Shepherdstown, West Virginia has a lock named after it – Lock No.
38 on the C&O Canal. The canal runs all across the campus, it
snakes around the stone buildings of the main drag, past The Lost
Dog Cafe, and the bookstore, and the tattoo parlor. The night
was oddly warm for late January, and a gray-green electric fog
rose from the man-made waterways, carrying with it a musk-musty
stench of decay, mud and flesh combining at the bottom of ancient
rivers. Everything was alive with the fog. The ghosts of
soldiers and moonshiners convened, tickling against our skin
through the holes in our jeans. We walked past the police
station, which was housed in a lopsided, weather-stained
cottage. A black cat crossed our path; its eyes flashed yellow
through the canal-smoke, it stretched and mrowled and dashed off.
Filia and I were headed back to her dorm, when we were accosted
by a shout of – Hey, Filia, Jess! We whirled around, trying to
place where the sound was coming from. Four faces slowly
materialized from the fog – Nikki, Ricki, Janine, and Luke.
Nikki was a skinny mismatched girl, all patchwork clothes and big
dirty boots. Janine was her best friend; a gorgeous zaftig girl
with blue-black hair and a permanent haze of clove cigarettes.
Ricki was a stunted and fragile-looking horrorpunk boy; his hair
swooped down into a devil lock and his jewel-blue eyes were
circled with eyeliner. He was the bassist for a punk band, but,
tragically, he had no sense of rhythm – I'd overheard his band
practicing in the dorm basement, just a day or two before. Luke
was my newfound gay boyfriend; he'd found me at The Lost Dog and
started making me free lattes and telling me the sordid details
of his love life. Luke was mod, mussed-up hair and white belts
and tight pants; he wore eyeliner, too, but in more of a glam
way. We immediately bonded over an addiction to typewriters.
What's up? Filia asked.
We're gonna go get drunk in the painting studio, Janine said,
waving a bottle of spiced rum in front of my face, enticing.
Care to join us? Luke inquired, jingling the keys to the studio.
The six of us – all under 21, except for Luke – holed up in the
painting studio, amid the half-finished canvases, broad brush
strokes of abstracts and nudes, paint sticky like cake icing. We
let the rum trickle down our throats. The spicy tropical amber
mixed with the scent of oils and turpentine, heady. Nikki and
Janine cuddled together, Filia laid her head in my lap and I ran
my fingers through her golden hair tangles. Ricki drummed,
offbeat, when we sang songs in a whisper. We couldn't be too
loud; we weren't supposed to be there. Luke paced back and forth
while he quoted from movies and sobbed that the boy he loved was
straight. We talked about the government, about how scary things
had been since 9/11. Luke and I promised to exchange mix tapes
after I got back to Chicago, and Nikki said she envied my mohawk,
wished she was brave enough to get one. Then she said – Fuck it,
I'm gonna do it, and Janine said she'd shave it for her. At one
point, all of us completely lit on the rum and the turpentine
fumes, we started to recite "Howl." I looked around at our
little gang of miscreants, thrown together improbably in the tiny
room. I felt the fog seeping in through the walls, the
moonshiner ghosts trying to climb into our nearly empty rum
bottle. And as I said who were expelled from the academies for
crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, I
realized –even if we can't change the world every day, even if
we're not always tossing bricks through windows or wheatpasting
our viewpoints in the alleyways of the cities, even if we're just
getting drunk in a painting studio, late at night in January,
talking and laughing and singing – sometimes, that is enough.