Very Bad Deaths Read online

  “What do people call you?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

  “Zudie, usually,” he said, as if he didn’t know. “But friends call me Zandor.” He pronounced it not like manned oar, but like the last half of the name Alexander. For all I knew it was the Serbo-Croatian equivalent.

  His voice made me think, Tweety Bird has finally conquered the lisp.

  Something about his eyes caught my attention. Not the eyes themselves. They were ordinary, hazel, a bit moist. Nor was it the way they met mine steadily. This was 1967. A lot of people looked you square in the eye and didn’t look away. It was the way his eyes looked at me.

  They said that he forgave me.

  In advance. For whatever. If I despised him for who he was, he would accept it. If I needed to be cruel to him to tolerate his presence, he was prepared to work with that. He was used to it. If I preferred to be polite to his face, then say cruel things about him behind his back, that was okay too. If I simply couldn’t bear him, and had to go back and scream until I got assigned some other roommate, he wouldn’t hold it against me.

  I was very young. But even back then, I dimly sensed that it might be a worthwhile thing to know somebody who was good at forgiving. It was a skill I wanted to learn myself. And I’d probably never get a better student project.

  So I unfroze, took that last couple of steps forward, and finished bringing my hand up into handshake range. My nose wanted me to grimace, but I suppressed it. “Pleased to meet you, Zandor.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Russell.” We shook.

  Go for it. “I think I like Slim better, actually.” His hand didn’t feel particularly slimy, or greasy, or encrusted with anything. His grip was not strong or aggressive, but neither was it weak or submissive. His fingers were a bit on the thick side. His skin was very warm.

  “Sure.” He broke the handshake, stepped back, and gestured. “Look, Slim, I’m open to discussion, but I thought we both might be more comfortable with things arranged this way. What do you think?”

  For the first time I took in the room. It was almost a generic dorm room. A rectangular box the approximate dimensions of a cargo container. Total contents: two single beds (thin mattress on metal spring frame), two maple desks with matching maple chair, a desk lamp and a short maple bookshelf on the wall above, and two maple dressers. The only thing that kept it from being exactly like every other one in the building was that since it was a corner room, it had windows on two walls.

  But Smelly—I was determined to call him Zandor, but I already doubted I would ever think of him as anything but Smelly—had changed the room even more, by rearranging the furniture. The standard pattern was that, as you came in the door you passed first a pair of closets on either side, each capacious enough to hold three sports coats at once, then a dresser on either side, and then a desk on either side, and then a bed on either side, and then your nose hit the window.

  Smelly had moved things. As you came in, there was a bed on the left—clearly his, already made, with some of his stuff piled on it—and on the right, a dresser that was just as plainly his. Then at the foot of his bed, there was nothing but space, until you reached a dresser at the far end of the room. Just to the right of it was the other bed, turned sideways, its head end flush up against the wall on the right. This put it right up against the radiator that was the room’s principal source of heat, and right below the main window. Along the right-hand wall, between the bed and Smelly’s dresser, were the two desks facing each other below the second window.

  The net effect was that my clothes would be as far as possible from his—and the places where I’d be spending most of time, my bed and desk, were both within the cross-breeze that would be generated if we were to leave both windows slightly open at all times. As they were now. That could get chilly in winter, but my bed, at least, was right next to the radiator. I could see that on cold nights I’d be warm in that bed, with plenty of air circulation just above me.

  It was a most thoughtful and practical arrangement. Given that one of us stank like Death in a garbage can. And it had been most tactful of him to just go ahead and do it before I arrived, and present it as a fait accompli neither of us needed to comment on in any detail. “Looks good to me, Sm…Zandor,” I said. “Aesthetically satisfying.” Think of a reason why it’s good other than how it will minimize his stench. “Uh—”

  “And we’ll both get sunlight at our desks.”

  “Right!” I blinked. “Hey, how did you know my name was Russell? There’s no name card on the door.”

  He shrugged, and took that steady gaze away from me for the first time since I’d come in the door. “Look, there’s one other thing I want to get clear from the start.”

  Oh shit. I braced myself. This was the part where he was going to tell me what he considered the law, and under what circumstances he would be laying it down. The house rules, his version. “What’s that, man?”

  Those fearless eyes locked on me again. “I’m pretty square.”

  “Oh hey, look—”

  “Let me finish, okay? I don’t drink, or smoke, I don’t go out much, I like music you’ve never heard of, and I study all the time. But I don’t expect the same of you. You can drink whatever you want in here as long as you don’t puke on my part of the room. You can smoke as much as you want. You can smoke as much pot as you want, or take any drugs you like, as long as you never ever leave anything illegal in my part of the room. The only place I draw the line is: no parties in this room, and no sneaking girls in here. Can you live with that?”

  “What kind of music?”

  “Ray Charles.”

  I felt myself starting to grin. “Which do you prefer? The Atlantic sides, or the new Columbia stuff?”

  His turn to blink. “Well, they’re both great. But my favorite is his big band instrumental stuff.”

  Big grin now. “Really? Never heard any.”

  He smiled back. “Then we’re going to have to hook your stereo up. Mine died on the trip.”

  On the way out to the car, and all the way back again, I kept intercepting looks, from friends and strangers alike. First they’d gape comically, at the sight of Smelly and me going by together with our arms full, obviously roommates. Then they’d throw me a look of sympathy, or pity, or amusement, depending on their disposition. Then when my own expression told them I didn’t agree I was a victim, thank you very much, they’d get mad at me.

  Ray Charles’s My Kind of Jazz albums turned out to be incredible.

  It didn’t take long for word to get around campus that I not only had drawn old Smelly for a rooms, I didn’t mind. I had always been considered weird in the extreme…but this immediately weeded even my oddball circle of friends down by a good twenty percent.

  I regarded it as something of an achievement. The people I hung out with, loosely known as the Boot and Buskin Gang, were a hard bunch to shock. They were the ones who usually did the shocking. Theater people. Poets. Philosophers. Musicians. Behavior that had been deemed borderline acceptable if not necessarily admirable, the previous year, had included soft drug dealing, gross sacrilege, treason, sexual relationships involving odd numbers of participants, pipe-smoking (by a female), chastity (by a male), blatant plagiarism, being kept by a 45-year-old divorcee with two kids who called you Uncle Bob, semipro porno work, pro vandalism, pig drunkenness, shoplifting food, reading poetry aloud, nervous collapse, attempted suicide, and even voting Republican. It was a point of honor with my crowd to be unshockable, nonjudgmental. Most of us would rather have lost our pants than our cool in public.

  But coolness lives in the forebrain, and aversion to morbid stench lies further back, involves neural circuits that were laid down millennia before the forebrain evolved. Even the hippest had trouble dealing with Smelly. And some of them, it developed, had a problem with me because I didn’t have a problem with him.

  “Man, I don’t care,” Slinky John Walton said loudly in the dining hall, a few days later, “Understanding is far
out and everything—but if you can live in the same room with that guy and not kill him, you’re as sick as he is.”

  I sighed. “Slinks, you of all pots have no business criticizing how other kettles choose to live their lives.” Slinky John wore, at all times, a wrinkled black ankle-length coat beneath which lurked God knew what, a Mephistophelean black beard with greased mustachios, and a black eye patch which kept moving from eye to eye. He was an anarchist and saw no reason to hide it. Nobody would have been much surprised if he had reached into that coat one day and pulled out a cartoon anarchist’s bomb, a black ball with a lit fuse sticking out, and hurled it at some politician’s passing motorcade. This year he had added to his costume a button, pinned to his lapel, which he’d obviously made himself by crudely painting over some other slogan and hand-lettering his own message. It now read, “GO LEMMINGS, GO!”

  “There’s a difference between healthy, therapeutic weirdness and pathology,” he said stiffly.

  “Nice to see you and Dean Dizzy agree on something,” Bill Doane said.

  “Fuck you,” he riposted, and I knew Bill had reached him with that shot. Slinky John and Sidney Disraeli, our universally despised Dean of Men, had tangled more than once over the subject of decorum, and would again.

  “You think you’re man enough?” Bill said. He was a big shambling rawboned guy with a red beard as big as his head, curly red ringlets of hair down to the base of his shoulder blades, and a booming laugh. He and Slinky John were close friends.

  “I think I’m right, and Russell has gone over the edge,” Slinks insisted. “Granted, I frighten small children and some adults. But I do not cause plants to wither, small birds to fall from the sky, and strong men to weep. Russell’s roommate does.”

  “I hate to admit it, Russ, but he has a point,” Bill said. “I tried talking to Smelly, once. You know, stand upwind, breathe in through my mouth, out through my nose. I gave him ten minutes; that was all I could take. Forget it. Cat wasn’t a bad conversationalist, really—but rancid, man.”

  “A walking pestilence,” Slinky John said. “No, a waddling pestilence.”

  “Do you stop noticing after a while?” Bill asked. “I’ve had that happen with some bad smells, that’s why I gave him ten minutes. But Jesus, it never got any better.”

  I shrugged. “You do get used to it…a little, anyway. And I get a good breeze in there. I bought a fan. And look, you guys remember what I roomed with last year, right? Anything’s an improvement over the Drink Tank.” My freshman year roommate, Brian “Tank” Sherman, had been a major asshole. He’d once drugged my beer at a clandestine room party so that he and a bunch of his jock friends could cut off my long hair and beard while I snored. Let’s say it strained a relationship which had never been good.

  “Fuck all that,” Slinky John said. “I want to know how you can stand living with a Stink Tank.”

  I glanced quickly around the dining hall, then gestured Slinky and Bill closer and lowered my voice. “Listen, I brought a little something from home. Panama Red.”

  “Jesus,” Slinky said. Bill said nothing, but a broad smile appeared in the midst of his beard. A fair amount of the time we’d spent together in freshman year had been in fruitless search for a local connection.

  That’s how long ago this was. At a medium-size college, there were fewer than a dozen heads, and no connection. Not even in town; there weren’t enough jazz musicians to support one. We had to make do with whatever we could bring from home. And, we had to be discreet to a degree probably unimaginable today: pot was considered a narcotic, then—both legally and culturally—and possession of one joint could draw you a class A felony indictment if the DA was politically ambitious.

  “So what do you say, John?” I went on. “Shall we go to your room and do some up?”

  He flinched. “Oh man, not there—are you nuts?”

  “Why not? Your roommate’s cool, isn’t he?”

  “Lukewarm—but he’s not the problem, man, it’s everybody else. Even if we put a towel under the door, sure as hell somebody would rat us out.”

  “Ah,” I said. “We can’t burn a bone in your place…because people would smell it. Is that the problem?”

  “Well, sure they’d—” he said, and broke off.

  “So I guess we’ll have to go back to my place, then,” I said.

  Bill’s broad smile became a broad grin.

  “Holy shit,” Slinky John breathed.

  So we went back to my place, heaved the sticky window all the way up, and between the isolation of the room, and the tendency of all passersby to voluntarily stop smelling when near it, we did up a couple of fatties without attracting the slightest attention. By the time Zandor got back from dinner, Slinky and Bill were ready to be polite to him.

  They didn’t get much chance, though. As soon as he saw I had company, he said he had to go right back out and do some studying at the library.

  “Zandor?” I said quickly, before he could make his escape. “Look…is it cool with you that we smoked in here? I figured, the window’s open, and…” I trailed off, unable to find a diplomatic way to say, and I thought your stink would mask ours. “It’s your house too, man. I won’t get high here if you have a problem with it.”

  He looked at me without blinking for several seconds. Then he made a little smile and said, “Slim, as long as you don’t leave any of it in my part of the room, I’m just fine with it. I told you that already.”

  I relaxed slightly. He hadn’t just said it; he’d meant it.

  “You want some?” Slinky John asked him.

  “Thanks for offering, maybe another time,” Smelly said, and fled.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, we all broke out in stoned giggles.

  Bill, who happened to be holding the roach, relit it, and passed it to me. “‘Slim,’ huh?” he said reflectively, and looked me over carefully. I held my breath. Well, I was already holding it, but you know what I mean.

  He released his own. “I like that. Slim Walker. Cool.”

  I mentally blessed my malodorous roommate. “I guess.” Like I didn’t care one way or another.

  Slinky John snorted. “Don’t bogart that joint, Slim.”

  “Wow, man,” Bill said a moment later. “I can actually see his smell.”

  Slinky lost his toke and coughed. “Holy shit,” he managed to croak, “Me too. Pale green, right?”

  “Like a zero gravity lava lamp.”

  By golly, they were right. “It’s actually a little easier to take, that way,” I said.

  “You know, Slim’s right,” Bill said. “It’s not so bad, seeing it.”

  After several seconds, Slinky John said, “True—but hearing his face was a little hard to take,” and all three of us got the giggles.

  Within a few days, most of the people whose opinion I cared about had managed to find at least a little compassion and tolerance for Smelly in their hearts, and lungs. And the rest stayed as far away as if a restraining order were in place, which suited me fine. Privacy is a rare and sweet commodity in a men’s dorm. It was worth a little stink to have peace and quiet.

  3.

  In a movie, Zandor Zudenigo and I would have gradually but steadily become good friends. I’m honestly not even sure we ever managed to become good acquaintances. Maybe by the end of that year we had become good strangers.

  He was just too weird to befriend. And I speak as one with a higher than normal tolerance for weirdness. He was away a lot, and when he was there he rarely spoke voluntarily, and when he did it was often in monosyllables or grunts—but there was more to it than that.

  It reminded me of Gertrude Stein’s famous crack about Oakland, “There’s no there, there.” You couldn’t get a purchase on him; it was like trying to make a snowman out of bubbles.

  Hundreds of times I found myself wondering what was going on behind those moist squinting eyes of his. Not once did I ever have a clue. I not only never knew what he was thinking, I rarely knew even in the
most general terms what he was thinking about. In freshman year I had been dismayed to discover that the roommate relationship could enforce a high degree of intimacy even with someone you couldn’t stand. Now I was a little startled to realize how little intimacy it could provide even with someone you kind of liked.

  And I did kind of like him. He was low maintenance. He had a knack for erasing himself. I’d forget he was in the room, or fail to notice when he arrived. His shoes didn’t seem to produce footsteps. His clothes didn’t rustle when he moved. He never seemed to be in my way, or make sudden or unexpected moves in my field of vision. He never complained about anything I did, and seldom did anything that bothered me. He didn’t seem to get drunk, depressed, high, homesick or horny. Or bored, even when he was just staring at the wall. Unlike his miserable predecessor Tank Sherman, he never played practical jokes, or said cruel things, or threw tantrums, or vomited on my bed.

  His only downside as a roommate, really, was that our room reeked so badly it made no perceptible difference whether he was present or not. Noseplugs, some incense, and I learned to handle it.

  One thing I noticed. Math majors frequently asked me what it was like to be his roommate. Math professors, too, even. They always listened carefully to whatever I said, and then they usually just nodded and thanked me and walked away. It happened often enough to make me wonder if maybe the reason I couldn’t seem to connect with whatever he had going on behind his eyes was simply that I was too dumb and innumerate to understand it.

  For whatever reasons, connection was impossible. I gave up trying early, probably in the first day or two I knew him. And I’m not sure I can explain exactly why. It wasn’t that he discouraged conversation, exactly. You would start to say something to him, and as the very first syllable left your lips he was already looking your way, giving you his full attention, and somehow you found yourself reviewing what you’d meant to say, and deciding it was dumb. Or trivial. Or shallow. Or something. So all that ended up coming out of your mouth was a sigh. And by the time you had patted your remark into acceptable form, you no longer had his attention, and the moment was seconds past.