I loosened my grip, and let the desk slip out of my hands; its full weight tumbled down on Ron, taking him totally by surprise. Down the stairs he rolled, limb over limb, flailing and silent; the desk mashed his head against a corner of the wooden rail, ripped his expensive IZOD shirt. A docksider moccasin flew off his foot. Bleeding from the mouth, he pulled himself up in a huff. He fetched his docksider and put it back on.

"Great guy, Barb. A real star," he said through his heavy, haughty breath. "Don't count on me being seen with you," he said to the girl, rushing down the stairs to catch his symphony. The wolf merely licked his chops and wandered back into the woods.

I went to public high school, you see, and this first week I had met more than one peer who called me a "pubie." Not that I had anything against "preppies" when I came here; I thought they were all wealthy, groomed kids who wore sweaters and tweed. But it was much, much more than that, this irrevocable division of the races, battle of mentalities. No, not all preppies are bad. No, not all pubies are good.

FROM THE TIME my parents dropped me off with all the other parents and all the other college boys and girls, the great expectations had begun to crumble. I had never felt so strange since my mother turned me loose on the first day of kindergarten.

And back in my room--my own room and vehicle of existence--the boxes full of ME lay waiting to be unpacked. Stereo first, all the other stuff later. Posters and signs to tell everybody who passed the door of Daniels 216 who I was. Who was I?

Less than 24 hours and I had overdosed. Less than a day and I was already experiencing displacement, shock, and near hysteria. To hell with all these pretentious status-seekers, purveyors of polite dinner conversation, academic bon vivants who transformed Beethoven and Marx into props for a daily song and dance.

ENTER TO HOWL. That night, he approached me with all the zeal and impulse of a new American spirit. Little Joe was naked and bold, still dressed in the irreverent street rags of adolescence; he shed Harvard's illusions of grandeur and specialty with every step. The world of people and events wafted about his presence far-removed and unimportant. HE was the moment, ignorant and unconcerned with the vague promises of the future of the past.

Besides that, he walked like a duck and took a lot of drugs. There was his high school girlfriend, pretty and clinging after his every step; there was the guitar which he was struggling to play, and the home-made stereo which demolished thousands of records. He was an incongruous blend of toughness, wit, frustration, recklessness, friendliness and zeal. Lots of zeal, all of it poorly channelled. He wanted to be a rock and roll star, you see, but in the end he wound up being himself. Lovable, but dangerous.

Back to the night. Where the wolf strains his eyes and sneezes through the dope smoke. The man opens the door; expanding clouds of pot smoke tumble out into the hallway two doors down from the senior tutor's apartment. The man enters the party. A panorama of naked wolves raise their hungry and wondrous eyes to him. It is dark and they are all seated on the floor, forming a circle and passing the pipe with an ambience of mysterious ritual. They toke and laugh and smile nervously as they apply their peripheral vision; some just roll back their eyes beneath closing eyelids and fall back on the floor with only the ceiling to reckon. Little Joe and his girlfriend preside over the ritual sitting on the bed, filling pipes and rolling joints and popping pills, wandering into the music and eventually into each other's affection. Somehow the room is filled with chatter, most of it superficial. People don't fall into each other's laps, but I keep hoping that someone will fall into mine.

This circle of wolves had one thing in common: it was their first night at Harvard. Fifty years hence, the room would remain intact; but this peculiar amalgamation of souls would never come to rejoin--perhaps only later in heaven or hell. But between freshman year, heaven and hell, each would come to love and be what the other sitting beside him would hate and despise. The only thing they all had to cherish at this tiny joint in time was their strangeness, and in time it would all diffuse.

As time sucked everyone into various activities and social circles and fields of study, there was only one constant: Little Joe. While most could be described as Crimson editors, or soc stud nerds, or Advocate poets, Little Joe remained a stereotype unto himself. Little Joe was playing his guitar too loud last night; Little Joe put a hole in the wall while practicing his kung fu; Little Joe smoked too much last night and wound up in Stillman Infirmary; Little Joe shaved his head just for kicks the other day. Just for kicks. For Halloween.

Halloween. That whole year seemed like Halloween. Halloween brought on the worst outbreak of freshman parties since freshman week. And the costume parties continued all year long.

He shaved his head, shaved it absolutely bald. His short, street-stubby from was now even stubbier, looking like one of those skin-heads out on the night for some good "Pakibashing."

Then he put on nylons, a dress and a stuffed bra, and finally the wig. He was a saucy hooker on his way to a Halloween party with his girlfriend--a hooker as well. They bounded down the stairs with all their playground energy and they encountered the infamous and repulsive Harvard apparition of drunken preppie-jocks. There they were, Little Joe and Rhonda, their slap-happy presence blazing through a clumsy mob of drunken, tuxedoed pretension.

"Heeeeeeeey, faggot," the preppie-jock slurred. Gales of black laughter.