continued from When We Were All Democrats
During the weeks I had spent out at my aunt and uncle's place in suburban Virginia before the start of my freshman year, they had put me up in a spare bedroom in the basement next to the family television room. I had no particular agenda while I was there. It was just a cushion time to allow myself to get used to being in the East. Compared to the openness of Colorado, the East felt lush with its overpowering greenness and dripping with humidity. The incessant sound of insects overwhelmed my ears whenever I went outside, although it seemed like I was the only one who noticed it..
In the languor of the humid August heat, I mostly hung out with my cousin Chris, who was exactly the same age as me, and had also just graduated from high school.
I had plenty of free time just to lounge around in the style of idleness and boredom as only teenagers can do. There simply wasn't enough good things on television to fill one's time without feeling as if one's brain was rotting, so n those days before the Internet and computer games, this often meant reading books, sometimes one right after another in succession. I did an amazing amount of my reading this way, and my reading habits suffered in later years when I no longer needed to fill the time this way.
In the television room of the Virginia house, I found a shelf containing a small library of paperbacks that included some of the works of Kurt Vonnegut. The paperback editions had a distinctive theme in the covers, each with an identifiable color. They were appealing on a book shelf sitting next to each other. It made you want to read all of them.
In high school I had read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which had a scarlet cover in that edition, and had very much enjoyed it, as did many of my friends. Vonnegut was as close to mandatory reading as contemporary fiction got among young men at the time.
After reading it, we had delighted in adopting the terminology of the religion of Bokononism that Vonnegut creates in that story, which is portrayed as a deist Caribbean variant of Buddhism, with calypsos as sacred hymns, and with an emphasis on appreciating the active role of coincidence in one's life, including making connection with strangers who may turn out to be part of one's life "team." In the book the term Vonnegut uses for one's life team is a karass. Acting with one's karass, in a loose and even unaware collaboration, one does the will of the Almighty without being aware of it most of the time. It's impossible to know everyone who is in one's karass. It may only become obvious later in life.
Among the Vonnegut books I found on my cousin's shelf which I hadn't yet read were Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. As only a recent high school graduate could do, I ripped through these works, pouring through them while spending lounging on the basement couch, and when we went on a camping trip in southern Virginia, where I read them while lying on a cot in the screened tent between trips out on to the lake to go water skiing. Reading Vonnegut provided conversational material with my cousin and my uncle Mark, who had both read all the books on the basement shelf.
As it happened, giving myself a crash course in the works of Vonnegut turned out to be a good move, Once I got to Xavier Hall, I found that my new dorm friend Pat was an even bigger fan of Vonnegut, to the point of having memorized an substantial collection of short selections from Vonnegut's works. He could recite passages at will to a humorous effect appropriate to the moment. I knew but a fraction of the ones I had at the top of his memory.
He knew all about Bokononism, so in a way we had religion in common from the start. We passed each other's cathechism quizzes with ease.
"If you wish to study a granfalloon,.." I might begin,
"...remove the skin of a toy balloon," Pat would say, grinning with delight while completing Vonnegut's explanation in Cat's Cradle for this invented term, one that referred to the surface-level leagues and associations of our lives which are not true karasses. Instead they are the empty-of-purpose human-created teams such as being in the same fraternity, or being from the same town, or being alumni of the same school.
Pat found it funny that I was from a place called "Fort Collins". One of his few points of reference for the West was a minor character in Slaughterhouse Five, a U.S. Army officer who came from Cody, Wyoming. When I'd read the book, I hadn't identified with that character, since he was a World War II soldier, but in Pat's fanciful associations, the character and I went right together in his mind.
"Do they have Indians out there?" he asked, jokingly. He said he pictured my hometown as a wooden stockade with a calvary regiment, like a movie western. I told him there had been such a fort, but it had been decommissioned a hundred years before. Yet I soon sensed there was no need to dwell on this type of literal truth with him. Instead it was more fun to let him build up a mental picture that we both knew was inaccurate but which could be the source of a whimsical slant that relieved the tedium of everyday life. In early Eighties it was still relatively easier to entertain these romantic anachronistic misapprehensions about other regions of the country.
In coming East I had thus transformed from an ordinary eighteen-year-old kid into a living breathing incarnation of an exotic region of the country. I liked it. It made me feel as if it imparted some edge to me over the other kids at Georgetown from the East, one that somewhat evened a deficit of sophistication that I imagined was always against me.
Pat soon set me straight on my delusion that everyone at Georgetown had come there to study at the School of Foreign Service. He was enrolled instead in the College of Liberal Arts, which everyone just called by its initials CLA, and which allowed a much broader selection of electives than the focused curriculum I had signed up for. He thought I was nuts for forcing that kind of unnecessary strictness on my studies.
His art for the Art House was music, and in his case, it was a bona fide passion that was one of his main hobbies, both in its creation and its appreciation. As I would learn, he was skilled at the electric bass guitar (or at least I think it was the bass). He hadn't brought it down with him at the start of the semester, so it was a while before I saw him play it. Given my experience with other musicians over the years, I now see him as almost the epitome of someone who can play that instrument well. He had the correct body type---long and lean with a slackness of posture, yet able to stand with a solidity that would allow one to to bounce and sway with a sustained rhythm, manipulating the strings without losing any steam over an entire performance.
From Pat I soon realized how superficial was my knowledge of music, it having been gathered mostly from top 40 AM radio, the playlist rotation on mTV, and a few albums owned by myself or my parents. I having introduced to more refined tastes by my cooler friends in high school, but with Pat I learned that I had barely scratched the surface of contemporary musical knowledge.
I was surprised, for example, to learn from him that a band that had made one of the popular music videos of that era, whom I vaguely assumed had been making their debut with that video, actually possessed a long and celebrated discography going back into the 1970s. Pat could explain the evolution of their sound from the first album to the video I knew, and why it signaled a new era in their production techniques to accommodate the trends of the video era.
His tastes reflected the rarified ones of a true band musician who had learned to distinguish the creative from the stale and non-innovative. Above all else he loved the album-producing masters of the Seventies who had never released singles for the radio, but whom other other well-known musicians had emulated in their own work. He was a connoisseur of their high artistry of electronica and analog multi-track recording. He had brought down a selection of his best vinyl with him from Philadelphia, and these found regular play in his room in Xavier as soon as he had set it his stereo.
I picture him best lying on his bed in his room in Xavier, looking up at the ceiling with his eyes closed, his hands propped behind his head on the pillow, wearing a t-shirt and long-legged jeans, and also with the giant bulb-like earphones on his head, the type that had gone out of style for normal everyday use in the age of portable stereos.
The earphones would be connected to his nearby stereo by a thick cable, and on the turntable, an album of one of the artists of his collection would be rotating at thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute, sending the needle of the arm through the tightening spiral groove in the vinyl, reproducing at will in his headphones the tapestry of sound that the musicians had willed into existence through their effort and genius.
When not wearing headphones, he played his albums over the speakers only with his door shut, alone or with a trusted friend. If he thought you might appreciate his collection, he might share samples with you. Otherwise he didn't push his preference and offered no critique or judgment of your own. In that way he was the perfect bassist, gathering in the sounds of all others around him while riding the steady beat, and sustaining it a way that let others play their own melodies on top of it.
Conversations with him were thus a constant improvisation of the musical and poetical. He could mutate a song lyric he knew instantly into a funny reference to current events, or a to someone we knew on campus. The mutated lyric would become the preferred patois by which we referred to that person.
On our way to hear the university president speak give a welcome address to the freshman class in the campus chapel, Pat spontaneously mutated a line from obscure song by a British progressive rock band of the 1960s, replacing the name Timothy Leary in the lyric with the university president's name, and singing aloud Timothy Healy's dead. No, no, no, he's on the outside looking in.
I didn't know that song at the time, so I had no idea why he was singing the name that way. I barely knew who Timothy Leary was, as all that Sixties stuff was ancient history by 1983. But it was great fun to imitate him. To this day when I hear that song, I can't help but change the lyrics in my head.
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