A Hippie Girl's Agenda

She strode over to the door, unlocked it, and opened it. Before leaving she lifted her skirt and mooned me with her bare ass. "Don't expect to ever see this again."

"No great loss."

She had to have the last words. "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on." I had heard that insult before and I assumed it intensified her angry feelings. "And fuck your stupid electric trains too, you little prick."

Then she was gone. I didn't even know her last name.

****

After closing the door, I went back to the desk. That had not been a calm or entertaining day. I felt jangled from the sudden bout of oral sex followed by the equally sudden argument and the insults we had traded with each other. I decided to stay in the office for a while longer. I sat by the windows for a while considering the just concluded events.

That little morality play had revealed how crass I could be. I had lied to her and catered to her misconceptions because I believed I could get some sex out of her. Also, I had cheated on my girlfriend, who had been very kind to me. And oral sex did count, as Bill Clinton would find out years later.

I hoped not to run into Clary on campus during the next semester.

Actually, it could be worse than that; perhaps she would come back and try again with somebody else. Maybe she would get on the paper for the fall semester and then she would find out that I had misled her.

I had the paranoid notion that she would hold a grudge and would start blabbing to other people, including my girlfriend, about what had happened. I couldn't stop Clary from joining the paper and I couldn't control what she would do there. It seemed shockingly easy to make an enemy.

The idea of being on the staff with Clarissa made me feel queasy. I had jeopardized my existing relationship in the hope of getting into her sleazy snatch. For a moment I considered trying to contact my girlfriend. She was more ambitious than I was, and she earned enough at her jobs to afford an apartment in Queens. I decided to put that on hold because I was feeling so much guilt.

Perhaps I calmed myself a bit by trying to think logically. It seemed likely that Clary already had a real boyfriend somewhere out there, maybe at our school. Also, I assumed that she would figure out that The Campus, with its more conventional content, was a better place for job opportunities. The New York Times stringer for City College was on their staff.

To distract myself, I noted the buildings I could see in the distance. There was the State Office Building on 125th Street, the former Theresa Hotel, the Schomburg Plaza apartments on 110th Street, and beyond that, Mount Sinai Hospital. The upper part of the borough was developing quite a skyline.

I wondered what kind of dramas were being played out in those places. As for Finley Hall, I was feeling anxious and more than a little sorry for myself. I understood the little drama that had just played out in there.

There was nothing to be done about it by then.

*****

There will be a sequel to this soon, which is set two months later in the following semester. The break-up with the ex-girlfriend is described in My Summer with Nora, Ch. 09.

The events depicted here are entirely fictitious but the settings existed at the time.

The Salient is based on an actual student newspaper of that era although it had a different name. The Monty Hall ad and the Lionel train essay were items published in January 1975.

There really was a guy who went to Stuttgart, AR, for a job.

A stringer is someone, either paid or unpaid, who is informally assigned by a newspaper to cover a beat, usually their own neighborhood, workplace, or school.

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