Richard Rushfield - Dont follow me, Im lost : a memoir of Hampshire College in the twilight of the 80s

Table of Contents

GOTHAM BOOKS
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.);
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England;
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2,
Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd);
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd);
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,
Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India;
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale,
North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd);
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, October 2009

Copyright 2009 by Richard Rushfield

All rights reserved

Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rushfield, Richard.
Dont follow me, Im lost : a memoir of Hampshire College
in the twilight of the 80s / by Richard Rushfield.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-14902-7

1. Rushfield, Richard. 2. Hampshire CollegeBiography. I. Title.
PS3568.U7273Z46 2009
813.54dc22 2009017817

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by
any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means
without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only
authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of
copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet
addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility
for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any
control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their
content.

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. I
n that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;
however, the story, the experiences, and the words
are the authors alone.

http://us.penguingroup.com

For Nicole

Ive always imagined that youd take me to some place where there lived a huge viscous man-sized spider and that wed spend the rest of our lives staring at it in fear. And thats how wed spend our days of mutual love.

DOSTOEVSKY, THE POSSESSED

CHAPTER ONE

Orientation, September 86

I swear, man, its not a hippie school.

I Dude. Nino looked me deep in the eyes. Its like the biggest hippie school in the world. Hampshire is the Harvard of hippie schools.

You can keep saying thatI sighedbut Ive been there. I went to parties there and Im telling you I didnt see a single hippie.

Whatever, man. But if you come home wearing a poncho, dont expect me to talk to you.

I shook my head. Dont worry about it. I wouldnt drag myself four thousand miles to be locked away in the woods with a bunch of hippies.

Six months later, I stood on line at freshman orientation. In front of me a pale-faced boy in a sagging knit sweater passed a joint to his parents, who carried his canvas duffel bags for him. Behind me, a young man in a rainbow bandana smiled when I turned his way, tossed a tiny leather bag into the air, and then kicked it into my stomach. It bounced off and plopped onto the ground.

Whats up, bra? he asked. You dont hack?

I remembered the conversation with Nino, eating chili fries in his car parked outside the Westwood Village video arcade. We chewed over the specter of my living among hippies like it was the plotline of a postapocalypse zombie movie, a story in which the living dead would drain my life force with a suffocating web of Buddha beads, leaving me to stumble across the earth, more rainbow-colored corpse than human, until the end of time.

Not that we actually knew what hippies were. Between us, my friends and I owned a handful of Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd albums, which werent bad background music, but they seemed as close to our lives as records by the Four Freshmen or, for that matter, Johann Sebastian Bach.

In mid-eighties Los Angeles hippies were, like the bobby soxers and zoot-suiters of yore, an extinct tribe who had roamed our land in prehistoric times. Legends were passed down of how in their age they had panhandled on the Sunset Strip while Jim Morrison had invented the rock poet genre, of their large concerts where they smoked marijuana in protest of war. Our only direct contact with the historic peoples was in the person of our headmaster, who called frequent assemblies to remind us that at our age he and his consciousness-raised buddies had changed the world, while spoiled brats like us couldnt even be bothered to show up for last Saturdays Nuclear Freeze Forum Day. In his agonized soliloquies, it was impossible to make out what exactly he had done to change the world (the story involved backpacking in South America, growing his own vegetables, and reading Robert Frost), but our parents assured us constantly that our headmaster was a great man, a visionary . They were the longest assemblies of our lives.

So when I visited Hampshire on my prospective student tour, it was with a fair level of trepidation that I stepped in to the famed collegiate Hippie Haven. My friend Drake, a surfer with beatnik tendencies, who had graduated from my high school and come to Hampshire two years before, hosted me for the weekend. He showed me around the campus with its dilapidated ski-lodge buildings set into clearings amid the snow-dappled forest, from the giant Art Barn where he was sculpting a papier-mch wave, to the little apartments where he lived with three others in admirable squalor. Friday night, Drake had his friends over to watch Miami Vice . While I tried to disguise how quickly I had gotten drunk on Drakes gin fizzes, I listened to their speculation about Crocketts new car, which was to be revealed on the episode, and their groans of displeasure when the white Testarossa was unveiled.

That is the most clichd choice they couldve made, one friend fumed.

This show might be losing it. Drake shook his head.

I told you guys, we should stick with Magnum, said another.

I dunno, Drake mourned. I just thought Vice was above this kind of chicanery.

After the show, we walked over to a party in a little village on the other side of campus called Prescott House that looked like a giant tin ski chalet. The crowd seemed a bit like the drama scene from my high school, but more intimidating, more severe, wearing even more black, with even more dramatic eyeliner. Its the New York kids, Drake told me.

A girl in a black miniskirt and red stockings, who looked like shed been crying, asked me if I knew who was holding Ecstasy on campus. I told her that I was just visiting for the weekend, which made her laugh and ask, Is that why youve been staring at me all semester in Gogol? She grabbed my arm and made me dance with her to a Bauhaus song. We sat on the couch, where she told me her name was Malaria, and said, Lets pretend everyone here is dead. While the music blared we stared at them and tried to picture them deceased. Youre good at this, she whispered. She said that Lewis in Enfield might be holding something and we should go check, but first she had to go to the bathroom. She stumbled off and never returned. Half an hour later, I glanced out the windows and saw her stumbling down the stairs with a guy in bondage pants and dreadlocks. I stood to follow her but Drake stopped me. Play hard to get, Rich. Thatll teach her. Two months later, when I received my acceptance letter from Hampshire, her red stockings were the first image that flashed in my mind.