Chapter 8 

We ended up wandering into the Rathskeller at UW, a large vaulted room which looked out over the frozen Lake Mendota. In the grey overcast light coming through the French doors, the details of the room were lost in contrasty shadows. It was 3 PM on a Sunday afternoon, and we were almost alone in the cavernous bar. We gathered around a small round table and commenced to drink.

After a few pitchers, I leaned back in my chair and looked out at the lake, grey and somber in the afternoon light. "Do you think we can walk on that ice?"

"Sure." Steve glanced over his shoulder. "That ice is about a foot thick. You could drive a tank on it."

All my life I've had urges to do things that only seem to appeal to six-year-olds, like jumping in leaves and rolling down hills and walking along the tops of retaining walls. Walking on a frozen lake fell into that category, especially since having grown up mostly in San Francisco and Alexandria I'd never seen very much freezing weather. Luckily, my compatriots were all about six years old in the head also, and with a great burst of drunken energy we unlocked the French doors and bolted to the shore.

A small boat pier stuck out about 50 feet into the lake. I, apparently, was the only one who found the sight of a pier imbedded in ice amusing. It was a decidedly strange sensation stepping off the end onto the lake, which was covered with about two inches of heavy granular snow. My shoes were immediately filled and I soon lost all sensation in my feet.

It was getting towards night, and a weird light was illuminating the scene, a warm diffuse grey which reminded me of foggy Sunday afternoons in San Francisco. The temperature was around 5 degrees.

"So, what now?," Dave asked.

Looking due north, we could barely make out the town of Middleton, about seven miles (we later figured) across the lake. At the time, it didn't look like seven miles. All we knew was that Middleton had some great bars. So, by tacit agreement in our six-year-old minds, we started slogging across the ice.

We engaged in a few snowball fights, all the while heading north. We passed some ice-fishing shanties and marvelled at the kind of person who in addition to taking up such a stupid and boring sport as fishing would then compound the idiocy by fishing on a frozen lake in the dead of winter. Within a half-hour, we had passed all signs of human life and were trudging through virgin snow. We felt like explorers.

At one point, I stopped and looked back to Madison. As night fell and the lake and sky started to merge into a uniform grey, the lights of Madison were coming on, making the city skyline look like a delicate gold necklace on a piece of grey velvet. The lights looked warm and inviting and civilized. I contemplated it for a moment, glad I could be in this place at this time to see this sight.

When I turned north again, the guys had pressed on to where they were mere specks against the disappearing horizon. Suddenly I was no longer in the capital of Wisconsin -- I was lost in a vast frozen icefield, adrift in space and time, totally alone. This feeling was interesting for a few moments until, overwhelmed by it, I shouted for them to wait up and ran forward to join them. I felt as if I had come back from the dead.

After an hour, Middleton was not looking any closer, and Madison had all but vanished at our backs. It was now completely dark and all of us had developed cold feet, literally and figuratively. Finally, to underscore the childlike futility of our journey, we wrote a giant FUCK, visible to aircraft only, in the snow and turned back. We made somewhat better time and within 45 minutes we were drying our feet in front of the Rathskeller's giant fireplace and honing our fine drunken edge with more pitchers of Miller.

While we were gone, the place had filled up somewhat and a band was setting up on the raised platform in the center of the room. By the time they started playing at 8 PM, the bar was full and warm and fun. The table we were sitting at was too close to the dance floor to allow any conversation, so we retreated behind a pillar and continued our earnest discussions. I have no idea now what we were discussing.

At one point, Steve visited the restroom and came back with a shocked and shaken look on his face. He didn't speak for a while, then plaintively asked a question. The timidity of his voice startled us.

"Guys . . . uh . . . do I look like . . . a fag?"

We denied it vehemently. Why, Steve looked like us! No way!

"Well, a guy in the john asked me out."

"Whaddaya mean, asked you out?"

"Well . . . " He was having trouble with this. "He asked if he could suck me off."

A shocked silence. Alan rose up. "Where is the bastard?"

"No, no, no." Steve pulled him down. "Let's forget it, OK?" He smiled. "Maybe it's the pink shirt, whaddaya think?"

Steve was soon back in form and we turned our attention to the dance floor. The University of Wisconsin students are well-known for being radical, both in their politics and in their after-hours pursuits. There was a feverish intensity to their dancing and revelry which made me feel slothful.

My eye was caught by one woman in particular. We all have our types, a physical ideal we pick up from God knows where, against which we judge everyone we meet. The woman dancing by herself before me was "my type" so exactly that I felt a twinge run through my heart when I first saw her. She was tall and thin, her blond hair tied up in a bun. Unstylish glasses slid down her nose as she danced. She was wearing a dowdy, non-descript brown dress. In general, she gave the impression of a librarian or a school teacher. But -- and this is what distinguishes my type -- underneath it all she was an animal. As her gyrating body occasionally pressed against her oversized dress, I could see that she was amazingly well-built, with high firm breasts -- she wasn't wearing a bra -- and long coltish legs. She was dancing up a storm, too, expending far more energy than any of the other dancers. It was this almost orgiastic frenzy which caught my heart. "My type" could best be described as uninhibited passion tied up in a bundle so plain and seemingly unattractive that only I could perceive it. John Updike once wrote about plain women being "juicier" than the more conventionally attractive types, and as time has passed I have learned the great wisdom of that observation. All my best nights have been with schoolteachers.

That night in the Rathskeller, however, such experiences were ahead of me. I was not a virgin, but only by the barest of definitial margins. This young lady fascinated me. Looking at her eyes, I was absolutely convinced, with a conviction that belied my limited experience with women, that if I asked her to take me back to her room I would be met with a forthright "yes" and treated to a night I would never forget. This thought unnerved me so much that I remained frozen to my chair until she eventually tired and left alone.

It was now about 11, and the noise and the heat were getting to us. While the rest of the guys were off on errands of some sort or another, Alan and I walked out to the pier. It was now well below zero, but we were feeling no pain.

We leaned up against the pier pilings, a thrill of cold steel racing up our backs. The Rathskeller had large floodlight focused on the lake, so the first 100 feet or so of the ice was brilliantly illuminated. We stared at our feet, breathing the sharp cold air and gathering out wits to reenter the fray.

Alan's head perked up, followed by the rest of his body. "What's that?"

"What?" But soon I heard it too, faint tinny music coming from the lake. The night was vastly quiet, and the frigid air made sound travel a remarkable distance.

"Music from Middleton," I ventured.

Alan listened with his head cocked for a second. "No, it's coming closer. What the hell? It can't be a boat . . ."

Soon we could see a faint shape resolving itself at the edge of the floodlit area.

"I don't believe it," Alan said.

It was a girl. She was wearing a long dirndl skirt and peasant blouse, and her thick wavy hair swirled around her head. She was dancing. A tape recorder was hung over her shoulder, emitting Chuck Mangione instrumentals, sharp and crystalline in the cold. She spun and swooped and jumped with strange abandon. As she came closer, we could see that she was dancing in her bare feet.

"Jesus," Alan muttered. We wanted to call to her, ask her why she was doing this, get her off the ice before she got frostbite. But she was so into her dancing, so obviously completely out of touch with the normal world, that Alan and I hesitated, like the two guards afraid to confront King Hamlet's ghost. She stayed at the edge of the lights, dipping, lunging and posturing like a woman possessed. At one point, she did a handstand, and as her skirt fell around her hips we could see that she wasn't wearing any underwear either.

We watched as she danced out of the lights and back into the trackless darkness of Lake Mendota.

"Jesus Christ," Alan said, turning back to the bar. "This really is a party town, isn't it?"

This is all I've finished so far . . . more to come!

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