My Friend Nolan: Part I

Michael Philip Nolan was an instructor in the English Department in the two academic years spanning 1980-82. We were officemates for the first one of them. In typical Nolan fashion, he must have found something objectively objectionable about me, for he found a new officemate for his second year.

For the first year, we were inseparable. I don’t know how we became so close so quickly; it had to have been something in his nature. He drew one in with his wit, his intelligence, his occasional surprising kindnesses, his outlandishness. He had a red afro and a mustache. Everyone noticed how he would rub his index and middle finger across it and then sniff his fingers.

One quintessential Nolan moment: I had given a final exam in June, 1982, and I was driving out on the Auburn-Opelika Road toward the mall, and there, walking by the side of the road, was Nolan, striding along, perspiring in his heavy jeans, in his odd exaggerated up and down gait, like the townie hippies. He didn’t own a car.

This wasn’t good. He had a final to give, and he was missing it. He had missed one before. This was in his second year on the faculty, after he had shunned me, so I wasn’t inclined to do him any favors. Anyway, it wasn’t going to do him any good to know at this point that his final had twenty minutes left to go. I drove on.

The instructors and graduate students played a lot of basketball together. One late afternoon, we organized an impromptu game. As Nolan didn’t have a car to get himself home quickly enough, Jerry Baxter offered him the loan of basketball shorts—Nolan taught in shirt and shoes suitable for basketball, of course. Nolan promised to wash the shorts. One day later in the week, I was lingering in the hallway when Nolan showed up to return Jerry’s shorts to him. As Jerry’s class was ending, Nolan pulled Jerry’s shorts down over his afro and opened Jerry’s classroom door and strode in. His class erupted. Jerry, a Southern fraternity boy whom Nolan called “Bubba”, showed remarkable composure; crazy Yankees weren’t supposed to wear your gym shorts on their head when they came into your classroom.

Nolan and I had fun times. We took a road trip to D.C. to see friends, and every few miles he’d paraphrase Keats: “McDonalds. The very word is like a bell. It tolls me back to my sole self again.” (We couldn’t afford fancy; I was making $45,000 in today’s dollars, and Nolan no doubt less.) Just as he missed finals, he left clothes at each stop.

We drank on weekend nights and went to all of the grad students’ parties with their sexual tension and academic pretension. I took him to an Auburn football game, the excessive pageantry and humorlessness of which amused him immensely, especially the fight song, which ends, “power of Dixieland!” He repeated the same awful jokes (“Let’s go to the Astronaut Café and get a launchmeat sandwich;”) he answered the inevitable groans with, “Old jokes are like old friends: they’re the best.”

But then in December of the first year, when I drove him to Auburn’s tiny airport to fly back to Chicago, John Lennon had been shot dead. We were both stunned; it felt like an ominous sign of something.

That entire first year, he sang the praises of a woman he was in love with, Else Elkhart. He had known her when they were getting their master’s degrees at the University of Chicago, and, according to Nolan, there had never been another woman like Else. She was funny, brilliant, and beautiful. We would all love her. Somehow, he managed to get her hired for an instructorship for the next year, and boy were we in for a treat! We would all be in love with Else.

When Else duly arrived the next fall, she first appeared at a party of instructors and grad students, and Nolan proudly introduced us to her. The universal reaction was shock. She was abrasive, opinionated, not mannerly (doesn’t fly in the South), and her physical appearance reminded some of us of Emma Goldman or possibly a young Madame Blavatsky. No one liked her.

Nolan was living in this curious structure, completely round—it was typical of Nolan to have found a place that no one else knew about—and he had two bedrooms and eagerly put Else up, imagining nights of erotic pleasure. Alas it was not to be. He apparently agonized in his hot early autumn bedroom, thinking of her across the hall. But perhaps even Nolan knew he was best off not to go knocking. Else was a pretty formidable German.

Neither of us saw it coming: when I was dropping him off at his circle house one night, we both saw a car out front, owned by one of the older graduate students, a fellow who’d been working on his Master’s since I was an undergraduate. He was married, with two young daughters. He had appropriated Else Elkhart. It is a tribute to Nolan’s fortitude that he didn’t throw himself off of the top of his round house. Eventually that fellow left his family, and a year or two later he and Else moved away to the northeast together.

Nolan spent a lot of time at my house, if only because I had a television, and in one of those years, the BBC released its six-hour production of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” I had never heard of John LeCarre, and Nolan introduced me. Thereafter we decided that we’d like to be spies, but Nolan said, “Look at me, with this hair. Our first day out, they’d find us shot in the back in our trenchcoats with copies of ‘Tinker Tailor’ in our pockets.”

Nolan had an annoying habit of making you think that everyone else he knew was a superior individual. He had gone to Augustana as an undergraduate, and he was full of stories of the people there: the laid-back president; the hunchback Norwegian; Spats, who refused to use Nolan’s comb because “it’s jinxed”; the myriad characters who, he gave you to understand, were about the funniest and most intelligent people in the world.

In his second year as an instructor, he took up with a group that he found more appealing and that didn’t include me: Jim Harris, mainly known for being the guy who wrote parodies of well-known poems like “The Waste Land” (which I’m sure has never been made fun of before) to skewer various faculty and left them under people’s doors. And a truly hot but snotty grad student named Jeannie McAllister, whom he reverently referred to as “Jeannie Jeannie Chili Beanie.” Harrison and those people became Augustana South.

Never mind. I was in my last sad year, had to go to law school the next year, and had more on my mind. I spent the summer after Nolan left trying to seduce a redneck townie and driving around the countryside throwing beer bottles out the window. I had my own crisis. I don’t even remember him leaving. It seemed a sad ending to a friendship, and I had no idea what had actually happened.