Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) by Donald Fagen Page B

recent
Mad
magazine parody that announced the release of a new album:
Bob Dilly Sings—Almost
. I was leaving one world, but hadn’t quite arrived in the next.
    Three tense hours later, we arrived on campus. Though the college had converted two elegant riverside manor houses into dormitory space, my own dorm was part of Stone Row, a group of ivy-covered buildings at the campus center in serious need of renovation. My father couldn’t believe that Bard’s exorbitant tuition (constituting the greater portion of his life savings) had bought me this dump of a room with leaky windows and peeling blue paint. Trying to make the best of it, he suggested to my roommate, a clarinetist named Chester Brezniak, that he toss a coin for the lower bunk. I won. I’m pretty sure my father cheated.
    Two other students occupied tiny inner rooms. Lonnie was a senior, a painter with an outstanding record collection, an endless supply of marijuana and nightly visits from an assortment of willowy girlfriends. In the other room was Alan, a soft-spoken, Peter Pan–ish, coffee-colored dancer who was always wearing leg warmers. The thing was, as I’d never knowingly met a homosexual and had some doubt as to whether they actually existed, the only category I could think to put him in was, maybe, “hyperaesthetic messenger of the gods.”
    The first weekend after registration, flyers announced that there was to be a “tequila mixer” in Sottery Hall for the incoming class. Shortly before it was to begin, I happened to be in the court behind Stone Row when I saw a van skid into the main parking lot and disgorge a group of scuzzy hippies—actually, I don’t think the word “hippy” was as yet being used to describe what they were—carrying guitars and equipment cases. This turned out to be the Group Image, an early tribal-type band that had been booked to provide the entertainment along with a fine band led by two Bardians, the Boylan brothers, called the Gingermen.
    In high school, understand, I’d never had much of a social life. I was one of a few Jews in a spanking-new facility in rural New Jersey. Moreover, I was an introverted jazz snob who was afraid to ride in other kids’ cars for fear that “Johnny Get Angry” by Joanie Sommers might come on the radio (though I did have a secret throb for Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las). I tried taking up the baritone horn, but when the music teacher, Chauncey Chatten, forced me to march during halftime at football games, I gave the damn thing back. So, for most of my highschool years, while the rest of my class was attending sports events or knocking over gas stations (I really had no idea what they did), I was home in my room flipping through the
Saturday Review
(I had a subscription), reading the thick Dover paperbacks I’d stolen from a basement bookshop in Princeton or sitting at the piano copping licks off Red Garland records. I didn’t drink or smoke. Aside from Soupy Sales’s rogue kiddie show, I had stopped watching TV when I was about thirteen. In short, I was a first-tier nerd, and pitifully lonely.
    Lacking physical confidence, I was shy with girls. I’d skipped the proms and graduation and all that stuff. The idea of actually going on a date was both conceptually repugnant and beyond the limits of my courage. In my senior year, I’d somehow managed to gain the friendship of a gorgeous, sad and hilarious girl by tossing off snappy remarks. I could make her laugh, but it never went much further than that.
    So I was a bit anxious when I walked into the Sottery Hall tequila mixer. The lights had been dimmed. Along one wall, several tables had been set up and stocked with hundreds of shot glasses rimmed with salt and filled with tequila. There were enormous wooden bowls of lemons and a fruit knife. After watching a few other students demonstrate their technique, I picked up a shot glass, bit into a lemon slice