Meeting new people

[garote]

Over a hasty breakfast of cereal and toast in the little kitchen, Ken and Phaedra and I planned our day. Ken needed to take a bunch of stuff out of his storage locker, so we arranged to meet there at 2:30, then transport the stuff to his grandparent's place south of Watsonville. In the meantime, Phaedra would hang out with Mike. Ken left in his own car to drive to his grandparents and make sure they were ready to receive the goods, and Phaedra and I took off for UCSC.

I dropped Phaedra off, and as soon as the door shut I found myself suddenly alone after several days of nonstop personal contact. My mind turned inward with a forcefulness that was a little disorienting. I drove downtown in a leisurely fashion and bought a newspaper and a coke with the scraps in my wallet, and headed back down Highway 1 and parked the van outside the building with Ken's storage locker.

I set some music playing and climbed in the back. The rear seats had been removed long ago, leaving a big rectangle of scratchy polyester carpet. I stretched out on it, unfolded the paper, sipped my drink, and slowly consumed the news. Ken arrived late but not as late as I'd secretly hoped. He knocked on my window at about 2:50, just after I'd finished the comics and stuffed the coupon pages in the garbage sack.

"My grandparents weren't home," he said.

"Aww crap."

"Yeah. I called their pager and both house numbers, and left voicemails, and then I just drove out there and yelled at the door. Bupkiss. So I left a note and came here."

"Well that kinda buggers things up."

"Yeah, nothing we can do. Shall we regroup at your place?"

I nodded. From there, we could pursue the next item of business: Locating a camera.

We stretched out in my room with the phone book open on the floor between us. There were quite a few shops offering camera rentals but we had no idea how to rank them, so we started at the top and called each number on the cordless phone. From that we learned that to rent a camera we needed to leave a deposit, usually the approximate cost of the camera. The Santa Cruz Camera Club had a fully manual camera with adjustable F-stop and shutter speed, and it would cost us about $20 to rent for a day, but they wanted $200 for a deposit. That was serious folding money.

I tromped downstairs and located my Mom, who was out in the back yard reading a book, and pleaded with her to get a short-term loan. She asked why.

"So I can rent a camera for a photo shoot."

She laughed and said "Are you kidding?"

Reluctantly, Ken agreed to front the $200. We went over the plans for the shoot again. I described each site I'd found in Pogonip and Ken put them in order based on technical difficulty and suggested turning the whole trip into a picnic as well. That sounded great.

The conversation wandered to music, and I played the CD-burn of Zog's radio performance of "Har-De-Har-Har". As he listened, Ken's expression grew more and more confused, until finally he stood up at the end and shouted at his shoes: "BLeeahggh! BLEeAaaAGHH!" It was a pretty fair reaction to such a loony story. He reached down and I could tell he was about to take off his shoe and throw it at me - something he's done before to express his distaste - but he got a better idea and decided to make a fashion statement:

"I don't like this shoe any more" announced Ken. He yanked his foot up and pulled off his left shoe. "I like yours better." He tossed it at me, bouncing it off my chest.

"Very well," I replied. "Have it your way." And I ripped off my own left shoe, threw it at him, and put his on. The fit was a bit snug, but walkable.

Ken snatched up my shoe. It was a bit loose, but walkable.

We went around wearing mismatching shoes for the rest of the day, and most of the next one. For a while it was just one of those why-the-hell-not things that friends do. We'd spot each other on campus, and as soon as we drew near we'd take off one shoe and pitch it over, along with some incomprehensible insult, then carry on. Eventually we'd trade back -- sometimes on a different day.

It was time to meet Phaedra, so we plunged into the van and drove back to UCSC. We found her in Beth's apartment eating a burrito at an absurdly small table, which was the only dining setup they could manage now that most of the living room was stuck behind a big curtain. A few minutes after we arrived, Scott teleported in from nowhere, and herded us all into Beth's bedroom to chat.

Beth and Dominic were already in there, so six of us were crammed into the tiny room. It had been a while since I'd seen Dominic, and his gleaming short haircut was a bit of a shock. His hair had gone from belly-button-length to nearly nothing. He was sitting next to Beth on her bed, wearing a black sweater and stubby leather shoes. He looked like a beatnik that had suddenly gone corporate.

"Welcome back!" I said.

He nodded and waved.

Phaedra sat on the bed next to him, so I curled around her with my head tucked against the baseboard. Ken sprawled out on the roommate's bed and appeared to nap while we chattered. This didn't leave enough room for Scott, so he bounced around the room like flubber, appearing to gain energy with each impact. We had a disjointed conversation that caught everyone up on recent relationship hijinks -- which people had gone exclusive, which people had called it quits, yada yadda. Eventually Scott bounced sideways and sat down on top of Ken, prompting a wrestling match.

In conversation with Beth, Phaedra mentioned that Mike and I didn't believe her at first when she said she was an A-cup.

Beth laughed. "Seriously?"

"Hey," I said. "In my defense, she was wearing a big sweater when we met."

"So what about now?" said Beth.

"Oh - shit, I dunno - maybe?"

"What!" said Phaedra. She sat up and pulled her arms into her shirt and rummaged around, and they emerged holding her bra, which she dropped in front of my face. I freed my arms from behind her and inspected the label.

"Okay, no contest. I believe you!"

"Really?" said Scott. "Let me see that!"

I tossed it to him.

"Well whaddaya know!" he said, peering at it. "Hey, I wouldn't have believed you either!" He tossed the bra back at Phaedra.

Dominic surged forward and snatched the bra from the air, and made as if to eat it. Phaedra reached out and stole it back, then pulled it inside her shirt again. "He's so sweet, isn't he?" she said rhetorically, as her elbows moved around under the shirt. Dominic grinned.

"So what are you," Scott said, turning to Beth. "A-cup, right?"

Beth laughed. "Mister," she said, "Bill and Ted could each use that bra as a hammock." She put her hands on the sides of her shirt and pushed them in, pointing her breasts at Scott.

"Aiigh, don't shoot!" he said, raising his arms.

"Pew pew pew!!!" said Beth.

"Heeelp!" he wailed, and fled the room. "I've got stuff to do anyway, I'll chat with you guys later," he said, then fled the apartment.

When he left he took most of the energy with him. Dominic had unpacking to do, and Beth felt like continuing yesterday's nap, so Ken hauled himself upright and we exited the apartment, and waved goodbye to Dominic on the landing. We still felt like socializing, so we went down a few floors and entered a hallway in B-dorm, walking along until we stood in front of Alex's door. Two knocks later we were inside.

From there we planned an outing to the Saturn Café, and called up Linda. In a few minutes she knocked and entered, and we all trooped to the Merrill parking lot and the van. On the way, Linda began a debate with Ken over what sort of name I should give to the van, a debate that would result in a name that I would only grudgingly accept due to it's tackiness.

So we moved along, a tight little bunch, minding our own business, through the Merrill quad. Suddenly I heard: "HEY YOU GUUUYS!" in a long, moving yell. A young woman was sprinting towards me with her arms out, and a long mane of blond hair flying behind her head. Hey grey eyes were wide and her mouth was showing an impressive spread of jawbone and teeth. If this was the moorland and she was carrying a sword, I would have probably shit my pants.

It's Lisa! I opened my arms and stooped down just a bit and she came crashing into me for a hug. Behind her, Kurt and Kate were huffing and puffing to catch up with her. I set Lisa down and told her the plan.

"Saturn Café, right now?" she said.

"Yup."

"Are you kidding? We came looking for you guys, to do the same thing! Let's roll!"

"Lisa is a woman of action!" I said, to no one in particular.

"Well duh!" she said, marching ahead.

The eight of us swarmed over to the van. I opened the shotgun seat and Phaedra hopped up, then I pulled open the sliding door and everyone else flooded in. As I went around, Phaedra leaned over and opened my own door. I suddenly remembered how Alex told me the other day, the way you judge whether or not your date is a keeper, is when you lead her to your car and open the door for her, if she remembers to reach across and open your door while you walk around. Nice thing to watch for.

I fired the van up, put it in second gear, and drove very slowly down the winding campus roads and out to the Saturn Cafe. The back of the van had no seats, so obviously it had no seatbelts. Just as well for this group, since they enjoyed being heaped on top of each other.

I sat between Lisa and Phaedra, across from Ken, which was just fine by me. Ken and I tried to set up a chess game but very soon realized we needed a board. We stole blue sugar packets from the table across the way and assembled a chessboard with alternating empty squares. About three moves later, the food arrived, and we had to destroy the game. Ken bought me a pesto burger and a malt. The burger was nicely textured, for a meat-free product.

We had a long and rowdy discussion, then I herded the troops back into the van and we drove back to Merrill. Lisa and Linda knew a surprising number of foreign drinking songs, all involving various animals, domestic and exotic. Sheep and Scotsmen were a recurring
theme. By the time we piled out of the van we all knew a few more verses of each.

Our group decided to perform some osmosis, and we went off in search of fresh individuals. So far we consisted of Kurt, Kate, Lisa, Linda, Ken, Phaedra, Alex, and myself. Since Ken and I knew where Colleen lived, we aimed for her first. Outside the Crown dorm, someone suggested that we act like viking invaders, coming to plunder the buildings of friends. Ken took the idea and ran with it, literally. First he threw open the door leading inside to the hallway. Then he stuck out his right arm, pointing up and ahead of him, and went: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!"

He took off with the coattails of his jacket flying, and we all followed suit. Eight screams ascended four floors and stampeded down a hallway, stopping in a pile in front of Colleen's door. One polite knock later, a face peeked out and meekly informed us that Colleen was taking a shower one floor down. "Thank you" I replied, just as quietly, and the door shut.

About a half second of silence. Then, all at once: "AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!" We ran back up the hall, then tumbled down one flight of stairs like Keystone Kops, and straight into the common-access bathroom. The eight of us stood there flailing catcalls at the shower curtains until one of them parted and Colleen stepped out in a fuzzy blue robe, and we greeted her with deafening applause. Her lips were pursed in consternation, but the rest of her expression said she was charmed. When the applause stopped she implored us to be quiet, since she was an RA on this floor. She didn't want to set a bad example.

We all knew we were a bad example. Some of us had the decency to look slightly ashamed, and pouted melodramatically and kicked at the floor a little.

We exchanged some hugs and told her of our plans to gather at Lisa's house and watch movies. Colleen said thanks for the invite, but she was busy for the rest of the evening. News that elicited a hangdog smattering of "aaawwws" in the bathroom. At Colleen's request, we shuffled out of the dorm in a much quieter fashion than the way we entered.

Standing around outside, we polled for suggestions. Lisa wanted to go visit Neil, but we had to wait for Linda and Ken, who were visiting someone else in the building briefly. Lisa wasted no time when they came back, immediately shouting, "Get Neil! AAAAAAAAAAA!!"

So we shot to the other side of the Crown dorms and up one floor. Down a hallway, to Neil's room. Was he there? No, he was helping someone down the hall with a network problem. We all turned around and tromped back up the hall and down the other one. Four doors down, we pooled outside an open one. Half a dozen people were already lounging around in the room. Lisa and I threaded into the crowd and found Neil, and Lisa attached herself to him. He was sitting in a wooden chair in front of a mid-grade Windows PC typing things into the network control panel.

We chatted, and he agreed to come with us. While this was happening, Ken barged into the room carrying a garbage sack over one shoulder. Wordlessly he wrestled it open and began pulling out a series of funny theatrical hats and slapping them onto people in the room. He pulled out a blue flatcap, a tall red-and-white striped hat from a Dr Seuss book, a beanie with a propellor on it, a hat with fake dreadlocks sewn into the back, a battered top hat, a green ballcap with "MD-457" sewn across it like something from an aircraft carrier, an absurdly small cowboy hat, a hat with fake ears on it, and so on. I was astonished. Where the hell had these come from?

We chatted with Neil a bit more. I thought about helping him with the network issue but decided to obey the "too many cooks" principle instead. Neil agreed to meet us at Lisa's soon, and Lisa reluctantly unwound herself from his waist. Ken collected his hats and redistributed them to people in our group before we took off. Kurt got the fake dreads, and looked absolutely hilarious in them.

After a pitstop at Brian's place down the hall, we struck out at a much more leisurely pace than before, for the Merrill parking lot. Lisa and Linda led a singalong of "Oh, Lord Chester" and "The Pirate Song" on the way, while Ken and I had a brief discussion about "recruitment tactics."

Since meeting Ken, I had seen him do what he called "recruitment" over a dozen times. He would walk up to a nearby stranger about our age, introduce himself confidently, and then introduce that person to everyone else in the group one at a time in a formal way. Then he would ask some broad question like, "so what brings you here?" Depending on the answer he would quickly narrow it down and then pass off the conversation to some other person in our party. Then he would proceed to the next stranger -- usually someone who had been standing right next to the first stranger, watching us in some mixture of bemusement and terror.

Most of the time the conversation would trail off and the stranger would say something like "well, nice meeting you," and wander away. But sometimes the conversation would pick up, and the stranger - or strangers - would get sucked into the group and follow along. It worked way more often than I would have guessed. Ken enjoyed connecting to people, and enjoyed connecting other people together almost as much, and it really came across. It was also something I recognized from my own history. In high school I tried to cultivate a group of friends, and one of my favorite tactics was to invite two or more friends to a place, introduce them to each other, and then contrive some reason to leave the room for a while so they would be forced to interact. I thought I was being pretty clever with that, but Ken was doing some real next-level shit.

And, I enjoyed doing it with him. Sometimes we would stand in the midst of our group looking around at nearby strangers, point them out, and decide together which ones might be "recruitable", then steer the whole group over to them and try our luck.

I still believed that it was better to meet people one at a time, when the group was smaller, so the conversation could have a more intimate feel. But Ken believed it was better to go high-volume: The larger the group, and the more people you threw in, the more likely you could cause smaller match-ups within it. I had to admit that in a place like a college campus, his method really delivered. We met scores of people every quarter, and most of them bounced off, but some of them threaded into our group and stayed there. I'm convinced that Ken was personally responsible for the creation of something like a hundred friendships, between people who didn't even realize - or remember - that he had facilitated them. They probably didn't even remember Ken at all, just the person he handed them off to after the first few lines of conversation.

We arrived at the Merrill parking lot and stuffed ourselves into Lisa's shiny new car, called "The G-Mobile" for some reason. Probably a sex joke. She drove it like a lunatic, down the hill and around the Merrill loop, up past the fire station to the Crown-Merrill apartments. The doors opened and we all exploded out into the parking lot, jabbering wildly, and followed Lisa and Kate inside.

We settled down across couches and into chairs and on the floor for the scheduled episode of the X-Files. We were all ready for some quiet time after that running around. Phaedra sat on my lap again. I administered a back massage and watched the show curiously, unfamiliar with the series in general. Not bad.

The lights came on and we began to mill about. Then the fourth roommate arrived, a person I'd never seen before. She was tall and lithe in casual clothes, with pale skin, greenish-blue gimlet eyes, and a close-cropped boyish blond haircut. Ken introduced her to me as Carolyn. She raised her hand up in greeting and made a little half-smile at me. She knew Ken already, and began chatting with him as they walked into her room, and I followed along.

It was like that other day in the quad when a girl had walked by and I'd felt mysteriously compelled to follow her, except this time the feeling was more like a hand reaching into my chest, plugging in an extension cord, then flipping a power switch. I had to know who she was.

Ken knew Carolyn from the Rocky Horror performances. I said I was auditioning to play Frank this year.

"Well, he pretty much is playing Frank this year," said Ken, nodding to me. "Unless we get some really amazing new person when Mike does the auditions over at Kresge. But it's hard to find a good Frank."

Carolyn nods. "Yeah, there was a guy who did it last year and he was amazing, but he stopped."

I was surprised. "Why?"

"He said he would only do it professionally, like, if people paid him. He said he was kind of bored with it."

"Huh. That sucks. Kind of sucks for him even."

Carolyn shrugged. "Want to see some pictures from the show?"

"Sure!"

She retrieved a packet of photographs from a closet shelf, and spread them out on the carpet. The previous Frank was in them, plus Kurt and Ken and Eszter and several other people I knew. They all looked weirdly younger. Did a single year really make that much difference? Carolyn was in them as well, dressed in an impressively spot-on Columbia outfit. I ran my eyes over her image, with the shorts and the tube-top under the jacket. Holy crap, she looked so good it was almost terrifying. She had one of those bodies that made alarm bells ring in my head: "Danger. Risk of electric shock. Fire hazard. Do not touch."

We talked for quite a while. The two traits that came across the strongest were a direct, no-bullshit emotional intimacy, and a sense of humor that veered back and forth between gentle warmth and enthusiastic, vicious bitterness. I could tell she had a lot on her mind. In fact, I guessed that her mind was obsessively chewing on something all the time and it would often chew on itself if left alone too long. I also guessed something about her that seemed clear from my perspective as a guy, even though it probably wasn't clear from her own perspective as a girl: Her shy behavior among strangers and groups, combined with her killer good looks, had screwed up her relationship with physical intimacy. She was hassled by men to such a degree that sexual intimacy and the threat of violence were now twisted together in her mind. If you didn't approach her in very specific steps, she would preemptively stab you in the face ... or you would stab yourself in the face and she wouldn't respect you.

As this impression formed, I pushed it into the back of my head with a broom. I would go over it later. Right now I just wanted to socialize and observe. Since Carolyn had been nice enough to show me her pictures, I suggested showing her the little webpage of scanned photos that Colleen and I had put together. Kate hadn't seen it either, so I went into the living room and fetched her. We gathered around a computer screen only to discover that the network was down, but Kurt overheard us whining from his room across the way, and said that we could look at it on his computer because it was cached in Netscape's temporary directory.

After that I answered some email, and Carolyn wandered out into the living room. Some minutes went by and when Kate and Ken and I emerged, everyone else was settled down around the TV watching The Princess Bride. I sat around watching it for as long as I could stand, about 15 minutes - I'd seen it a half-dozen times already, and was bored with its cuteness - then decided it was very late and I needed to get home.

I gathered Ken and Phaedra, and we walked back to Merrill with Linda and seated ourselves in the van. Ken and Phaedra and I discussed the photo shoot and vowed to get it done the next day. During the drive home my scalp started to hurt, and I had a headache pulsing behind my eyes when I shut off the van in Watsonville.

Glumly I prepared for bed. Phaedra went downstairs to take a shower and Ken fussed with his blankets on the floor. I felt like someone was applying a large electric drill between my eyebrows. Had the day really been that long? I flopped forward on my bed, knees on the floor, and tried to relax the insides of my head. "If you see Phaedra," I yelled over to Ken, "tell her that my head hurts."

"Headache?" Ken asked.

The yelling had hurt, so I just went "hrmgh."

"Sorry, man," he said.

After a while I heard Phaedra coming up the stairs. Would she look into the room? She did. I heard her bare feet on the carpet.

"Wouldn't the bed be more comfortable if you were in it?" she said.

"Head hurts." I told her.

She sat on the edge of the bed. "Well, I have something you could take, but it takes an hour to work. You'd probably be asleep by then."

"Yeah, hopefully." I replied.

She got up. I'd been hoping for a head massage but in the moment it seemed pretty lame to ask for one.

"Hope you feel better soon," she said, and walked to her room.

I shambled downstairs, hoping that a shower would loosen things up. It sort of worked. When I finally drifted off I had a crazy dream involving a tornado made of lightning that was coming my way. I had found pretty good protection in the basement of a warehouse: Cement walls covered over with the raw wooden paneling like the walls in Phaedra's temporary room. Would I survive the coming storm? The dream ended before it hit.

Comments

[zeugma92]

Fateful day!

[garote]

Indeed! I wish I could remember more about my first impressions of Carolyn. All those conversations with her really influenced my approach to romance and to women in general, I think...

[juan_gandhi]

Have to slowly read all this stuff; the density comparable to "Franny and Zooey".