thirteen points all by herself. The game ends when one of the four players tops a hundred points. The winner is the player with the lowest score.
In our marathons, each of the other three players would cough up based on the difference between his score and the winner’s score. If, for example, the difference between my score and Skip’s was twenty points at the end of the game, I had to pay him a dollar at the going rate of a nickel a point. Chump-change, you’d say now, but this was 1966, and a dollar wasn’t just change to the work-study chumps who lived on Chamberlain Three.
3
I recall quite clearly when the Hearts epidemic started: the first weekend in October. I remember because the semester’s initial round of prelims had just ended and I had survived. Survival was an actual issue for most of the boys on Chamberlain Three; we were at college thanks to a variety of scholarships, loans (most, including my own, courtesy of the National Education Defense Act), and work-study jobs. It was like riding in a Soapbox Derby car which had been put together with paste instead of nails, and while our arrangements var-ied—mostly according to how crafty we were when it came to filling out forms and how diligently our high-school guidance counselors had worked for us—there was one hard fact of life. It was summed up by a sampler which hung in the third-floor lounge, where our marathon Hearts tournaments were played. Tony DeLucca’s mother made it, told him to hang it someplace where he’d see it every day, and sent him off to college with it. As the fall of 1966 wore out and winter replaced it, Mrs. DeLucca’s sampler seemed to glare bigger and brighter with each passing hand, each fall of The Bitch, each night I rolled into bed with my textbooks unopened, my notes unstudied, my papers unwritten. Once or twice I even dreamed about it:
2.5.
That’s what the sampler said, in big red crocheted numerals. Mrs. DeLucca understood what it meant, and so did we. If you lived in one of the ordinary dorms—Jacklin or Dunn or Pease or Chadbourne—you could keep your place in the Class of 1970 with a 1.6 average . . . if, that was, Daddy and Mummy continued to pay the bills. This was the state land-grant college, remember; we are not talking about Harvard or Wellesley. For students trying to stagger through on scholarship- and-loan packages, however, 2.5 was the line drawn in the dust. Score below a 2.5—drop from a C average to a C-minus, in other words—and your little soapbox racer was almost certain to fall apart. “Be in touch, baby, seeya,” as Skip Kirk used to say.
I did okay on that first round of prelims, especially for a boy who was almost ill with homesickness (I had never been away from home in my life except for a single week at basketball camp, from which I returned with a sprained wrist and an odd fungal growth between my toes and under my testes). I was carrying five subjects and got B’s in everything except Freshman English. On that one I got an A. My instructor, who would later divorce his wife and wind up busking in Sproul Plaza on the Berkeley campus, wrote “Your example of ono-matopoeia is actually quite brilliant” beside one of my answers. I sent that test back home to my mother and father. My mother returned a postcard with one word—“Bravo!”—scrawled fervently across the back. Remembering that causes an unexpected pang, something actually close to physical pain. It was, I suppose, the last time I dragged home a school paper with a gold star pasted in the corner.
After that first round of prelims I complacently calculated my GPA-in-progress and came out with a 3.3. It never got near that again, and by late December I realized that the choices had become very simple: quit playing cards and maybe survive to the next semes-ter with my fragile financial-aid package intact, or continue Bitch-hunting beneath Mrs. DeLucca’s sampler in the third-floor lounge until Christmas and then head back to Gates Falls for good.
I’d be able to get a job at Gates Falls Mills and Weaving; my father had been there for twenty years, right up until the accident that cost him his sight, and he’d get me in. My mother would hate it, but she wouldn’t stand in the way if I told her it was what I wanted. At the end of the day she was always the realist of the family. Even when her hopes and disappointments ran her half-mad, she was a realist. For awhile she’d be grief-stricken at my failure to make a go of it at the University, and for awhile I’d be guilt-ridden, but we’d both get over it. I wanted to be a writer, after all, not a damned English teacher, and I had an idea that only pompous writers needed college to do what they did.
Yet I didn’t want to flunk out, either. It seemed the wrong way to start my life as a grownup. It smelled like failure, and all my Whit-manesque ruminations about how a writer should do his work among the people smelled like a rationalization for that failure. And still the third-floor lounge called to me—the snap of the cards, some-one asking if this hand was pass left or pass right, someone else ask-ing who had The Douche (a hand of Hearts begins by playing the two of clubs, a card known to us third-floor addicts as The Douche). I had dreams in which Ronnie Malenfant, the first true bred-in-the-bone asshole I had met since escaping the bullies of junior high, began to play spades one after another, screaming “Time to go Bitch-huntin! We chasin The Cunt!” in his high-pitched, reedy voice. We almost always see where our best interest lies, I think, but sometimes what we see means very little compared to what we feel. Tough but true.
4
My roommate didn’t play Hearts. My roommate didn’t have any use for the undeclared war in Vietnam. My roommate wrote home to his girlfriend, a senior at Wisdom Consolidated High School, every day. Put a glass of water next to Nate Hoppenstand and it was the water that looked vivacious.
He and I lived in Room 302, next to the stairwell, across from the Proctor’s Suite (lair of the hideous Dearie) and all the way down the hall from the lounge with its card-tables, stand-up ashtrays, and its view of the Palace on the Plains. Our pairing suggested—to me, at least—that everyone’s most macabre musings about the University Housing Office might well be true. On the questionnaire which I had returned to Housing in April of ’66 (when my biggest concern was deciding where I should take Annmarie Soucie to eat after the Senior Prom), I had said that I was A. a smoker; B. a Young Republi-can; C. an aspiring folk guitarist; D. a night owl. In its dubious wis-dom, the Housing Office paired me with Nate, a non-smoking dentist-in-progress whose folks were Aroostook County Democrats (the fact that Lyndon Johnson was a Democrat made Nate feel no better about U.S. soldiers running around South Vietnam). I had a poster of Humphrey Bogart above my bed; above his, Nate hung photos of his dog and his girl. The girl was a sallow creature dressed in a Wisdom High majorette’s uniform and clutching a baton like a cudgel. She was Cindy. The dog was Rinty. Both the girl and the dog were sporting identical grins. It was fucking surreal.
Nate’s worst failing, as far as Skip and I were concerned, was the collection of record albums he kept carefully shelved in alphabetical order below Cindy and Rinty and just above his nifty little RCA Swingline phonograph. He had three Mitch Miller records (
“Nate, no,” Skip said one evening. “Oh please, no.” This was shortly before the onset of Hearts mania—perhaps only days.
“Oh please no what?” Nate asked without looking up from what he was doing at his desk. He seemed to spend all his waking hours either in class or at that desk. Sometimes I would catch him picking his nose and surreptitiously wiping the gleanings (after careful and thorough inspections) under the middle drawer. It was his only vice . . . if you excepted his horrible taste in music, that was.
Skip had been inspecting Nate’s albums, something he did with absolutely no self-consciousness in every kid’s
