Big Ray didn’t look that way when he was a freshman at Westbridge State College, at least that’s what I heard. He was so bony, and with his height, several inches over six feet, he could have been nicknamed Beanpole although no one did. No one ever called him Big Ray to his face. He wouldn’t have stood for either.
When I met Ray, he was the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, and I was a would-be reporter in the second semester of my sophomore year. In those years, the newsroom was located in the old ticket office outside the auditorium of the college’s administration building. The literary journal’s staff met in the mezzanine. Our group hung out at either place or in the commuters lounge in the building’s basement, a noisy, but more interesting place to study than the library. The paper used to be called the Westbridge Gazette, in honor of the college, until Big Ray changed it the previous spring to The Hard Truth much to the consternation of the college president, who threatened to cut funding. But in a moment that became legendary, Ray stormed into a trustees meeting and told them what this world needed was more hard truth, and so the president backed down.
It was just after winter break when Big Ray agreed to let me write a column called “Who the Heck Is That?” It was my idea, and when I explained I would write about interesting people on and off campus, he stroked his heavy black mustache and said to give it a go, that he would make his decision after he read one. My trial story was about a kid in my class who played air-guitar on the steps of the administration building, performing as if a crowd filled the quadrangle instead of the snow that piled up that winter. People cheered whenever they saw him. He was that entertaining. His favorite musician was Jimi Hendrix. He sang “Foxy Lady” in a sexy rock kind of way, which made me laugh, and Big Ray smile when he read the story. Ray played with the hairs of his mustache and gave me a questioning look.
“So, Lenora Dias, think you can crank these out every edition?”
I told him yes, which meant I was now entitled to sit in The Hard Truth office to use the equipment and not just visit my friend Tim, who was on staff. Tim was the arts reporter, reviewing books, music, and movies for the paper. He was pretty good although I disagreed with his opinions of “2001 Space Odyssey.” He loved it, and I thought it was the stupidest movie ever.
“You’d have to be really, really stoned to think it was any good,” I told him after we left the movie theater.
He frowned.
“Well, yeah, but you could have at least pretended, Lenora.”
Big Ray was always in the newspaper’s office. He greeted us by our first names, and then gestured with his thumb where we could work. Sometimes he was hunched over a portable typewriter, punishing its keyboard with two fingers so fat their skin looked ready to split as he wrote one of his no-holds-barred editorials. “That bastard Nixon is going to get us all killed” began one. When Ray left for a break or to use the men’s room, his belly plowed furniture out of his way.
A great deal of the time, Big Ray wrote in a blue spiral notebook he pulled from a beat-up leather briefcase. It was his journal, and I knew from someone asking it was supposed to be none of our goddamned business what was in it. Well, if that was true, why did he flash it around people?
One night we were working at the office. I had just finished a column about the retarded man who rode his bike around campus when Ray started chortling. Tim asked what was so funny, but Ray wouldn’t answer. He raised his hand above his journal and pawed the air. Tim’s eyes locked with mine. He passed me a note: “R is a big fat phony.”
I shoved the paper into my pocket in case Ray found it. He wouldn’t care about being called a phony, but he would about the “big fat” part. Ray was a hardship case, one of those guys who stuck with platonic relationships because he didn’t know how to have a girlfriend. I knew he liked being around me and the other girls who worked at the newspaper. He’d mention my costumes, the gypsy clothes and beads I wore. Once when I braided my hair then wound it around my head, he called me the Madonna of Westbridge. I grew up Catholic so I thought it hilarious.
But Big Ray could also be cruel. One time in the commuters lounge, where we had gone to get coffee, he commented about one of the night students sitting at a nearby table. “Shit, that woman has a mouth like a horse,” he said almost loud enough for her to hear.
I was embarrassed when he whinnied.
People had lots of stories about how Ray got so fat. The predominant one was that he came to Westbridge State College half-starved, the result of growing up poor with a stepmother and two half-sisters after his father died. He was only nine when that happened. When Ray, a scholarship student, found out food was in unlimited supply at the dining hall, he began to fill himself. People talked about his going for thirds. He learned to drink cheap beer fast from a pitcher when he joined one of the college’s three fraternities.
“What do you write in your journal?” I asked him.
His face barely moved from the page, but his eyes bore into me.
“Everything about everyone. And anything about anyone.”
“Are we in it?”
“You’ll never find out.”
He kept his fleshy hand curled around the edge of the notebook, which was silly because there was no way Tim or I could make out the words across the room. He lifted his head.
“I know. I’ll let you see one page if you show me your tits.”
I felt my neck and cheeks fire up. Tim, who had been working on a review of an album, didn’t seem to know where to look. His head jerked up and down.
“In your dreams,” I said, pulling my things together.
I heard Ray laughing still as I left the building. I did not return for three days, and he acted like it never happened when he saw me again.
Tim and I were alone in The Hard Truth office one afternoon when he asked whether I thought Ray was a virgin. It was February, but the thaw made winter seem like spring, a false one, we knew. We had the door open in the windowless office to let air into the place.
“How should I know?” I said.
Tim leaned over his typewriter.
“I figure if Ray isn’t a virgin, it must’ve happened when he was a freshman and still skinny,” he said. “If Ray were to do it now with a woman, he would have to be careful not to crush her. That lucky lady would have to be on top.”
“Jesus, Tim, thanks a lot for that.”
When Ray came in moments later, Tim and I glanced at each other, wondering if he could have heard. Ray didn’t say a word as he took a chair next to Tim. He immediately opened his journal. When I glanced across the table, I thought I saw him jot our names. This was getting a little creepy. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. I heard others on the newspaper staff grumble. Maybe someone should steal Big Ray’s journal and teach him a lesson.
That happened much easier than I ever thought it could. One night I spied a notebook on the floor of the newspaper office while I was working alone on a column. When I bent to check, I saw it was Big Ray’s journal, but sensing a trick, I straightened in my seat and awaited his return. He and Tim left minutes after I arrived to score some pot. The dealer was only going to be around a short time, and Tim was borrowing a car, so they had to hurry. Ray, if I recalled correctly, carried his briefcase because Tim told him it would make the dealer nervous if he brought it into his apartment.
“So leave it in the car,” Tim told him.
Fifteen minutes later, no Ray and Tim. In that time I resisted reading the journal, but that is exactly what I did an hour later in my room. I carried the notebook beneath my coat. No one saw me, except the janitor who swept the foyer with a large push broom. Ray started this edition of his journal a couple of days after Thanksgiving, which he wrote he spent alone despite invitations to friends’ homes. He skipped visiting his half-sisters, as he called them, and ate a half-gallon of ice cream while watching a football game on TV.
I skipped ahead to see if Ray wrote about his offer to see my breasts, which he did, although he knew I wouldn’t let him. He said it gave him a hard-on. Like I said, creepy.
I flipped through the pages. Most contained his rambling thoughts on politics. He made a list of professors, noting who had leftist and rightist tendencies. He wrote about our friends. Tim, he decided, was a hopeless pothead. He was less kind about the others.
I found another entry with my name. He described a night early this semester in which he announced in the news office he was having an acid flashback. He said his skin looked as if it belonged to a snake and the floor was about to break in two. I had offered my hand, which he crushed. Another girl massaged his shoulders, and once, when he groaned, she gave him a hug.
“You both are making me feel normal,” he told us.
But the truth, Ray’s journal revealed, was he faked it. We stayed with him for two hours, trying to talk him down, and then we walked him home, where we handed him over to his roommates. He felt ashamed, but not too much.
“Ray’s fucking nuts,” I muttered as I flung the notebook to the floor.
I jumped when I heard a knock at my dorm room door, but I didn’t answer when the girl down the hall said I had a call on the house phone. The guy didn’t give his name. I didn’t answer, so she went away. I pulled a blanket over me. Music from the room next to mine beat through the wall. If I got up early, I could take the notebook back to the newspaper office, but maybe Ray had found me out. In that case, I’d better rip it into pieces and dump them down the dorm’s garbage shaft. I wouldn’t admit to anything.
I lay on my bed and stared at the open notebook on the floor. Words in thick black ink filled each line. I kept wondering who was worse: the liar or the thief who found one out?
This short story is one of four in my collection, Professor Groovy and Other Stories, available in Kindle and Audiobook. I did the narration. Many of the characters also appear in my novel, Peace, Love and You Know What. So, what is the inspiration for this story? Let’s just say I take what I know and have my way with it. And, yes, that is a photo of me and a former boyfriend, Bobby.