Shadowplay
The year was marked by the scent of patchouli. It roped and twisted its way into my room, coated the curtains, soaked into my skin. Some pseudo-hippy incense-burning chick with Camarillo brillo hair lived in the room next door and I put up with a lot of unwelcome odors. Pot smoke, sweat masked by scented oils, cigarettes and sandalwood. My least-favorite scent is an amalgam: Fall Term 1987.
Fall Term 1987 wasn’t limited to the waftings of pseudo-hippy chick. There were hints of puke (my own, my friends: we drank a lot), late night clothes exuding flat beer fumes and the remnants of cigarette smoke, the sticky 18th birthday remains of Coco Lopez and rum. That fall I comforted myself with baked potatoes clotted with butter and sour cream, used their earthy scent as an antidote to the disinfectant-sharp dining hall air.
Then there were the freshly opened condom packets; musty sheets left to go grey on the bed; my roommate’s apple shampoo; and the dangerous pull of Carl’s room across the hall. His walls were bare. In fact, the room was practically empty, save for a dead rose propped up in the empty whiskey bottle on his college-issue desk. I remember the smell of alcohol on his breath, sweet as molasses, as he unlocked the door.
He introduced me to the band Joy Division and to the previously unknown pleasures of the grownup crush, revealed the depths of my ability to obsess about certain kinds of men -- rebellious, prone to dressing in black, ready-made blanks for my projected fantasies. I wrote a short story about him for a freshman composition class that began "Carl is tall, dark, and handsome. Not classically good-looking ...." It was true. He had a Jeff Goldblum look, the dark-haired, smart, slightly nerdy ectomorph with his thick orange turtleneck, heavy boots and thrift store coat. He smelled like whiskey and cloves. The pull to Carl was obsessive. Single-minded. And pointless: I had a boyfriend and Carl was almost completely uninterested in me.
The real danger was Alonzo. Twenty-six, a senior from South America attending our small college on a sports scholarship, Alonzo was friends with Carl, but seemed to prefer the company of freshman girls. Rangy and tall, with hair like the young Kafka, Alonzo hung out in the dorm, crashed our parties, insinuated himself into our budding social lives. “Come on! What’s the problem?” he’d ask, eyes bulging, hand outstretched for my roommate Martha, making an offer we couldn’t refuse.
By the spring semester Martha had dropped out of college to get treatment for her eating disorder. I was unmoored, lost without my fellow drunk from a dysfunctional family. One snow-fresh February night Alonzo offered to take me out for a Procolino’s pizza. Afterwards (his intensity, his forcefulness) I reluctantly went back to his place, a windowless room in a Spanish professor's basement.
Shadowplay II (Gordana &
Marko Zivkovic)
The professor wasn't home. Alonzo switched on
a desk light, turned on the clock radio and
reached for me. I could smell his cologne in
the air. Polo. Not a good sign.
You know where this is going, right? It’s an
old and very common story. I hesitate to call
it rape, rape with its violence and
violations and death threats and nightmares.
This was more like coaxed coercion. Alonzo,
all exploring tongue and crawling hands, used
his knee to push me onto his thin camping
mattress. I protested. He insisted, did what
he brought me there to do. (I recently found
out that Alonzo had been inducted into the
college’s athletic hall of fame. The entry
noted that he was so eager to get a U.S.
education that he was willing to sleep on the
floor. Yeah. That's right.)
Afterwards, the room damp with forced
intimacy, I focused on the radio. George
Michael was singing Faith. Martha loved
George Michael. She also had a crush on
Alonzo, similar in intensity to my crush on
Carl. Now there was something between us.
Another lie. I already had a moat of lies
between me and my boyfriend, a series of
flirtations and one night stands that I
excused by thinking of his early treatment of
me, as payback for the 1 a.m. visits, the
nights he lost to bong hits and Elephant
beer. It was getting uglier and uglier,
wasn’t it? What was I becoming?
Alonzo the conqueror drove me back to the
dorms in the professor's car. I headed for
the showers. The coed bathroom was empty, no
need to shout all-clear. Little blue
toiletries bucket in one hand, towel tossed
over the curtain, I turned the hot water on
full-force.
I couldn’t wash the smell of him off me fast
enough.