Excerpts from "That Summertime Sound"
MARCUS:

Here’s how it started: I was walking down the hall in my freshman dorm and heard a racket. A real racket, not just the spacecake hippie jams that emanated from half the rooms on the hall I’d just transferred away from, nor the rubbery New Wave tedium that rang from the other half. This sound was furious, keen and exuberant. The singer sounded like he was being beaten to death. As I drew closer, the “song” dissolved into a psychedelic puddle, raw energy exploding towards chaos. No synthesizers, no solos. It was music out-of-time.

“What’s going on?” I asked one of the several people who were pushing down the hall away from it. Everyone except me. “What is that?”

“217,” the guy said. A rat-faced kid from DC with his hat jammed low on his forehead. “Sucks.”

“What, the room does?” I looked at the scrap of paper from the housing office. “Hey, 217—that’s my room.”

“Lucky you, dude. Maybe you can ask him to turn it down.”

“Why don’t you do it?”

He laughed. I recognized him from my cognitive science lab, and from the night he’d passed out in the quad and woke up mummified in paper towels. “Nah. It’s that guy.”

“Which guy?”

“The dude with the suits.”

“I see.”

I went down the hall. I knew who he meant, he meant that guy—that one guy—whose politeness struck others as intimidating. Here on a campus full of spiky punks and bully boys, maniacs who stripped naked or attempted suicide on the campus’s closed-circuit television network, there wasn’t really another way to interpret him. Good manners were a form of aggression. I pushed open the door.

He was sitting on the gray-carpeted floor, hunched over a crappy plastic turntable, the kind that came in a suitcase, wired to an equally crappy pair of speakers. A spray of Dylanesque verbiage, much of it unintelligible, exploded through these courtesy of the slender little 45 he was playing over and over again. The record ended in a shower of shrieking HEYs and backwards-tracked vocals, a refrain along the lines of I WANNA SEE YOU CRAWL! CRAWL! CRAWL! It was so cheaply pressed the needle slid from mid-chorus toward the label before the last note had ended, at which point he picked it up and placed it back at the beginning once more. I had to wait for it to play through, two minutes and change before he looked up and saw me. At this point he grinned—he had a particular, toothy smile that seemed both inclusive and stand-offish, a sort of cross between a Cheshire Cat’s and an ax-murderer’s—and shook his head before dropping the needle yet again.