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.