I'm not sure that I wanted to move to the Farm. I did have a sense that the world was full of mistakes and that we needed a new approach to living or else very bad things would happen. but I felt very alone in the world. my parents had moved away. and my Girlfriend broke up with me two or three times a year. for a relationship that only lasted three years, that's a pretty bad record. I remember getting very exited at a Greatful Dead concert where i found a crowd of people dancing. there was a tangible web between them as if they were all connected by the same set of strings and they each had their own personal bubble. there was no real pattern to the dance but the motions looked the same every one had there own variation. that night i danced and felt like i belonged there. Peter Gabriel had a song out about wanting to join the rhythm of life.
My experience in art school was a disappointment for me and my friends and family. my friends pointed out that i could reapply to Tyler after two semesters and use the credits that i had already earned. my friends thought i was talented and that it was tragic that I was so bitter and depressed that i could barely bring my self to go to class. I had a happy side too. but most of my old friends didn't see it. They had withdrawn to a safe distance to avoid the overflow from my misery. In the spring of '82 I met Connie. she just sort of walked up to me at an art opening, I had noticed her around but she wasn't in any of my classes. nor did she live in the dormitory. she had strawberry blond hair and always wore a flight suit which looked actually battle scared. I never got to know her well enough to ask about the suit. but she did adjust my attitude considerably. It wasnt just the sex. Really, the sex was a big disappointment; the attraction was the main course. one of the things that Connie taught me was not to meditate in front of other people. She said, "It cuts you off from them, and it looks like you're trying to be superior." Another thing I learned from her was that you have to trust yourself to be able to do a cartwheel.
Connie and I talked about love and romance and about trying to be a better person. we talked about art and school and about our goals. She worked in ceramics and she had a pretty realistic perspective about art. We both admired the work of an Asian American woman who was in Connie's dance class. This girl had perfect poise, although her build was somewhat healthier than dancers usually come. Most of her Junior year, she had been throwing gigantic Raku fired vessels that were shaped like a wasp nest: wide at the top with a very narrow base. Connie explained that she kept pushing herself to build the taller an thinner, testing the limits of her skill and the strength of the materiel. At some point one of her constructions collapsed while it was still on the wheel and the moist clay folded in on itself like a gently twisted table cloth. Afterwards, she began to make this happen deliberately, extending her craft into the realm of chance.
In contrast, Connie's final project that year was a set of thick tiles, which, arranged together, formed a childlike scene of daisies. They were for the kitchen of the woman that she rented a room from: a thank-you, for her hospitality. I only saw that kichen once and never met the owner. It was only in later years that I came to understand what the gesture meant, that the tiles filled a place in someone's life and and her world a little nicer and that art could help people to do that. I was more interested in spinning off the edge of the wheel than putting four squares on the counter, but I politely kept quiet and absorbed my brief glimpse into another persons world. Connie often said that School was a great big soap opera love story, and I would counter that School was about growth and learning to take responsibilities and improving ourselves. She didn't see the difference. The one thing that she said that she could not stand was playing games. I'd ask her what she meant by that, but she couldn't explain. I promised myself that I would try not to play games with her but first i had to learn what it meant. Iassumed that "playing games," happened when people lied about relationships and cheated on their friends. but my education was far from complete. I never told her about Diedre. Which was fair enough. from my point of view Dee wanted nothing to do with me. She had nothing to say on the phone but Long silences and she seemed to hate being seen in public with me. We had made love intensely, I would like to say passionately, but aggressive would better suit the occasion. She didn't like to make eye contact during sex. I know that I am being indiscrete. But there wasn't much else to our relationship. My guess is that I was not a very satisfying lover: just a convenience. Later we did fall in love or so it seemed. but that spring, we were over it.
One of the first things that connie asked me was if I played music and would I like to play for her Opening that week. She seemed unconcerned by the fact that I couldn't really play and didn't even have an instrument. As it turned out She had invited one of my best friends Rebecca Olmstead to play flute and another fellow who had started learning tabla. I borrowed a guitar from a guy in the dorm and we all sat down and had one "rehearsal," where we agreed that Becky I would just pluck a few open strings like a tambura. The opening itself was nice. informal, Connie's friends and relatives came. I might have met her parents. The whole thing was over in an hour or so. I was the only freshman in the room. In fact there were very few students.
I was an insomniac and I used that to my advantage by staying up all night to finish my sculpture projects. Connie would come over to the studio to visit me. while i was scribbling away on big sheets of card board and stitching them together with baling wire. I had no idea what the thing was supposed to be. The assignment was to create an environment. We ended up sleeping inside the thing the night before the project was due. It looked like some kind of fire place, or a cave. but that night it was the simplest kind of shelter. We just slept both of us were exhausted from class projects and I had an unpredictable roomate named Jimmy who had removed the lock on our dorm room because locks were confining to him. (he lost the key.)
When Connie and I did finally start kissing it was intense and sweet. I wanted to be alive and to be with her. We wandered around Tyler for a whole night, crashing little parties and making out next to the old brick kilns outside the glass and ceramics building. We spent the night together at the house where she stayed. Had breakfast in the kitchen and walked back to campus where we both had stuff to do in the studio.Iwas in love.
Monday morning, I woke up like a new person and headed over to a morning drawing class that i usually missed because I over-slept. There parked on the lawn was Diedre she had fresh baked muffins and a thermos of coffee. She coyly asked if I would like some. I set down and started to talk with her. She poured me coffee, then I saw Connie. i had never seen her dressed formally only in her scruffy aviator suit. This time she was dressed for the real world, a business suit with a skirt and shoulder pads like they wore in the eighties she had huge tinted glasses and her hair done up in back. An entirely different person. She looked at me for one moment and I knew evey thing was wrong. I could not speak or move. I never saw her again but every part of me wanted to get up and run after her, to explain what I could not explain: that I was set up, that this was some trick, or a mistake, that I cared about her and that she looked great in a suit. But i just sat there in my ragged blue jeans. Dee offered me a muffin.