The Grasshopper King Read online

  There was one more reason to move, which she didn’t bring up, because my father didn’t know about it yet: there was me. I think she had some idea that, born in the West, I would grow up steely, level-voiced, inclined to swift action. My mother is a woman of passionate opinion, and has been wrong about many things; but never, I believe, more wrong than in this.

  The Grape Arbor’s vegetarian leanings failed to catch on with the miners, drillers, and mountain men, and we were too far from downtown to attract the university crowd. Before long my parents had to learn to grill cheeseburgers to survive. Business, even so, was slim. A year after the move my father started looking for a second job. Unbrawny, ill-at-ease around machinery, he was in trouble from the start; but eventually he secured a slot on Mayor Meadows’s geothermal research team. Reading maps, digging holes, he could do, and the impossibility of advancement suited his constant nature. In this manner we mobilized upward. Starting from poverty, we topped out at bare subsistence.

  Despite themselves, my parents began to think of New York nostalgically, even wistfully. My mother had come to the opinion that there wasn’t much to the wilderness that couldn’t be experienced adequately through nature magazines. And the artists—true, their tips had been small, their demeanor condescending, but at least there had been a certain standard of conversation. The artists had never spat chaw or slapped my mother’s rear, and when they cursed it was in the service of wit. Their every rudeness seemed, in retrospect, like charm. But there was no money to go back now.

  When I was old enough I was put to work in the restaurant, in charge of the grill and the fry-o-lator. I spent every afternoon engulfed in a miasma of singed Crisco, tamping down patties the size of drink coasters, sullenly imagining myself in New York, where I was certain that I belonged, and where hamburgers, I was equally certain, were not cut so liberally with wheat germ that whole unalloyed pockets of it spilled out from the meat onto the grill and charred there, with a smell like a burning barn. Since, to my mother’s way of thinking, the grill was strictly a sidelight, I was the waiter too. In fact, my cooking constituted the majority of what we sold. Her carrot manicotti, billed as “famous”—it had been in poems—languished. Apparently the people of Chandler City didn’t care for fame. Nor did they care for her mock-Caesar salad, her several plates of crudités, her soy and brown-rice paella, any of the sugarless, dairyless, yeastless cakes that rested flat and foreboding in our display case like defunct UFOS. Mostly she sat at the window, glowered, and smoked. I often told customers I was not my parents’ son, but an orphan midget, away without leave from the Dutch national circus. Some seemed to believe me.

  Taped to the wall beside my Murphy bed was a snapshot of my mother, in the original Grape Arbor, setting a platter of sprouts and wax beans in front of Gregory Corso. The poet was smiling, his head cocked just noticeably to the left, and I liked to think he’d just said something sly and outrageous to my mother, that her affectless expression marked the moment just prior to understanding, that just after the shutter closed she would break into the laughter of shared sophistication. It was the best kind of laughter, I thought then, although I had never heard it.

  I used to get up an hour before I needed to for school, shut myself in the bathroom, and mimic Corso’s wry, one-sided smile in the mirror. Once I had reproduced it to my satisfaction—I was twelve—I tried it out in the schoolyard. I suppose I imagined that the other boys, observing the tiny questioning lift of my brow, my lips’ world-weary tilt, would in unison reassess me as a sort of playground guru, would direct to me henceforth their questions of fashion and social arbitration.

  Instead they took me for palsied. I endured their jeers, their intermittent blows, with Corso’s smile—or my grotesque imitation of it—fixed on my face. After that day I never had many friends at school; I spent my time with a loose confederation of playmates, most of them stigmatized by one physiological defect or another. The defective boys tolerated my attempts at drollery; and each day at recess, when I would inveigh against our classmates, our teachers, Chandler City, the entire American West, they listened to me dutifully. From time to time they played cruel tricks on me, but I never complained. I recognized that it was the closest thing to wit I was likely to come by for some time.

  My career in high school was undistinguished. The demands of my teachers were unbearably mundane, and my peers’ opinion of my intelligence meant less than nothing to me. All I could think of was getting my diploma and striking out for the East—more specifically, for the New York of my zealous imaginings, the symphony of taxicab horns, the murmur of education and wealth, starlets on my arms, and so forth. From a news magazine I had clipped out a sentence reading: “In the 1980s, New York City remains the cultural center of the Western World.” I taped the clipping below the bathroom mirror and forbade my parents to take it down. As before, I spent each morning before the mirror; but now, instead of smiling, I scowled, imagining the clipping as the caption to my head shot, tallying the days before I could depart.

  But my applications to Columbia, NYU, Pace, Fordham, and Cooper Union came back with purported regrets, and the few lesser schools there that did accept me were unable or unwilling to forgive my tuition. And this, my parents informed me without ambiguity, meant it would be Chandler State for me. I was stunned. In my essay I had explained at great length that it was impossible, at this point, for me to live anywhere but New York City, and that my unimposing record was clearly (and it was clear to me, then) a matter of my frustration at remaining entrapped in the ludicrous, backwater city-if-that in which I’d had the misfortune to be born.

  For a while I dallied with the idea of giving up college altogether, and booking my own passage to New York. But none of the traditional means of free transport applied to me. Hitchhiking was out—as a man alone, I was invisible to truckdrivers and frightening to vacationers, and no one else drove through Chandler City. I considered becoming a hobo; but a little research convinced me that a life of flattering housewives for scraps, of nights spent hanging inches over hurtling, sparking tracks, violated all my standards of acceptable privation. I wasn’t even sure there still were any hoboes. Even if I were to get to New York, I had no way of making a living. There was no musical instrument I could play soulfully on the corners; I knew no powerful insiders who would guarantee me work. I couldn’t type and I was certainly no boxer. There was nothing to be done about it. I had four more years, at least, before I could become expatriate.

  There was always suicide, of course. I thought of it often—decided, in fact, that I would certainly go ahead with it, weighed the available methods each time I bent, sweating, over another grillfull of the restaurant’s awful hamburgers. But, having gotten through the decision, I felt there was no hurry, and September, to my mild surprise, found me living. Undefiantly, I registered. I consoled myself with the assurance that, although I had been forced to enroll at Chandler State, I could not be forced to conform to its ways. I would piece together what counterculture I could. Having abandoned the idea of becoming a hobo—please forgive me—I set out to become a Boho.

  My fellow skeptics were easy to locate; they were the ones pressed grimly into the corners at mixers, draining their gaily-named cocktails one after another, remarking cuttingly on passers-by, always claiming to be about to leave. We formed a clique of sorts—Bick Wickman, who claimed to be from Liverpool, Marinet, Barberie the thereminist, the supercilious Kack, Charlie Hascomb, I, the others . . . We called each other by our last names and swore ourselves to total and eternal honesty—this meant meanness. At odd hours we could be found gathered in someone’s dorm room, or in the recesses of Happy Clappy’s, smoking pot, laughing hollowly, devising cruel nicknames for the basketball players and the fraternity presidents, constructing various drastic schemes (pipe bombs, excrement, itching powder) toward the impairment of the university’s function, and eventually releasing the balance of our scorn on whatever members of our group were absent. From time to time the directions of our
enmity would converge on one of our number, and before long that one would be driven away, to be spoken of thereafter with a venom otherwise reserved only for the most popular and well-connected students.

  Charlie Hascomb, a local like me, was my “best friend” that year (certainly we were not friends in the lay sense.) His straw-blond hair was meticulously groomed and hung down below his shoulders; his face was long, too, and droopy at the eyes, giving him a permanent expression of aristocratic glumness. Without any visible exercise he maintained a credible imitation of an athlete’s physique. I envied this, and, angry with myself for my envy, spent most of my time with him, by way of punishment.

  Charlie’s only weakness was a terrible fear of insects, and, by extension, of contamination in general.

  “Good goddamn,” he would say, gravely, shaking his head, whenever he walked into Happy Clappy’s. “This place is a filth hole.” He was always peering at the floor, starting at peripherally glimpsed motions, rubbing at the underside of a table and gazing mournfully at whatever came off on his finger. His clothes smelled of bug spray.

  “I see it this way,” Charlie told me once. “Basically every living thing either looks like it shouldn’t be able to think, and can’t, like a worm, or a tree; or looks like it should be able to think, and can. Dogs, birds, higher life-forms in general. But then look at a bug. It’s got arms, legs, eyes, everything; but no personality, no reason.”

  “What’s scary about that?” I asked him.

  He frowned at me, disappointed. “If it doesn’t bother you,” he said, “I can’t possibly explain.”

  Ordinarily anyone with such a fetish would have been hooted from our set at once, viciously and with glee. But Charlie was safe from that. For one thing, he was our dealer; although in those days there was nothing easier than finding a new dealer. More important, he possessed an uncanny talent for mimicry, which he used mercilessly against all those who fell from his favor. An incident in which he’d impersonated a sorority vice-president in a late-night phone call, and the subsequent abjection of the former friend of ours who believed himself summoned to her service, inspired in each of us a proud kind of dread. It was not worth anyone’s risk to take him on. And allied with him, I knew, I myself would never be outcast. The two of us used to sit in the back of Happy Clappy’s until closing time, Charlie “doing” the other members of our circle one by one, until I was weak with laughter and the pleasure of being included.

  I find it almost impossible now to identify myself with the vain, unpleasant undergraduate I was. But to my annoyance my memory of the period is thorough and detailed—I can recall each act of mean-spiritedness, each self-righteous slur, every one of my embarrassing affectations. I grew my hair long and wore a hideous beard, which tufted out from the sides of my jaw and across my neck without ever impinging on my face. An ordinary beard, at least, would have covered my acne. All the marijuana I was smoking made me break out more severely than I ever had in high school. I was always changing majors in response to imagined slights from my professors. I wore a long black raincoat wherever I went, inside or outside, winter or spring, and I fancied that the people who whispered at my passing were inquiring of each other what my mysterious story might be, what I knew that they didn’t; and so on.

  On the east side of campus, in a little copse of elms, stood a statue of Tip Chandler. Our founder, immortalized in bronze, must once have struck a noble figure. Under one arm he clutched a stack of books—Homer, Virgil, Ovid—and with the other he gestured grandly toward the west, his palm open and flat as if he were offering something to the Pacific; but that hand was empty. A goldpan was slung from his belt. His sandaled feet were spread wide apart on his pedestal, as if he were trying to keep his balance on an unsteady surface. And perhaps this pose represented one last burst of prescience on the old prospector’s part, for, as it turned out, the weight of the memorial was too much for the less-than-solid clay our school was built on. So Tip Chandler came to resemble his name. By the time of my arrival he had developed a list of about twenty degrees in the direction of his outstretched arm, so that his gesture of manifest destiny took on the aspect of a lunge; he seemed to be diving like a graceless ballerina into the elms.

  This was where I liked to sit: on the high edge of the canted pedestal, behind the statue’s back, my raincoat tucked between me and the cold marble. It was not at all comfortable. My back rested against Chandler’s unyielding calves, and the tilt of my seat forced my knees up awkwardly toward my chest. But many footpaths met at the statue, making it a particularly visible place to settle myself; and it was so uninviting as to guarantee that no one else ever sat there. It suited my imagined reputation that there should be a location associated with me, and only me, in the public mind. It made me, I liked to think, a sort of landmark unto myself.

  All this by way of explaining my dismay when, one afternoon in the fall of my junior year—having by this time D-plused my way through eight majors, alienated myself from most of my original cadre, and proceeded not an inch toward the manifestation of my own destiny, whatever it was—I arrived at my station to find that someone was already sitting there. It was a girl.

  “I sit there,” I said dumbly.

  The girl was no one I recognized. This alone was strange. By virtue of my endless disapproving contemplation of the people walking by me, I had come to know almost everyone on campus—if not by name, then by some offensive habit of bearing or dress. But this girl was new. She was wearing a long black sundress with a pattern of ivy that coiled up to the scooped-out neck. Her face was pale and scattered sparsely with light freckles. She was pretty, I guessed—her prettiness was the matter-of-fact brown-eyed kind that is usually agreed to be unintimidating. I found it nerve-racking. She smiled in a hard but serene way. She was looking at me as if I were about to say something.

  “But now you’re sitting where I sit,” I explained.

  “I know you sit here,” the girl said. “You’re Sam Grapearbor. We have psychology together.” She swung her legs gracefully over the pedestal’s edge and let them dangle almost to the ground.

  Now I was beginning to place her; she sat in the front of the class and left as soon as the lecture ended. I hadn’t recognized her because my attendance in psychology had lately been poor. I had hoped the course would feature more murderers and outcasts. I was about to switch to criminal justice.

  “Jenny?” I tried.

  “Julia,” she said, and hopped off the statue. She smoothed her dress with the heels of her hands. The day was unseasonably warm; the wet smell of the already-fallen leaves had risen over the campus, and the students had brought out their bright shorts, their flip-flops, for one final outing. All except me. I was wearing my raincoat, as always; and inside it I was starting to sweat.

  “I’ve eaten at your restaurant,” Julia told me.

  “You have to be kidding.”

  “Nope,” she said. “I liked the carrot manicotti. It’s justly famous.”

  “It’s not really famous. It’s a ploy.”

  “So why do you always sit here?”

  The question I’d been waiting two years for, and it caught me by surprise.

  “It’s nice,” I told her, which sounded weak even to me, so I tried again. “It’s suitable. Nobody bothers me.”

  “It’s uncomfortable.”

  “You get used to it.”

  “Really?”

  “Sort of.”

  She smiled. Her gums showed. “You’re the expert.”

  I was trying to find something wrong with her, to help me regain my usual footing. She was skinny and I could just make out the cords in her neck. That and her washed-out coloration made her look, I supposed, a little tired.

  Was that the best I could do? I who’d called a linebacker a name that made him weep?

  “OK,” I said, “here it is. What I like about this statue is its very vulgarity and ludicrousness and the fact that it’s about to collapse. Which I think is deeply symbolic. Which
I think sums up my feelings toward this—” I waved my arms around, unable to come up with a grand enough gesture; it would have to encompass practically everything I’d ever heard of. “This situation,” I concluded. “In which we find ourselves.”

  “I think it’s gross,” she said, and smartly, without warning, took my arm. “Let’s go someplace else. Walk me to class.”

  “To class,” I repeated. “Let’s go.”

  The two of us walked a little ways across the campus, not talking. Julia had put on a pair of sunglasses; she turned her chin up and watched the sky, while I met the eyes of the people passing us, trying to convey by my unconcerned expression that it was ordinary for me to be strolling with an attractive stranger, that were it not for the feather-touch of her hand on my elbow (steely, I refused to look down at my elbow, her hand) I might veer away, not noticing her absence until I deigned to turn my head.

  “What’s your game?” I said, finally, trying to sound tough; but I was melting, melting.

  She looked at me over her sunglass rims. “I don’t have a game,” she said. “I’m just a curious person. I’m wondering why you’re so disaffected all the time.”

  “Why aren’t you? That’s what I’m curious about. You don’t seem brain-damaged. You’re sober.”