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I left Diane to regroup with her cadre of communists and walked back to Cloyne holding the bloody bandana to my face. My nose was still hurting. It had swollen a bit but didn't seem broken. I wrapped some ice in a towel, held it to my face and went to my room.
Alan was there. "What happened to you?" he asked. He was about to put on a Peter Frampton album on his stereo and crank it up.[1]
"A woman I met hit me with her protest sign," I replied.
"Yeah, that's what happens when you approach strange women and ask them if they think James Taylor is good music to fuck too," he said, matter-of-factly.
"I was trapped in a protest takeover. Police fired teargas. We escaped. People were choking and vomiting.
"Tell me something new and exciting." Alan yawned, "That happens all the time."
I took off my sweatshirt. It still had a slight smell of teargas, as did the rest of my clothing. I picked up my book bag to see if it needed to be decontaminated, and that's when I noticed the zipper was open and the items in it were gone.
Missing from my small cache of worldly possessions was my Texas Instrument Calculator, Model TI-50A and my pristine copy of A Room of One's Own. I was upset. Not only had I paid good money for these items, but also the loss of the Rhetoric book meant my plans for a successful study date with Karen would have to be canceled.
At dinner, I asked if anyone had a spare copy to lend. Katy and Dan weren't talking to each other for unknown reasons and were too preoccupied to care about my plight. The engineering students weren't required to take English or Rhetoric (which explains why most of them can't write readable reports), and Alan and Mike didn't think Rhetoric was a serious academic subject.
I didn't have the money to buy another book. What was I going to do?
[1] He had gotten into a discussion with a group who felt Pink Floyd's music was more indicative of the counterculture rock SF scene than Frampton. To avoid defeat, he was going to play Frampton for days at full volume until somebody got sick and tired of it and agreed Frampton had some musical merit.
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With the conclusion of chapter ten, the preview ends. Cloyne Court has forty-nine chapters.
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This episode is based on a true story.
Although seventy-five percent of this memoir is factual, liberties were taken with the other twenty-five percent for plot purposes. That is where scenes were recreated from memory when they were not clearly defined in the journals written by the author from 1976 to 1980.
Individual characters are composites of several people and do not represent any one person, and the names have been changed to protect innocent people that may be guilty of indiscretions in their youth.
All characters, names and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this memoir should be considered products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously.
