Read The Collective for Free Online

but booze flowed freely in the dorms, and we always tanked up before going to the dances.
    “You’re not so bad yourself,” I said, nuzzling her. She was tall and gangly, with long legs and arms, big hands and feet, but she had a classical air about her, her face strongly angular yet alluring. She was blond, of course.
    A few days later, I asked her out to a movie that was playing at the Grandview, the theater half a mile from campus. They were showing Running on Empty, a new film starring River Phoenix as the son of two former Weather Underground–type radicals on the run from the FBI. I figured afterward I could ply Didi with what I had learned about the antiwar movement in my Vietnam class.
    But we didn’t end up staying until the end of the movie. Halfway through, I turned to her, and she to me. She was chomping on a piece of gum. I was about to ask if she wanted the rest of the popcorn, and as I opened my mouth she spontaneously spat her wad of gum right into it. Startled, I took a sharp intake of breath, which lodged the gum in my throat, and I started choking. Alarmed, Didi punched me in the solar plexus, which made me hawk the gum out, directly into the hair—a nesty brown bouffant—of the woman in front of us. Didi and I gasped, but when we realized the woman somehow had not noticed the new appendage that had been projectiled into her hairdo, we began giggling, which escalated into a paroxysm of near-pee-in-the-pants guffaws. We were kicked out of the theater.
    We went to Dunn Bros Coffee for cappuccinos and carrot cake, and talked. Didi was from Massachusetts, Irish Catholic, and intended to major in math and computer science. Her father, like mine, was an engineer. He had grown up poor in Dorchester and gone to UMass Amherst and then had started a hugely successful company that specialized in hospital software systems. He expected Didi to work for him after she graduated.
    “Did you want to follow in his footsteps, or were you feeling forced?” I asked, thinking the story didn’t change much across ethnicities.
    “Oh, I don’t know. I’m the only one of his kids with any facility in math. I actually like math.”
    “You don’t look like a math geek.”
    “What’s a math geek supposed to look like?” she asked.
    “Well,” I said, “probably like me.”
    I walked her back to her dorm, Turck, and outside the front door we smooched a little, but it was all rather chaste, without presage of ardor. This might be a dead end, I thought.
    Nonetheless, the next Friday we joined a gang of students to go to the Sonic Youth concert at First Avenue, the club Prince had made famous. Macalester was in a quiet residential St. Paul neighborhood, miles from downtown Minneapolis, which usually required two buses and forty-five minutes to get to, but the school had decided to make a semi-sanctioned event of it, offering a couple of vans to transport us to the club, and we all eagerly piled into them, Joshua included.
    “This is Didi,” I told him.
    “Hey,” he said, barely registering her. “Fucking-A, how cool is this, huh? We’re finally getting off the goddamn reservation. First Ave! Sonic Youth!”
    I wasn’t all that familiar with Sonic Youth, or that entire classification of punk rock. Truth be told, before I came to Mac, my favorite musician—I’m ashamed to say—had been Billy Joel.
    Sonic Youth was touring for a new album, Daydream Nation, and Joshua ran through the song list, citing the allusions to Denis Johnson, Saul Bellow, Andy Warhol, and William Gibson. “It’s, like, a lit major’s wet dream,” Joshua said, laughing. “I mean, yeah, it’s the most mainstream, commercial thing they’ve ever done, and they’re going to get some flak for it for sure, but it’s still got its subcultural, seditious connotations, you know?”
    When we got out of the van near the club, Joshua pulled me (and I pulled Didi) into an alleyway. “We’ve got to get in the proper mood for this,” he said, and produced a pipe and a lighter from his jacket