With the music of Maurice Jarre threading through his mind, Tomas toiled across the dunes, thinking he was Lawrence of Arabia. The dunes halted at 27th Avenue. Cars hissed along the four-lane asphalt speedway. It was a mad dash across it to Kay's Hut. Shakes and burgers made from scratch, tasting good as Brooklyn egg-cream and Texas sirloin. The juke box always seemed to be playing "Our Day Will Come" by Ruby and The Romantics.
Tomas closed the jalousie door behind him. He saw someone he knew. Sitting in a booth and nursing a cold cup of joe was Kit Pico.
Pico was a loner. Aloof, condescending, and droll to a fault.
Tomas did not like him and did not know anyone who did.
Yesterday in Ethics class that smart-ass actually asked Professor Egner what he thought of Bertrand Russell. Everybody knew that Egner had edited "Bertrand Russell's Best."
The professor had just paused for questions concerning his lecture at hand, on Spinoza.
What was Pico after? Brownie points?
Snidely Egner replied, "Lord Russell is a senile old man."
Hopes of hearing a new posit on Russell were dashed. Pico slumped back, agape. As if he had gotten his ears resoundingly boxed.
*
With the stealth of a frontier leatherstocking Tomas approached Pico. His shot across the bow: "Buffalo Bill's defunct."
Pico looked up from his reading. "What?"
"Cumming's poem."
A snarky grin snaked across Pico's lean face. "Cummings?"
"E. E lower-case Cummings, yes."
"Right."
Evidently Pico liked to make conversation difficult. Tomas felt obliged to explain: "I've always thought you looked like Buffalo Bill Cody. And after yesterday's Ethics class I figured you to be defunct."
Pico's grin was spontaneous. Bright as the Bikini Atoll. "Well, Pard. That's right kindly. Please sit."
Tomas slapped down his abhored Math book. Slid in opposite Pico. "You took quite a pasting."
"Yes I did." Ruefully shaking his head. Today Pico's leonine mane was a wind-tossed shock of bleached blond hair. His trailer park was a nest of surfer bums.
Tomas relaxed.
Pico went on: "And I deserved it too. I know what I looked like. But really, I only wanted to know old Egner felt about Russell and all that Ban The Bomb shit."
"I believe you."
"I appreciate that. Say, whaddya wanna hear? You get three songs for a quarter. My treat."
My treat. Something Indio had said.
Pico winced as the theme from "Mondo Cane" began to play.
*
A rickety rattle-trap Coast Cities Coaches bus carried Tomas across town, passing the Miami Jai-alai Fronton, the Hialeah Race Track and Loew's Drive-In Theatre. Took an hour to reach his destination. He did not mind. It was time well-spent. Reading assignments for Social Studies carrried the day.
He found Oscar Handlin's "The Uprooted" to be very dry stuff. Yet its merit was obvious, setting the theme for the course. The next book was Steinbeck's "The Grapes Of Wrath." It clubbed him with the force of a baseball bat swung by Ted Williams.
Meanwhile he had become obsessed with two females in the class.
One was a pushy windbag who told everybody she was from Israel. Claimed she had worked in a kibbutz where life was rugged and dangerous, but of all, purposeful. Said she believed America was a nation of pleasure-seekers too complacent about its role in the world. Tomas wondered what the hell she was doing at Miami-Dade Junior College. And not at Hebrew University. Asking her would get him pummeled into next week. He had seen her in the gym, wearing a breast-support and a head-band. She was a burly chock-a-block golem composed of blutwurst. Knocking the crap out of a punching bag. The campus boing champ, Cory Caravagio called her a bull-dyke behind her back. For a guy with lightning jabs he was such a gutless wonder.
The other female dominating his idle thoughts was a nattering cow who could not keep her hands away from her own curvaceous body while extolling unrequited love for Miami Hurricane football hero George Mira. Her fat bee-lips smooching the air. Tomas couldn't stand it. He ached to drag her from the classroom by her ponytail and shut her mouth with a big sloppy kiss. Her bounteous breasts rolled beneath the seascape of her bled madras blouse, unbuttoned enough to reveal a copious application of talcum powder. Half-moons of sweat darkened her armpits. Her odor intoxicated him. Each time she mooed about her dream lover Tomas mentally screamed: Shut up! Shut the fuck up!
*
The Zoo convened on the snack-bar patio. Science geeks and Philosophy nerds wore tweed jackets with elbow patches and Hush Puppy shoes. One of them flaunted a Hugh Hefner smoking pipe tamped with Swedish tobacco. Psychology and Literature majors wore Beatnik Black and white canvas shoes. New shoes were customarily initiated by a fellow Zooster, smudging them by stepping on the toes. They smoked Lucky Strikes and listened to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and believed in Nat Hentoff.
Tomas loved them all. He loved the way they shared newly learned knowledge. Like lonely servicemen in lonesome barracks swapping Mickey Spillanes, the Zoosters traded favorite books too. A Kafka for a Beckett, a Eugene O'Neal for an Edward Albee. It wasn't Harvard perhaps, but it was their voyage of discovery.
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