I Went Back to Ohio

That old time excitement and
pomp that used to pervade the American College Experience has long since passed
us by; anyone older than fifty can tell you that. The exuberant sense of school
pride and fervor for tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of
Paradise disappeared with the expansion of the middle-class, and even the
freewheeling adventuresome spirit depicted in Animal House has eroded
into the abysmal pseudo-parties of frat houses today. Still, if one is cunning
and clever enough, a righteous sentimentality can still be captured on the
Corporate Universities’ campuses of today, and the snapshots and memories of
the first years of your divorce from childhood can be collected carefully and
pinned down and labeled–right there, right then: That’s where I was, that’s
where I shined. But after your four or five or even six years, once the
balloons have floated too high to see and all the confetti has been swept away,
there is little left for you if you should return.

Still, like a wandering troubadour or an international armed forces coalition,
you hope that during the time you had you made the place you visited a little
better, contributed something to the myth, maybe even sustained the chaotic
spirit that, more and more often, is being bound with red tape. So when I
returned to Kent, Ohio, early in the spring, I had expected that not much would
be different, that I would be welcomed back by old professors and pointed out
by many admiring underclassmen as “that guy who _______.” And, trust
me, there are a lot of things that could fill that blank. Even for a school as
big as KentStateUniversity, I managed to know a couple thousand people on a first
name basis and have even more than that watch the many stupid and brave things
I had done.

After nine hours driving through the southern and midwestern savannahs, I
arrived at my old roommate’s apartment to collect him. Ernest is the type of
chap that many wish they could be yet find so little time to try and become. An
accomplished axeman and athlete, with a keen understanding of higher
mathematics and physics, he is often found 10,000 miles beyond you both
philosophically and physically once his temperament has become ignited. He
drives very recklessly, and has run over many small animals which should have
had science and adaptation on their side, including a roadrunner. How he
managed to nail that roadrunner, I’ll never know, but by gawd he did it. He has
followed me many places we should not have been and gotten me out of several
scrapes without so much as straining a muscle. We, of course, had a bond.

My first destination was the Rathskellar, the bar on campus at which I used to
quaff and serve up many dark potions both as a customer and bartender. I
expected to see several old friends (Kent has a high retention rate both among students and
graduates; the elastic of its community never seems to tear), but instead I
entered through the door and saw several teenagers. The barman, who had been
one of my best customers last year, talked to me a little while and charged me
very little. While the beer was cold and good, what he had to say set the tone
for most of my visit. He told me the old group never really came out too much
anymore, that Food Services was crunching down on the bar even more with regulations
and stipulations, and that one old friend, Bil, who was going to take my place
as bartender, had come down with leukemia and almost died.

“Jesu, joy of man’s desiring,” I said to Ernest. “You didn’t
tell me people were dying around here.”

“I didn’t know, man,” he said.

“Well, let’s get out of here regardless,” I said. “We have to
find solace.”

We toured campus for a brief while, but after having to evade too many corrupt
acquaintances, we decided to step off of state property and dive into the private
sector. I spun my car into the parking lot of the Dairy Mart where we assumed
Pyle was still working and hoorah for us, he was. We talked for a while as we
used to do, leaning against the refrigerator that held frozen pizzas and ice
cream treats and confusing the customers. We asked for some information on some
upcoming parties, but he couldn’t put his finger on any. Our conversation was
interrupted several times by policemen coming in for free refills on their
coffee. Pyle said that that’s how it had been for a while; the cops were
spawning.

Ernest grumbled. He despises cops more than I do, and the scene from two years
ago was still fresh in his mind. Dateline Kent, Cinco de Mayo, the last fiesta before finals week
and/or before going home. My first year we had followed the packs of people
over the rolling hills of campus, people crisscrossing paths on their way to
different places, each side street filled with traditionally student-owned
homes just thick with human shapes and clinking cans. There was a sense of
accomplishment wherever you went, that another year was over and we had made it
past the academic sirens. Marathons were being run in our blood, and even the
dark things that can happen to girls in attic bedrooms and basements did not
occur because everyone wanted to be outside breathing that type of Ohio air that falls down from the sky for only a few weeks
out of the entire year. Everything was well and good until some asshole decided
to set his car on fire.

This was in Townhomes, an apartment complex east of campus that had a student
residency rate of almost 100 percent, and it was here were a lot of the
heaviest partying was done since it was close enough to campus to walk to yet
secluded enough so that not many adults came snooping around. While everyone
else danced and did kegstands, a young man snuck out to his piece of shit ride
and set it on fire. He had decided that his car was sufficiently lacking in
chrome, leather, and decibels, so he devised a plan to blame an unknown
partygoer for incinerating his car and collect enough insurance money to buy a
new one, perhaps something with better gas mileage or tinted windows… The car
got burned completely, and so did his little plan. Five witnesses saw him do
it, and up shit creek he went, along with the rest of us.

During the next year, the Kent State Police Department tried to make a quiet
arms deal. They wanted M-16 rifles; you know, the ones we used in Nam to kill Charlie. Other police departments have M-16s,
they argued. The higher-ups quickly put an end to that, failing to see a
correlation between quelling race riots in L.A. and stopping drunk college kids from pulling off
harebrained schemes. Unfortunately, a lot of other purchases were approved
under the radar, including tear gas launchers, riot gear, and rubber bullets.
So my sophomore year, when Ernest and I went down to investigate Townhomes, we
found it completely cordoned off by armor-clad police who were gassing the
parking lot to keep kids from drinking on the lawn and shooting anyone who
tried to come near (after the appropriate amount of warnings, of course) with
non-lethal projectiles. One kid we met had a huge red-black bruise on the back
of his thigh. He was a resident who was trying to leave the carnage since the
gas had wafted into his flat, coating the curtains.

Nobody but students found this sort of police behavior odd, and the next year
things were taken up a notch on the pre-emptive end. An ordinance was passed in
the city that allowed the cops to approach a home due to any noise complaint
from a neighbor, and, as a result, instantly enter the house and start cuffing
people if they sensed any probable cause when the person who had his stereo too
loud opened the front door. At the Dairy Mart, Pyle told us that this ordinance
had been further revised so that an outside complaint wasn’t even necessary.
Any cop who thought that too much noise was being made in a house could just
walk up and, at the very least, hand out a ticket.

One Sunday in March of last year, my senior year at Kent, the cops pretty much put the last nail in the coffin of
repression during a student-led march protesting the Iraq war in its infancy. The group numbered less than seven
hundred people, the majority of them being kids who just wanted to play their
congas outside and who were sort of lost since they were marching through the
science and technology part of campus, where most of them had never been
before. The cops, forewarned of the march, were ready and waiting. I woke up
that morning and was driving out to get some breakfast when I noticed there was
a State Trooper parked down every single side street off of the main
thoroughfares. I quickly decided to go back to my room and wait out the day
sans doughnuts; I knew there would be bad consequences for the poor martyrs who
decided to step outside their dorms.

The pictures were in the paper next day of students being wrestled to the
ground and cuffed. The dangerous hippies had failed to disperse. Some were
arrested; many were bruised and bloody. It brought back bad memories of the
event that had tarnished our school for at least 30 years, and no one thought
to bring up the idea before hand that a uniformed cadre bearing down on some
protestors might cause the bile of that day to rise up again in the city’s
stomach. But, once again, no one other than the students batted an eye, and so
the Boys in Blue continue to corral the students sporting blue and gold…

The beating of uninformed student hippies like a band of coal mine scabs pretty
much convinced everyone that stepping out of line was just asking for some kind
of punishment, and the party scene has atrophied, though the bars are still
carefree. Ernest and I headed for one of those safe havens, the Zephyr, and sat
for a while talking about songs in the jukebox and the musicians who had made
them. The doorman was a friend of mine who looked surprised to see me. One of
the bartenders-slash-decorators remembered my name. Both described bad juju and
talked about their plans for escape. A man stood up and hushed everyone.
Holding up his cell phone, he yelled, “I just found out I’m going to be a
grandfather!” Jostled by the yell, we turned and saw a man no older than
forty-five sporting hipster clothes and a spiky haircut. It was depressing and
enjoyable at the same time, and so we bought him a Maker’s Mark.

“The Spring I seek is in a new face only,” I told Ernest after
several jiggers of Beam.

“Let’s go play music,” he said. “We might as well get the band
back together while you’re here.”

And so we crowded into our singer’s bedroom and launched chords out of our amps
so that they reverberated around us and enclosed us until we were safe again,
three boys isolated in their noise and youth.