"Spider Robinson - Very Bad Deaths" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

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.
If I've given the impression that Smelly himself never spoke, that's not strictly true. He did say things
occasionally. Just seldom, and as economically as possible.
I once saw him stop a riot with a two-sentence telephone call, for instance. No shit.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Nieuwe%20map/074348861X___4.htm (2 of 6)24-12-2006 1:50:07
 - Chapter 4



It was the year when, all across North America, young men with long hair, beards, and no girlfriend
somehow simultaneously decided, like scattered lemmings marching to separate seas, to band together
and take over their campus's library building. It was generally agreed that this would shorten the
Vietnam War. Also, it was as much fun as a panty raid, but you didn't have to feel like a total jackass.
There was nothing like an official SDS chapter at Saint Billy Joe; the administration would never have
permitted anything so radical. But that year our campus longhair supply finally reached critical
massтАФfifty or so. And so one sunny fall day, the same sort of migratory instinct that brings rural young
men with mullet-head haircuts into 7-Elevens with cut-rate pistols led those fifty urban young men with
Buffalo Bill haircuts, and two or three of the more adventurous girls, to march on the Chaminade
Memorial Library together with guitars and antiwar banners and a pound of purported Acupulco Gold.
They tried to set an American flag on fire in front of the main doors, and though they failed, they did
manage to literally raise a stink, and the word spread round campus like fire. A crowd materialized in
time to see the intrepid demonstrators announce that they were Liberating the Library, then disappear
inside the building. Everyone backed off about half a football field, in case of gunplay or an air strike,
and began taking sides.
I was one of them. The spectators, not the demonstrators. I was as opposed to the war as anyone my