Chapter 4 

The next day was February 1st, and everything -- the weather, the work, the class -- seemed leaden. We spent the morning learning about child's benefits. If a covered WE or SE person dies, his minor children (or wards, if he's the natural grandparents) get to split his benefits. "This obviously works to the advantage of only children," Dave said. A child can continue to receive benefits until he's 21, or 22 if he can prove he is attending college.

I ate my lunch by myself in the break room, and after we resumed class Dave had two announcements. A "Personality Adjustment Session" would be held that night after work at Bud's, a new bar just down the street from SSA.

"Second, there is a little administrative matter to take care of. We have a lot of additions to be made to the CM. They're called 'transmittals,' and SSA issues one whenever there's a change to the CM. The issue you have of the CM is dated August 1977, so there are six months of these things to catch up on. The white ones correct typos, the blue ones provide new legislation and the pink ones are urgent revisions. Let me get them for you."

In front of each of us, Dave dropped an 18-inch stack of multicolored paper. We were flabbergasted. "This will probably take the rest of the week, so we'll go easy on the course material until you`re done."

I stared at the mounds of pink, blue and white transmittals and a wave of massive self- pity washed over me. After my unexpected bout of homesickness the night before, I was having a lot of doubts -- about SSA, about Madison, about myself. It would take at least a week to insert the transmittals in the CM, and suddenly it appeared to be the stupidest effort imaginable. Around me, most of my new colleagues attacked the job with gusto, laughing and getting to know each other, with the devil-may-care attitude of students when the teacher leaves the room. I sat morosely, however, amid the fun, every muscle in my body clenched up as they do when a tedious job is expected of me, occasionally replacing a page but mostly reviewing my escape options. What if I just repacked the car and left? Would anybody, except me, think I was a total failure? What about the people I had said goodbye to in Washington just a week earlier? My whole life yawned like a pit before me.

Finally 4:30 rolled around, and amid a great clatter of chairs and rustling of regulations, the 15 of us headed out. I debated whether or not to go back to the apartment, but figured sitting around would only prompt another emotional outburst.

It had started snowing again, and the cold -- it was 6° -- hit me again as I stepped out of the car. Bud's peeked its head out of a snowdrift, looking like an Antarctic research station. Nobody can live in this cold. In DC it's 47 degrees today. I wrapped my ugly coat around me and went in.

Bud's had a very comforting smell of beer, soap, cheeseburgers and waxed floors. The place was paneled in dark wood which made even the brightly lit eating areas gloomy and cozy at the same time. The place was fairly new and divided into a bar area, a drinking area with booths and little wall lights, a dining room and a small but well-equipped dance floor, with a DJ booth, masses of color spotlights and speakers the size of my car. Practically the whole SSA office was there in addition to the CRTs, a surprising show of support when I considered that out of the 300 people at NAVSUP I probably couldn't have gotten more than ten to hoist a few after work. This was encouraging.

I was never a barfly -- in fact, in my years at the University of Virginia, renowned for its guzzling student body, I had visited a bar exactly twice and had only been drunk once, on a bottle of bourbon -- the official school drink -- I single-handedly gulped down the week before I graduated. Luckily, I only had to live in that room for another week, but it was months before the vomit came off my comforter. But new times call for new measures. I walked to the bar, unaware of how to order, and meekly asked for a beer.

"What kind?"

"Uh . . . ."

"Miller, Schlitz, Special Export, Stevens Point . . . "

"A Miller, please."

After paying what to my Washington mind appeared to me a ridiculously low price for my mug, I sat down next to Doreen. She looked a good deal more friendly than she did the first day in the forms room.

"Hi, Doreen."

"Scott, right? This is Andrea." She introduced me to a tall, impish-looking blonde with a sexy nose and long tapering fingers. "And you know Debbie."

"Hi." I took a gulp of beer and almost gagged on the unfamiliar taste. Evidently I was wearing my crisis of faith on my sleeve. Doreen maneuvered her head to catch my eye.

"What's the matter?"

"Oh, I guess I'm homesick." I considered that statement. "Sounds childish, I guess."

"No, not at all." I evidently brought out Doreen's maternal instincts, for she patted my hand and clicked her tongue. "Where are you from?"

I swirled my drink in both hands. I saw someone do it on TV once. "Washington, DC."

Doreen suddenly sat up and glanced at Debbie as if expecting a trick. "Washington, DC?"

"Well, actually Alexandria, Virginia. It's right across the river. . . ."

Doreen slumped back, her mouth agape. "I'm from Alexandria!," she exclaimed, pointing violently at herself.

I didn't expect to come 800 miles and meet someone from home. "You're kidding!"

"No! What part?"

"My parents live in Mount Vernon. I went to Fort Hunt High School."

"I lived in Landmark!"

"Jeez." We stared at each other for a moment. "You from there originally?"

"No, I was born here in Madison, but Paul and I moved there when I got a job with the Navy Department. . . . "

"I worked for the Navy Department!" I almost bounced out of my seat. My mug was now empty and was miraculously replaced by a passing waitress. "I just left NAVSUP to come here."

"NAVSUP? I worked for NAVSEA!"

This was ridiculous. The Naval Sea Systems Command, by far the larger of the two, was a few hundred yards down Jefferson Davis Highway from NAVSUP.

Doreen shook her head. "Oh, we've got lots to talk about. Here." She gave me a few dollars. "Go get us a pitcher, will you?"

Someone had force-fed the jukebox and it had been playing Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" for about an hour. Bud's was getting packed, and I had to fight my way through a bubbly crowd to get to the bar. On my way back, armed with a pitcher and a few plastic tumblers, I stopped for a second to watch the pool players. I hadn't played since my grandfather let me win at the corner tavern when I was six years old. It looked like a lot of fun.

Doreen and I chatted for a couple of hours, finding more and more interesting intersections of our lives. I greedily sucked back pitcher after pitcher of beer, enjoying the taste more and more and appreciating the cheery cast it put on my frame of mind. The seats next to us were filled with a rotating group of people, and along the way I was introduced to most everyone in the office. They were a happy, charming bunch, seemingly as happy with their station in life as I was unhappy with mine. I was particularly struck by a young woman I hadn't met, and I pointed her out to Doreen. She was a dark, mysterious woman in a stylish outfit a few notches above everyone else's apparel, and a pair of large glasses framed eyes I wanted to fall into. Her body moved with a cat-like grace. I couldn't take my eyes off her.

"Oh, that's Linda," Doreen said. "She's one of the Title XVI CRs."

"She's something."

"Well, as far as I know she's not attached. Maybe you can liven up her life for her." Doreen giggled.

"I'd certainly like to try. . . Do you want another pitcher?"

"Sure."

I slid out of the booth and almost fell on my ass. My head felt as if it was stuffed with cotton, but it wasn't an unpleasant feeling. I looked around the loud, smoke-filled bar, and felt that I was good friends with everyone.

"Scott?"

I looked down at Doreen. "Yes?"

"Weren't you going somewhere?"

I did a little hop and skip which subjectively, somewhere in my addled mind, I knew looked ridiculous. "Right you are, Ms. Haug. Here I go!"

People and things whirled by me much faster than usual. Halfway through the crowd, I was overcome by an urgent call of nature and fought my way to a restroom. My bladder seemed to have expanded to the size of an oil drum, and I laughed out loud at the endless stream while the other habitués glanced at me strangely. My zipper seemed much more complicated than usual, but I reasoned out its workings and was on my way to the bar again when I was hailed by Alan and Steve. They were playing Fussball.

"Hey, Scott!" Steve displayed his wide grin, made wider by the vast amounts of beer he had also ingested. "Come on. This guy is no match for me. You play him a round."

Alan looked up in his peculiar befuddled way. He reminded me of a chubby Gabe Kaplan. "What? Oh, yeah. OK. C'mon, Scott." He twirled a few handles. "Got a quarter."

After a long, drawn-out search for one, I inserted it in the machine. Steve dropped one of the three balls amid the monoped figures.

"GO!"

Alan and I pushed and pulled on the handles, twirling them maniacally. After a few seconds it was apparent that neither one of us was sufficiently sober to control the course of the game. The ball stayed untouched in the center of the board. After battling for an eternity, we collapsed in laughter against the wall.

"Jesus, am I wasted!," Alan shouted. "I love it!"

"I've never played this thing before," I said between gasps. "It doesn't look than difficult. . . ."

"Shit," Alan said, "back at Iowa I majored in this damn thing."

"You went to Iowa?" Ah. Small talk. I can handle this.

"Yeah. Shitty school, but they took me because of my dad."

"What's he do?"

"My dad? Shit, he owns Iowa. I can do anything I want in that fucking state."

I wasn't sure I had heard right. My ears were buzzing in a minor blues chord. "Your dad owns Iowa?"

"Might as well." He leaned over the game conspiratorially. "If you're ever in Iowa, and get in some deep shit, just mention 'Andich.' Save your ass every time."

"'Andich,'" I repeated stupidly.

"C'mon," Steve said. "Let's get a pitcher."

"Uh oh. I think I was supposed to get one for Doreen." It seemed ages ago.

"Doreen, huh?" Steve's maniacal grin widened. "Not bad."

"Did you know . . . " I trailed off, forgetting what I wanted to say. "Oh, yeah. Did you know that Doreen used to live in my home town?"

"Really? Small world."

I did a long pantomime of agreement. Everything else was moving faster, but I seemed to be ticking down. "Small world, you're absolutely right." Muttering this phrase repeatedly, I staggered off towards the bar.

I'm not terribly clear on the next five hours at Bud's. I downed at least four more pitchers in the company of shadowy faces. The dance floor exploded to life at 9 PM, drowning out most small talk. At one point, an older woman, her hair a peroxide blonde, sat beside me.

"Are you Scott Cook?"

"I most assuredly and definitely am."

"Did you go to Fort Hunt High School in Alexandria?"

The mention of my alma mater stunned me. "Yes! Yes! Yes, I did!"

"I thought the name sounded familiar. I'm Eliot Stovers' mother." She held out her hand.

Eliot! Good God! Eliot Stover was a chubby blonde bully with whom I had shared my duties as student assistant in Mr. South's physics class my junior year. We spent that year in South's back room, watching the Today show on a salvaged TV and occasionally running out to set up experiments for the real students. We carefully avoided mentioning to each other that we held our position due to our total stupidity in all things scientific. I was more the literary type; Eliot, however, had no known interests outside of soccer.

I focused on her as best I could. "You're kidding."

"Eliot and I moved up here when I got divorced." She straightened up with pride. "He's going to the University on a soccer scholarship."

"A soccer scholarship?" I burst out laughing. I laughed much longer than necessary, or even polite. "Do you work at SSA?" I asked between guffaws.

"Yes, I'm an SR."

"Well, bring Eliot in someday," I said, gulping another beer. "I'd like to see the little fucker again."

Mrs. Stover blinked a few times and left.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting in a booth with Dave Norton, his inscrutable face revealing nothing of his state of mind.

"You married, Dave?," I yelled over the music. This was an inane question, but it was the most cogent I could manage, and it was especially brave considering that I wasn't even sure the person across the table was Dave.

"Nope. Never found anyone good enough." Dave hardly moved his mouth when talking, but transmitted everything with his eyes, bright semaphores in his impassive face. In my tunnel vision, they were all I could see.

"God, I'd love to be married!," I shouted, and it was the truth. It was not something I liked to admit very often.

Carolyn wandered by at that moment, one of the SSI CDCs. I had talked to her briefly earlier, a tall angular woman with a hint of hidden sin and a straightforward stare. She was in the process of divorcing a man named Scott.

"Carolyn!," I yelled. "C'mere." I grabbed her around the waist and deftly planted her on my lap. The rational half of my brain let me know that this was tacky and so far out of character that I risked becoming another person, but the other half of my brain told it to shut up. I decided that I liked beer very much.

"How about trading one Scott for another?" I patted her ass.

To my surprise, Carolyn looked at me with smoldering eyes and lunged for me. Her tongue ran around in my mouth like a trapped ferret. She tasted of Scotch.

After an eon of animal pleasure, she lifted her head. "Anything you say, gorgeous," she growled, and she was gone.

Dave reached across the table and shook my hand. "Welcome to Wisconsin," he said.

Renee, our Title II mentor, was passing by. In the two days I'd known her, she seemed to be a female version of my normal self, shy and out-of-place. Regardless, I pulled her onto my lap.

"Renee, how'd you like to get married?"

She slid one arm around my back. "I'm already married, Scott," she said in good humor. "What would Joel have to say?"

"Joel? Your husband's name is Joel?," I said in mock horror.

Renee shrugged. "What can I say? I've tried to get him to change it. . . . "

We both laughed and she took the opportunity to slide off me, not an unpleasant sensation. "Check with me in a few years," she said as she was swallowed by the crowd.

Emboldened by these quasi-conquests, I proceeded to yank at least a dozen women out of the aisle to pose the same question. As I recall, I got two "yesses," one of whom stayed on my lap for half an hour, matching me drink for drink and whispering novel sexual acts in my ear. The fact that I had never heard of half of them only increased my interest. However, she left when Donna Summer's "Love to Love You, Baby" started on the dance floor and I found I was unable to stand up, much less dance. I was too far gone to remember her name, and for the next three months I kept a look-out for her. I never did track her down.

Events were speeding by like a freight train now, and I had transmuted from "uninhibited" to "deranged." Leaving Dave, I headed up and down the crowded area in front of the bar, greeting acquaintances and strangers alike with a back slap and a loud voice which no one seemed to understand. Stumbling against people, I spilled innumerable drinks. I was becoming the center of attention and relished it. Maybe I could survive in Madison.

On my precarious way to the restrooms once again, I was stunned to see my dreamgirl, that luscious creature Doreen had told me was named Linda. She was standing by herself, evidently waiting for a friend to emerge from the ladies' room. I rushed up to her in a flat-footed trot.

"Linda! Linda! God, you're so beautiful, Linda. I think I'm in love with you. Let's get married! I want to have your children!"

Linda looked at me as if my eyebrows were on fire. Without a word, she turned and walked back towards the bar.

I trotted behind, watching the hypnotic undulations of her hips. Trying to appear in control of myself, I grabbed her bare upper arm, as soft and as pleasant was a pillow on a cool night.

"Linda. Linda. I know I'm drunk. I know it. But I'm such a nice guy, I really am. To know me is to love me -- like the song, right? Heh heh. Seriously. . ." I put on my William F. Buckley serious face. "How about a drink?"

This was the wrong thing for an obviously drunken person like myself to say. Linda wrenched her arm away. "Who are you?," she demanded in a nasty tone of voice.

"I'm . . . I'm Scott Cook. I'm one of the claims . . . claims repres . . . CRTs . . . just started . . . it's February 1st . . . ."

Linda left me again. We were now in the heart of Bud's, in the middle of everything. "I'm a goddamned jewel, Linda!," I yelled after her. "You'll never do better!"

Steve Potter grabbed my arm and steered me to a booth. "Easy, Scott."

I thumped into a seat and poured a glass from someone else's pitcher. "God, she's great! I'm going to marry her!"

"OK. Scott." Steve made sure I was settled in properly and left. I greedily drank from the beer, determined to prolong this wonderful feeling. I made a detailed study of the wall lamp next to my head, and lured by a steady beat, headed for the dance floor. I couldn't feel my feet or my legs, but floated to the dowels bordering the dance area and surveyed the scene.

The thump of the woofers ate into my heart, and the lights dazzled my dilated pupils. I hated disco, but now it seemed the only proper music to go with 15 pitchers of Miller's. A few of the SSAers were doing the Hustle to one side, but most of the dancers were locals. Two women in particular caught my eye, dancing with each other center stage. They were townies, blonde and rapacious-looking, attired in tight white satin jumpsuits and six-inch wedgies.

A phrase popped into my head. Silk bimbos. I muttered this over and over as I watched them.

The next thing I knew, the song was over and I was seated at their table. They gave me the same look Linda had.

"Hi," I said, and stared at the ashtray.

I was suddenly yanked to my feet and led away. It was Dave Norton.

"Hi, Dave old buddy."

Dave said nothing and led me to a table. I grabbed his arm and pointed back towards the dance floor.

"Silk bimbos," I said.

"Yeah, right. Just stay here, OK?"

"OK."

I poured another drink and looked at my watch. 11:35! My God, time flies when you're having fun.

Another blackout ensued. The next thing I knew, I was sitting, incredibly, under a table, talking to Andrea's knees. I was clinging to her big plaid skirt.

"So," Andrea said, leaning down to talk to me, "how do you like Madison so far?"

"OK. Fine. Perfect. Couldn't be better." I was practically in suspended animation. I gripped her skirt tighter. The enormity of my faux pas was dawning on me. "I'm not like this, Andrea! Believe me! I'm a quiet type, usually. I don't know what went wrong!" I was now sobbing, the last refuge of a drunk.

"I know, Scott, I know." Andrea patted me on the head. "We all better get home -- it's a school night."

I staggered to my feet and wobbled to the coat rack. My coat was in a pile on the floor, and water from melted footprints was everywhere. I seemed to be viewing my actions from a number of different perspectives, watching dispassionately as I got tangled in my coat, lost my car keys in the sodden lump of outergear and finally shoved open Bud's back door. The cold was infinitely worse -- down to -25° -- but luckily I was totally numb. I fell a few times on the ice and managed to get the Rambler started against its protests. I careened down the short distance to my apartment, narrowly avoiding snow drifts and telephone poles which sprang before me like monsters in a fun house. Struggling through the locks, I spread-eagled on my mattress and plunged into a swirling coma.

I awoke the next morning, dimly aware I'd been out late the night before but blissfully ignorant of the extent of my welcoming salvo in Madison. I had no trouble waking up and felt fresh and healthy. I was again greeted with a picture of the Alexandria courthouse of Good Morning America, but it didn't bother me this time. My homesickness had miraculously disappeared.

When I entered the class, all eyes focused on me. Conversation stopped dead.

"Uh . . . Scott, how ya doin'?," Steve asked as I sat down next to him.

"Just fine." What's everyone staring at?

Dave Norton leaned over on the other side. "Today you are a man," he intoned.

Dave Gerlach came in. He was teaching a session on lump sum death payments that day.

"Hi, guys. I hope we've all recovered from last night . . . especially Mr. Cook . . ."

I was stunned. Was I that bad? As Dave started the lession, I asked Steve what I had done.

"Well, you had a good time, I'll tell you that." He laughed in a whisper. "Have you decided which one you're going to marry yet?"

Oh, shit. That killed it. I spent the rest of the session writing a begging letter to the Navy Department to take me back, while Dave described the lump sum death payment, or as it is more commonly known at SSA, the LSDP.

"Anytime a covered WE or SE person dies, his spouse or children get $255 to cover the funeral expenses. Actually, the LSDP is a bit of a joke. Most people, at least the kind of people we get here in Madison, have spent the last 20 years paying installments on their burial plots, so they don't need the money. Anyway, you can't bury a parakeet for $255 these days. It sounds like prize money, doesn't it -- 'Show us your dead spouse and we'll give you $255!' Last year, we shelled out over a billion dollars on this."

Being new to the bureaucracy, we all gasped.

"Under some circumstances, we even pay it to uncovered wage earners, but that's a little complicated for now. Usually, you take the LSDP application at the same time as the spouse or children's benefits, since obviously someone has just died, right? You take it on this form, the SSA-8." He held up a red and white form. "Piece of cake."

During lunch, Doreen came up to me at the Coke machine.

"How are you feeling?" She looked more like my mother than my mother now.

"OK." I punched the Diet Rite button. "I guess I really made a fool of myself last night." I lowered my voice. "Was I really that bad?"

"It was not a pretty sight."

"I'm not really like that, Doreen. Really."

"I know." She patted my arm. "I've been going around to everyone and telling them that you're really a nice, quiet guy, but you're just a little homesick. We'd never hold anything like that against you. Don't worry."

And she was right. For the next three months, none of the staff at SSA Madison ever mentioned the incident again. In Washington, an act like that would have ruined my career right at the start.

Thursday and Friday passed without incident as we hunkered down, finished filing the transmittals, and learned more about the bizarre Social Security system.

By the end of the first week, I'd met and talked to all 14 of my classmates and had formed a quick opinion of them. In addition to Steve, Dave and Alan, they were:

• Laura R., a forty-ish woman whose husband had just left her with three kids and a mortgage in Chicago. She was an uptight, strident woman with coarse black hair and severe glasses, who bitched continuously about SSA being the opening wedge in the formation of a fascist police state (or something like that), and about how she was being held back from her "inherent potential" by rampant sexism. Being an asshole didn't help her, either.
  
  
• Carrie M., a rich bitch from Evanston. She looked like she had a finger up her ass except when she was drinking, which was every night from 4:30 to midnight. Then she became a classic cock-tease, squeezing some poor guy out of as many drinks as possible, then disappearing on the way to his car. She drove to Chicago every weekend to visit her boyfriend, if indeed she had one. She had a strange 6X kind of hairdo, a pixie cut that went with her usual outfit of a corduroy jumper dress over a white turtleneck. She looked like she was going to her kindergarten graduation, and she usually had a grosgrain bow stuck to one side of her head.
  
  
• Cindy T., massively overweight and shy to the point of neuromotor shutdown. Her ears merged seamlessly into her shoulders, and when she smiled, her eyes disappeared. She was the only one of us who stayed in the Highlander Inn the whole three months rather than renting an apartment, for some bizarre neurotic reason. She only attended one social function while in Madison, and ran out the door with a look of abject terror on her face when a joint was passed around. She was from Bettendorf, Iowa, and Steve Potter, who had relatives in Bettendorf, said that as far as Bettendorf girls went, she was the cream of the crop.
  
  
• Karen J., who bore a close -- nay, perfect -- resemblance to Chuck Jones' Tweety Bird, with her bulging temples, tiny mouth, big feet and saucer eyes. Which isn't to say she was unattractive, just a little odd. Who could have guessed that this little 4' 11'' girl with the squeeky voice would turn out to be the most twisted of us all? She didn't really come into her own until close to the end of the three months, but by the time we left town, she had ingested, snorted and smoked most substances known to mankind and, coffee-break rumor had it, had done a threesome with the branch manager and his wife. I went with her to see "The Goodbye Girl" our first Sunday in Madison, and all I got was a box of Jujubees.
  
  
• Phil T. -- Heir to a chain of grocery store in Cincinnati, Phil seemed to have a tremendous amount of rage buried in him. He usually sat quietly in class, his thinning hair parted Trotsky-like in the middle, with his arms crossed and a look of seething resentment screwed to his face. He never came to Bud's on Wednesday nights and in fact never seemed to do anything. About halfway through the course, he was finally persuaded to leave his apartment and join us at Bill R.'s place for a game of poker. He drank straight Wild Turkey for three hours, lost a lot of money (every hand, he'd shout "Raise the limit! Raise the limit!") and finally exploded towards midnight in a long embarrassing tirade -- how could he, heir to the number two grocery chain in Cinci, end up in Wisconsin with such preverts, talking to old people as if someone gave a shit about their miserable little lives? I can buy and sell all of you! He challenged us all to a fight, and fell asleep in a corner.
  
  
• Skip G. -- Skip, whose real name was Francis, has a short, tough character with a beard and a knobby nose. I never did find out what his background was, or maybe I did but was too drunk to remember it. He looked like a Navy man, a sonar technician type better at listening than talking, an impression reinforced by the dark blue knit cap he constantly wore. He and Dave Norton became pretty close, and they were always talking about the wilderness -- they both loved nature (hiking, camping, kayaking, all that macho stuff) and had a great distrust of civilization. Skip, however, lacked Dave's ability to let things roll off his back, and I often detected a great sense of disappointment in Skip. His passion in life, strangely enough, was the television show Soap, which was in its first year. We all liked the weirdness of the show, but Skip apparently saw something deeper in it than we did. We decided that if his mania for Soap was a comment on his mysterious past, perhaps it was better we didn't know more about it.
  
  
• Ed S. -- Ed as a tall, thin guy with a mustache and a goofy series of expressions which suggested Bruce Dern doing Jerry Lewis. (Everybody has a mustache, come to think of it; I was the only clean-shaven guy in the class). He was a very likeable guy and never pissed anyone off, which counted for a lot. His one vice was dancing, and on the nights we'd go to Bud's, Ed would get all dressed up in his disco outfit and dazzle us with his inept footwork and his apparent inability to be embarrassed by his disco skills. This pastime earned him the nickname "the Disco King." For all our macho posturing, Ed was the only one who scored while we were in Madison, albeit with a former girlfriend who drove up from Rockford.
  
  
• Bill R. -- Bill was a classic buddy-type, ala Bill Bixby in My Favorite Martian (whom I had wanted to grow up to become at one point). He was quiet but with a good sense of humor, and always had beer and whisky in his apartment for us. He drove a pick-up truck, and his one regret about Madison was that he had to leave his dog home with his parents.
  
  
• Frank H. --
  
  
• Ken --
  
  
• Steve B. -- the strangest of them all. Six foot three, hulking shoulders, but with a latent sissyness and close, beady eyes that made him look like Oscar Wilde in a walrus suit. Steve didn't care much for SSA, calling it "Uncle Sugar's handout" and comparing it to closed union shops and flouridated water. It was, however, a Government job, and as such his stepping stone to what he considered his true destiny --being an IRS agent. He spent long hours unintentionally amusing us at coffee breaks, longing for the good life of strong- arming recalcitrant taxpayers, repossessing cars ("Right out from under their asses -- hee hee") and, especially, being able to carry a G-man .38 in a shoulder holster. More and more, he concentrated on the gun -- snub-nose, heavy, lying in his hand like a coiled snake, the light glinting off the sights, waiting to stop some Commie lawbreaker dead. . . After a while, this got to be scary, and we'd all silently shift to another table when he got started. He also rambled on about the kind of car he should buy -- an RX-7? A 280Z? A Porsche? He endlessly compared various sporty models out loud, to himself usually, paying a lot of attention to whether or not the car had enough storage space for an Uzi. When finally, on the last day of class, he drove up in a brand-new silver 1978 Mercury Zephyr, it produced the single longest laugh of the course.
  
  (There was an interesting footnote to Steve's story. After we left Madison, I was assigned to the West Frankfort office in southern Illinois and Steve to the Carbondale office about 40 miles away. We both moved into apartments in Marion, Illinois, a grim town equidistant from both offices, without the other knowing about it. In the second week of our residence, a hideous murder was committed in Marion -- a widow on West Elm Street, an exemplary citizen, was stabbed 57 times, then raped and arranged in an interesting position in front of the fireplace. (The squeamish Marion Republican was not entirely clear on this point.) The only clue the intrepid Williamson County police had to go on was a description of a tall, mustachioed man in a silver car with out-of-state plates seen in the area at the time of the murder. Marion is a small town, and needless to say, Steve was quickly arrested and incarcerated in the basement cell in the Marion courthouse. (Seeing his name in the Marion Republican that afternoon in the office break room, I fell into a fit of laughing so debilitating that my branch manager almost called an ambulance.) They held Steve for two days, despite his furious denials ("I'm an American! I have a .38 special! I work for Uncle Sugar!"), until his branch manager in Carbondale bailed him out. The last I heard of him, he was living with Karen J., who worked in Harrisburg, another small Illinois backwater nearby. What this reactionary gun nut and the Party Queen of Odana Road found in common with each other has mystified me ever since.
  
  

At the end of the first week, the cliques had started to form. The women, while not having much to do with each other, had nothing whatsoever to do with any of the guys. The guys split into the "party hearty" crowd -- Steve, Dave, Skip, BilI and Alan, with Ed a frequent guest and Frank welcome when he could get away from his wife -- and the rest. No one ever saw Ken outside of class, and by tacit agreement everybody avoided Steve B. and Phil like the plague. I unexpectedly found myself part of the main group, out most nights of the twelve weeks doing some stupid college activity like drinking or driving like a Mexican -- unexpectedly, because I had had little luck previously in getting involved with the in crowds, both in school and out in real life. My preference for nights at home reading and watching TV had led to a utter lack of social skills and ability to interact with people. That Wednesday night at Bud's was practically the first time I'd ever been in a bar or struck up conversations with strangers or refrained from going home simply because I liked the company. It was an exhilarating time in my life if only because it got me out of the house. My three months in Madison made up in its intensity for the four years I had wasted in hermit-like seclusion in college.

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