Square Ordeal

ONE DAY I was walking in front of Holyoke Center, minding my own business, when something extraordinary happened. I was just starting to listen to one of the Square's myriad biblical prophets when someone burst through a nearby crowd of mimes and lifted me over his head. I looked down into the blue, slavering face of a vampire with teeth well over six inches long, and screamed at the top of my lungs.

Giggling and snorting wildly, he spun me around in a patently unpleasant manner, grunting "Ummm, yuk yuk, a fresh one, yuk yuk!" I was just about to try vomiting in self-defense when someone pre-empted me by incapacitating my assailant with a wide swing of one of her suede Nancy Sinatra boots. As he slumped forward, I fell safely to the pavement and ran as fast as I could.

That was almost 17 years ago, Halloween Day, 1969. My attacker was some poor idiot tripping on LSD and the spirit of the holiday, and my savior was my mother. I only mention this incident because of the comment I made a few minutes and several blocks later, when my mother caught me trying to crawl into a police car.

"Aiiii hate Haaaahvahhd Skweahh! Pleease don't evah make me come back heahh!"

Well, as you know, life has many cruel ironies, not the least of which is that after 14 years spent far away in the wilds of Virginia, I found myself returning to the Square--to live there. I could be really cute and positive and say "...and how I've learned to love it," but this is not the CUE Guide, so I can be honest.

If anything, Harvard Square has gotten worse.

TO BEGIN WITH, when I arrived here in 1983, it didn't even really exist. The majority of the Square had been replaced by a giant canyon of concrete and twisted metal, the likes of which had not been seen since the days of the London V-2 blitz. The real problem, however, was what surrounded the subway's gaping maw.

I discovered it one night when I was doing my laundry, and needed change for a dollar. Country bumpkin that I am, I walked into Store 24, waited in line, and asked for change.

"Whattaya talkin' about?!" roared an enormous fat man behind the counter, brandishing a baseball bat. "Buy somethin' or get the hell outa heah!"

"But I only have a dollar," I whined in dismay, "and I need four quarters!"

"This scumbag giving you trouble?" an even more enormous cop growled, squeezing through the door. I was just about to say "yes," when I realized he was pointing at me; so I retreated very slowly, hands in the open, onto the street. Something similar or worse happened in every store I tried, until I ended up settling for three quarters and a dime, and that only at the price of prostrating myself in front of an entire restaurant.

For a long time, I thought it was me. Perhaps there was something in my slow Southern politeness which evoked unpleasant memories of Chancellorsville and Bull Run, or maybe it was a general antipathy towards college students. I tried various ways to fit in, like looking around and sneering "These goddam Hahvahd kids," or saying things like "Boy, it sure is a lot coolah up heah than down in them sewah lines," but nothing worked.

IT WASN'T UNTIL the Cambridge Crater had been refilled, and the real population of Cambridge returned that I began to realize why every merchant in Harvard Square detests his fellow man. Look at what he's got to deal with.

The nasty and loathesome qualities of Harvard people are so well-known that it is almost passe to mention them. Much more interesting are the myriad drunks, psychopaths, amateur astrologers, zombies, self-proclaimed demigods, Sleestaks, princes-in-exile, Shi'ite Mormons, invisible people, levitators, Klingon spies, werewolves, and assorted cultists who swarm the place.

I don't know if it is because I look intelligent or simply because I look confused enough to believe them, but every creature of this type always finds me the perfect person with whom to share his creationist or eschatological theories. Indeed, it seems I can never make it from Bay Bank to the Coop without something lurching into me and shouting at me "God is here!!! I saw him in the Wursthaus!" or "Don't think I don't know what you did to my wife!"

But much more antagonistic are the Cambridge punks, who look like refugees from an Hieronymus Bosch painting, hanging around in the area once occupied by the aforementioned shell-hole. Even their habit of spray painting slogans like "Eat the Unemployed" and "Please kerb your God" on all available non-moving surfaces would be all right, if it were not for one unfortunate trait.

Certain members of their ranks, perhaps eager to prove their manhood in some heavy-metal courtship ritual, have the habit of inviting members of the Harvard community, myself included, to relatively unarmed combat. Seldom a week goes by without some Twisted Sister fan sneering "Lookin' sweet, babycakes," at me, or trying to slamdance me off of the sidewalk.

Maybe it is some particular curse attached to me, but it seems such challenges always come at the worst possible times--like when I am hurrying to turn in my thesis, or walking to lunch with a professor. Why can't someone once try to start something with me when I'm at a team dinner, or cleaning my gun? They must break into University Hall and read my exam schedules and deadlines, for these are the only times they choose to make their attacks.

They also seem to have a keen awareness of my wardrobe, for it is only on that one day each month that filial duty causes me to wear my mother's latest silk and sequine Polo gift that one of them jumps up in my face and demands $10.

HARVARD PEOPLE have developed a variety of defense mechanisms against such verbal and physical attacks, the most popular of which is backing down and saying "It means a lot more to them than it does to us." I don't believe such people as far as they could throw me; I know it means a lot to me to hear my mother's honor abused by a pimply teenage Satanist with hair like a chicken.

To be honest, there is no defense against the Square's punks, lunatics, friendly merchants, and vampires other than the one Harvard gives us--staying in our dorms.

Sometime long ago, deep in these ivy halls, the sages realized what they had assembled here was an army of Napoleons. There was no way they could expect such people to live together in the same Yard and same dormitories unless they found a way to keep them in. They had tried and failed with fences, but now they had a better idea. The next day, they brought in the first shipment of loud, tone-deaf street musicians, and let them loose in front of Johnson Gate.

You see, the terrors of Harvard Square fulfill a vital function for the University, one very much like that played by the swamps and crocodiles around Devil's Island. No matter how badly a prisoner or student may want to escape, five minutes outside the gate will have him screaming to get back in.