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The Birth of Triangular Diplomacy

By this time, Terry and Jerry had found a new hook up for weed. Terry had dumped his young girlfriend and was entertaining a new female every other night which meant he needed lots of weed. This was back in the day before roofies, where half-attractive boring dudes had to resort to getting their dates stoned and wearing them down through pointless conversation. Terry’s new hook up had a lot of weed and a sense of perversity to match; he told us the guy had offered to give him pound of weed in exchange for some original amateur college porn. Now, Mark didn’t really want to have anything to do with this because when you’re talking about that kind of weight in dope, you’re talking about jail time. I tried to explain to Mark that the real concern with that sort of activity is when money was involved. Magistrate business involved no exchange of money—goods and services were what we bartered in—the cornerstone of all free trade.

Bart owed us a big favor and he was still banging that little Italian broad left and right. I suggested to Mark that we combine all circumstances and allow everyone to profit. The plan was to set up a camera in Bart’s room, in a hidden location, to film various sexual acts between him and his little Italian. Bart agreed to record ten sessions over three weeks. We would then allow Terry to broker the deal for the porn tape with his hookup in exchange for a quarter pound of kind bud, this would be the birth of phase two growth for the Magistrates.

The new plan was to supply small quantities of weed to individuals in exchange for favors to be cashed in at a later date, when needed.  These small, no charge transactions, would only take place after an interview with the client by Mark and myself, to ascertain what exact attributes might be useful (or if they were Narcs).

Notes were taken and Goat, in exchange for free weed, agreed to use his superior computer prowess to concoct a program that would cipher the notes we took on each individual in case they should fall into the wrong hands. Tim, Darren, and Malcolm weren’t in on it at this point because there was no need for them to be but we’d all be balls deep by the end of the semester.

By this time, the sub-structure and foundation of the Magistrates had been established. We were officially a campus Cosa Nuestra, trading favors for favors, dealing in drugs, pornography, and vicious beatings, all without one cent of money changing hands.

In theory we were untouchable but the difficulty always comes with the application.

This is the Business We Have Chosen

We were serious business by Halloween, with weed heads, chronic trouble makers, small claims bullshit, and a strong-arm network working together to make the lives of the Magistrates as comfortable as possible. I had acquired a kick ass stereo system from a kid who was about to fail out because his second English class assignment had received a no pass grade. I rewrote his paper and did his final project in exchange for his stereo system, a $500 Aiwa shelf deal with surround sound and we were now kickin’ it in Dolby Digital. Things were good, smooth, until we got the rape case, that one Mark took personal.

The little girl came to us the weekend after Halloween. She had been at a fraternity party near Kohl Hall and was walking back through the alley, the house located off campus because of a prior rape charge (go figure). While in the alley, she was accosted by two kids from the fraternity coming back from the bars, around 2:45. They ripped off her party pants, her thong underwear, and sodomized her behind two large plastic trashcans on wheels. She didn’t look either one of us in the eye when she told us the story.

Mark asked her if she knew who did it and she nodded. She had met both of them earlier that night, before they went to the bar, and she stayed at the party, their names were Ron and Jason. They were seniors graduating at the end of the semester—they probably thought she wouldn’t recognize them. Ron had a Playboy bunny earring and Jason’s little finger on his right hand was minus a fingertip, both of these character traits blazed into her memory. Mark hugged the girl and told her we’d do what we could. She winced at his touch.

He knew her from his Criminal Justice class, helped her study for their last quiz. He was pissed and told me he wanted to handle this one alone. As soon as he said this, I knew he had a thing for her and the vengeance was going to be ugly. I consented but begged him to constrain himself.

Mark didn’t tell me what happened, didn’t want to make me an accomplice, but I heard rumors. The kid with the missing finger was found in the same alley he raped the girl in, beaten so bad they had to take him to the ER and drain his leg of fluid. He was in the hospital for three days and, although I didn’t see the doctor’s report, I’m sure the words several harsh blows with a blunt object probably appeared on there somewhere.

The other rapist was in even worse shape when they found him a week later, caught coming out of the rec center, just as he got to his car, which unfortunately for him was parked in the outer rim of the parking lot no-man’s land. He was hit on the head and knocked unconscious. When he woke, his arm was broken and one of his testicles had been smashed from a brutal nut stomp without reservation of force. He’d be lucky if he could father children.

When I heard what happened, I felt a kind of Old Testament justice descended upon the campus. People who lived their lives sucking off the tit of apathy had better watch out because the Angels of Justice now held dominion over the raped, the abused, and those just wanted a little marijuana in their lives.

The pot would be free and the penalties always more severe than the crimes they followed.

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That Old Love Challenge

I thought the Magistrates were dead until Bart came to Mark’s room the night he picked up Death Row’s Greatest Hits, seven 40 caps twisted off on the floor and Bart begging us to help him with his impending dorm trial over the girl in the bathroom, this was two days after the copy of his write up had been passed around the floor. Bart said, I hear that you guys can get things done?

Mark, slipping back into power mode, said, We might be able to help. What do you need?

Bart said, Well, I need some help with this bathroom thing.

I immediately thought there was no fucking way we can help this kid with this but Mark said there might be something we could do, and asked Bart to give us a couple days to figure it out. Bart left the room, satisfied that his fate was in the hands of professionals. I packed up the rainbow-sheen two footer graphix bong I had picked up at Phil Man’s in Dayton the previous summer and asked Mark how the fuck we were supposed to affect a dorm trial. We both knew Bart was desperate for help and the payoff was sure to be tremendous in the long run. Mark had inside knowledge of this RA who wrote Bart up, that she came from the same hometown as Snowplow. Mark had spoken with another RA on the second floor about the Bart situation as he sat on the smoke bench the previous night. When they got to the part where Bart said he’d go down on her for a pardon, the other RA told Mark that the girl wouldn’t have accepted that offer from anyone but Snowplow.

Snowplow? I said with disgust.

Mark said, I know. I know. I guess they went to the same high school together and she was two grades above him. She’s had a thing for him ever since.

I said, And you mean to tell me they ended up in the same college, in the same dorm, and even on the same fucking floor?

Yep.

I said, Well, shit man, it must be fate and who are we to fuck with fate?

Mark said, That’s exactly what I was thinking.

No way man, that chick is whacked! Snowplow was wearing his traditional boxer shorts as we sat in his dingy second floor room. It was almost noon the following day and the shades were still drawn, a musky odor soaking the room in a net of stink that you couldn’t get away from no matter where you moved. Mark looked pensive. I was pissed.

I said to Snowplow, Listen man, we went out of our way to do you a fucking favor.  Now you need to do something for us, right? Remember the deal?

That must have gotten the best of his sense of honor because he said, Goddammit, you’re right. You’re right. He looked serious for about five seconds and said, Alright I’ll do it, but this squares us.

Mark said, Yeah, sure it will. Just make sure you get both copies of the write up from her room.

He said, If they’re in her room, I’ll get ‘em. What’s the kid’s name?

Alexander. Bart Alexander. Don’t forget.

The RA on the second floor told Mark that all RAs turned in their exception reports and write-ups to the Hall Director on the final Wednesday of the month, which left us only about a day or so to get the report out of her room. Every form had two duplicates for a total of three copies. Bart had one copy with his signature, one went to the RAs file, and the other went to the Hall Director for use in the formal hearing. The RA generally filed the report and never worried about it again until they were called in to testify on the incident. Sometimes there was no need for testimony and the whole incident was forgotten in the campus stretch between Orientation Day to midterms to finals. If Snowplow could get the two copies out of her room before the meeting on Wednesday, my boy Bart would likely be home free and would owe us one hell of a favor.

The quick skinny is that Snowplow did it but he got into more trouble doing it than what we were trying to solve. The plan was for this bulbous-nosed meathead to call the RA on Sunday night, ask her to go out and get some dinner, come back to her room, and start drinking. We weren’t sure how exactly that would be accomplished on a Sunday night but Snowplow was adamant he could do it and we left it to him.

We didn’t tell the ass not to get butt fucking drunk before he even got to her room. He got there, sloppy as hell, the door open, and she must have been in the bathroom which was six doors down from her room. This gave him about four minutes to investigate her room for the write-ups. He found them in her desk drawer in a folder marked Hall Meetings. There were four other sets of write-ups in there. Snowplow grabbed Bart’s papers, folded them up and shoved them into his pocket just as she walked back in the room.

He woke up naked next to her Monday morning. She had no roommates so no one but the Magistrates knew and since it pertained to official Magistrate business, a secret was a secret and something we held deadly serious. We didn’t hear anything from Snowplow until finals week, when he told us the RA was pregnant with his baby. He came to us for help with the situation but there were levels that even the Magistrates wouldn’t sink beneath. Bart was home free and we wouldn’t waste much time in collecting on the favor. I heard a few years back that Snowplow married the RA and they’ve been together ever since, plowing the snowy interstate routes of Eastern Ohio. Life take some jagged turns sometimes.

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The Others

The plan involved Phil and his girlfriend. The poor guy had run up a three hundred dollar phone bill his first month there, talking to her about her stupid high school life, trying to explain what college was like to her, both of them speaking totally different languages from totally different countries. It turned out that the nights she wasn’t home talking to him (every other one), she was out with the starting senior quarterback, giving the guy blowjobs in the backseat of his Cavalier after every Friday night football game. Phil heard from one of his good friends who still went to school there and he was crushed. Mark still had Snowplow’s key fob and we were going to put it to use.

We talked Phil into going back to Columbus for his high school’s Homecoming weekend. On the ride there, Mark and I got high and Phil ran through his collection of Metallica CDs. Mark stayed busy cleaning his potato gun and fashioning a new pipe weapon out of a steel bar he had pulled from a campus dumpster. The strapping tape was wound, the music was cranked and we were all feeling good. The late night phone calls had stopped.

We sat in the stands of the Homecoming game where Phil’s girlfriend wiggled her little cheerleading ass and her quarterback boy toy threw for eighty yards. Phil hadn’t told her he was coming and we sat on the visitor’s side so as not to attract any attention. With one minute left on the game clock, we headed out to the player’s parking lot, stopping off at the truck for the potato gun, the wrapped pipe, a flashlight, and Phil’s Polaroid instant camera.

There was a dense growth of trees that we hid in until about an hour after game time when, sure as shit, here comes Phil’s girlfriend and the master jock. The guy’s walk telegraphed that it was his sole responsibility for the team’s win that night, a prideful ambulation that began from and ended at his penis. We waited until they had been in the car for about ten minutes, seeing her head occasionally bobbing up, Kurt Cobain belting out My girl, my girl; don’t lie to me through the cracked back window. Mark readied the potato gun and after the calibration was complete, he passed the gun to Phil. He said aim at the back window and when you’re ready, push the button on the butane torch. Phil nodded, those ten minutes had been damn hard on him.

Mark and I snuck up to the car; it was the only one in the lot by that time.  We were ducked down and waiting.  We waited for about two minutes that felt like twenty and finally the itch got the better of Phil.  The window exploded, startling me and moving Mark into action.  From inside the car came a masculine, What the fuck? The girl opened the door and ran toward the school, gone with the wind.

Mark opened the back door of the car, pulled the grunting meat head out by his hair, jerked his head up to his mouth and said Hello, motherfucker. The kid struggled as well as he could, even managed a decent shot to Mark’s neck. But Mark, built like a panzer, wasn’t fazed. The pipe went up, down, up, then down. The white strapping tape was muted red by the third descent. Phil’s girlfriend was screaming from the school, making a hell of a racket. We needed to speed things up and I looked over and saw Phil, still hidden in the bushes like we told him to. I told Mark to get the flashlight.

Mark pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and shined it on the kid’s face.  I picked up the Polaroid from the grass by the back tire of the Cavalier. I pointed the camera at the bloody dumbass, knocked out cold on the grass, and fired off a picture—proof.  I looked to the bushes again and said come on dude! Vengeance had once again been served and we all headed back to the truck.

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The Arrival, Cont.

Mark extended his hand and told me his name, not bothering to ask for my own.  I have found that if someone is worth their salt as a future friend, you can learn what you need to know about after three minutes of dialogue and I liked Mark instantly, a complete sense of comfort that would grow into a love between friends that can’t really be expressed except to say that if I tried here it would only come across as a bad narrative poem, so I’ll leave it at that.

Phil extended his hand and gave me his name, confirmed we both lived in Columbus, and asked if I could buy him some beer that night. I told them my own name and we shot the shit while I helped them finish putting up their posters.  Mark brought out a neon beer sign and plugged it in, a sign that would create a distinctive glow, serving us as a lighthouse beacon the many times we were to walk Main Street inebriated, looking for the way back home. Mark would always say, that’s me up there and point to the purple room on the third floor. My own room distinctive only in that Malcolm and I put our cold drinks on the ledge in the winter because we didn’t have a refrigerator. That’s me, I’d say and point to the ledge with the half-empty Mountain Dew and Arizona Iced Tea bottles.

I had been in their room for about 45 minutes when my roommate came back. The three of us had put up their wall decorations, pushed the clothes into two more respectable piles, and hooked up the Sega to the 13” combo TV/VCR. I cracked open one of the sodas Phil brought and was sitting in the puke brown easy chair Mark’s mom got at the Goodwill the day before. The first thing I thought when I saw my roommate was black was, cool. Malcolm walked with an air of dignity that can only belong to those who’ve been told they were beautiful their whole lives. I eventually learned he was from a good family with strong moral roots, they looked out for each other, gave what they had for what was needed, the stuff that makes America work after all the bullshit about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps fades from the echo.

I walked back across the hall to my room and said, Hey man, my name’s Jeremy.  I’m your roommate. He would later tell me that when he saw my full name on the roommate cards they send in late summer, he knew I had to be white. I laughed and we hit it off like champs. He was happy to hear I’d be turning 21 in a couple of weeks and would be able to buy him liquor. After a couple comfortable minutes of conversation, I excused myself and told him I’d let him get settled. We shook hands and the rest is what follows.

The Pep Rally

I talked Mark and Phil into going with me to the opening day pep rally. I had never attended campus events when I went to the University of Cincinnati, the fraternity taking up all my spare time as far as things like that went. I thought I’d be a true member of the campus community and Phil and Mark were both as ignorant as I was about what this whole college living thing was all about. So, we went.

We walked in that hot August sun that scorches grass albino and on the way there I pulled out my dugout and lit up. After taking a hit, I offered it to Phil who put his hands up in a, I don’t mess with it gesture, but Mark accepted. We were both stoney G by the time we got to the pep rally and being in the presence of all those people really started making me paranoid. By the time the band came in whomping and banging, I was ready to leave. Phil was watching the crowd for cleavage and Mark and I were both red eyed and I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was. I gestured toward the open double door and he nodded. I nudged Phil and shouted in his ear that we were leaving. He nodded and said something incomprehensible because the horns started up. We pushed through people, some a little too hard when they wouldn’t give, and eventually we made it out of the gymnasium. When the door shut behind us, the absence of noise was completely welcome. I looked at my two comrades and they smiled back at me.  Phil said, I didn’t see any decent bitches in there, man. I nodded back and said, let’s walk. I patted my pocket with the Dugout and Mark smiled.

By leaving the auditorium,  we made a fork in the road choice that day, the question before us was are you a constituent member of this campus; one that will follow directions and cheer when a sign is raised, speak when your hand has been recognized, smile at your professor superiors and vote in all campus elections? By leaving the auditorium we were saying, no we will not to all of those things. We were breaking away and finding our own path, the true mark of the hero’s journey. The Third Floor Magistrates, as we would come to be known, would walk the BG campus like the Tribe of Abraham in the Old Testament and that rainy night when Mark died face down in the mud we would all understand exactly what the price of being the hero was.

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The Arrival

August in Northern Ohio is a tortuous time and Bowling Green was built on the deepest drained swamp in the region, steamy and surrounded by reedy marshes and horsefly swarms, and though there is nothing like the experience of going away to college in America, nothing more unnerving, more exciting, or more disgusting to one’s zone of personal comfort, the landscape infects and affects the psychology of the citizenry.

When you live in a land peopled up with hills and valleys, the people at their posts are up and down, schizophrenic in their daily rush to get back home to prepare to leave again. When you live in a swampish flat land, the people are metal tables over a fault line, prone to violent outbursts like thunderstorms over a prairie.  And when the Bowling Green wind cracks above 30 mph, the people stiffen up like a man in a dark room when the only sound is a gun hammer nailed back, each anchored with the probability of becoming feral cats cornered when the wind changes direction without asking.

I stepped out of my parents’ Lexus and looked to the roof of my new dorm, watchtowers on both ends, conjuring up images of assassins on the rooftops, and I instinctively looked for the place I’d seek shelter from if the bullets started flying. I pulled my guitar case out of the backseat where it had ridden next to me the 120 miles from my parents’ house to my new palace of higher learning.  Sandy blonde hair hung in my eyes and I brushed it aside as I strapped two duffle bags over my left shoulder, holding the six-string Fender with Dean Markley pickups in my right hand, my Crate amplifier in my left, and I walked into the lobby like I was late for the show.

A freshman dormitory on move-in day is a sphere of confusion filled with swirling particles of excitement, the scent of sexual hope in the air and the binding tension of everyone wanting to get their parents quickly the fuck out of their new rooms. There were seventeen kids in the check-in line, each holding papers in their hands and looking anxiously bored, a situation that would normally send me combusting into flames, but this was my day for change and I wasn’t going to let it get me down. Shit, I wasn’t even supposed to be there, having given up on college when I hit the end of Pre-Med at Chemistry 201, and the weight of being a writer fell from the shell of my skin and hair and nails, leaked out of my eyeballs, and poured out my mouth like a secret desire on fire to become a public display.

The dubious sentences I slammed together in those days were drug fueled psychobabble, inspired rambling statements about all humanity being one being, the same philosophical platitudes that had been pushed around the world, under the graveyards, and painted onto the stars in the sky since monkeys fell from trees and taught themselves to walk on two feet. My early 20s spirit was speeding through the 60s and 70s in fast-forward and my teenage mind was still running to catch up.

But while I couldn’t write very well back then, my desire to express myself was something unstoppable. When giant stars, stars with many important things to say, burn their fuel, it burns fast and full and often leaves no mystery. In A Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfied’s teacher tells him that the difference between a mature man and an immature man is that the immature man is willing to die for a cause while the mature man is willing to live humbly for one. It would take the death of a great friend and a piercing seven-minute Tool song to drive Salinger’s message home to me.

I finally got my room key, signed my safety away on a yellow form with unevenly typed lines, and pushed a rickety wooden cart filled with all my crap up to the third floor, wobbling wheels straining at their revolutions, the jagged corner of the plywood board splintering my calf as I nudged it through the elevator door. I remember thinking thank god there’s at least an elevator and then the door opened, the motion one of those accordion style fold-in gratings where you half expected a capped doorman to welcome you in, but there was no doorman and the only thing greeting me was a markered message of Fuck your mother. I did, the last piece of graffiti one wants to read while actually standing next to one’s mother. I thought of Holden Caulfield again.

I cornered the cart against the brick wall of the girls side of the floor, and there were three other guys, each with their own sad wooden pushcarts waiting to get in as I got out. My parents and I pushed ourselves down the hall, squeezing through plastic bag-holding mothers, cursing fathers, screaming little brothers and crying little sisters, a thousand different voices, a monotone mess having a pointless and heated conversation with itself. Call if you need anything. This is the first day of the rest of your life. Be good. This is your test as a mature human being; don’t let us down.

My own mother was much slyer than the other parents, having slipped a handwritten letter into my toiletry bag, a letter which began and sounded better in writing, This is the beginning of your life as a man. I remember finding the letter as I was stuffing my Oxy face soap and toothbrush back in the bag, the envelope’s white edge peeking out the inner pocket of the black bag. The note was short, signed with love, and was accompanied by a $100 bill. I don’t know whatever happened to that letter but I think about it often, usually in the middle of the night when I’m stuck in a story arc, thinking about Mark, all those girls, the minutes I waste that I should be writing or playing with my kids or fucking my wife, I think about that letter and everything falls into place.

I unpacked the shitty wooden cart, followed my parents down the hallway, back to the death trap elevator where we said our goodbyes, the old man showing no emotion, my mother weeping like I had just been brought down off the cross. My parents were gone and I was finally on my own for the first time in my life, the bill now coming under my name. Life felt grand and golden that afternoon as I walked back upstairs and pocketed the dugout that contained my last quarter ounce of pot; I had no one to smoke it with but pot always seems to draw the right companions when you need them. Pot people connect on a level with altered minds, bent away from the everyday clinking of second after second of linear time, questions bouncing off each other, the veil of pretense lifting, nodding and nodding, the understanding pouring concrete over our feet, sticking us into time and space like quasar coordinates.

Marvin came back to the room and we made our introductions, he was holding a box of Kleenex and a small tub to Vick’s Vaporub which he set on his desk like territorial markers. The room was about 6’ x 10’ and there were closets on both sides as you walked in, complete with a chipped mirror on the back of the main door, and splattered with industrial paint. I hung up the three dozen articles of clothing I owned, arranged my towels, underwear, socks and baseball hats. I then turned to entertainment, setting up the Sony CD boom box with detachable speakers, Bob Marley’s Natural Mystic soon sacramentalizing the space. I lit an incense stick in the handled brass pot filled with Myrtle Beach sand I had kept around since my sophomore year in high school. The room was filled with Fresh Rain incense smoke in minutes; nothing goes together like Marley and Fresh Rain incense. I was filling the three-foot long shelves with my four hundred books that I had to winnow down to fifty before I came. Just after placing the last book, I heard a knock at the open door, a thin kid, clean-shaven, with a misplaced look of authority stood in the doorway. Hi he said, what’s your name? He brought a clipboard from behind his back and my fists started clenching.

Bradley, I said, Jeremy Bradley.

Okay Jeremy, I need you to sign this because you’re not allowed to burn incense in the building. He pushed his yellow piece of paper at me, the lines still unevenly typed, the Kohl Hall theme for the day.

What? I said.

The incense, he said. It is yours, right?

I looked at the brass pot and the half burnt stick with the smoking red eye.

Yeah, it’s mine.

He looked at the paper, then back at me, handed me a pen, the paper blank except for one sentence:  I _________________ acknowledge that I have been warned about the following dormitory policy that I am in violation of section ____ of the Kohl Hall rules of conduct. The second blank had a number printed in the geek’s handwriting which was as ordered and structured as his clipboard routine.

He said, I’ll fill in the rest. I just need your signature there. He looked around my room, scanning my books as I signed the paper and handed the clipboard back to him. He reviewed the paper, pointed at the incense and said could you put that out please? Thanks. My back was turned, leaving he said hey Jeremy, it was nice meeting you. Make sure you read your rules and regulations handbook.  It’s in your top right hand drawer. I’ll see you at the floor meeting tomorrow night.

He shuffled out and I got up and shut the door behind him. I went to lie down on the bed and thought better of it, opting to check out my top right drawer instead.  There were several papers there, including two books. One was the dormitory regulations the clipboard kid told me to read and the other was the campus rules and regulations. The two pieces of paper were a late night pizza coupon Open till 3 AM! and the other was a calendar of events for the weekend. I saw there was a pep rally that began in three hours, this mildly interested me and decided I’d check it out. I also decided I’d try for that nap after all, lay down on the bed, and closed my eyes for ten minutes until the CD ended. Thumping, yelling, and muffled conversations pushed through the door, penetrating the room, and there would be no more sleeping that afternoon. And when I thought the hallway noise couldn’t get louder or more obtrusive, Snoop Dogg split the air sippin’ on gin and juice…laid back…

Now Snoop was a weed call where I came from, a flag that fellow weed smokers raised to let others feel their presence.  This was the time when the marketing monster of gangsta rap had just begun to take root in white suburban society.  I had been listening to rap music since LL Cool J came out with Bigger and Deffer in 1984.  My second freshman year in college was the age before Tupac was murdered and the war between East Coast and West Coast was still blazing in all its propagandized mediatic nonsense.  All I wanted at that point out of my rap music was either the slick beats of Dre with a steady flowing voice, something to nod your head to while you waited for the bowl, bong, joint, or blunt to come your way; or, I wanted the edutaining lyrical lectures by the more cerebral members of the rap community like KRS-One and A Tribe Called Quest.

I opened my door and didn’t have to look far for the source of the sound, the door across the hall was opened and I saw two big guys moving stuff around, one wearing a faded Old English hat with broken bill, khaki shorts, deep bulge pockets and an Avon Lake High School football shirt. The other guy was a polar bear of a man; he stood about 6’ 4” and had small wire frame glasses that didn’t quite fit his face, ripped up blue jeans thin from wear, and an Ohio State Football shirt. I was clearly in the land of graduated athleticians. The kid with the Old E hat looked at me and said, Whassup, man?  This phrase was and remains my generation’s traditional form of greeting between males regardless of skin color.

I responded in kind and walked into their room to introduce myself. I would come to spend the majority of my time that year inside that room and the first time I walked in there was a desperate claustrophobic feeling like the walls were trying to distance themselves from us all. My theory is that we smoked those walls into submission with the dozens of downy sheet stuffed toilet paper roll smoke sessions we held in there, the walls grew with us, got high with us, and by the end of the first semester, we put a collar on that fucker.

I was greeted by Pink Floyd, 311, Snoop Dogg, 101 Sexual Positions and Beers of the World posters. You can tell a lot about someone by the first thing they do to settle into a new environment, my own first instinct being to shelve my books. Mark and Phil, who introduced themselves seconds after I entered the room, were indulgers, clothes lying in heaps and smears, unfolded and strewn across the room in piles. Their first executive action as new inhabitants of their room was to establish sound and once accomplished, Snoop Dogg was the ceremonial champagne bottle over the bow and then attention was turned to wall decorations.  This was the order being carried out when I entered.

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