MY FIRST or possibly my second week at Harvard, a proctor on the floor beneath mine gave a party, which I did not attend. An assistant dean came to the party one of my roommates told me afterwards, to answer freshmanly questions and try to explain the Harvard experience. By one or two o'clock after he had had a lot to drink the assistant dean was ready to really explain the Harvard experience. "You are the best," he explained slurredly. "Never forget that you are the best. You should be proud that you are the best. Pass me another beer."

This is the official line of Harvard, or as close as there comes to being an official line. I began to unlearn it immediately, naturally, and I recently decided that many of Harvard's better features are suggested in some lines of Ezra Pound about a tradition that there can be honesty of mind without overwhelming talent. My first encounter with Science at Harvard, for example, came during my first and pretty nearly my last bridge game there. It came a few weeks after the assistant dean's explanation, which it seemed to call into question, if not to contradict. The bridge game was in Thayer South, a dormitory which is the past has often housed many pre-medical students, and this may account for the fact that there was an experiment going on when I came in, with 20 or 25 people standing around watching its progress or if they were too short for that, the backs of the people in front of them.

It appeared that someone had just fed is goldfish some LSD, and everyone was naturally curious about how they would react. Since goldfish are not articulate it was difficult to tell. Some people thought the fact that the goldfish were swimming in rapid circles indicated that the found the LSD stimulating and pleasurable. Others thought indicated that the goldfish were losing their minds, having swallowed an overdose, and that in any case it was cruel and improper to vivisect goldfish in this manner. Still others said, in effect, that swimming in rapid circles is to goldfish what lying is to Mr. Ehrlichman: they may not do it well, but they do it often, and probably better than they do anything else. Therefore, these skeptics suggested, it was probable that LSD, at least in small quantities, has no effect on goldfish at all. At the time I was even less interested in goldfish than in bridge (last spring I discovered a whole school of large and beautiful goldfish swimming in the Charles, a river I had thought was inhabited only by aquatic rats and pontoon bugs, and this increased my regard for goldfish to no end), so I went back to my own Hall, Pennypacker, without learning the experiment's conclusion, but nevertheless, suspected that despite the assistant dean's assurances, better experiments could be devised.

LIFE in Pennypacker was somewhat different from life in Thayer South. Just as Harvard had crowded a predominance of premeds into Thayer South, according to the conventional wisdom, so it had crowded a predominance of misfits and lunatics into Pennypacker. One piece of evidence for this belief was the fondness of many of Pennypacker's residents for scaling the building's outside wall, balancing on the inch-wide fourth-story fire-escape railing, and them chinning themselves onto the roof. The main attraction of being on the roof, as far as I could tell, was the opportunity it afforded for climbing down again. Sometimes I would sit on the fire-escape for an hour at a time, pretending to study and wondering whether or when someone would fall, and whether it would upset the Elks in the lodge across the street when he did. No one ever fell. Whenever I asked anyone why he liked to climb to the roof, he would generally explain that he enjoyed it, which I thought was an excellent explanation.

Nor was this all the fire-escape was good for. The cat found it invaluable, for instance. The cat followed one of my roommates home one night when he was with a girl named Lucy, and so the cat was named Lucy even thought it was a male cat. The cat lived on Pizza crusts, my roommate's marijuana plant. which he mistook for catnip, catfood, and silverfish, which are little bugs that come out of the radiator in the bathroom. The cat would have been indispensable as a silverfish-catcher if we had wanted the silverfish caught. He would sit patiently beside the radiator like a panther in the jungle, waiting for a silverfish so small it could hardly be seen to come out so he could pounce. It was really a very nice cat, and when a bewildered-looking man from Buildings and Grounds came checking for pets--pets are strictly forbidden in Harvard buildings, a rule slightly less ridiculous than the signs against the presence of women in the billiard rooms of some of the once all-male Houses--we told him we were keeping the cat overnight for a cousin who was out of town, or some such story. I doubt that he believed it, but he pretended to quite well.

THE ONLY thing wrong with the cat was that he often shat in the bathtub instead of the litterbox, and even this wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't taken to climbing out on the fire-escape and then in other people's windows so that he could try out their bathtubs too. Eventually he tried out the bathtub of the person down the hall, a character who had borrowed my roommate's tennis racket a week or so before. When my roommate gave him the racket, he looked at it disdainfully.

"Haven't you got a metal racket?" he said incredulously.

"No," my roommate said.

"Well," he said grudgingly, "I'll take this one, then." A couple of days later he accused someone three rooms down of stealing his bar of soap. Pennypacker is one of the few freshman dormitories with bathrooms in each suite, so stealing the bar of soap would have entailed breaking and entering first. Since this is how my roommate ultimately got his racket back, however, maybe it wasn't as far-fetched as it sounds.

This individual down the hall was extremely angry at the cat, as indeed he had a right to be. "Come see what your fucking cat just did in my bathtub," he suggested. We could guess what the cat had just done in his bathtub, of course, but that wasn't enough for him: he wanted it cleaned up as well, as I guess was only right. Eventually my roommate became moderately friendly with him and halfway through exam period they even got stoned together, in an evening which climaxed when my roommate marched indignantly into the Underdog, a restaurant which was already doing a surprisingly thriving business, and demanded that the owner immediately divest his store of its pinball machine, as his contribution to suppressing the Mafia. My roommate claims that the Mafia has a usufruct on all pinball machines and devotes most of the profits from them to hooking ghetto children on heroin, but even if this is true I suspect that he was also influenced by the amount on money he had lost playing pinball the week before. So maybe the cat was finally forgiven his trespass, but that was later on.

At the time, we decided to get rid of the cat, so we put an advertisement in Boston After Dark and a nice lady with a cat of her own came and took him away and renamed him Benjamin, just like the lady in The Sound and the Fury. The cat was so affected that he never molested the lady's bathtub, but on his first day in his new home, he began to claw the furniture. Thereafter he was well-behaved. Even though he had almost certainly never read any Ezra Pound, apparently, he had become so imbued with the Harvard atmosphere that he didn't want to be taken in on false pretenses of perfection. He was credit to his race and a good cat.

AFTER WE got rid of the cat it was time for the Spring demonstration. There was no Spring demonstration last year, but before that there had reportedly been one every Spring since the great strike of 1969, when President Pusey called in the police, and if we are lucky maybe there will be a demonstration again this year, hopefully not because of anything like the mining of Haiphong, which provoked the one I am describing. There was a huge mass meeting of several hundred people, sponsored by The Crimson and all the radical groups that were not yet completely moribund and also several that were, and everyone adopted a set of demands and voted to go out on strike. The main controversy at the meeting. I believe, was over whether one of the demands should be the release of Russian Jews, but this demand was voted down after several speakers pointed out that even though most of the people who opposed Russia's detaining Jews also opposed spitting on old ladies and beggars, and they did not advocate including an end to this practise in the list of demands. Aside from an immediate end to the mining of Haiphong, the main demand adopted by the meeting was that Harvard not call in the police to evict a group of black students who had seized Massachusetts Hall that morning and insisted that Harvard sell its stock in Gulf Oil, as a protest against that company's payments to Portugal, which was (and for that matter still is) suppressing several African revolutions.

After the meeting everyone adjourned to march around Massachusetts Hall. It was exciting. A group of people were playing bongo drums and chanting slogans--"Quang Tri! An Loc! Do the same to Derek Bok!" was the most memorable slogan to come out on the strike--and the occupiers were shouting speeches from the windows. "This is really very exciting," I said to one of the people marching in front of me. "Yes," he agreed, "but I'd still rather be making it with someone." I didn't fully appreciate that exchange 'til I had more of a standard of comparison, but its honesty of mind might well be labeled brutal.

AT BOSTON University last spring, by way of contrast, there was a demonstration to keep a Marine recruiter from recruiting. By three or four in the afternoon few but the most dedicated reporters and the most dedicated radicals were still around, and so as a putative member of the first category I occupied myself by listening to the putative members of the second, who were running around trying to convert one another. Finally three of the most dedicated missionaries--one an unaffiliated rad; one from the Socialist Workers Party, which is the oldest Trotskyist organization in the United States; and one from Progressive Labor, which took over SDS a few years back and which used to be Maoist but has now decided that Mao is a tool of the bosses--bumped into each other, smack in the middle of Bay State Road where there were no cars to duck behind.

They stared at each other apprehensively, but the guy from the SWP tool the plunge. "How much political reading do you do a night?" he demanded. The guy from PL yawned delicately.