Unlikely Twins

(Photo by Irving Penn)

It is unnaturally cold here, and my studio is not heated, so I do not work. Indoors nor out. I sit and listen to the heater whisper, "money, money, money." My house was built in 1926. Wood. Old windows. No insulation. It is not built for the cold. A few days of this is something we expect, but not weeks. It makes me lazy. And hungry.

I am dull. I have no photos.

So once again, I post an Irving Penn. I feel as if I'm stealing, but really, who should I ask?

I want to get along with my narrative, but I can't seem to write about the college years. I need to get through them to harder times. I was happy in college. It was in many ways the happiest time of my life. Certainly it was the most carefree. But it is difficult to write about happy. Happy teaches nothing. But it is important to write, for it provides the contrast. I will try.

* * * * *

After Christmas, Mike and I moved into the trailer park outside of town. Having never had a roommate before, I found living with someone other than my parents unnerving at first. We shared everything from the television to the bathroom. But we found solutions to most things. We divided everything down the middle and stayed strictly within our bounds. It worked. We shared nothing. We never went in on groceries together. We cooked and ate together every evening but never mixed our food, even when we were having the same thing. We washed our own dishes and ate our own snacks. We had our sides to the faux-leather couch in front of the television. Each night, Mike would open a carton of milk and a bag of cookies and eat them all. Never, not once in all the years we were there, did he offer me one. This was not a problem, just an odd fact. The cabinets where we stored our canned food were divided equally. We split every bill down the middle, and drove each other to campus on alternate days. We both took 9:30 classes, so we set our alarms for identical times, each set to the same radio station. We'd get up and each have three pieces of toast with jelly and two glasses of milk. And it worked. We never had a squabble.

At first, we had the idea of riding our bikes to campus, but it was January and the road into town was filled with big trucks at that time of day. There were hills to warm us up, but when we got to class, we'd have sweat through our shirts, so in the end, we decided to put our bikes on the back of our cars (we each had a bike rack), and use the bicycles on campus.

Several days a week, we'd meet for lunch at a vegetarian restaurant, the first we'd ever known. After school, we'd ride home and change clothes, then come back to campus to play basketball for a couple of hours. Then we'd come home, take showers, and begin to cook dinner which we would watch in front of the television with its stolen cable programming. After dinner, we'd clean up and then break out our guitars and play for awhile. On Wednesdays, we went to Sonny's Barbecue and had the student special, and after dinner we'd use the pay phone to make collect calls home to our parents to give them the weekly report. On Fridays, we'd look for the twenty dollar check we both got in the mail from home. Fridays were glorious, of course, and we would meet up with friends for two-for-one pizzas and pitchers of beer or whatever other student discount we could find, then we'd go to hear some music that one of us had heard about, often at some out of the way country bar where there would be a fiddle and banjo band playing music we'd never heard of in some small dive. And sitting there, we'd all look at one another with the faces of initiates into some secret society, pleased to have found such strange mysteries so different from anything we'd ever known before.

Saturday mornings were given to basketball, and Saturday afternoons to walking around town, going to the most fabulous bookstore we'd ever seen (having come from a town that did not value books) and feeling as if we might pass out, overwhelmed with all of it, then on to some hippie place for lunch and to the coop for organic food, just walking through the crisp days with hands in the front pockets of our pants looking like the photos we'd seen of Jack Kerouac in San Francisco (another new and "secret" knowledge) until the beginning of dusk. And that night, there might be a movie at the student union, something foreign and strange or just an American film, hip and groovy, or maybe, once in a while, we'd spend money on a theater, but that was rarely necessary. And that night, we'd go stand outside some bar in town with other hipsters making comments on the passing parade. And if the band was really a good one, we'd go inside and listen with raptured attention, and when it was over, we'd walk through the cold and windy streets feeling the buzz of the beer and the scene, jacked to the very edges of life, open to the dark wind and the stars and the moon, heartstrings pulled by the incredible freedom and romance like nothing else in life that would ever happen, in love so deeply we could barely breathe, together but separate, each locked into his own thoughts without words.

It was like that day after day, week after week. It was beautiful and would never end.