Word: namo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...professors' closing remarks in our last classes before vacation might as well have been starters' pistols. Our clutches engaged and Namo and I opened our throttles. Bags were packed, a care was rented. I found a party in Connecticut Friday night. Saturday Namo arrived from Cambridge with a big blue boat of a rented car. We got unlimited mileage in the rental deal, and we had collision insurance, too. Namo grinned when he told me. The people at the rental agency would not have liked his grin. Saturday night we spent driving in a storm, moving south at 75 miles...
...started to lose touch. As I passed a tractor-trailer near Jacksonville my eyelids forced their way shut, and I dreamed that a giant copy of a history course syllabus was sailing down the road behind me, trailing our Pontiac. I awoke some three inches from a guard rail. Namo drove for a while after that, but he, too, insisted on taking split-second naps at the wheel. I still cannot remember how we got to Fort Lauderdale alive, but my next memory after the giant syllabus and an uncomfortably close look at some palm trees is that of Namo...
...this was how to get away from it all. In fact, it all seemed to be right there--college life, minus the intellectual content, transported to a warm climate where most people are strangers. Namo and I have sneered at the Freshman Mixer for years now, but something--wanderlust or maybe perverse interest--had nonetheless brought us to one big goddam non-stop, open-air, all-East Freshman Mixer. There were new elements to it, of course. The Harvard mixer had no Midwesterners cruising in turquoise Firebirds with tailwings and racing stripes. It had no 30-year-old hangers...
...Namo and I initially stepped back and started to analyze the scene from a sociological standpoint, being effete Eastern intellectuals. But it is the king of pace that defies analysis in its simplicity; the sophomore from Ohio State had summed up the place's raison d'etre as well as anything we could say. So, the second day there, Namo and I were beeping and hooting and prowling the discos with the rest of the common animals. If you can't analyze 'em, join...
...madness became wearying soon enough for Namo and I. Skin accustomed to the grey skies of Cambridge burns easily, and after a few successive nights the flashing lights and thumping bass of a disco make the club-hopper feel more like a soldier in the trenches at Chateau-Thierry in 1917 than a happy vacationer in Florida in the spring of 1978. After a while, the beer started to lose its tang, the rebel yells started to sound strained, and the blond, tanned 30-year-olds lounging at beachside bars started to look like desperate characters. The mirage was fading...