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Wally

This is a story I cannot possibly imagine telling back when I was twenty or thirty, or maybe even forty years old. Nor is it a story, exactly, because it’s true. So perhaps instead I should say: This is a true story and its subject is time.

I only half-knew Wally back when we were in college together. We shared the back row of a couple classes, wore the same white surfer tee shirts, though I wasn’t a surfer, and we went to a few of the same parties. Wally was on the water polo team, the swim team, too, and his body was a smooth and tense as an otter’s. I liked to swim, so sometimes he and I would toss a water polo ball back and forth, shoot at the net, that kind of thing.

Once in a while we would see each other near the beer keg at some party. Wally was a member of a hard-living, slightly wild, and to my mind, glamorous club. I was in no group at all. The point, I guess, is that Wally was a person I felt flattered to be — not a friend of, exactly—but recognized by. We would pass in a hallway and he would nod and I’d nod back as if we had something in common. He was one of a group I suppose I’d now call the Jock-Nihilists, a larger group, I think, than many knew. This was in the sixties, an era where people were said to be RF’ed, which stood for Rat Fucked, and exactly how that worked visually, I can’t explain, but essentially to be RF’ed meant to be the victim of a low trick. The most memorable use of the phrase I can think of actually came from the mouth of one of most impressive of these Jock-Nihilists—a friend of Wally’s—on a day one November when I was sitting out in the college quad, working on my tan. “Hey, Jim,” he said, “Kennedy got RF’ed.” And that was how I heard what happened in Dallas.

I was a Nihilist myself, but a garden-variety, college student type, embracing that creed mostly to disguise the fact I didn’t possess anything of value to lose. The difference for the Jock-Nihilists, however, was that they did. They were the great ones, the good-looking and confident ones. They were the ones who could actually get a date just by asking. They were the ones who played sports with effortless grace, and yet, at the same time, in the middle of a game or a party or just talking, I might catch the eye of one of them across the room as he was talking to a pretty girl, and he would give me back a look that said, “Sure, I know you see me here, but of course you realize that none of this means shit.” It was the same look I imagined Yeats’ Irish Airman had when he foresaw his pointless death, something along the lines of, “The years to come seemed waste of breath, /A waste of breath the years behind/In balance with this life, this death.” Or something like that.

The last time I saw Wally was the summer after we had both graduated. I was unhappily waiting for the army to call me up to Vietnam, but they hadn’t yet, and, monstrously healthy, I spent much of my time on various schemes to become 4-F, including one from a friend who was already in the Medical Corps, where I was supposed to empty a vial of bacteria he sent me unnoticed into my urine when I took my physical. Not only could I not figure out how I was going to sneak a test tube into my shorts, but worse, while I was waiting to be told the actual date of my physical (it kept being postponed) some of the stuff, which I’d been storing in my refrigerator, apparently escaped and a weird mold began to cover all my food. My friend never told me what kind of bacteria it was. In any case, at one point or another I decided that if I owned a car, somehow it would be a kind of talisman to keep the draft away. I can’t explain now why this would be so, but it was all I had, and it wasn’t much. So when I saw an ad for a convertible posted on the college bulletin board I called the number. Wally answered.

I went to meet him to look at the car in question. It wasn’t cheap, but mostly I was disappointed to see it wasn’t a full-sized model, but a coral red Ford Falcon, a smaller—and to my mind sort of dopey—version of a Real Convertible. Wally was cool enough to drive a vehicle like that around all day, and obviously did, and nobody thought less of him, but as for me, I knew that the moment I got behind the wheel people would see me for what I was, a person who wasn’t good enough to own a full-sized convertible. I told Wally it wasn’t what I had in mind, and he was a gentleman about it. “Oh well,” he said. He was just going to have to sell it to someone else because he was going to join the Air Force, and wouldn’t have a chance to drive anything for a few years. A week later, on the same bulletin board, I found a full-sized Ford Galaxy 500 convertible that was being sold by one of my professors. It was a glamorous automobile, and pretty much a complete piece of junk so naturally I snapped it up. In the end I did get out of the Army — the hard way — by starving myself and generally being so hopeless they sent me home, happy to be rid of me, and time went by.

A lot of time went by. About forty years after college, to be more precise, with good choices, bad ones, marriages, divorces, jobs and no jobs. Over the years, when the alumni news caught up with me, I might think for a tenth of a second about Wally, though not even specifically about him, only “those days,” or “those guys” of which he was one, but the alumni news came only twice a year, so I didn’t spend a lot of time reliving my old college days. There were class reunions, of course, but I skipped them despite the fact that after living in a dozen cities over several years I found myself in a house within walking distance (well, a longish walk) of the campus.

And then there came a day last spring that was unseasonably, uncomfortably hot, and my stepdaughter and I were in the neighborhood of the college with a little time to kill before I was supposed to drop her off somewhere, at a hair appointment, I recall. We were about a half an hour early, so I asked her if she wanted to take a quick tour of the campus. She’d been to the college once before, when I took a nephew of mine around for a visit, but I figured another trip, now that she was nearing college age herself, couldn’t hurt.

“Umm,” she said, meaning it was hot and she didn’t much feel like it, but which I took to mean, “Well, if you insist.”

“Come on,” I said. “It will be quick.”

And actually it was. Classes weren’t in session, so there were no eager student faces, no intense discussions, or any of those things I didn’t exactly remember from my college days, but I was sure must have been there. The large auditorium was open, but except for three people who were measuring seats, it was empty. We stood outside the empty dining hall and watched through a window as two people with buckets cleaned a spot on the floor. We walked into the old part of the library, which had been completely emptied for a film shoot. “We’ll look at a dorm,” I said, “then leave.”

So we headed up the hill toward the girls’ dorms, and I steered her between two large buildings that were used, at least when I was there, as lecture halls. I was getting hot and tired myself, and was thinking that while this tour wasn’t an absolutely terrible idea, it certainly was not one of my best, when, for the first time that afternoon, I suddenly heard some excitement in her voice. “Look,” she said, ”here’s a memorial to every one who died in World War One!”

Well, I thought, she does like history, and though I couldn’t figure out why a memorial plaque would be all that interesting, I was glad to see something had caught her attention. Certainly I must have walked by the same plaque a hundred times while I had attended classes there, and couldn’t remember once having noticed it.

I moved toward the girls’ dorms, but she wasn’t finished. “And look,” she went on, “Here’s World War Two,” — a pause — “and Korea, and Vietnam.” Sure enough there they all were, all the wars in bronze, listing all the dead alums, set into a stucco wall painted the same beige as I used to spread around those summers I worked on the college painting crew. Then a name caught my eye: Wallace Wiggins, it said, and my first thought was that it must have been Wally’s father, so I looked above it to see if it was the Korean War, or even World War II. But it was Vietnam, and when I looked back at his name, it wasn’t even dead, but Missing In Action. Wallace Wiggins: not dead, but not alive either, more like caught somewhere between the two, more like the workings of my memory. Wally had been there and not there for forty years.

We walked back to the car.

She got her hair done.

But by then, as had happened once or twice before, my world changed. In some fundamental way everything I had believed: the idea that somewhere, Wally and the rest of those Jock-Nihilists were going about living their lives, having children, grandchildren, fulfilling the promise of the college to provide the world with humane executives, educators and middle-managers — all things expected of a certain class —this whole vision of normality had been based on a lie. One of us at least had not kept up. One of us had been left back at the starting line all those many years ago, while we others ran blindly on, and now here he was, like one of those Stone Age hunters who fell only to be found in the heart of a glacier, centuries later. And that person had been, of all people, Wally.

That evening, when my stepdaughter saw her mother she told her, “Oh, Jim’s sad because a guy he almost bought a car from died.”

And I suppose that’s right, because really, when I come to think about it, our connection was only as close as that. We weren’t friends, only acquaintances, and I never even bought that car. But had Wally known something when he would nod at me as if to say, “No matter what, it doesn’t mean shit”?

I think he couldn’t possibly have understood the truth then, but for me, now, a curtain has been lifted, and from where I am standing if I turn my head a little to one side I can see Wally, an absurdly tiny figure in the jungle of time — smiling, tanned, right back where I left him all those years ago —his plane down, his buddies gone, and still hacking away at those vines that want to swallow him, still trying to find his way out of there, but to where and to what?

I can’t imagine.

Wally, you old nihilist you — you tell me.

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The writer: Jim Krusoe, the founding editor of the Santa Monica Review, teaches at Santa Monica College and in the graduate writing program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. He has written five books of poems and a book of stories, Blood Lake, and the novel Iceland. His second novel, Girl Factory, was published in May 2008 by Tin House Books. Read an excerpt of Girl Factory here.) Read a Q&A with the author here. Says Carolyn Kellogg in her LAT review, “Jim Krusoe pulls off a balancing act between science fiction and subjectivity in this playful, funny novel. And he makes sure you’ll never look at Pinkberry quite the same way again.”

The essay: “Wally” appeared in the spring 2008 edition of the Santa Monica Review and Jim also shared his essay with us at CaliforniaAuthors.com.