<\/p>\n
That old time excitement and Still, like a wandering troubadour or an international armed forces coalition, After nine hours driving through the southern and midwestern savannahs, I My first destination was the Rathskellar, the bar on campus at which I used to “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring,” I said to Ernest. “You didn’t “I didn’t know, man,” he said.<\/p>\n “Well, let’s get out of here regardless,” I said. “We have to We toured campus for a brief while, but after having to evade too many corrupt Ernest grumbled. He despises cops more than I do, and the scene from two years This was in Townhomes, an apartment complex east of campus that had a student During the next year, the Kent State Police Department tried to make a quiet Nobody but students found this sort of police behavior odd, and the next year One Sunday in March of last year, my senior year at Kent<\/span>, the cops pretty much put the last nail in the coffin of The pictures were in the paper next day of students being wrestled to the The beating of uninformed student hippies like a band of coal mine scabs pretty “The Spring I seek is in a new face only,” I told Ernest after “Let’s go play music,” he said. “We might as well get the band And so we crowded into our singer’s bedroom and launched chords out of our amps
\npomp that used to pervade the American College Experience has long since passed
\nus by; anyone older than fifty can tell you that. The exuberant sense of school
\npride and fervor for tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of
\nParadise<\/em> disappeared with the expansion of the middle-class, and even the
\nfreewheeling adventuresome spirit depicted in Animal House<\/em> has eroded
\ninto the abysmal pseudo-parties of frat houses today. Still, if one is cunning
\nand clever enough, a righteous sentimentality can still be captured on the
\nCorporate Universities’ campuses of today, and the snapshots and memories of
\nthe first years of your divorce from childhood can be collected carefully and
\npinned down and labeled–right there, right then: That’s where I was, that’s
\nwhere I shined. But after your four or five or even six years, once the
\nballoons have floated too high to see and all the confetti has been swept away,
\nthere is little left for you if you should return. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nyou hope that during the time you had you made the place you visited a little
\nbetter, contributed something to the myth, maybe even sustained the chaotic
\nspirit that, more and more often, is being bound with red tape. So when I
\nreturned to Kent, Ohio, early in the spring, I had expected that not much would
\nbe different, that I would be welcomed back by old professors and pointed out
\nby many admiring underclassmen as “that guy who _______.” And, trust
\nme, there are a lot of things that could fill that blank. Even for a school as
\nbig as <\/span>Kent<\/span>State<\/span>University<\/span>, I managed to know a couple thousand people on a first
\nname basis and have even more than that watch the many stupid and brave things
\nI had done. <\/span><\/p>\n
\narrived at my old roommate’s apartment to collect him. Ernest is the type of
\nchap that many wish they could be yet find so little time to try and become. An
\naccomplished axeman and athlete, with a keen understanding of higher
\nmathematics and physics, he is often found 10,000 miles beyond you both
\nphilosophically and physically once his temperament has become ignited. He
\ndrives very recklessly, and has run over many small animals which should have
\nhad science and adaptation on their side, including a roadrunner. How he
\nmanaged to nail that roadrunner, I’ll never know, but by gawd he did it. He has
\nfollowed me many places we should not have been and gotten me out of several
\nscrapes without so much as straining a muscle. We, of course, had a bond.<\/p>\n
\nquaff and serve up many dark potions both as a customer and bartender. I
\nexpected to see several old friends (Kent<\/span> has a high retention rate both among students and
\ngraduates; the elastic of its community never seems to tear), but instead I
\nentered through the door and saw several teenagers. The barman, who had been
\none of my best customers last year, talked to me a little while and charged me
\nvery little. While the beer was cold and good, what he had to say set the tone
\nfor most of my visit. He told me the old group never really came out too much
\nanymore, that Food Services was crunching down on the bar even more with regulations
\nand stipulations, and that one old friend, Bil, who was going to take my place
\nas bartender, had come down with leukemia and almost died. <\/span><\/p>\n
\ntell me people were dying around here.”<\/p>\n
\nfind solace.”<\/p>\n
\nacquaintances, we decided to step off of state property and dive into the private
\nsector. I spun my car into the parking lot of the Dairy Mart where we assumed
\nPyle was still working and hoorah for us, he was. We talked for a while as we
\nused to do, leaning against the refrigerator that held frozen pizzas and ice
\ncream treats and confusing the customers. We asked for some information on some
\nupcoming parties, but he couldn’t put his finger on any. Our conversation was
\ninterrupted several times by policemen coming in for free refills on their
\ncoffee. Pyle said that that’s how it had been for a while; the cops were
\nspawning.<\/p>\n
\nago was still fresh in his mind. Dateline Kent<\/span>, Cinco de Mayo, the last fiesta before finals week
\nand\/or before going home. My first year we had followed the packs of people
\nover the rolling hills of campus, people crisscrossing paths on their way to
\ndifferent places, each side street filled with traditionally student-owned
\nhomes just thick with human shapes and clinking cans. There was a sense of
\naccomplishment wherever you went, that another year was over and we had made it
\npast the academic sirens. Marathons were being run in our blood, and even the
\ndark things that can happen to girls in attic bedrooms and basements did not
\noccur because everyone wanted to be outside breathing that type of <\/span>Ohio<\/span> air that falls down from the sky for only a few weeks
\nout of the entire year. Everything was well and good until some asshole decided
\nto set his car on fire.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nresidency rate of almost 100 percent, and it was here were a lot of the
\nheaviest partying was done since it was close enough to campus to walk to yet
\nsecluded enough so that not many adults came snooping around. While everyone
\nelse danced and did kegstands, a young man snuck out to his piece of shit ride
\nand set it on fire. He had decided that his car was sufficiently lacking in
\nchrome, leather, and decibels, so he devised a plan to blame an unknown
\npartygoer for incinerating his car and collect enough insurance money to buy a
\nnew one, perhaps something with better gas mileage or tinted windows… The car
\ngot burned completely, and so did his little plan. Five witnesses saw him do
\nit, and up shit creek he went, along with the rest of us.<\/p>\n
\narms deal. They wanted M-16 rifles; you know, the ones we used in Nam<\/span> to kill Charlie. Other police departments have M-16s,
\nthey argued. The higher-ups quickly put an end to that, failing to see a
\ncorrelation between quelling race riots in <\/span>L.A.<\/span> and stopping drunk college kids from pulling off
\nharebrained schemes. Unfortunately, a lot of other purchases were approved
\nunder the radar, including tear gas launchers, riot gear, and rubber bullets.
\nSo my sophomore year, when Ernest and I went down to investigate Townhomes, we
\nfound it completely cordoned off by armor-clad police who were gassing the
\nparking lot to keep kids from drinking on the lawn and shooting anyone who
\ntried to come near (after the appropriate amount of warnings, of course) with
\nnon-lethal projectiles. One kid we met had a huge red-black bruise on the back
\nof his thigh. He was a resident who was trying to leave the carnage since the
\ngas had wafted into his flat, coating the curtains. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nthings were taken up a notch on the pre-emptive end. An ordinance was passed in
\nthe city that allowed the cops to approach a home due to any noise complaint
\nfrom a neighbor, and, as a result, instantly enter the house and start cuffing
\npeople if they sensed any probable cause when the person who had his stereo too
\nloud opened the front door. At the Dairy Mart, Pyle told us that this ordinance
\nhad been further revised so that an outside complaint wasn’t even necessary.
\nAny cop who thought that too much noise was being made in a house could just
\nwalk up and, at the very least, hand out a ticket.<\/p>\n
\nrepression during a student-led march protesting the <\/span>Iraq<\/span> war in its infancy. The group numbered less than seven
\nhundred people, the majority of them being kids who just wanted to play their
\ncongas outside and who were sort of lost since they were marching through the
\nscience and technology part of campus, where most of them had never been
\nbefore. The cops, forewarned of the march, were ready and waiting. I woke up
\nthat morning and was driving out to get some breakfast when I noticed there was
\na State Trooper parked down every single side street off of the main
\nthoroughfares. I quickly decided to go back to my room and wait out the day
\nsans doughnuts; I knew there would be bad consequences for the poor martyrs who
\ndecided to step outside their dorms. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nground and cuffed. The dangerous hippies had failed to disperse. Some were
\narrested; many were bruised and bloody. It brought back bad memories of the
\nevent that had tarnished our school for at least 30 years, and no one thought
\nto bring up the idea before hand that a uniformed cadre bearing down on some
\nprotestors might cause the bile of that day to rise up again in the city’s
\nstomach. But, once again, no one other than the students batted an eye, and so
\nthe Boys in Blue continue to corral the students sporting blue and gold…<\/p>\n
\nmuch convinced everyone that stepping out of line was just asking for some kind
\nof punishment, and the party scene has atrophied, though the bars are still
\ncarefree. Ernest and I headed for one of those safe havens, the Zephyr, and sat
\nfor a while talking about songs in the jukebox and the musicians who had made
\nthem. The doorman was a friend of mine who looked surprised to see me. One of
\nthe bartenders-slash-decorators remembered my name. Both described bad juju and
\ntalked about their plans for escape. A man stood up and hushed everyone.
\nHolding up his cell phone, he yelled, “I just found out I’m going to be a
\ngrandfather!” Jostled by the yell, we turned and saw a man no older than
\nforty-five sporting hipster clothes and a spiky haircut. It was depressing and
\nenjoyable at the same time, and so we bought him a Maker’s Mark.<\/p>\n
\nseveral jiggers of Beam.<\/p>\n
\nback together while you’re here.”<\/p>\n
\nso that they reverberated around us and enclosed us until we were safe again,
\nthree boys isolated in their noise and youth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,352],"tags":[68,353],"class_list":["post-2506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cass","category-gsarchive","tag-cassander","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2506"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2750,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2506\/revisions\/2750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}