Revolution Read Free Page B

sifting through the protesters toward me, the hippies swaying. They looked drab and disarranged beside their cop counterparts in fine suits and unhappy helmets, standing in a line. Against this blur, George was young and shining. He shifted through the assortment of people, sliding around them. He came over to the tree I stood under, leaves falling all around. He had blue-green eyes and the sort of blond hair that blonds call not blond. He held up his fist to me like a microphone and asked me what I wanted to say.
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    George had an odd system of rules. He didn’t believe in paying bills. Phone bills, library fines, gas bills. It was a principle for him: never pay bills. Corporations were evil, rich, foolish to trust him. Around that time credit card companies first began handing out cards to students. He thought this was funny. He called it free money. He signed up for several credit cards, spent up to the limit, and threw the bills away. At first I didn’t know how this was going to work out for him, but it wasn’t as bad as you’d think. Bills piled up and floated away, and more appeared to replace them. Yet he never refused someone money if asked, even if he himself really needed it (which was always), so he was usually broke. It was what made me fall in love with him: his disregard for rules other than his own. He simply didn’t care about money, possessions, sleep, food. I found this daring and visionary. I wanted to be like that too.
    He had a coterie of friends since childhood who were protective, fearful for him. “Oh, give it here,” they’d say, dropping a twenty on the counter, “I’ll pay for his.” Never resentful, they acted as if George had done them some quiet deed long ago and now they were in his debt, or—on his more annoying days—as if he were the kid brother whose father on his deathbed had charged them with his care. Maybe to them he seemed hopeless or muddled. You could not have a regular conversation with the guy. He had no reaction to chitchat about sports, school, snow. He never swore, never took drugs. At a party he was the one in the corner bending the lamp into strange shapes. He wasn’t outgoing and he wasn’t a leader. He was a prankster, but all his pranks were private jokes. I was the only one who laughed. To me, George was spectacular, misunderstood, brilliant. He was a senior and he studied continuously, four hours a night, and he never missed a class. At a school like ours, this was deranged. He went in for physics, philosophy, and math. Amid the psych majors, the communications minors, boys sunk in bean bags watching ball, no one understood what he was talking about. He was just smarter than everyone else.
    â€œGenius,” was how I put it then. “He’s a genius .” I felt that I’d come from a long line of genius men. The women in my family fell in love with geniuses, was how I understood it.
    â€œI believe he might be the real thing,” I told my friends from home on the phone. “A true genius .”
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    He and I both had checked jackets for some reason. The jackets more or less matched, and we rarely took them off. We walked around campus, jabbering to each other in those jackets. Whatever few scraps of friends I’d begun to make in the dorms I immediately forgot. Until I met George I’d found my new college life that had been set up for me boring, excruciatingly so, and the people who were supposed to be my new college friends by far the most boring element in it: smiley, well-built women—skiers, runners, blondes. They were eager to describe their organizational achievements—their schedules, their sports activities, their boyfriends, their matching heart mugs and flower shower buckets. So if I wasn’t with George, I wasn’t with anyone. He and I would meet up at four o’clock each day and, before our long nights of