The Grasshopper King by Jordan Ellenberg Read Free Book Online

counterculture I could. Having abandoned the idea of becoming a hobo—please forgive me—I set out to become a Boho.
    My fellow skeptics were easy to locate; they were the ones pressed grimly into the corners at mixers, draining their gaily-named cocktails one after another, remarking cuttingly on passers-by, always claiming to be about to leave. We formed a clique of sorts—Bick Wickman, who claimed to be from Liverpool, Marinet, Barberie the thereminist, the supercilious Kack, Charlie Hascomb, I, the others . . . We called each other by our last names and swore ourselves to total and eternal honesty—this meant meanness. At odd hours we could be found gathered in someone’s dorm room, or in the recesses of Happy Clappy’s, smoking pot, laughing hollowly, devising cruel nicknames for the basketball players and the fraternity presidents, constructingvarious drastic schemes (pipe bombs, excrement, itching powder) toward the impairment of the university’s function, and eventually releasing the balance of our scorn on whatever members of our group were absent. From time to time the directions of our enmity would converge on one of our number, and before long that one would be driven away, to be spoken of thereafter with a venom otherwise reserved only for the most popular and well-connected students.
    Charlie Hascomb, a local like me, was my “best friend” that year (certainly we were not friends in the lay sense.) His straw-blond hair was meticulously groomed and hung down below his shoulders; his face was long, too, and droopy at the eyes, giving him a permanent expression of aristocratic glumness. Without any visible exercise he maintained a credible imitation of an athlete’s physique. I envied this, and, angry with myself for my envy, spent most of my time with him, by way of punishment.
    Charlie’s only weakness was a terrible fear of insects, and, by extension, of contamination in general.
    â€œGood goddamn,” he would say, gravely, shaking his head, whenever he walked into Happy Clappy’s. “This place is a filth hole.” He was always peering at the floor, starting at peripherally glimpsed motions, rubbing at the underside of a table and gazing mournfully at whatever came off on his finger. His clothes smelled of bug spray.
    â€œI see it this way,” Charlie told me once. “Basically every living thing either looks like it shouldn’t be able to think, and can’t, like a worm, or a tree; or looks like it should be able to think, and can. Dogs, birds, higher life-forms in general. But then look at a bug. It’s got arms, legs, eyes, everything; but no personality, no reason .”
    â€œWhat’s scary about that?” I asked him.
    He frowned at me, disappointed. “If it doesn’t bother you,” he said, “I can’t possibly explain.”
    Ordinarily anyone with such a fetish would have been hooted from our set at once, viciously and with glee. But Charlie was safe from that. For one thing, he was our dealer; although in those daysthere was nothing easier than finding a new dealer. More important, he possessed an uncanny talent for mimicry, which he used mercilessly against all those who fell from his favor. An incident in which he’d impersonated a sorority vice-president in a late-night phone call, and the subsequent abjection of the former friend of ours who believed himself summoned to her service, inspired in each of us a proud kind of dread. It was not worth anyone’s risk to take him on. And allied with him, I knew, I myself would never be outcast. The two of us used to sit in the back of Happy Clappy’s until closing time, Charlie “doing” the other members of our circle one by one, until I was weak with laughter and the pleasure of being included.
    I find it almost impossible now to identify myself with the vain, unpleasant undergraduate I was. But to my annoyance my memory of the period