That Saturday, move-in night, I sit around in Bart's apartment and watch the underclassmen we skate with drink and pinch each other in his living room. These guys I hang out with when Bart’s not around--he’s picking Beth Winkler up from the airport in Albany.
"Invite that girl over," says Carter, a loud 19-year-old boy from Simi Valley. He wears an oversized skate tee, pleated pants and Clarks - Wallabees. His father is Jamaican, his mother a Texan Swede. A self-described 'Waldorf Bushman,' he grew up the youngest of seven, tending a backyard chicken coop.
"No, she's not talking to me." Paul. "Not after Berlin, man. She is not happy about that." Paul is an art kid from an international school in Asia whose understanding of American culture runs deeper than mine. He is well-liked for his emotional understanding. He's wearing a wool v-neck over a bootleg band t-shirt.
"When you saved her from kidnappers?" asks Carter.
"I was the one who convinced her to go out that night. We had class in the morning; I thought I could smash."
"Instead, you got smashed up by a bunch of Arabs."
"They were German, Carter."
"Oh, right, man. They were wearing masks."
"It's always white locs now," says Rico, a 22-year-old sophomore who beat a graffiti-related felony last year. I respect him deeply. His hoodie reads at its center, 'Metropolitan Museum of Art' in small text. I'm not sure if it's recent merch. The cut-off for vintage is 30 years, right? "Nigga stole my bike out of my car this summer was white."
"You saw him?" says Paul.
"Cops showed me some surveillance tapes. No mask, either."
"What about Claire," Carter pushes, "from that film class you had, Paul?"
"She doesn't like me that way-"
"No, for one of us, man."
Rico laughs. "No, for you. I get pussy."
"What about Joy?" Carter looks over. "You just got dumped, right?"
"I'm good on chicks… I got some stuff going on."
"Right," he says.
Paul leans up from the couch, murmuring about the time. "I gotta eat something, let's just do something later."
Carter looks over. "You wanna dining hall? Jenny's on tonight, I could get Joy in, easy."
"We could go into town," I say, "Need to get Bart more beer, anyway--you guys drank it all."
Rico points at me. "Isn't your homie Jane working Pizza Pizza tonight? New girl."
"Yes," I say, though I don't think she is. Her spending money is skimmed off the top of one of her mom's investment portfolios.
"What if we brought beer to the dining hall," Carter's saying, and I'm thinking about Jane and her money and how she fucks me good.
"And which party?" Carter continues. "There's the thing at 32, on Clement and those Israeli girls at FuckHaus are doing some theme thing--"
"You're bugging me about bringing somebody around," Paul says, "While there's a FuckHaus party?"
Carter pauses, his gaze to the ceiling. "They have a keg, too… Easy. FuckHaus it is."
"Yeah, whatever," Rico says.
I snort. "I'll come by, I guess."
A group of male musicians in the class of 2016 had donned the 8-bed duplex "Buck House." After several years and several incidents of sexual misconduct, the 8 rooms slowly became the domain of non-men, mostly white women. Its new moniker, "FuckHaus," came about after Eve Greenberg returned from her semesters abroad in Tel-Aviv and Berlin. She spent that academic year having sex and remarking at how fucked all the settlements were and listening to 4x4 dance music in dark clubs. A typical traveled New Yorker, she's pretentious and polite. Bart kissed her around New Years’ freshman year. They were in front of an Italian restaurant in Gramercy. He says he still thinks about her sometimes.
The part of the FuckHaus party I can stomach without intoxication or the allure of random sex is in the backyard. There, one can hit the keg, sit by a fire and gawk across a property line at the two-bedroom converted shack the soccer boys live in. One time early last year--actually, maybe it was move-in day--Tracy and I sorta broke our code and made out at a FuckHaus thing. I was taken by her steely looks and calming smirk. Anyway, we fooled around a bit in a bathroom and I got carried away and made her orgasm. She then pulled me out to scavenge through a concurrent soccer party for beers. The kids there were dressed very formally and yelled into each other's ears around a ping pong table. There was no house music or techno or hyperpop or anything; instead, they listened to Playboi Carti and occasionally danced. I wondered what a computer science major would have made me look like, before Tracy walked me home, through the forest, and begged me to cum inside her. She got back with her ex-boyfriend a few weeks later; I wasn't jealous but he was a better skateboarder than I was. Tracy and I don't talk about that night much.
My problem with FuckHaus isn't how lame I think it is, or its whiteness, or class quality or whatever the hell. I just don't think straight at these things.
Olivia Hirsch was a FuckHaus girl. Clothes stitched with patches of mismatched wool, skinny-dipping, pink Nintendo DS, a boyfriend from Europe or the mythical Philadelphia, member of the textile department. Scent of lavender, unwashed swimsuits and Nat Sherman. One night before I met Olivia, I saw her playing drums in the basement, back before the Dealership noise ordinance. Clad in big jeans and a sports bra and slicked with sweat, she sang into a mic with its cable twisted around a lamp, dangling over the toms. It was freshman year. Bart made me go, said I needed to see some stuff off-campus.
"Squash, right?" Eve pumps the keg, her dainty, freckled sun-burnt arms crossed over the plunger. She's somewhat tall, her brown hair still only shoulder length from the buzzcut girls here do freshman year, finally away from their neurotic nitpicking parents. She has an oddly small mouth, set in a quiet scowl. Eve's got a nose my mother would call Egyptian before I’d admonish her for it, though I have no clue why that'd be offensive. She is wearing a stiff denim pant, green, with a wash like they'd been forgotten in the ocean. Underneath them--somehow-- are Supreme Nike Dunks from last season, betraying both a large foot and maybe a StockX account. Needless to say, I am terribly attracted to Eve, and I do not mind that she's the first person I run into tonight.
I remember the "Springer Spiders Squash" crewneck I'm wearing--Independent, not Gildan, thank god--and say, "I managed freshman year. Played at practice."
"Yeah, I'd see you at tournaments." And I saw Eve often as a volleyball striker, as Bart and I decided to see as many girls’ games as we could that year.
Eve hands me a cup of local lager and froth. "You still with that girl you fucked in my room last year?"
My eyes widen. Her intonation is only vaguely New York, bits and pieces left from probably speech therapy. Do other ethnic private school parents, desperate to shed any evidence their child ventured about in their outer-borough neighborhood before college interviews, send their kids to speech therapy? I went as a kid, for a lisp.
Eve laughs. "I'm not mad. Saw you guys moving in today."
"We're real good friends." I watch her pump the keg again, the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. I can count bones in her back through her t-shirt. I wonder what she's like in the sack. I wonder if she laughs at guys.
"You talk to Dana yet?"
"No," I mumble.
"Says she's dating a lawyer. I just hope she's staying sane, y'know?"
"Me too, sane, lawyer, yeah."
"Well," she says, sipping beer. "I've got to go host my party, and I hate these people." Her face forms a gummy grin. She's leaning over close enough that I can smell the lavender and Nat Sherman. "See ya."
"Nice to see you, Eve." Lawyer?
"Same," she says, walking off.
Is that what Dana's telling people? Lawyer? Lawyer. Maybe I do have that brain tumor.
I walk the party for a few hours, drinking more as I catch up with people. In the kitchen, I watch this Bay Area Montessori girl take her shirt off, swapping her cropped band t-shirt for Carter's 2XL thing. They're kissing by the time I move on. Yura asks how I'm doing, and if I've seen Carla anywhere. Bart shows up with Beth, and no one really recognizes her. He’s carrying around one of those 4k Canon camcorders and popping into doorways. I hope he gets Carter and that Marnie girl. Bart and Jimmy and I crowd Paul as he describes his affection for Claire from his film class. We’ve seen them around together. I begin a “Move-in day” chant and Bart’s camera is in my face again. The night is slowly turning to what I call evil and though I don’t mind causing problems, I need to get up at a reasonable hour to finish unpacking.
I do not get laid at this party, but Eve gets bored and lets me walk her to the bar. She's gripping my hand tightly when she asks if I think Bart's gonna go to her party later.
"He’s already- Bart's with Beth Winkler," I say flatly. "From Disney Channel."
"Oh my gosh, you're right." She grips tighter. "Y'know, I don't even need to go to the bar anymore."
"No?"
"The air is nice enough."
"Right." That awful, humid Hudson Valley air hangs between us as I wait for her response. For a moment, I wonder if I’ll get one; it seems Eve is content to dreamily stare into my eyes.
"Wanna invite me up for a drink," she finally asks.
I stare up at my apartment, across the street, second floor, the lit window probably Tracy fingerpicking to a GarageBand drum loop.
"Eve, uh, maybe another night."
"Oh, you're a good boy, huh."
"Sure."
She pulls me close, arm over my shoulder, and we kiss; I don't know what it is. I don't know. I need a thesis advisor. I need a cigarette. I need to skate. I don't need another kid to bother. But I lean in anyway. A moment later, I watch Eve greet the bouncer. She disappears through the double door. I can smell her on my shirt.
Freshman year is a crash course in being the client to an institution. All the community stuff they sling is sorta true, sure, but dorm living is built to force you into groups and pit you against the kids who study on Thursday night. The people who play non-racquetball sports are also the enemy. And the hippies. Obviously, this gamification of social whatever is the product of fear and the shared giddiness of being elevated from the grade school loser Dischord Records T-shirt kid to a sexually active taste-maker who shares cigarettes with kids descended from WGA members. None of that is real, or cool, or has any utility in real life, and a much cheaper move to a neighborhood new to white people in a major American city will bring about the same false feeling.
Anyway, this girl, Eve Greenberg, was the dorm snitch in my freshman dorm. She was not, actually. She shared a triple with two Poly Prep kooks who hated her, and they wanted her out. That rumor was a step in that process. (And it didn’t matter, they ended up transferring to Bard anyway.) Eve moved to Olivia’s floor in Romano, so I’d see her around. In the mornings where I unromantically trudged back to my dorm, I’d see her returning from her morning run. We’d share a nod, maybe a word about getting breakfast ‘before the rush.’