Students at the asylum

She walks us over calm green lawns into the stuccoed belltower building. A fountain bubbles, carved with ample time by long-since-dead artisans in Roosevelt's WPA. It's tiled in yellow and blue ceramic, brightened by a flood of California sun. Once an asylum, today a small public university. Here is her office, admissions, a counseling center. There are now gates in the fences, which were fences built for show, one senses: anyone with a hint of pep and a three-step start could clear them and tackle the foothills beyond. She passes us by the art studio, wide and luxuriantly stocked. Colonial windows bow open to yield summer air, filtered by rising green scribbles of ivy. Students past, among you Charlie Parker, was it too bad a place to be stuck, in either sense of the word? A few say the Eagles wrote Hotel California about the place in its mad days, but only an unrefurbished dormitory makes sinister suggestions: smoke stains, windowless cells. Soon painters will come and leave a cheery white coat. Masons will make holes for the sun, then the new class will arrive.