New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 7

by Grant Bailie

Mr. Carleton was an old man who lived next door to Robert. He would sometimes knock at Robert’s door and ask to be invited in for tea. Robert owned a hot plate and tea kettle but sometimes he was out of tea and Mr. Carleton would just come in for a glass of water and sit at the chair by the window staring out at the sky and talking about his life or the view while Robert stood nearby or sat on the edge of his bed.

Robert did not like to turn Mr. Carleton away, though he sometimes knocked at inopportune times and at odd hours. He seemed like a nice old fellow to Robert, though it was true he always smelled of mints and mothballs and he was sometimes chewing a stick of gum that Robert suspected of being placed in his mouth just outside his door to mask another odor even before noon.

Mr. Carleton had been a teacher. Whether he had retired from teaching or had been unceremoniously thrown out in disgrace, Robert was never able to determine, though sometimes Mr. Carleton would mutter something vague about a lapse in judgment and the temptations of the flesh.

Mostly he talked about his students. He still remembered most of their names. The special ones, that is; the ones he had felt himself getting through to and in whose eyes he had seen the spark of greatness or, at the very least, the spark of recognizing greatness when it was passed out in paperback form to all the students in the class.

“There was one young lad,” Mr. Carleton said. “Would write the most heartbreaking essays about his home-life. His dog had cancer and his stepfather beat him and what have you. I would sit at my desk after hours some nights just weeping over this poor boy’s life and the way he put it all down on paper. An excellent student. Excellent student.” Mr. Carleton dabbed at the corner of his eye with the back of his hand. “It was a pleasure to give him an A.”

Robert wondered, but did not ask, if Mr. Carleton had done anything about the stepfather beating the boy. Had he alerted the proper authorities or school counselors? Or had the stepfather only beaten the cancer stricken dog? It was unclear, but either one was bad enough.

Robert had received no As in any of his classes in high school and had left that institution a virgin. He had entered college a virgin, but it was a situation he remedied during his first and only year.

There was a girl he sat next to in Philosophy 101. She was taller than him — even sitting — but had issues and insecurities of her own that sometimes made her seem smaller. She would sometimes come to class with large bandages on her arms, or strange burn marks on the backs of her hands.

Her name was Raina and she wanted to be a singer though her speaking voice was thin and scratchy and Robert could not imagine how it might ever transform itself into anything musical. He lent her his philosophy notes when she had missed class for several days and had returned sporting a brand new bandage shaped like a triangle on the inside of her elbow.

She always smiled at him — a slightly nervous smile with eyes drifting downwards — and always took the empty seat next to his. Sometimes he looked over at her desk where, while the professor would drone on and on in a monotone voice about Hume and Kierkegaard and all the rest, she would be writing dark poems about the abyss of her soul and the demons that haunted her in the blackness of her eternal room.

They went out for coffee once after class. They both found the professor to be a bore, and she, who had once been considering a degree in Philosophy, was now considering switching over to Economics.

“Just as well,” Robert had said. “Not a lot of working philosophers out there.” And she had laughed and he had smiled and felt good for three days on the strength of that one successful joke.

Later, not that day, but on another, they had gone out for drinks together at a nearby bar. It was a popular hang out for the college, which was nestled among piney mountains in an otherwise quiet section of the country. Larger specimens of his classmates were noisily ordering pitchers of beer and fighting about the rules of darts. Another was trying to balance a shot glass on a broad flat forehead that looked almost made for balancing a shot glass. These were his peers, but they seemed already to be of an alien race.

Robert and Raina sat in a booth in the quietest corner they could find, which was only marginally quieter than the exact center of the bar where at that moment two male college students were taking turns punching each other in the chest.

Raina shouted to him some of her philosophy about life — her own philosophy, not the tired old ideas of dead white men that the professor went on and on about while she fought desperately just to keep her eyes open.

In her view of things this world was unknowable, and the things we think we know only exist in our thoughts which are ruled by our perceptions which are completely unreliable and arbitrary and how can we really know anything beyond what we ourselves are and feel and if someone feels that the world is made up of evil and darkness then that world is in fact made up of evil and darkness because that is their world. Robert nodded, though he thought he recognized some of her ideas from his notes on Kant or maybe Hume and that he had lent her after she had missed class and come back the next day with only a small bandage on one wrist.

Sometimes he could not hear her words at all but only looked at her mouth and allowed himself to imagine what it would be like to kiss when it was not quite moving so much.

The lights in the bar came on and a shout of protest rose up like a wave from the beer scented foaming sea of broad-shouldered humanity.

“Spring forward, kids,” the bartender said, and pointed to his watch, which he had just set an hour ahead of any other watch in the bar. “It’s the law.”

More shouts were heard and several man-boys tried to argue that it was Fall forward and Spring back, which made just as much sense to them so really they should have an extra hour to drink.

“It’s the law,” the bartender repeated, but a look of fear was creeping into his face and he was probably wondering just then if it wouldn’t have been smarter to have set the clocks forward before he had opened for business that day.

The students seemed to multiply magically in the enclosed space, and swelled forward, pressing against the edge of the bar with bellies and breasts.

Someone threw a chair, and instantly everyone was on their feet throwing more chairs and glass was breaking and the front window was shattered and Robert and Raina found themselves on their feet as well — in defense rather than anger — in the middle of a mob that was now making plans to run out into the streets to look for more glass to break and cars that were small enough to turn over.

Robert grabbed her hand in a gesture of protection and tried to lead her through the crowd to safety before the campus police came and arrested everyone, but it proved difficult for Robert to make an impression on the broad backs and shoulders that barred their way. He shoved against an immovable wall of t-shirted muscle. He said: “Excuse me, we’d like to get through.”

In the end it was Raina who led them through the crowd, with Robert feeling suddenly not the protector at all but the child of a fearless mother who pulled him through, her hand holding his tightly, until they were outside in the Spring night air and she was laughing about the excitement of it and brilliance of their narrow escape.

The other students were pouring out onto the street, grouping, looking around for a convenient outlet for their rage.

“We should get out of here,” Raina said and Robert agreed.

They went from there to a small apartment she had off campus that she shared with two other girls. Neither of the girls were home — maybe they had joined the mob that was even then growing and marching down Main Street. They could hear from her apartment the howling of drunken men and the laughter of women.

He kissed her at last on the couch in a living room littered with pizza boxes and empty bottles of Schnapps. For a room lived in by girls, he thought, it was remarkably like a room lived in by boys.

There was some trouble with their mouths — some trouble in coordinating their faces, lips, and tongues. For Robert, there was too much behind this kiss for any of it to be easy. Too many dreams and trips to the bathroom. Before and after the kiss were two separate worlds, and had it not been for pornography and a surprisingly thorough encyclopedia of health in his parents’ study he would have had no idea how to proceed, and anything that would be revealed beneath cloth and contraptions would have been an unbridgeable shock.

But things progressed nicely enough from there. Fearing that her roommates might return early from their night of pillaging, they moved to her bedroom. And here Robert lost his virginity, on an unmade bed, beneath a poster of a brooding singer who would later kill himself with a shotgun.

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