TO BE NOBLE
PART 1
by ELE ROOS
It is too cold to be outside smoking, and the numbers of smokers has diminished accordingly. With a zero degree windchill only a few of us are dedicated; power-hitting cigarettes, held clumsily between gloved fingers. The first years still glance nervously through the windows, watching as people scurry during the ten-minute passing period. They haven't perfected their timing, and worry that they will be late for class. In a few more weeks, when everyone is starting to creak and groan under the pressure of finals, there will be more people standing here, the closet smokers, the ones that don't really inhale. They will come out the door to borrow cigarettes and lighters, and waste all of our fluid as they try to light facing into the wind. But today is a cold day, in the middle of the quarter, and it is only the dedicated.
We are not friends, we the smokers. But we are a community, we know each other in the self-serving way of addicts, can zero in on each other in crowd of a hundred people, when we have run out of cigarettes and need to borrow. Sometimes we chit-chat, sometimes we stand a little distance apart without speaking. I don't think that the others even know my name. I am simply the Camel smoker with the green coat. And that is fine. I don't ask much from people, besides from civility. And when the girls stand too close and try to talk with me, I find I have nothing to say. I too often find myself watching the wind blow their hair across their face, in strands, catching in the Chapstick gloss on lips a little swollen from the cold. I started off chivalrous, and would hold the lighter to their cigarettes, but I always found my hands a little too shaky, so now I just hand them the lighter, barely touching gloved hands.
There is one that looks at me a little too long. She keeps asking me what I have planned for the weekend, or what I did over the weekend. Today she is standing close. In winter gear, it is hard to say if she is attractive, but I have seen her before. She is, like most law school woman, not quite pretty. Her face is overly-angular and her hair unkempt. She puts her unlit cigarette in her mouth and looks at me with her head tilted, green eyes wide. When I hand her the lighter, she isn't wearing gloves. She hands me back the lighter and then walks a few feet away.
It is too cold to worry about littering. I drop the mostly smoked Camel onto the cement, would have ground it out with the boot, but the wind rolls it down the steps. There is still too much snow to worry about fires, so I turn to go in. That girl is watching my cigarette as it stumbles down the steps. She is hunched in, making herself small, and blowing impatient puffs of smoke. She doesn't look at me. I grab the door as someone comes out.
This is, now, my home. The walls, which somehow overpower, were constructed to hold in light and space. They arch high, but it seems that no one ever looks that high, to see what makes the ceiling. It is always instead the navigation between bodies, the acceleration of short passing periods, the grabbing and the hoisting of the time of departure. Potted trees, gone a bit wild, reach out into the hallways, sustain tears, and learn to grow upwards. So many places for sitting, for conversation, for sacrilege, overlooked. I have learned to inhabit these places where I can observe unobserved. Not that there is really any need to make oneself anonymous, I am not one to be noticed.
In different places, at different ages, I learned to create my invisibility. For the obvious reason: I was the kid to be mocked. The one that had to go home and explain that the stain on my shirt was chocolate, not blood, just because it was easier that way. Because my mother didn't really want to hear. Perhaps, there are still the tinges of discomfort. I have become thick skinned. Perhaps more so than is necessary.
I don't know why, I, myself, remember. Perhaps because it was not a simple inadequacy. It wasn't that I wasn't quite good enough, I was the kid that everyone made fun of. So, now, maybe I am the cliché of all clichés, dork boy makes good. Perhaps, I could buy a trophy wife and go back to a reunion. . . But it doesn't really work that way. I am still alone, somewhat comfortable here in the place without persona, without harms and risks.
There are those that thrive, splendid in this element, setting down networks of roots through the bowels, access to the unknown rooms, putting hours, days, nights in the aerie of paper and thought. Making marks and trying to immortalize selves, all the war through, spinning fibers of printed pages, adding to the weight of bursting shelves, volume upon volume, all intertwined in allusions and references, cite, check, quote. To make law, and bind the future to follow. Eyes glazed at that possible power to freeze the present perceptions, enduring. And perhaps I aspired to be them.
As it is, quicksand. The more struggle, the stronger the pull. Better for me to ignore, slip silently through, time, space, credit hours. Go home alone in the early dark evenings and feel the wave of frustration curling around the edges. The longing for friction, assuming the place of significance. Until it is too much, and have to use my hand. I always close my eyes, so I can't see what it is that I am doing, let my mind create snippets of fantasy, of mouths, vaginas, forms of soft pink wetness, until right at the moment when I shoot the stickiness there is always some picture of defilement, of victory, of violence. And then I am messy and ashamed.
We are exposed to the best faculty early. But because quality education is expensive, our exposure is in the most efficient way possible. So we sit in large lecture halls, at splintered wooden benches, in uncomfortable chairs, and realize that this doesn't even look like The Paperchase. There is of course the Socratic method, but the fear fell away quickly, when the first brave soul simply said, "I didn't have a chance to read that case" and the world didn't end. So now we all play the odds, feign ignorance, and glare at those that raise their hands.
• • •
In The Now: June 16 - June 22, 2001
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BY ERIC MESSENGER
Everyone Wins With the N.M.E.
BY LEOPOLD E. QUANSARA
Sweet Jesus Pie
BY ROSCOE BULWARK and CLETUS JONES
• • •
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