In a minor demonstration of cosmic irony, I was admitted to Occidental College, Class of 1964. While there, I distinguished myself chiefly by avoiding inclusion in the college yearbook and by learning a little writing craft on the school newspaper. I majored in Comparative Literature, a notably vague curriculum, and had the time of my life.
Although co-educational, the women students perceived goal was to be “finished” and achieve a suitable marriage. The hallmarks of being finished were a good vocabulary, membership in the right sorority, and virginity. God only knows what the young men were meant to accomplish.
In my junior year, I was seeing a girl named Maryanne. She lived in the women’s dormitory and was also dating Ben, a USC student, but she frequently spent weekends at my off-campus lair.
One Friday night in spring, warm and fragrant, I waited for Maryanne to return from a movie date with Ben. It was getting on toward 12:30 a.m., the women’s curfew. Couples strolled by, kissing chastely at the gate before parting. Whispered voices drifted out of the darkness, and the yellow glow of the dormitory’s solitary porch light seemed barely able to hold its ground.
I reclined in the back seat of Maryanne’s green Ford coupe, drinking bottled beer and listening to soft jazz on the radio. The plan was simple enough: Maryanne would part from Ben at the door, sign in, and later clamber out a window to join me for the remainder of the night.
The problem was that Maryanne was late, and the beer I had been drinking was ready for redistribution. There was no toilet nearby.
Just downhill from the parking lot lay a shrubby area known as the Chaparral. The brush was head-high and dense, threaded with narrow paths leading to the lower campus. From the ridge above, one could see people moving through it by day, though they could not see one another.
So, I stepped into the shadows above the Chaparral and, as young men often do when convinced of their own invisibility, took the opportunity to urinate in a high arc into the brush below. I had procrastinated and had a considerable quantity of used beer to jettison.
No sooner had I achieved my desired forty-five-degree trajectory than I heard scuffling in the Chaparral directly beneath me. Then, after a moment of charged silence, a female voice wailed, “Oh, God dammit, Georgie—it’s pee!”
What followed was a bellow of animal rage. One of the larger linemen from the varsity football team burst briefly from the brush and lunged blindly up the berm in my direction.
There are certain bodily functions that do not readily admit interruption. For a moment or two, I was the terrified—if convulsively laughing prisoner of my situation.
Fortunately, poor Georgie was undone by his own haste. His trousers and jockey shorts hobbled him, and his first charge ended face-first in the dirt. He rose muddy, naked from the waist down, and doing a creditable impression of a wounded rhinoceros.
A three-hundred-pound, half-naked football player with an erection is not someone with whom to debate natural necessity, intention, or misadventure.
I brought my business to a hasty but satisfactory conclusion and fled, yodelling into the night. I hid in the shadows near Maryanne’s car, my laughter abruptly quenched by raw fear.
Maryanne later chastised me for my ignorance: the Chaparral, she explained, was a recognized courting ground for dormitory students. She identified the couple by name and reported that my female classmate had returned to her quarters in considerable disarray and high dudgeon.
This may help explain why I have never attended a class reunion. My identity as the couple’s assailant has surely leaked into the Class of 1964 by now. Although Georgie must be an octogenarian, I am confident he would still batter me with his walking stick or Zimmer frame.
We were teammates once. He never had a sense of humor.
