in a matter of months.

Moments before, my father nearly put his foot through a rotten front step. The distinctive two-story porch visibly sagged and its second-floor windows dropped panes of glass like loose teeth. Inside, ceiling plaster cracked and fell in chunks while sheets of plywood shored up crumbling walls. The toilet in the downstairs hallwayturned-bathroom was temperamental at best, and the fiberglass door to the building’s only shower stall fell off every time you entered its sardine-can interior.

My new room on the third floor sported views of an attractive metal fire staircase, one of Chestertown’s air raid horns, and the college’s maintenance facility. To me, after living sophomore year in relatively new and sterile Talbot, Richmond House seemed like a creative writer’s paradise, the ultimate artistic environment. To my parents who lived nearby, it looked like they wouldn’t visit too often.

That year nine of us stuffed ourselves into the house.

Some were seniors who had already notched a year or two under their belts, and the rest of us who still waited were more than willing to put up with some unusual sleeping

quarters. On the first floor, eager students moved into the former office of the Associated Writing Program and a storage room where water from that leaking shower overhead dripped onto back issues of The Washington College Review. Even the library next to Professor Bob Day’s office was occupied. If you wanted to borrow a book you needed to knock and ask permission from its resident.

Upstairs, all four bedrooms on the second floor filled with poets and novelists, including the tiny annex room with an emergency exit door and its own private fire escape. Legend has it this was the guest bedroom used by Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky during their notorious campus visit in 1978. I shared the third floor with an aspiring poet rock musician, his two large amps hooked up as speakers, and occasionally the other members of his band.

Any way you looked at it, this living arrangement fueled a fire marshal’s nightmare, which by the way, is the official reason why Richmond House was condemned. And perhaps that imminent safety indictment helped encourage our choices for reckless recreation. Even though the toilet seldom worked, those long walls in the downstairs bathroom served as handy scrapbook pages for anything from dirty limericks and demented fairy tales to a Rorschach blotch of Richard Nixon’s profile. A trash can fire in the kitchen had been commemorated with drawings of flames licking up the wall that would make Blake himself proud. Our big moment for literary criticism came several times a week when someone shouted it was time to make Ernest Hemingway cry. We’d pull an old-fashioned chrome fire extinguisher off the wall and spray water on

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the larger-than-life poster of Ernie’s disapproving face hanging over the stair landing.

We committed our greatest crimes against peace and quiet. Who would think we could write in a place where large amps blasted The Who, ZZ Top and Van Halen every weeknight? You either learned to like it, or you moved out. (No one left, by the way.) Sometimes music was turned up so loud it obliterated the wailing fire siren ten feet away, and made furniture in my room dance from bass vibrations. Our homey little parties often turned into drunken jam sessions with kitchen utensils or lovers’ screaming matches on the front lawn.

Long-suffering neighbors would only cross our street to check the pulses of guests sprawled facedown by the porch steps.

WCR meetings, usually raucous impromptu affairs with arguments over shower privileges, held court on the porch or in the hall since you couldn’t find a room that someone wasn’t using to sleep, eat or seduce in. Late one night a couple residents decided to renovate the library bedroom with materials supplied by a tiny darkroom off the kitchen.

Like elves, they hammered and sawed until dawn in the bowels of the house. Next morning, amid scrap wood and sawdust, a brandnew bookish bachelor pad proudly revealed itself among the shelves.

But we didn’t always have our way—the house fought back. You could count on endless days and nights when the plumbing completely broke down. Maintenance pretended we didn’t exist even though Richmond House sat right in front of them. Since staff seemed eager to avoid us, we’d apply the necessary makeshift Band-Aids ourselves. Eventually Bob Day demanded to know why his writers were seen wandering the campus late at night in their bathrobes, carrying towels and toothbrushes.

During Christmas break, the water pipes froze and radiators burst. This happened after a back window was forced open and the house looted. In addition to the usual stereo equipment, jewelry and loose change, thieves even stole a housemate’s clothing. The burglary affected us all. Local police brought in a bloodhound

to track down our stolen belongings across the yard to a nearby house. Suddenly, the slum behind us was no longer charming or exclusively the home of neighborhood kids who invited us to play ball. In gratitude, we held a party for law enforcement with the dog as honored guest.

As graduation loomed and last-minute pardons from demolition failed to materialize, the house became quiet, and its rate of decay appeared to accelerate. No more WCR work parties, music album debates or English Comp all-nighters. No more making Ernie cry. We undergrads sat on the rotting porch steps in stunned silence, summoning energy to pack and move out.

Graduating seniors wandered away, looking toward the action beyond College Avenue. House friendships that seemed as immortal as the writers we studied fell apart.

Upon departure we took pieces of the house with us—a window, a sign, yellowed clippings from the bathroom hallway, all mementos of a time when we lived like outlaws on the edge of civilized campus.

On demolition day the next year, I couldn’t watch the scheduled destruction of a place harboring my young life’s best and worst memories.

Some well-meaning friends (who viewed it as a sporting event) noted when Richmond’s two-story porch was pulled away, the rest of the walls collapsed like playing cards. Funny to think of that sloping, rickety attachment destined to sheer off at any second, as our house’s main support.

While visiting the college’s latest incarnation of campus literary center, I’ve noticed many familiar posters (upside down when appropriate), numerous new ones to mark time’s passage, and some artful framed photographs that would never survive spontaneous jamming in the Richmond House kitchen. Even Ernie has been framed and placed in a protected spot. I’m happy to see the fixtures of college life I knew so well move on to beautiful surroundings. I’m glad student writers have a house where they call the shots in their own world of all-night Sophie Kerr marathons and Sunday afternoon poetry readings.

<To me, after living sophomore year in relatively new and sterile Talbot, Richmond House seemed like a creative writer’s paradise...>

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But theirs is a legitimate world—which marks the difference between the present writers’ house and its predecessors. We remain in memory as the poor relations down by the maintenance building. Our isolation bred a mixture of freedom, irreverence and oddly, a sense of responsibility that many of us didn’t know we possessed.

Bob Day always wondered why men and women of Richmond House rarely dated each other. I think it was because, more than learning about good literature, or which professor to avoid, or even how to write the Great American Novel, we also experienced a little of what the outside world would be like, and we came to care for each other like brothers and sisters living together in a falling down, yet uniquely supportive, house.

The sun was over our town; it was like a blade.

Kicking cottonwood leaves we ran toward storms.

Wherever we looked the land would hold us up. ~William Stafford, “One Home”

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The Last One At Richmond House NATALIE BROWN McKNIGHT ‘84

I was the last student to live in Richmond House. I was there in 1980-81, the year before the house was demolished. I lived at the house illegally, having moved in there with my boyfriend when life in the Minta Martin dorm became intolerable (that will have to be another story).

I was a freshman, and the other residents were juniors and seniors. Freshmen were not assigned to Richmond House, but no one seemed to mind that I was there, or if they did, they were kind enough not to say so. Moving in, living there, was just one of many rules we broke with impunity; there were rules, of course, but no one seemed to care to enforce them, at least not at Richmond House, which was situated both geographically and artistically on the far margins of Washington College, below or beyond the radar. We were a rag-tag group of writers

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living in a crumbling firetrap on the far edge of campus, on the border of what was considered the “bad” part of town, and we were pretty much left alone most of the time. And we loved it.

The house probably should have been condemned years before. The porch was sagging, the entire house leaned to the left, and the plumbing was a disaster. One night raw sewage ran down the wall of my boyfriend’s room, so we dragged the bed into the library, and my boyfriend and his best friend shifted into a frenzy of carpentry, converting the library to a bedroom, ripping out floor-to-ceiling book shelves and reconstructing them around the bed to make a wonderfully inviting bed nook.

They worked at it all night as I dozed in a chair, and by dawn they were done and the room was transformed.

The next day Bob Day stopped the three of us en route to class to say he’d notice there’d been some reconstruction in the library. We explained the circumstances, and Day nodded.

“The books are ok?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Well, then . . . ,“ and he rode off on his bike.

Not another word was said about our taking over and reconstructing a room that did not belong to us.

Rules broken, property commandeered, and the only concern was that the books had been respected. In retrospect, I have never since lived in a community that functioned so smoothly in the absence of rules.

For me, Richmond House was a revelation. To discover a group of interesting, talented, cool twentysomethings who loved poetry, for god’s sakes, who got excited about sharing a new poem with friends--I couldn’t have made it up or dreamed of it if I had tried.

I simply didn’t know such people existed. And they were all excellent writers. I remember some of their poems to this day: a heartbreaker about Ebbets Field, an insightful villanelle on Guernica, the first sestina I ever saw, and a long poem in the style of Li Po, to name just a few. Even the graffiti was literary. My favorite was on the wall of the downstairs bathroom: “Nietzsche is Pietzsche” it said, in small, clear, unadorned print, as if it were a statement of obvious and irrefutable fact.

The parties, too, were informed by the arts. The Moveable Feast party, with differing hors d’oeuvres in every room (I tried my first olive and first oyster that night, although it’s hard now to believe I’d never had either in my 18 years . . . ); an intimate sherry party, where we read aloud Poe’s “Cask of Amotillado”; a Wizard of Oz party that I went to dressed as Dorothy with my boyfriend dressed as Toto. (Several of us later participated in making a film directed by a drama friend that was a spoof on The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, and Grapes of Wrath, if you can imagine that. To this day, I can’t watch Grapes of Wrath without giggling, a response that those around me invariably find disturbing).

Much happened that year both in and beyond the house: a disillusioning presidential election, Reagan was shot and Lennon assassinated, friendships formed and then strained under the pressure of Sophie Kerr Prize competition. At the end of the year, when the Prize winner was announced, and we learned it had gone to someone who didn’t live in Richmond House, someone who had writ-

ten a Philosophy thesis, we were stunned. We sat around all afternoon on the porch drinking beer, saying little.

But as we sat there, I think we all quietly began to realize that what had happened had been the best thing for all of us. Now no one had to be jealous or resentful of anyone else in our inner circle. It was all over. Everyone had lost. Everyone had won.

The next year, the house was torn down in the fall.

Most of the friends I’d made in Richmond House the year before had graduated and were gone. I couldn’t bring myself to watch the destruction. But later, after it was over, I walked down to the site. It was a gray, overcast day, fitting my mood.

As I approached the pile of rubble, it seemed too small to have ever been a house.

The back fire escape was still standing, and as I stood there looking at the remains, a few clouds parted and a shaft of sun shot through directly above the fire escape, making it look quite literally like a stairway to heaven. It seemed so perfect and so poi nt less — perfect as a symbol of the promise I’d felt in those first months in Richmond House, and pointless because how could I ever use it in a story? It was so cliché, and no one would believe me. Fortunately I had a Kodak Instamatic with me and snapped the shot, and I’m sending it with this essay. I’d never use such an image in a conclusion unless it really happened. I learned too much about writing at Richmond House to do that.

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The End of Something Peter Turchi ‘84

After doing his apprentice work on the windows of William Smith Hall, Eli Elliot was faced with a harder job, building a wooden house on what is now the southwestern corner of campus. At least that is the story they tell, for no one is exactly sure who is fully responsible for the two story structure. What people do agree on is that the house was built in honor of Dr. Richmond, a popular

interest in creative writing. They edited the Broadsides series and the Washington College Review, publications that have continued and, more importantly, with the help of Associate Professor of English Robert Day, they established a literary community of their own as they took up residence in the house. The Associated Writing Programs, a national organization, also had their offices there until

black doctor who was a leader of the black community in Chestertown.

Last Tuesday, Elliot’s work was brought crashing to the ground in the cold December morning. The house had not been in official use since last May, though a group of sculptors sponsored in part by the Maryland Arts Council lived there this fall. The house had served many purposes; when the Richmond property was acquired by the College in 1948, the building was divided into apartments which were then made available to faculty members. It was used as housing more or less reluctantly by the College because the second floor porch had sagged from the very beginning, and there were problems with meeting various fire codes. At one point a metal fire escape was erected at the back of the house.

In 1971 the building became the home of the Washington College Writers Union, a group of students who, in addition to studying literature, pursued a common

1979.

In recent times Richmond House had become the home of controversy; when the College announced that the house could no longer be used as student housing, the residents protested. They knew it was unsafe, and cold, but it was theirs, as much a symbol of things they cared for as it was a place where they lived.

But the house’s condition grew steadily worse. Pipes froze and burst, the ceilings began to collapse, and water poured down the walls of one of the first floor rooms.

They called the resulting puddle a miniature Walden Pond, but they knew the situation was bad. Maintenance could no longer keep the ceilings from falling and, as if to complete the residents’ bad luck, the house was broken into over the Christmas vacation.

The Writers Union offices have been moved into Spanish House, and its members now live in Dorchester, but it cannot be the same; the Writers Union was founded

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in Richmond House, and with it went that community’s sense of history. A few people who lived in the house, and a few more who hadn’t, visited the site as the piles of glass and splintered wood were loaded onto trucks and hauled away. Someone took a picture, and as it developed in her hand, the tall red fire escape came into focus, jutting up towards the dark December sky, where it dissolved into the brightness of the winter sun.

A few days earlier one of the last residents of the house came back to the Campus, and he also took pictures. The building was still standing, but it was barely Richmond House. There were no steps leading to the porch, there were not even remotely useable pieces of furniture, or bulletin boards, and upstairs, there were not even any wall.

So he did not take pictures of the inside; instead he aimed his camera through the windows, to the outside, to capture the views in a perspective from which they would never be seen again.

Years from now, Richmond House will be history; they will tell stories of how Allen Ginsberg slept there, of the luncheon with John Barth. Dr. Richmond and Eli Elliot and the building they shared may be forgotten, but the spirit of the people who lived there later will continue; more important than the way the house affected the structure of the stories they told and the poems they wrote was the way it affected the structure of their lives.

<But the house’s condition grew steadily worse. Pipes froze and burst, the ceilings began to collapse, and water poured down the walls of one of the first floor rooms. They called the resulting puddle a miniature Walden Pond, but they knew the situation was bad. Maintenance could no longer keep the ceilings from falling and, as if to complete the residents’ bad luck, the house was broken into over the Christmas vacation.>

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BOOK TWO: DORCHESTER HOUSE Dorchester Drama by Natalie Brown McKnight ‘84 37 The New Frontier by Sandy Hiortdahl

‘85 45

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dorchester drama NATALIE BROWN MCKNIGHT ‘84

Dorchester was not really a “house” in the same way that Richmond House was. It was a relatively new red brick dorm situated with two other identical dorms around a depressing little concrete courtyard with a dead bush in the middle. It had little character as a building. The only thing it shared in common with Richmond House, besides writers, was that it was in a state of disrepair. Almost from the moment it was built it showed signs of falling apart.

The windows were drafty, the central and sunken common room flooded every time it rained, and the walls between bedrooms were so thin you could accidentally punch a hole through them just by tacking up a poster. Richmond House at least took years to become decrepit. I was fortunate to live in both.

Dorchester housed writers—along with drama majors and a few students who were neither and wondered, unamused, how they’d ended up there. There wasn’t as much shared poetry as in Richmond House: no late night papers written by groups of writers shouting lines over each other to the one at the typewriter; no sestina contests. But there was lots of drama: there was late night writing and editing for the Elm in the suite next to

mine sophomore year; Broadsides and the WCR beingproduced; tea being brewed & cookies and cheesecake baked at all hours. We lived on sugar, fat, caffeine, and bad wine leftover from Sophie Kerr receptions (drinking age was 18 back then; or at least those entering college when I did got grandfathered in to legal drinking). Hard to say whether there was more tea, wine or fatty sweets:-.

I melted a teapot down to a leaden lump twice forgetting it was on when I left for class. My neighbor, the editor of the Elm, developed kidney stones from all the cheesecake I’d baked him. My suite by the end of sophomore year looked like a bar going out of business with empty and partially empty gallons of white and red cluttering every room (I organized the Sophie Kerr receptions that year and my senior year, and my reward was inheriting the spoils).

I hosted the worst party of my life at Dorchester-a double surprise birthday party that ended with both birthday boys in the hospital and a lot of broken glass and drops of blood in the Dorchester common room. I’d like to think the hospital visits had nothing to do with me—just an unfortunate side consequence of a perfectly

<Dorchester housed writers—along with drama majors and a few students who were neither and wondered, unamused, how they’d ended up there.>

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innocent party. But I did bake the cake, and I did provide the cheap wine. The sturm und drang—well, that just came with the place. I’ve sworn off surprise parties ever since.

When I returned to Dorchester my senior year after studying at Manchester College, Oxford, I was in the same suite but with a bigger room and new roommates, who became two of my closest friends and later bridesmaids. Senior year witnessed the same slew of baking and tea brewing, another melted kettle, and more wine.

One of my roommates that year preferred shots over wine, and when she’d had a few too many would head out to climb the watertower, the unofficial icon for writers at WC. Why was the watertower so important to us? Was it because it cast dark, gothic-like shadows on the lawn? Because it stood out, as we hoped to do someday? Because it was dangerous? Because a freshman once wrote a poem about it called “The Mancake,” which became legendary among Writer’s Union folk for its presentation of the strange temptation to climb the tower and the possible consequences? All of the above?

For whatever reason, when my roommate got drunk, off she’d go to climb, and being a decent friend, I’d go right up after her to bring her down—a frightening task when both have been drinking and both have succumbed, mid-ladder, to vertigo. In retrospect, we should both have been dead: Mancakes.

Writers from Dorchester won the Sophie Kerr prize both years I lived there, which was not what happened when I lived in Richmond House, as my previous essay in this collection attests. Both years conflicts and paranoia festered as the prize announcement approached. By my senior year I decided to write a murder mystery based on the competition for the prize, but I never did. Perhaps I prefer to remember the great readings the Kerr money supported. Or maybe mystery is just the wrong genre for these tales. One could build a very successful long-running sitcom on the community of creative, sometimes self-destructive eccentrics that the 2nd literary non-house brought together. The Office goes to college. Or a drama—Game of Poems, perhaps?

Maybe that’s what I’ll do next . . .

But now it is she who pauses, As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.

A stillness greatens, in which The whole house seems to be thinking, And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor Of strokes, and again is silent. ~Richard Wilbur, “The Writer”

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“Triple Feature,” cover of Broadside by Peter Turchi ‘82, followed by the 3 poems printed inside.

(Broadsides Vol. 1, No. 12, Feburary 3, 1982)

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THE NEW FRONTIER SANDY hiortdahl ‘85

In the 1980’s those days, Washington College was a smaller institution than it is today, less brick, less land, fewer bodies, with the Hill Dorms (the fraternity houses), Hodson Hall (our cafeteria) and Miller Library being at the very heart of it. Most of the nightlife centered there as well. In fact, the college was so centrally configured that what were then called the “New” dorms—Dorchester, Talbot, and Cecil--sat at what seemed the “far edge” of campus. Beyond them stretched fields with brambles and small trees all the way to Speer Road.

So the New Dorms had a frontier-type allure, and in my pre-freshman tour with Pete Turchi (Sophie Kerr Prize Winner, 1982) he leaned over and whispered, “They thought it best to put all of us creative types way out here.” He went on to explain how Talbot contained primarily artists and musicians, Cecil was full of drama majors, and Dorchester held the writers, more or less.

To me, it seemed idyllic to be “way on the edge,” on the outermost of Saturn’s rings.

That, and there was the advantage of being able to have a single room, even as a sophomore. Granted, the rooms were tiny: the bed placed under the window took up one whole wall, but for “creative types” it made a difference. I didn’t want to have to explain to a roommate I’d be up working on a novel at four a.m., or that my Elegy to Beethoven required me to listen to the Ninth Symphony forty-eight times in a row.

As Turchi said, the administration had offered its creative types the newest buildings on campus, inner and outer balconies and a kitchenette for each suite, an impressive central area with two-story windows and a

working fireplace, ample parking—but there was also the sense of them saying to us “Stay on your side of the road.” As the 1980’s left behind the crazy 1970’s, it seemed to go without saying that we’d be smoking dope and holding séances and making moonshine in the bathtubs, but all would be well if we “kept it over there.”

And while the isolation did allow freedom of all sorts, absolutely necessary for creative types, we found ways to bring the campus community “over the road” for visitations. Bar none, the dramaturges gave the best parties, cast parties that became campus wide, and in the morning most of the regular students were back in the safety of Kent, Somerset, and Queen Anne’s. The artists held informal shows and had tie-dyed T-shirt afternoons to which everyone was invited while the musicians jammed. We writers hosted readings and one-act plays utilizing our indoor balconies; when visiting dignitaries from the writing world came to campus, we were often given a head’s-up from Bob Day (who lived next door at the time) that they wanted to see our dorm and so if we’d please make it look less like an insane asylum, he’d appreciate it. There was more than a little ironic laughter when the poet Donald Justice claimed we seemed “entirely too normal” to be writers.

We were not normal. And our collective imagination created more than its share of strange magic in Dorchester. One day in particular stands out for me, a cold, fall afternoon with the large windows showing yellow maple leaves sailing by in ones and twos. A fellow poet from a downstairs suite was working on a sestina while several of the guys from upstairs tried to get a fire going. I

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asked the poet what she was working on and she wrinkled her nose and replied that she’d heard I was a witch.

I should’ve let it go, but the trickster in me couldn’t help playing with her, “I’m not a witch, I’m a genie,” I said, “Make a wish.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Anything,” I said, “Ask away.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“Test it out, then.” By now the fireplace guys had the fire going and were grinning at us.

“Test it?”

“Sure. Make a small wish, anything you want.” My plan was to show how gullible she was, to see if she’d continue this game.

“Well, I’m hungry but I don’t have money for the Lance machine.” It sat under the stairwell to our left.

“Easy enough,” I said, “You go and pick out what you want. I’ve taken care of it.”

She smirked again, “Just like that, huh? You’ve taken care of it.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Go pull whatever knob you like and it’s on me.”

“Without money.”

“Right. You want Cheese Nips, you got it.”

“What if I want the Choc-o-Cookies?”

“Sure. Choose the cookies. Whatever you want.” I sat up as she rose, eager to tease her once she pulled the knob and showed her gullibility. With her back to us, I winked at the fireplace guys as if to say ‘watch this poet make a fool of herself.’

She went up to the machine, looked back over her shoulder. The wind blew hard against the side of the building, blew down the chimney a bit so a slight curl of smoke rose about us. “Any one I want?”

“Yep. Go for it.” I planned to tell her, once it didn’t work, that she’d have to try a different one, just so I could see how many times she’d try it before she got the joke was on her.

But that’s not how it happened. She pulled the knob for the Choc-o-Cookies, the knob came out as it would’ve if she’d put money in, and the cookies clunked down into the receptacle. I was as stunned, maybe more stunned, than she was. “Witch!” she screamed.

“No,” I said, “I didn’t—I’m not—I was kidding, for Christ’s sake!”

“How did you make that happen?” she demanded.

“I didn’t. I didn’t make it happen. I was trying to see if you’d play along.”

“The cookies came out. They’re right there, in the

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bottom. I didn’t put money in.”

“I don’t know,” I said, and it was the truth.

“You put the money in already,” she said, “That’s what happened. Before I came out here.”

It didn’t seem to matter to her that she’d been there before me or that the Lance machine had been her idea to begin with. I couldn’t explain it, had not been near the machine.

Similar incidents occurred. Fires would start in the fireplace when no one was around, textbooks would disappear from one suite and appear on the couch of another, seemingly by themselves. I know people will say it was a collection of coincidences and practical jokes, but I’m inclined to believe from my experiences there that at least some of it was the result of some non-violent and creative poltergeist activity.

In the day to day, we struggled with our writing and accepted the magic as part of our reality, of our weird little village of creative types. We didn’t always understand the specific neuroses of artists and piano maestros and the leading-role stars of a production, but we knew what it meant to put ourselves on the line with art, to be vulnerable or blocked or, yes, insane. Indeed, it was a comfort to hear the other arts had their own, distinct insanities. We would gather outside sometimes, at the nexus of the dorms, and sit on the brick squares there to commiserate. To me, at those times out on the new frontier it was like like the circling of the wagons. Inside, there was us and art and magic. Outside, the world.

BOOK THREE: O’NEILL HOUSE The Ghost of O’Neill House Past by Sandy Hiortdahl ‘85 45 Cats by Michael Rudin ‘88 47 The Goose by Elizabeth Frankie Rollins ‘90 55 Postcript by Paul Henderson ‘87 57 An Affair To Remember by Thom Hawkins ‘98 58

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Front porch at Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neill Literary House. (photo credit: Jim Fragomeni)

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the ghost of o’neill house past SANDY hiortdahl ‘85

In the year of its inception, the O’Neill Literary House was a cold place, and by “cold” I mean that a hard frost sometimes formed on the inside of our bedroom windows that first semester as winter came on.

All the kinks of conversion to dorm hadn’t been worked out, exactly, but we settled into making it like home in our own ways. My little room on the third floor faced Washington Avenue, with a view of Spanish House (now gone), Kent House, and the crosswalk. It was pleasant to sit at the window writing away while watching Chestertown mosey by. My room’s other window looked down on Ermon Foster’s yard. Mr. Foster, the Registrar then, had been a prodigious and artistic gardener. As autumn slid toward winter, a profusion of purple and orange mums stood tall over a humble line of pumpkins, the curling vines sneaking toward our yard.

On any given day, the guys on the second floor would be playing Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd, while below on the first floor, the kitchen staff might be preparing for a lunchtime talk or reading. As the cold intensified, Bob Day stacked cordwood beside our outside steps and we’d make a fire as the portrait of Virginia Woolf looked down on us, as though doubtful. We’d talk about our writing or debate Faulkner vs. Hemingway. As that first semester drew down on us with its fit of papers and tests, it seemed to us the House wanted a proper holiday christening.

“Christmas Party,” I said, having been nominated to stand in the doorway of Bob Day’s central first floor office, “We want a Christmas Party.”

He frowned and then sighed. “No one has time, this part of the semester. That’s why there aren’t any real winter holiday parties on campus. No one will come.”

“They’ll come,” I said, “You know, if…”

He squinted. “If what?”

“If, you know, we have the right Christmas accoutrements. Since, as you say, no one else is having such an event, it ought to be pretty popular.” I was making it up as I went along. As student writers, we were not the most well-known people on campus: in fact, all people really knew of the place in 1984 was that “somewhere on the edge of campus was a house without heat and that’s where they’d put all those crazy writer types who used to live in Dorchester.”

Bob cocked his head and looked wary. “Accoutrements?”

“You know, the usual. Holiday stuff.”

“Which ‘stuff’ exactly?”

“Egg nog? A nice tree? Some decorations. Punch.

And snow, if you can manage it. Picture this,” I said.

“Bennett Lamond intoning parts of A Christmas Carol, President Cater and Libby sharing some punch in front of a crackling fire, our tree decorated with little faux books and tiny feather pens. It’ll put us on the campus map once and for all.”

“I don’t think so,” he said, and went back to his paperwork.

The next day, the campus maintenance fellows knocked on the front door and when I opened it, Spike said, “Here you go,” and he and Harry walked in toting

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between them a stainless steel tub containing a live Christmas tree about five feet tall, “Where do you want it?”

“Is this for us?” I asked.

“For a party, per Professor Day. He said you needed it right away. Here it is.”

We ordered food and plates, sent out campus wide invitations, asked the local elementary school to come up with some carolers, and spent the next few days decorating from old boxes of Yuletide frippery someone had

On the evening of the party, we set up everything and then waited. And then we waited more. The froth on top of the egg nog drooped a bit. We inhabitants of the house gathered around the fire and gave each other dubious looks for the next half an hour. Our carolers were the first to arrive, but as they had no one to carol to, we gave them each a cookie and had them start stringing another string of popcorn garland. And Bob shook his head.

But then it happened, as though by magic: people arrived in groups of four or five, students, staff, faculty, so many people that our carolers had to line themselves up on the stairway that led up from the front door. As they started in on “The First Noel,” our house filled to overflowing, people who at the last minute had put their studies and grading aside to welcome in the holiday. The back yard filled with people as well.

Within ten minutes, the egg nog was gone. Within half an hour, the second batch was gone. We sent the guys out for more supplies, cheese and cookies and of course eggs and cream and more Southern Bob Day in his office at O’Neill Literary House. (photo credit: Jim Fragomeni) Comfort. Bennett read from A Christmas Carol, Nancy Tatum found in the Drama Department. It certainly looked like from Twelfth Night, and everyone joined in on a rousing a Christmas party and then, in the interest of good unity version of Jingle Bells. It grew so warm in the house that and good cheer, we decorated for Kwanzaa and Hanukwe had to open the windows. kah as well.

It was the first holiday of a place which stood in a “The house looks great and we will have a fine good long tradition of former lit houses. Just as we’d emerged time,” I told Bob, standing in his office doorway again, from the spirits of the student writers of Christmases “even if, you know, not that many show up.” and holidays past, who’d been in Richmond House and “No one will show up,” he said, and went back to then Dorchester. We of the present would cast our spirits grading. forward to the student writers to come.

“But you got us a tree,” I said.

When I’m in town for a visit, driving past, I cast a “I like to recognize stubbornness,” he said. “And the glance in the direction of the lit house. Two sturdy pines lawn needs a good tree or two.” stand tall and somber in the front lawn (for indeed, the following year a second tree joined ours) and I feel the We decided on my family’s Norwegian egg nog as the spirts surround me. centerpiece drink. That’s what my father always called it, though clearly it’s an Americanized hybrid since its main ingredient, next to eggs, is Southern Comfort.

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cats

michael rudin ‘88

Fuzzy slippers and a bathrobe As I rounded the back of Tony’s house, he stopped working, placed his hands over the top of the rake and set his chin on them. When I was close enough for him to hear me, I stopped on the lawn and, fanning out my coat with my hands in the pockets, yelled, “What the hell is this? Tony? Raking the yard? What the hell? “ He grinned as I walked up to him. “You’re going to get blisters. How come you didn’t hire anyone this year?”

“I had to get out of the goddamned house,” he said, making a half-hearted effort to gather three leaves caught under a small rock near my feet.

“You’ll ruin your clothes. You might get mud on them.

What good is a pair of stained Sergio’s?”

He shrugged and continued raking.

“God, Tony, those look a little tight. Even for you. Did your balls fall off last night?”

“I’m trying to kill myself.”

An upstairs window opened. “Yooooooo-hoooo.

Tooooonyy.”

We looked up and saw a shaved bare leg with a fuzzy green slipper appear from inside the house.

“What the hell?”

“Have you got any cigarettes on you?”

“Sure,” I said passing him a pack. “I thought you quit smoking.”

“I just took it up again.” He fished one out with two fingers and crumpled up the pack. “Sorry to take your last one.” He threw the pack on a small pile of twigs, acorns, and leaves.

“That’s all right.” I handed him my lighter. As he lit the cigarette, the girl called to him again.

“Tony! Honey. Hi honey.” Tony squinted and looked up towards the roof and I followed his gaze. She was standing on the apex of the garage roof.

“Oh Christ,” Tony mumbled through his pursed lips, exhaling through his nose.

Besides the green slippers, she was wearing a yellow bathrobe, and green and yellow ribbons held her dirty blond hair in two tails, one on each side of her head.

“Get off the roof you idiot.”

“Yoo hoohoo honey.” She stuck her hand straight out in front of her and waved and shook her hips.

“Get down from there.” He turned to me.

“Tony. Tony. Time for breakfast honey.” She pulled a covered glass out of her bathrobe pocket, ripped off the lid, and flung it into the air. With her free hand, she reached into other pocket, pulled out a piece of celery, and stuck it into the glass.

“I don’t like Sunday mornings.”

I nodded, still watching her. She bent over from the waist, placed the glass between her toes, stood erect, untied her robe, and shook her shoulders until it fell from her body. She scooped up her glass and faced the street.

“Oh my God.” He threw his cigarette down and ground it into the dirt with the heel of his boot.

“Hi there. Hi. How are you today?” She screamed.

Toney and I stared at each other. We looked down the side of the house and saw a paper boy racing down the sidewalk on his bike, away from the house, glancing over his shoulder at the girl on the roof.

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I smiled. Tony looked from the paper boy to the roof.

She was waving at the boy. “Bye bye little newspaper boy.

Have a nice day.”

“Would you get off the goddamned roof? You’re scaring everybody.”

She turned around carefully to face us, sipping her drink, her free arm outstretched and slightly bent for balance. “Fuck you.” She staggered and regained her stance.

We cringed.

“She looks like a cheap Statue of Liberty up there,” Tony comments. “Well, I’ve got to go.”

He dropped the rake ad started for the back door. I grabbed his arm. “I think we should go to the Blue House,” I said, nodding to the girl on the roof. “What do you think?”

I let go of him and he rested his weight on one leg and scratched his head. “Yeah, How about this Thursday?”

“Good enough. I’ll get in touch with Mally and K.C.” “Right,” he said, backing away from me. He pointed his thumb back over his shoulder and said, “I’ve really got to go. Thursday.”

I passed in front of the house and the girl shouted to me and waved. “Hi there. Hi. Have a nice day.” I stopped and turned around. I looked up and saw two arms reach around her waist, grab her, and pull her down the off the top of the roof. She dropped her glass. It shattered and some of the pieces slid down and clinked in the gutter.

Smoking clinic and bubble bath “Mally?”

“Up here.”

I leaped up the stairs to the third floor and pushed open the door. Heather was sitting up on the bed, holding a pen in her left hand and a cigarette in the other, contemplating what she was going to write on the pad that rested on her lap. Mally, arms and face spattered with paint, was standing on a drop cloth among spattered piles of crumpled-up sheets of paper. He was painting the room a yellow color that reminded me of the cinderblock walls of a hospital children’s ward.

“You missed a spot,” I said, pointing with my hand still in the pocket of my overcoat. It was an odd-shaped spot: two triangles that looked like mountains, tilted up and to the left.

“I know,’’ he replied, winking at me.

I shrugged. “Hi Heather.”

Heather forced back a quick smile before she bent her

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head over the note pad, her hair falling forward over her knees, concealing her face. Her elbows vibrated as she scrawled.

I turned back toward Mally. “This is a really gross color.”

“Yeah? I kind of like it.” He smiled.

Heather savagely ripped the page out of the pad, crumpled it up in one hand and threw it at Mally. It bounced off his left shoulder, hit the wall, and mingled with the other balls of paper surrounding Mally’s feet.

He dipped his brush in the can of paint he was holding, wiped it on the side of the can, and continued painting.

Heather huffed a sigh, crinkled her empty cigarette pack and threw it at Mally. He flinched as it struck him on the back. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stormed out of the room.

Aren’t you going to read the note?”

“No. You can, if you want to.”

As I bent down to retrieve it from the pile, I noticed he had missed a spot near the bottom of the wall. “You missed another spot down here.”

“I know.”

I ironed out the piece of paper with my palms: “Get rid of him and come over here and fuck me!!!”

I help the note in front of Mally’s face. “What the hell is this?”

“She’s been here too long. I’ve got stuff to do. I wish she’d go back to Houston, for Christ’s sake.”

“I thought you wanted her to come up for a visit.”

“I did. But I thought she was going home Monday morning. Evidently she’s made other plans. I can’t take it.”

“How long does she plan to stay?”

“Maybe she’ll leave Friday. At least that’s what she said. Her smoke is choking me. My whole house smells like a night club ceiling.”

I put away the matches I had dug out of my coast and jammed my cigarette behind my ear.

“I thought you loved her.”

“I do, I think. Shit. She’s too intense about things. She won’t back off. I don’t have time for this crap. Especially now—I want to do more work on this goddamned house before winter. But for the past four days, every time I get home from work, she practically rapes me in the hallway.”

Heather paced back into the room with a lit cigarette in one hand and tumbler of whiskey and ice and a pack of cigarettes in the other. Mally winked at me. She set her drink and cigarettes on the table by the bed, and sat down

hard on the bed facing us, arms crossed, cigarette stuck between her lips, glaring at me.

I nudged Mally with my hand, stuck in my coat pocket, and said, “Well anyway, Tony and K.C. and I are going to the Blue House on Thursday night. Want to come?”

He set his paint can on the floor and laid the brush on the rim. “Sure.”

Heather shrieked, stuffed her cigarette in the ashtray, grabbed her drink, and ran out of the room. Mally shrugged, “Don’t worry about it.” He stepped back from the walls and spread his arms. “What do you think of my paint job?”

I walked over and stood next to him. The color would make anyone sick, I thought. I noticed that he had missed more than the two spots I had already pointed out. In block letters that took up the entire wall, side to side and floor to ceiling, were the words QUIT SMOKING. “Nice,” I said.

“Yeah, I like it.” He grinned.

“The Blue House. Drinks and music. No sick-colored subliminal messages painted on the walls. I’ll see you Thursday.”

I passed Heather at the bottom of the stairs. She was taping notes with arrows on the walls pointing to the bathroom, gripping a box of bubble bath between her teeth.

Writing it off The only lights on were in the basement. I knew instantly what K.C. was doing. As I plowed through the brown leaves on the walk to the front door, I pictured him sitting at his desk: his long skinny body hunched over his typewriter, right and left index fingers alternately flicking straight up in the air before punching a key; a half-empty bottle of tequila sitting to the left of his typewriter, with a piece of salt rock and a plastic lemon; working under the light provided by a single bare 40 watt bulb positioned on the wall four feet above the desk.

I quietly opened the screen door on the front porch and walked down the hallway to the basement stairs. As I passed the bedroom door, I could see a dim flickering light. I pushed the door open. Two candles on the night table dripped wax onto a magazine. As my eye adjusted, I discerned a woman in bed, wrists locked in two pairs of handcuffs, flat on her back, covered by a sheet, snoring loudly.

I closed the door and descended to the basement.

K.C., cradling a bottle of tequila in the crook of his left arm, turned in his chair as I trotted down the stairs.

“What are you doing K.C.?”

“Working. Writing” He turned back to his desk.

“What are you writing?” I picked my way through stacks of old newspapers tied with string, reams of cellophane-encased typing paper, balls of paper that had been ripped from the typewriter boxes full of manila folders. I sat down on a two-drawer file cabinet next to the desk.

“I’m writing a story.”

“What’s it about?” I reached over and eased the bottle out of his arm.

“Oh shit,” he sighed, sinking back into the chair. “It’s a purge story, I guess. About my last girlfriend.”

“Christ, K.C., you haven’t had a relationship in six years.”

“I can’t get it off my mind. It’s driving me nuts.”

“Driving you nuts?” I pulled cigarette out of my shirt pocket. “What about the girl that’s handcuffed to your bed?”

“I can’t get this last affair out of my mind. Don’t smoke down here; this whole place will go up in flames.”

I put the cigarette back in my pocket and took a pull off the bottle. “You seem to be doing all right now,” I said, waving the bottle towards the ceiling. I hand the bottle back to him.

“Uh-uh. I couldn’t—“ “Do you mean to tell me that you got that girl all the way into your house, into your bed, handcuffed her, and then you couldn’t—“ He nodded.

“Shit.”

“That’s why I’m down here,” he said, taking several gulps of liquor and scooping up the chunk of sale and lemon juice. “I’m trying to get it out of my system.” He looked at the items he held in his hand and set them back on the desk.

“Why don’t you go back upstairs and get it out of your system?”

He slammed his feet on the floor and pounded the typewriter with both of his fists. “I tried that already!”

I took another drink and nudged his shoulder with the bottle. He accepted it and drank. Some of the tequila dribbled out from between his lips.

“I should go. I hope it works out. Blue House on Thursday, right?”

He nodded once.

As I closed the door to the basement, I heard K.C.

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beating the keys. I passed through the hallway and heard the girl rustling the sheets. I opened the door.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi. Would unlock these for me? The key is on the table.”

“Not the most comfortable way to sleep, is it?” I asked, inserting the key into the lock.

“No,” she answered, sitting up and drawing the sheet around her. “Is he down in the basement again?”

“How did you know that?” I sat down on the side of the bed.

“It happened the last time. He said he’d be right back. He left me all night tied over the arm of the chair in the living room.”

“Why did you see him again?”

“I like him.”

“You don’t mind when he leaves you like this?”

“He’s got a problem he needs to work out. He didn’t do this to hurt me.”

The house was quiet. “I think he’s done,” she said, locking her left hand in one of the handcuffs. She held her free wrist out to me. “Would you?”

I walked around the bed and closed the metal around her wrist.

“Thanks.” She smiled and winked at me, wriggling herself back under the sheet.

“Sure,” I answered. “Good night.”

I pushed open the screen door just enough to slip through and held it until it rested in the door frame.

I shoved my fists deep in the pockets of my overcoat and kicked the leaves as I walked home.

Marie’s toaster I hung my overcoat on one of the wooden pegs just inside the kitchen door.

“Mrs. Cuddy? I’m home, Mrs. Cuddy.”

No response. I became aware of the phone cord when it grated around the door frame, stretching into the living room. A hand with a half-empty glass of wine and a burning cigarette floated in circles in the doorway. A shriek broke the silence.

“Aahh! You’re kidding. You’re kidding, right?

Oh honey, tell me you’re kidding.” A pause. “I don’t believe it! God, I don’t believe it.”

The glass of wine shook violently for a moment, ashes drifting to the floor, and the hand withdrew from my view. I opened the refrigerator and groped

inside for a beer. The cat that she insisted on having stared at me from next to its dish near the side of the refrigerator. After opening a can of cat food, I spooned it into a weighted plastic dish on the floor and quickly sipped beer. I watched the cat eat, its head bobbing up and down, and listened to the muffled sounds of Mrs. Cuddy in the next room.

I watched the cat again for a moment, then turned and gazed out the window, thinking—as I often did—of how to get rid of it: poison in its food; suffocation with a pillow case; stew; microwave. The cat stared at me from its crouched eating position on the floor.

I wished that my wife had taken the damn thing with her.

The phone cord dipped and bobbed, and Mrs. Cuddy stood before me.

“He-loo Nathan. How was your day?”

“O.K. Mrs. Cuddy. Who were you talking to?”

“Oh Marie Palest. You don’t know her. She was telling me about the couple next to door to her. Seems that last night they got into a big fight about something or other. Marie said she heard things breaking half the night.”

“No kidding,” I said, gulping my beer.

“But what clinched it for her was when she heard a loud crash, like glass, from outside. Well, when she went outside in her bathrobe the next morning, she saw a broken window in their house.”

“Too bad,” I nodded.

“That’s not it,” she replied, waving her palm in front of me. “When she got around to the side of the house, what do you think she saw?”

“Ahhh,” I started, reaching in the fridge for another beer.

“Could you get that bottle of wine, too, while you’re at it?”

I got the bottle and set it on the counter in front of her, pried the cap off my beer, and rubbed my chin while staring at the ceiling. “She saw…two women caught in the throes of fornication.”

“Nathan!”

“Come on Mrs. Cuddy. You’re no novice in the art of—“ She blushed as she poured herself another glass. I loved it.

“I know, Nathan, but there is some amount of decorum one must—“ “O.K. What did she find?”

“She found a toaster. And a stiff cat not more than two feet away from it.”

I laughed.

“It’s not funny. Honestly, I don’t understand you sometimes.”

“My wife didn’t either. That’s why you’re a perfect babysitter.”

“Well, thank you. Jenny’s asleep. She was a doll today, really.”

“She threw up on the carpet again, didn’t she?”

Mrs. Cuddy hesitated, then looking at the floor said a quick “Yes” and sipped her wine.

I nodded again and poured the rest of my beer into a glass. “It’s O.K.” “How did you know?”

“Jenny’s always a doll when she throws up on the carpet.”

“Oh. Well. It’s next to the rocking chair.”

Mrs. Cuddy didn’t mind watching Jenny as long as she didn’t have to deal with the realities of human functions.

“I would’ve cleaned it up,” she began, as if reading my mind. “If I hadn’t already had eight children. “It’s all right, Mrs. Cuddy. How many hours do I owe you?”

“Six.” “O.K. I’m writing it down. See? Right here. November fifth. Mrs. Cuddy. Six hours.”

“Thank you, Nathan. She really is a sweet child…”

“No problem, Mrs. Cuddy. You can go now.”

“Thanks Nathan. See you later.”

She drained her glass, picked up the bottle, and walked out, bumping her ample hip against the door frame, shutting the door quietly behind her. Mrs. Cuddy was convenient—she lived in an apartment across the street—but rather inefficient. Plus she often call called friends out-of-state. But she knew children, especially babies. I finished my beer, set the glass in the sink, and got another. After throwing the cap on the counter with the others, I walked through the living room down the he hall to Jenny’s room. I pushed the door open all the way to make sure she hadn’t caught her head between the bars of her crib. She had a small head, but a rather long chin.

Like her mother. I loved her anyway.

She was lying on her stomach, breathing quickly. I listened for a moment, watching her tiny back move slightly up and down. I went into the bathroom, grabbed a cloth and cleaned up the mess near the rocking chair in the living room.

As I walked into the kitchen, I stepped into a fresh pile of puke in the doorway, compliments of the damn

cat. I cleaned that mess, too, and threw the soiled cloths away and went to bed.

Bless the bartender Tony, who lagged behind us in the lobby, approached the table, stripping the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes.

How are things going with you, Mally?” he asked, sitting down.

“Christ, Toney. One day I was painting and when I came down she had all these signs taped to the walls with these fucking arrows pointing to the bathroom. I couldn’t get the tape off the walls without ruining the goddamn paint. I’ve just about had it.” He winked at me.

“Mally’s having a hell of a time trying to get his place back together,” I added.

“So did you finally get her out?”

“I didn’t get her out so much as she finally had to go back to Texas. But she promised she’d be back in a week or so.”

“Fuck. Why don’t you just tell her?”

“Funny, Tony. I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

“Right,” he punctuated. “So what’s up with the writer?”

“Leave me alone, Tony,” K.C. said, dropping his head into his hands on the table.

“What’s with him?” Tony asked me, jabbing his thumb in K.C.’s direction.

“He’s struggling with his material,” I answered.

“Leave him alone. It’ll come. Eventually. He hasn’t missed a deadline yet.”

“All right. Then how about you?”

“I thought of a new way to get rid of the cat. Glue its mouth shut and it’ll choke on its own puke.”

“It’s still throwing up?” Mally asked. “Christ, Nathan, maybe you ought to take it to a vet or something.”

“I know, I know. I can’t seem to find the time. Just thinking about struggling with the thing all the way to the vet gives me the creeps. Give me a cigarette, Tony.”

Tony threw the pack across the table. I withdrew a cigarette, placed it between my lips and lit it. When I exhaled, the smoke drifted in front of Mally’s face.

“Sorry about that Mally.”

A waiter approached the table.

“Hey, look who’s working tonight. Lenny,” Tony said. “”Hi guys. How is everybody? The usual?”

“Mally. Lenny’s grinning, Mally. He’s got the lip

51

curled and he’s grinning.”

“Yes,” Mally studied Lenny’s face. “You’re right.

Come Lenny, spill it. What’s the action?”

“I hate it when you guys do this to me,” Lenny replied, fumbling with his bar rag.

“Don’t answer them, Lenny,” I said. “Don’t let these idiots snag you again.”

“Aw, what the hell. Thanks just the same, Nathan.

They’re just one-nighters anyway. It doesn’t matter.”

“Yea, but it reflects badly on you. You’re being treated no better than a four-year-old sired by a stud stallion.”

“Here’s the deal,” Lenny continued, passing my comment with a wave of his hand. “The one at the end of the bar. White dress with the red hat. A possible. The two Swedes at the table near the door.

Cousins. Both of them are definites. I’ve got their numbers right here.”

Lenny pulled a bar check out of his pocket.

“Mally, I’ll take you five to one he gets the red hat.

That dress doesn’t fool me.”

“Do me proud, Lenny,” Tony said. “Sweet talk that pretentious bitch all the way to your mattress and drive it into her until you pop that godddamn hat off her fucking head.”

“Right. If I take off my tie, it’s the one at the bar.

Be back in a minute with your drinks.”

“I wish you guys wouldn’t do that.”

“They’re only women, and one-nighters at that,” Tony defended himself.

“Come on, Nathan. It’s all in fun. If Lenny really minded, he’d tell us. How’s Jenny, by the way?”

“She’s all right. She’ll be a killer when she’s older, as long as she doesn’t develop a mouth like her mother has.”

Lenny returned with a tray. He circled the table: Tony received a tumbler filled to the brim with whiskey; K.C., tequila with a big slice of lemon; Mally and I each got mugs and a pitcher of beer.

Just let your hands fly, gentlemen, when you’re ready for another. By the way, Mally, I think you may be out of luck, tonight anyway. When I asked her to pay for her drink, she gave me a twenty and told me to keep the change.”

“Holy shit! You’re kidding me, right? Is there no decency left in this world?”

Lenny shrugged, as if to say, “Can I help it?” and walked away. I poured for Mally and me. K.C. hadn’t

lifted his head since he dumped it into hands when we first sat down.

Tony wiped the whiskey off his chin after gulping half his glass and nudged K.C. in the ribs with his thumb.

“Hey. Writer. Drink’s here. Cheer up.”

K.C. lifted his head carefully, as if not quite sure his neck could sustain the weight. He sighed heavily, and we stared, waiting for him to speak. He pushed the lemon wedge beneath the ice in his drink with his middle finger.

“I need to go to the cabin.”

The cabin was a simple frame house that the four of us had bought years ago, shortly after college. Our reasoning for this purchase was rather simple, if not completely idealistic: it was a place for us to go to when one of us needed it. Alone. The deal included the condition that if one wanted to go, the others would pay for the transportation. The idea was that it would be something any one of us could fall back on.

A security.

“So something is up with the writer,” Tony remarked in a tone containing a certain amount of sincerity. “What’s the problem?”

K.C. took a sip of his drink. “I’m beginning to think like the guy who, when introduced to a woman, refuses to shake her hand because he knows that they will a few drinks, go home. Have sex, have more sex, fight about something either significant or trivial, and break up. So why bother?”

“Every woman’s a different experience,” Mally commented, draining his mug. I held mine between us and we clinked glasses. He filled them up again, “I just need to think for a while.”

“Sounds fair to me,” I stated. “Gentlemen, dig.

And dig deep.”

The three of us slid forward in our chairs and pulled out our wallets. I threw three twenties on top of the bills that Mally and Tony had already placed in front of K.C. K.C. collected the money as though performing a task that he was not enthusiastic about, but which was require of him.

Tony drained his glass and waved his hand toward the bar while lighting another cigarette. I looked over to the bar and saw Lenny nod, then mouth words to another waiter.

The other waiter approached the table with a complete round of drinks. As he distributed the glasses

and pitcher, Mally nodded towards Tony.

“So Tony. What’s happening with you?”

“He’s doing his own yard work,” I interjected.

Mally quickly turned his head and face me with unblinking wide eyes.

“What?”

I nodded and tilted my nose toward Tony, to leave whatever explanation there was to him.

“She’s driving me to it. Flashing my neighbors from the roof. She even got the damn paper boy.

A little raking is good therapy,” he said, slugging another half glass of whiskey. “Christ Mally. Don’t look so surprised—“ “But Tony, you’ll get blisters on your hands.

Maybe even dirt.”

K.C. had been looking into his drink, and now I could see that he was grinning under his beard. I nudged him.

“What the hell’s on your mind, K.C.?”

“Tony,” K.C. said looking up. “Why don’t you handcuff her to the bed? Then you won’t have to worry about her doing that shit.”

K.C. finished his drink and waved his hand in the air. Tony rubbed his chin for a moment, turning the idea over in his mind, then gulped his drink. He looked at K.C. A grin began to form on Tony’s face.

They clinked glasses.

“You know, K.C., if you wouldn’t mind it too much, I think I might like to go up to the cabin with you. It’s big enough for the two of us, don’t you think?”

“Sure thing.” K.C. reached into his pocket and out his wallet. “Here’s your money back.”

Mally and I threw more bills on the table, and Tony scooped them up and shoved them in his pocket.

“Here’s to both of you,” Mally said, filling up our glasses with the last of the pitcher a waving to Lenny at the bar. Lenny brought more drinks to the table.

“Everything all right?”

“Everything’s great, Lenny,” K.C. answered.

“Tony and I are going up to the cabin for some relaxation.”

Lenny nodded.

“Any change yet?” Tony inquired.

“No, nothing yet. I’ll let you know.” He walked away, bar rag along over his shoulder, scribbling on his check pad.

We sat quietly, looking at each other, the lady in

the white dress at the bar, the Swedish cousins, our drinks. I took a large swig and set the mug back on the table carefully. The other three watched me because I was the only one doing something. I caught their gazes and matched them. We all stared at the center of the table.

I thought about Jenny and the cat and Mrs. Cuddy.

Then the cat some more and how much it hated me. I think: that’s why my wife refused to take it with her; she left it to hate me in her absence.

“Fuck her.” I said under my breath.

“What’s that, Nathan?” Mally asked.

I looked and they were all watching me. Simultaneously, we all drank.

“Fuck her for leaving me with that damn cat,” I finished my beer and poured another one. “She did it for a reason. She left it behind because she knew we hated each other.”

We fell silent again and drank. After we finished that round, Lenny came with another, put them around the table, and left. K.C. who had been pushing the ice cubes around in his glass, suddenly stopped what he was doing, drank the entire glass and set it down, blowing air through his open mouth. He beamed at me.

“Why don’t you mail it to her?” he asked.

“You can’t send a cat through the mail.”

“Why not? Just throw some newspapers in there, a little food. Use a heavy type of box to muffle the noise—who’s going to know?”

Tony joined in, “And don’t put a return address on it. Problem solved.”

I looked at Mally. He shrugged.

“You’re a big help.”

“Hey, I’ve got my own problems. Try to imagine your cat as a chain-smoker,” he said.

“Well, O.K. But it can’t be that simple.”

Tony lit another cigarette and said. “You need to get laid, that’s what your problem is. You’re too uptight. I’m going to talk to the Swedes.”

He started to get out of his chair.

Tony, you fucking bastard! Sit down, for Christ’s sake. Knock it off, will you. I can take of my own affairs.”

“O.K.” he said, smiling and reaching for his glass.

“I was just trying to help.”

“Yeah, well, that kind of help I don’t need from you. Especially from you.”

They were all laughing. I sat back in my chair.

“Tony, you’re an ass. Give me another cigarette.”

“Hey, Tony,” Mally said. “Can you do anything for me?

“Your problem is too fucking weird for anyone to deal with,” he answered, waving a finger at Mally.

“Why don’t you come up to the cabin with us, Mally, when she comes back from Texas,” K.C. offered.

We all looked at K.C. Mally and I looked at each other.

Tony looked at me, and I at him.

“Sounds reasonable to me,” I said.

“Hell, sounds perfect,” Tony said.

Mally chuckled to himself and drank, thinking about the idea. We waited to see what his decision would be.

“Shit. Why not?” He started laughing out loud. “I’ll just tape a piece of paper to the door with an arrow on it.”

We passed more bills back and forth to each other.

Mally poured the remaining contents of the pitcher into our glasses and finished the beer, while Tony drained his glass and lit another cigarette. We all shot our hands in the air at the same time, laughing and looking at each

other. Lenny came with a tray. We stared at him, waiting to hear the latest developments. He spoke only after had set the drinks on the table and written the order down on his pad.

“Nothing new,” he said and walked away, shaking his head.

“Well, since the rest of us are going,” Mally started, filling our glasses, “are you in Nathan?”

“Sure.”

K.C. read my mind: “Listen. Just wrap up the fucking cat and when Mrs. Cuddy comes over, ask her to take it down to the post office for you.”

“Good idea,” I said, and thought for a moment. “Nice touch. That reminds me. I’ve got to go.”

We said goodbye and I dropped another bill on the table. As I walked out the door, I told a final glance toward the bar. Lenny stood at one end, giving an order to the bartender. When he turned around, I saw that he had loosened his tie considerably.

Mike Rudin and Paul Henderson in O’Neill House kitchen (photo credit: Jim Fragomeni)

54

THE GOOSE elizabth frankie rollins ‘90

Paul sent it to me, a PDF file of faded dot-matrix printout. I’d written a story that I’d sent to him in the early 90s. The Literary House appears in it. He thought I should send it for the anthology. Cringing, I read it.

The Literary House does feature in it, and Bob Day’s dog, Murphy, too. But Murphy is long since dead, and the other character, Michael, is dead, too.

It turns out I’ve been telling part of this same story for twenty years. I use it in my teaching, describing the moment in college when all of my classes aligned in meaning, zinging connections between Camus, Dostoyevsky, spontaneous mitosis, and narrative. Coincidence, mutated daughter cells, meaning.

Until I read it again, I’d forgotten that these connections were born in this story about the goose.

In the story, there’s been a reading at the Literary House. Half-drunk, I am washing out the wine-stained coffee mugs, cleaning the ashtrays, meaning to catch up with the others at another party, later.

I am startled when the basement door opens, and Michael stumbles out of the dark into the kitchen. He asks me why the goose did it.

I don’t know what he’s talking about. He’s insistent.

He takes my wet hands in his and looks me in the eyes.

“The goose,” he says.

I still don’t know. He lets go of my hands and looks around the room in a daze. The wooden table is cluttered with post-reading debris. There is a huge nut-studded orange cheese ball with a gouge in its side, listing on a platter of crackers.

“Can I have that cheese ball?” He points with a pale finger. I laugh and say yes. He thrusts both hands into

the bottom and lifts. The platter comes with it, wheat crackers skittering to the floor. I take the sides of the platter and pull and it gives way with an awful sucking sound.

“Open the door,” he says gravely.

I open the door for him and together we run across the lawn, Michael ahead of me, holding the cheese aloft like an acolyte. When we reach the street, he hurls the thing across the yellow lines. It sits, heavy and dead and glowing on the asphalt. Michael wipes his hands in the grass at his feet.

Afterwards, we sit on the lawn and smoke cigarettes from his rumpled pack of Vantages. He pats me on the ankle and tells me he understands that things don’t always make sense, and then he stands and wanders into the dark. Watching him walk away, I remember the goose.

The goose was in a story he’d brought to our creative writing workshop one day. The narrator of the story is lonely, depressed, desiring something. He drives to a bar, drinks some beers, and picks up a woman. Driving home on a winding road in West Virginia, with the woman’s high laugh screeching in his ear, he loses his temper and strikes her. A goose steps into the road. Its eyes are bright and small and it looks right at him. The car hits the goose and there is an audible bump. The narrator rages. The world has no order. It’s pointless and brutal and lonely and cruel. Futile! He realizes he is screaming at the woman, whose name he cannot remember. He drives her home.

There was that dangerous undergrad workshop talk after. What kind of car? What time of night? Should we

55

know the woman’s name? We didn’t ask the right questions and this upset Michael. The story was dear to him.

He stopped attending the workshops. Sometimes he went on drinking binges.

That goose.

I return to the kitchen and finish cleaning up. Then I go on to the next party and push the goose from my mind. I drink to stop fretting Michael’s strange appearance from the dark basement, his aloneness.

Screeching brakes and honking awakens me the next morning. I live across the street from the Literary House, and as soon as I look out the window and see the dog in the road, I remember the night before. There’s Murphy, dancing, pouncing, lapping up cheese, cars bunching around him. I half-laugh, half-cry the whole way down to get him, murmuring to myself all the way to Bob and Kathy Day’s house with my fingers under his collar. I am invited into their sunlit kitchen for coffee. I am giddy,

broken open to some understanding I don’t know how to name. In the following weeks, my classes align like a constellation around a disordered and meaningful world.

A few years later, Murphy got run over by a grain truck he was chasing down the road in Kansas.

Michael died, young and alone.

My biology teacher said that there is no such thing as “spontaneous” mitosis. All cells come from other cells with information, instructions. However, and rarely, some cells spontaneously recombine in new ways.

I feel that awakening bloom again now. Patterns of coincidence. What we don’t know. What gets illumined.

How stories inform stories. How we fail each other. How we save each other. How we are going to die. How we are the narrator, the woman, the goose, the sorrow, the road.

How the headlights are coming right at us.

Jennifer Eisberg, Michelle Balze, and Mike Kaylor at the Literary House Press, 1987. (photo credit: Jim Fragomeni)

56

POSTSCRIPT Paul henderson

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;87

That I found this piece of writing of yours, Elizabeth, buried deep in some post-collegiate pile of letters that, post-Lit House, bound us together is a connection. That I read your writing now and remember Mike and that he and I talked about the story that you mention in your piece in the Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neill House years ago while he was writing it--that I told him then that it was too much him, that he was too much the character on the road at night with the Vantages, the six pack of Busch beer, the beat up truck and the flickering headlight, headed to some woman whom he loved but who had no idea about him.

Those are all connections. That a story or a detail in an essay could decades later connect us again to earlier connections: I think I would have to make up a new word to show that in some more fantastical way the connections are causally related as well.

No one knew at the time what life would be post-college, post LitHouse. That was the beauty and tragedy of the place. It was a hothouse of young people trying to make those early connections--with each other and the world we tried to record and observe. Many just floated away not to be heard from again, some never wrote again, and others are out there writing away and making a go of it, trying to find that goose.

We fail each other, we love each other, we lose each other, we find each other. We become our own stories. I have a bottle of whisky on my

desk that has been there since I last said goodbye to Mike in Portland. One bright afternoon I followed Bob Day with his dancing dog Murphy in the high Kansas grass quail hunting while I was mired in a grim MFA program in Wichita. I met a woman named Sarah smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee at table in the Lit House in 1986 who was recovering from New York City and who is now connecting me to a woman I love in Arizona and the ghost of my best friend.

Through the Rose Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neill Lit House and the peculiar sensibility of the all the people who have passed through there, wanting to see a moment of illumination in life grow into a piece of crafted literature, we are all still connected.

57

AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER Thom hawkins ‘98

Although poetry anthologies often include an index of first lines, it is a last line that I remember: “My God! whose world is this!” The poem was “What I’d Like to Know Is” by Kenneth Patchen and it was nailed to the left of the toilet (if you were seated) on the ground floor of Washington College’s O’Neill Literary House.

In our minds, there was no question whose world it was. We were freshman, eager to establish our identities at the place where we would spend the next four years of our lives. We were also writers, mostly the bookish type—pale, quirky virgins—our sober tales a testament to how much we still had to learn. At the pre-orientation weekend, I announced I had spent my summer stalking Kurt Vonnegut, which was basically accurate. I left a note on the door of his Manhattan brownstone and a message on his wife’s voicemail. That first week, I carried a worn copy of his Fates Worse than Death to remind everyone I was serious. I suppose some part of me wanted to keep the riff-raff at bay: only serious friends need apply. I hoped to be approached by no one who was less dangerous than I appeared—shifty, in flannel shirt and a fedora. The strategy worked.

Kevin had straight dirty blond hair down to his shoulders and an eternal scowl. He told me if the sun were to be suddenly vaporized, it was so far from earth it would take eight and a half minutes for us to know about it. What would I do in my last minutes? Sure, the question was completely illogical—how would we know it was the end times?—but I answered that I would swim again with dolphins in the open ocean, a repeat of

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what I considered to be my most worldly experience to date. He told me he’d spend the time having sex with his girlfriend. I immediately regretted my response. Here, clearly, was a man of the world, and me, well, a pale, quirky virgin.

Despite this, we became friends, accomplices, and foils. We were the co-hosts of a weekly column for the Elm, the student newspaper, in which we pestered local merchants for discounts for college students and made frequent cameo appearances in each other’s creative works. By Parents’ Weekend in October, we decided to take the next step: to introduce our mothers. To celebrate the occasion, we decided to show them what we’d accomplished in our first weeks of college.

Our mothers sat uncomfortably on my dorm room bed as the tape began to play on the 11-inch screen of my combination TV/VCR. Fade in. Two stuffed bears—a rather stiff, small white bear and a plush, grinning brown bear—approached each other. They began to kiss. They made out. They had hot, moaning sex in many different positions. Then they smoked cigarettes. Fade out.

That neither mother was surprised was a testament that we’d broken them in properly.

Officially, the movie was titled “Death to Our Toys, Part 1: Sunshine and Roundboy, An Affair to Remember”—but later it became known simply as “Bear Sex.” It was a truly collaborative effort—Kevin was an auteur,

but I was the guy with the A/V equipment.

Our first step in the production process took place in the back room of the Chestertown Movie King, where we selected a pornographic movie for research purposes.

We found one about a woman who gets locked out of her apartment in a towel and while waiting at her neighbor’s for a locksmith, he spills coffee on her, she jumps up, the towel falls off, and they have sex on the creaky kitchen table. (I imagined that they later got married.) We studied camera angles and lifted the audio track.

Kevin went to the second floor of Caroline Hall to cast the film. He came downstairs with our stars and a promise he would show their owners later what we were doing with their stuffed bears.

Kevin shot the video on my 1988 GE video camera while I moved the bears—they weren’t puppets, so we had to keep my hands out of frame. Kevin’s roommate Jason, who was trying to finish a paper, occasionally looked over and gave us advice based on his own experiences: “No, the brown bear is too far up on the white one.” (I hoped he would someday add this to his resume.)

In some of the shots, my head is unavoidably visible, but masked with a pillowcase.

We edited by shooting the TV screen as we played back the scenes in the order we wanted them while the extracted porno audio played on a nearby tape recorder.

It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

Now we just needed an audience.

The O’Neill Literary House was a point of intersection for drama geeks, student journalists, artists and poets, drawn by the casual atmosphere, the parties (fueled not by beer, but coffee and a contact high from printer’s ink), and the promise of the Sophie Kerr Prize: thirty-five thousand dollars to the graduating student with the most promise in “literary endeavors” (whatever that meant). It was there Kevin and I decided to premiere our film, at the 1994 Freshman Literary Colloquy.

The colloquy was a freshman tradition at Washington College: a curated formal reading of works following a selected theme. The theme selected for 1994 was “The Beat Influence”—it was in “influence” where we saw our opportunity. Who could argue anything in the latter half of the twentieth century had not been somehow influenced by the Beat Generation? Surely at least Burroughs or Bukowski would have approved of our work!

To mask our bald attempt to hijack the event for our own purposes, we infiltrated the colloquy committee and convinced them to add the words “A Multimedia

Presentation” to the posters, promising we would deliver a selection of videos to accompany the readings.

Our Trojan horse consisted of two other videos, few-second clips from our mutual obsession, the music documentary 1991: The Year Punk Broke, each looped into a five minute reel. One clip was a confused-looking baby and the other a close-up of the faces of a couple being happily humped against the front of the stage by the overwhelming tide of the crowd behind them.

Somehow, though, just days before the event, news of our plan leaked and one student objected. Her grandmother was coming to hear her read and there was no way she would subject her family matriarch to our version of “art.” We had to call in the big man upstairs to settle the dispute.

Professor Bob Day, the Literary House sage, showed no hint of shock when we explained the situation. Clearly, he, too, had been broken in properly. We each argued our respective positions—“art!”, “grandmother!” I could tell he enjoyed being the only person in that entire universe to whom all parties in this case would listen and obey.

He sighed and then quickly, as if he’d encountered the same situation a dozen times before, suggested a compromise—we could show the video, but muted. With the volume up, he reasoned, who could hear the readers? It would be too much of a distraction.

Even without the soundtrack, I doubt there’s anyone who remembers what was read that Sunday afternoon.

Certainly there was some Kerouac and Ginsberg, Burroughs and Bukowski. But no one came for the Beat Generation. They came to watch, in the words of the Elm writer who covered the event, “two unbelievably animate stuffed bears performing various sexual acts.”

This was our world, Kevin’s and mine, at least for that afternoon. Kenneth Patchen was right, though, to question its ownership from his perch next to the ground floor toilet; the O’Neill Literary House yielded to no permanent authority, poet or printer, essayist or novelist.

Although Kevin and I continued to collaborate, there was no “Death to Our Toys, Part 2.” The grandmother never appeared. I’m not even sure she was real.

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Student gathering with Richard Wilbur on O’Neill House front porch: (front left to front right) Matthias Conaty ‘91; Erin Murphy ‘90; Richard Wilbur; Alison Auber Toney; Elizabeth Rollins ‘90; unidentified male; Mary Riner ‘90. Photo credit: Jim Fragomeni ‘88.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Tamara Dubin Brown '82 (Richmond House) from Washington College with a double major in English and Art, continued on to graduate studies in English at the University of Kansas, and eventually earned a Master’s degree. She met her Kansan husband in a KU creative writing class taught by Bob Day and has spent over 25 years in the Midwest and Great Plains. After providing reference assistance in public libraries for the last eight years, she is currently a freelance writer and artist who lives with her husband, daughter and ornery hoosier cat in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Bob Burkholder ’72 (Richmond House) a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina, where he studied with James Dickey. He has published on Emerson, Melville, and American Transcendentalism. He is the founder of Penn State Adventure Literature, a field-based literature program. He has been a faculty member for four decades at Penn State University, where he is currently acting head of the English Department.

Raymond Cummings ‘99 (O’Neill) is a longtime music and culture writer who has contributed to the Village Voice, MAGNET, paperthinwalls, Baltimore City Paper, and Splice Today, among other publications. He is the author of several books of poetry, criticism, and satire, including Crucial Sprawl, Vigilante Fluxus, and Class Notes.

Jim Fragomeni '88 (O’Neill House) is a photographer.

Thom Hawkins '98 (O’Neill House), known in his Washington College years as Jef(f) Frank, graduated with a BA in English and was the first student to qualify for Washington College’s creative writing minor. He later earned an MS in Library and Information Science from Drexel University and now lectures on various subjects, including the fourth dimension, cryptozoology, the statistics of game shows, and Dada and Surrealist poetry and writing techniques. He is the author of two children’s books, Baldwin and The Yeti Made Me Do It (and Other Cryptozoological Excuses), and with his wife Linda, the author of two children, Hollis and Audrey.

Paul Henderson '87 (O’Neill House) lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.

Sandy Hiortdahl '85 (Dorchester and O’Neill House) is a freelance writer and copyeditor, as well as an Associate Professor of English at Northeast State Community college in East Tennessee. She keeps company with a blue heeler named Kismo Blue and dreams of the ocean. When she graduated from Washington College in ‘85, she received honors in English, the Writers’ Union Award, and the Sophie Kerr Prize. As well, she’s a recipient of consecutive Key West Literary Seminar fellowships; a Maryland State Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence; The Ghost Mountain Award; and last year was named the Grand Prize Winner in Pen2Paper’s short story contest, which focused on disabilities. She has an M.F.A. from George Mason, an M.A. from the University of Maryland, and a Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America. Her work appeared last year in THEMA, The Summerset Review and Barely South Review, among others. More may be found on her website: www.sandyhiortdahl.com. She’s on Twitter too: @hiortdahl Brian Meehan ‘82 (Richmond House and Dorchester) contributed his Christmas Card Broadside in the Dorchester section.

Leslie Kitchen Rock '77 owns a Maryland real estate brokerage and development company. She lives in Princess Anne, Maryland.

Natalie Brown McKnight ’84 graduated from Washington College with a double major in English and Drama, went on to get an M.A. in creative writing (The Writing Seminars) at The Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature at the University of Delaware. She has been working at Boston University for 24 years as a Rhetoric and Humanities professor, Chair of Humanities, Associate Dean and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning, and is now Interim Dean of the College of General Studies. She has published three books on Victorian fiction (Idiots, Madmen and Other Prisoners in Dickens; Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels; and Fathers in Victorian Fiction); her most recent publication is Culture and Context: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Literature, a 2-volume anthology of literature and art.

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Elizabeth Frankie Rollins '90 (O’Neill) graduated from Washington College with a BA in English and a Writers Union Award.

(Wherein she arranged Lit House picnics and watched wasps take off with the meat; danced wildly on the deck and got a four-inch splinter through her sneaker; heard Toni Morrison read from her then-new book, Beloved, and the course of her own dreamhearttruthnarrative was set.) Rollins is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Sin Eater & Other Stories (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2013). Rollins has published work in Sonora Review, Drunken Boat, Conjunctions, The New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Washington College Magazine, and Fairy Tale Review (forthcoming), among others. Rollins previously received a New Jersey Prose Fellowship and a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She teaches composition and fiction writing at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona.

Michael Rudin '88 (O’Neill House) Peter Turchi '82 (Richmond House and Dorchester) earned his MFA from the University of Arizona. He directed the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College for 15 years and the creative writing program at Arizona State University for 5.

He currently teaches at the University of Houston and at Warren Wilson. He has co-edited three anthologies and written five books including Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer and A Muse and A Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic. In addition to the Sophie Kerr Prize, he has received North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His wife, Laura, is a professor of Education; their son, Reed, is a musician.

After graduation, Martin Edward Williams ’75 (Richmond House) spent several years on the Italian pro trap circuit without noticeable distinction. He then worked for many years for Frank Purdue, served in higher education as a VP for unmentionable missions, and retired in 2008. He travels the Western Hemisphere in a rare Americruiser RV, not welcome in the state of Florida.

Since those halcyon Lit House, Mary Wood '68 (Richmond House) reads books, enters poetry contests at the Bookplate in Chestertown, where she won 1sr Prize twice and then was kicked upstirs to the hard job of being a judge. Bob Day got her rounding up scattered bits of writing (The Last Manuscript Drive Drive?). As a result, she has published three slim volumes: First Ice, poetry, illustrated by Kathy Day; Passing Glances, essays; and A Swim Before Lunch, short stories—all designed by Jim Dissette. Her plays—Crossing the Gulf Stream; Remarkable Recovery; Hunting Rights; A Chestertown Romance—have all been produced locally. Mary thinks we are all lucky to have these Lit House memories, that background of friendship and foolishness.

Covers of Lit House magazines, Menagerie 4, Spring 1996, and Opportunistic Infections, Spring 1998, both by Raymond Cummings ‘98

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