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And that dismal cry rose slowly

And sank slowly through the air

Full of spirit’s melancholy

And eternity’s despair!

And they heard the words it said

PAN IS DEAD–GREAT PAN IS DEAD– 

 PAN, PAN IS DEAD.

                                                                –Elizabeth Barrett Browning

 

... fun, fun, fun ‘til daddy takes the T-bird away

                                                                –The Beach Boys

 

hen I was in college I had a friend, Bill Forrester, who was a godlike character. That is, he was godlike in considering the entire of existence, substance and force, as his plaything. Also, he was kindly, merciful, and unomnipotent enough to suit any modern theologian. But mostly he was a goof. He liked to, as he put it, “goof people out.” He liked to put pet-store turtles in cafeteria soup. He liked to squirt his dog on the muzzle with menthol shaving cream, turn it loose in a crowd, and yell, “Run for your life! Rabid dog!” And he liked to hide in the woods and open fire on Reserve Officer Training Corps drills with a starter’s pistol. Sometimes Forrester’s pranks went awry. The turtles caused an outbreak of salmonella. Some hero on the track team tackled the dog and broke its little neck. And one of the panicked ROTC squad eventually became a National Guard platoon commander and, so I’m told, was last heard from at Kent State in May of 1970. But Forrester was constitutionally unable to let things  alone. He decided on an antipathy to our school’s philosophy department. Forrester hated philosophy of any stripe. He picked an addlepated professor of this subject, a Dr. Norris, and concocted, in the doctor’s name, an abstruse, unreadable, and wholly fallacious essay on existential truth values, postulating a subjective logical positivism that could be demonstrated by means of a five-dimensional set theory. He was assisted by a computer programmer friend, Bolo Henderson, who produced a hundred printout pages of dense and impressive mathematical symbols that actually pertained to the town’s sewer assessment. Forrester sent this thing off to whatever kind of publication it is that prints this kind of thing, and they printed it. Apparently it chimed in with the fashions of the time. Dr. Norris was acclaimed, invited to lecture on the subject, given tenure, and, a couple of years later, made head of the department. Dr. Norris was the only real philosopher Connersville State College had ever attracted, and it was thought he had to be kept at any cost. The cost was enormous. He turned out to be a wild alcoholic with a particular sexual affection for newsboys. He would teach no afternoon classes because he had to assist these lads in delivering the evening paper, which he did by chauffeuring them around in his old Packard while he wore nothing but jockey shorts and drank from a thermos of Scotch. He took to sporting a bright orange wig hat and a quilted housecoat at faculty meetings. He insisted on attending every fraternity initiation. And when the campus was relandscaped he refused to give up his accustomed parking spot, and, even now, his rusted twotoned Caribbean convertible is parked every morning in the middle of a greensward. Lithium treatments have helped, but he still runs around the campus at dawn dressed in women’s underwear.

                Sometimes Forrester’s pranks gave pain to Forrester himself. He had an old Volkswagen and liked to have his friend Norm Jefferies, who was a paratrooper just back from Vietnam, drive him around while he stood up through the sunroof naked except for Jefferies’s parachute pack and a pair of ski goggles. He’d ride back and forth through the town at night, shining a big dry-cell flashlight at pretty girls. One night he saw a girl who was prettier than most. The prettiest girl he’d ever seen, he claimed, and he pulled the rip cord. The car was going about forty miles an hour when the chute opened and Forrester was pulled out the sunroof in a cloud of camouflaged nylon. There was a lot of explaining to be done in the emergency room, and the police were pestered all night by reports of a man from Mars.

                Sometimes people would take one of Forrester’s tricks and turn it to their advantage. He was managing a little grocery store and carryout for a while and discovered that the aerosol can of a certain plum-whip dessert topping was charged by nitrous oxide. If you set the can upright and let the contents settle, then put your lips around the nozzle, you could get one or two lungfuls of that drug.  Forrester  alerted his friends and they were soon buying plum whip by the case. The dessert-topping salesman was amazed and told the district sales manager about this tiny grocery on the wrong side of a small town selling five, six hundred dollars worth of their product every month. The sales manager visited Forrester and asked him his secret. “I’m an amateur master chef,” said Forrester, and he improvised what he said were just a few of the marvelous recipes he had concocted using the company’s dessert topping. “For instance,” Forrester told the man, “when a lady’s checking out I will say to her, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, but I see you don’t have any plum whip here. Have you tried plum whip on bologna sandwiches? The kids will love it.’ Or if it’s a man, I’ll say, ‘Hey, no plum whip? Goes great with gin!’” The sales manager thought Forrester was crazy, but whatever he was doing worked, so he invited Forrester, for a fee, to travel around the state addressing meetings of route men and sales representatives on how to sell more plum whip. Forrester composed a lecture describing all sorts of plumwhip recipes: plum-whip salad dressing, plum-whip pepper steak, deviled plum-whip eggs, fish in plum-whip aspic, jellied veal mousse with plum whip, etc. The salesmen listened, incredulous. Then after the lecture, when Forrester could speak to the salesmen privately in ones and twos, he’d tell them that this was all bullshit and that the real secret of selling all this plum whip was that people were using it for sex, squirting it on each other’s genitals and licking it off and so on. “Tell the grocers to give cute girls a couple of sly suggestions,” he said. Plum-whip sales soared and Forrester paid for a semester’s tuition with the lecture money, but all across Ohio that year there were grocery clerks being arrested for a sexual offense that was never well defined in the press. Sometimes Forrester’s railleries were inspired by a sense of justice. Connersville was in a “dry” county, and the only liquor that could be sold legally there was beer with an alcoholic content of less than 3.2 percent. The market was flooded with horrible local brands that met this specification, the worst and most prevalent of which was Knucklemeyer’s Pilsner Supreme. It was evil swill, and some bars served nothing else. The Knucklemeyer people offered, at nominal cost, a tour of their brewery in nearby Cincinnati. The most important feature of the tour was all you could drink in their brewery tavern. Forrester chartered a bus at his own expense and then spent a week rounding up the town’s worst and most violent drunks (not counting his friends). He put them all on the bus to the brewery and stocked it with twenty cases of the beer in question. The last we saw of the vehicle, it was rolling out of town with its occupants all standing on the seats peeing out the windows, so that it looked like a gigantic sprinkler truck. I don’t know what happened next. The bus never came back and only a couple of the drunks ever returned to town, and shortly afterward Knucklemeyer’s ceased to be sold in Connersville.

orrester kept house in a big old ramshackle rundown place in the middle of town, and any number of people lived there with him, depending on who had lately been evicted by a landlord or thrown out by a girl friend or wife. Forrester’s idea of a household was to have a party seven days a week around the clock. Someone was always awake drinking or taking drugs, and there was no telling who might be screwing whom or what in any bed at any time. Forrester put notices on all the bulletin boards in town, offering his dining room free to any band that wanted to practice, so that there would always be music, preferably amplified by electricity. And in the middle of the most lubricious bacchanal, you could count on tripping over the patch cords of some earnest future Herman’s Hermits. Forrester was almost immune to sleep, and he would pop in and out of the house thinking up things to do and sponsoring events such as a town-wide bicycle-thieving contest, which collected forty bicycles in his kitchen and resulted in a mammoth indoor bicycle race from the kitchen, through the rock band, into the living room and up the stairs, down the hall, out the bathroom window, around the veranda roof, and back, the winner being the first one to drink the-pitcher of Mai-Tais in the refrigerator. Forrester missed a turn at the top of the stairs and went through a stained-glass casement and into the driveway below. The bicycle was ruined.

                Forrester, when sufficiently drunk, believed that certain transformations were possible. I think that’s what he believed. Sometimes he would get in a fight with his girl friend, a very serious type, and he would hide. But the way he would hide was that he’d sit down in the middle of the living-room floor with a jug bottle of wine and say, “I’m hiding.” It was convincing in an odd way. At least, it seemed to work. Forrester once decided that if he went outside very quickly and climbed up on a windowsill and peeked back in, he’d be able to see himself having fun. But his foot slipped, or his hands did, and he fell in through the windowpanes and fell over the top of the people on the couch and landed face first in a coffee-tableful of highball glasses. Another time Forrester decided he was a woolly spider monkey and climbed a neighbor’s sixty-foot TV antenna. This upset the neighbor, the more so because spider monkeys have no sphincter control. But when Forrester got to the top of the antenna it occurred to him that he wasn’t really a woolly spider monkey after all and, besides, he had a morbid fear of heights. He was up there all night alternating between identities, paralyzed with terror when he was Forrester and obstinately enjoying himself when he was a monkey, swinging around and pissing and shitting, deaf to the lure of mixed nuts or spoiled fruit. The fire department’s ladders wouldn’t reach him and the power company finally had to come get him with a cherry-picker crane. Forrester wrapped his arms and legs around the neck of the foreman and bit him on top of the head.

 

very Sunday at Forrester’s house those of us who were conscious would take brooms and begin to sweep, sweeping up cigarette butts and condoms and wine bottles and hamburger wrappers and beer cans, most of all beer cans, hundreds and hundreds of beer cans. We’d start in the attic and sweep around prostrate forms and strange piles of bedding and the remains of furniture, and we’d sweep through the house, down the stairs, and into the living room, where there was a trapdoor that went down to a dirtfloored cellar some eight feet deep. Into this cellar hole we’d sweep all the beer cans and other litter. When Forrester rented the house in the fall of 1966 the cellar was empty and by the spring of 1967 it was full to the floorboards.

                Eventually the situation at Forrester’s house went out of control. There was too long a period of constant riot. Norm Jefferies and Bolo Henderson got into a fight on the porch one night and were rolling around strangling and hammering each other. Forrester hated to see a fight and tried to break it up with a wet mop. When that didn’t work he borrowed someone’s pickup and backed it through the porch rail and used the mop handle to lever Norm and Bolo into the bed. I don’t know why he did this, and when he’d done it he didn’t know either. It didn’t stop the fight. So he just drove around town with the two of them fighting in the back. It was like the advance wagon for a circus menagerie. On another night there was a mantle-jumping contest. The point of it being to see how far people could jump from the mantle, to see whether they could jump all the way to the couch. Which they could, but the couch legs punched through the floor and broke a water line that was never fixed. The cellar full of beer cans was shot through with running water so that a sort of litter quicksand developed, very treacherous to the step. And after that there was no water in the house. Forrester tried to take a bath in beer, but it was no good, though you could flush the toilets with what was left in a warm keg. Norm Jefferies was staying with Forrester then, until he could find a job that involved destroying things. And on one of the rare occasions when Forrester slept, Norm went down to the black part of town and stole a chicken and came back and threw it under Forrester’s down quilt and then sicced his pet German shepherd, Joker, on the flapping lump in the bedclothes. Forrester woke up, he said, in the middle of an enormous ball of blood and goose down and chicken and snarling vicious dog. He had to go explain himself at the emergency room once again and get the feathers raked out of his cuts and bites. Several nights later there were a hundred people or so in the house. One of them was a small personable homosexual named Dale who was being teased by two large girls from Cincinnati. One of them got Dale in a half nelson and pulled him down to the floor, then flipped him over and sat on his chest, her fat legs pinning his arms, while the other girl got his pants down and mouthed him into an erection. Then she pulled her skirt up and raped him. Contrary to the street-corner psychiatry offered by some of the onlookers, this did nothing to change Dale’s attitude toward women. Also, the abuse of drugs in the house was flagrant, unconcealed, and began to attract the attention of some of the students at the college who were eager to try those drugs themselves. One member of the golf team showed up of an evening and wanted to buy LSD. Forrester gave him a vitamin B-12 capsule and the kid convinced himself into a kind of a fit. Jefferies knocked him down on the bare springs of a fold-up daybed and then folded the bed up around him and rolled it on its casters out the front door and off the porch. The drugs also attracted the attention of the police, who tried to keep the house under surveillance. Forrester said he had the only place in town where the garbage was picked up by a black sedan. But this wasn’t true. There were too many big old houses in the town with too many young layabouts living in them, and they all looked alike, and it was actually Bolo Henderson’s house the police had under surveillance, though they thought it was Forrester’s. There were no drugs for sale at Forrester’s house. Drugs were too readily consumed there for retail stockpiling. Henderson’s house, however, was the source of narcotics for nearly the whole town.

 

he police had heard complaints about this Forrester guy and about what they thought was his house, and when they saw all the blinkers and stumblers coming in and out they were sure they had a premises of ill repute, which they did, but the wrong one. Anyway, they raided Henderson and surrounded his house with police cars and broke down the door and started finding kilos of marijuana and jars full of barbiturates and packages of methamphetamine and hypodermic needles and everything else you can imagine. And every time they found something they’d hoot and run outside and put it in a squad car and smile. Then they’d rush back inside to look for more. Quite a crowd of us began to gather outside the police lines, and when we looked up at the house we saw something that the police were too busy to see. That was Bolo Henderson hiding on the porch roof, hunkered down on the shingles and pressed against the side of the building, trying, to be as inconspicuous as possible. Every so often the police would come up to us and say, “Where’s this Forrester guy? Any of you seen him?” and so on. And people in the crowd would say that that wasn’t Forrester’s house they were searching and that he didn’t live there, but the police would say, “Sure he doesn’t,” or, “Right” or, “Shut up and go to hell. “And all the while Forrester was standing in this crowd watching, and watching Henderson where he crouched on the roof still apparently invisible to the police. So Forrester went back down the street to his own house and called police headquarters and told them he was a public-spirited neighbor and he knew that Forrester fellow whose house was being searched and he knew where the guy was hiding, and Forrester gave his own address. When the call came over the police radio most of the officers jumped into their squad cars and squealed the hundred yards down the street to what was really Forresters’s house but which they thought was his hideout. And during the confusion Henderson shinnied down a rain pipe and ran into the bushes and was gone.

                But just because Forrester wasn’t selling drugs didn’t mean that there weren’t all sorts of drug remains lying around his house. And, when the police arrived where they thought they’d been, they had almost as good a time as they’d had where they’d been when they thought they were there.

                After ransacking the house, the officer in charge, all aglow from his finds, came back to Forrester and asked him if there were any more drugs in the place. “There might be some down the basement,” said Forrester, and he pulled up the trapdoor.

                “What the hell is this?” said the cop. And he stared at the apparently solid mass of sodden beer cans and then he tried the surface with his feet and was sucked right under, hat and all. Forrester said he could have escaped in the confusion that followed, but he was too interested in seeing if the man would survive and if any of the other policemen would be drawn into the morass while trying to extricate him. Several more were, although they all eventually floundered out.

                The warrant was not in completely good order, being made out to the wrong street address, but this was before society had become as litigiously intimate as it is now and it wasn’t yet considered sporting to upset the outcome of an entire match over one faulty line call. Instead, a certain leniency was proffered and Forrester was offered the choice of jail or joining the army. The latter seemed to offer more opportunity to exercise his predilections, and a military uniform would “goof out” his friends more thoroughly than prison denims, so he volunteered for the draft.

                Forrester eventually became a company clerk and got access to his own files and to various bits of military information. He discovered that there was still extant in the United States Army a “blimp corps,” and showing the same talent he had with the philosophy thesis, plus some additional talent in forgery, he transferred himself to this unit. He thought that was a pretty good joke. The army may have thought it was a pretty good joke too, because they didn’t have any blimps, so they put him in an observer plane.

                And thus out of playfulness Forrester went to Vietnam, and his plane was shot down, and he was killed. So maybe there’s no excuse for playfulness in life. Norm Jefferies, on the other hand, had contracted a hatred for the Viet Cong on his previous tour of duty. And thus out of hatred Jefferies went back to Vietnam and was killed in a rocket attack. Dale had a crush on a boy who enlisted, so he enlisted too. And thus out of love Dale went to Vietnam and got killed by a booby trap in Puang Tri province. And Henderson went to Vietnam for no reason at all and didn’t even get that far and was killed in a traffic accident in South Korea. So maybe there’s no excuse for anything else either.