There were certain weeks my sophomore year when my hall in the Nicolsons felt like a home. I’m not talking home in the Hallmark sense of the word, but rather home as in “Grandpa lives in a Home now.” These were the weeks when a little brown package ordered off the Internet from some pharmaceutical company in Canada (that manufactured drugs in Mexico) arrived in the mailbox of one of my hall mates. Slowly, over the course of the next several days, peoples routines (ranging from the hygienic to academic) would unravel.
The floor actually smelled differently those weeks. Plumes of stagnant life would waft out into the hall, where someone would be taking their merry-sweet time at the water fountain clad only in a sheet. At night, bodies clutching bowls of microwavable noodles would accumulate on someone’s bed, where more pills would be distributed. With their slurred speech, open flies, and food spotted chins, I got a glimpse of what I imagined my friends would be like in early stages of dementia. Always, there were pills missing. Always, accusations would fly, and eyes would grow beady with suspicion. This was not a typical hall. Pick a bunch of creatures of nasty habits and give them rooms in the same hall and you have the third floor of Nicholson Seven 2002-2003.
Drug dealers made a lot of business on our hall as our hall’s business was mostly drugs. Prior to living in Nicolson Seven, I was a total prude when it came to drugs. As I became privy to these scenes, I grew less so. I was chasing something that year, some vague notion of cool. I remember feeling pride as our hall developed a reputation among underclassmen as being the seamy underbelly of otherwise wholesome Foss Hill. As the year progressed I started to pick up my own nasty habits. My weekends now started on Wednesday, I graduated from a social to a chain smoker, and I became smitten with a little blue pill many of my friends were prescribed for Attention Deficit Disorder. I called it Magic Blue because of its color and the fact that it made cleaning your room almost as fun as that scene in Mary Poppins where they snap and things just fall into place. Magic Blue would send me into a delirious fit of hyper-productivity, from which I’d emerge eight hours later, having accomplished more work in one sitting than I usually did in one week, my nerves frayed, my endorphins depleted, ready to par-tay.
My body always felt a little wrong the next day, but I never worried about it. There’s something about being in college that invites self-destruction. It happens to different degrees and in many forms.
“One night when I was in college I was craving chocolate and so I went out and bought a Sara Lee chocolate cake,” my mom often recalls of her years in Wellesley. “And then I ate it. The whole thing!” (I can see her clad in a lace nightgown furtively stuffing cake into her mouth while her cat Gracious* and her roommate Kitten* look on disapprovingly.)
It seems like college is your last chance to partake in self-destructive, indulgent, outrageous behavior. You better get it out of your system now because what’s funny in college is tragic afterwards. Abundant resources cater towards all sorts of impulsive behavior. Paper bags of condoms are placed about campus, the Office of Behavioral Health offers free therapy, and at night you can dial a number and a van will be there within moments to take you where you want to go. As a demographic, your mental health, drinking and sexual habits are constantly being studied and discussed in the media. So many people and networks are concerned with your well-being. There is a sense that nothing is our fault, that we are the victims of outside pressures and circumstances beyond our control.
“Git!” my housemate shouts at a squirrel that is nibbling on the pile of trash that has accumulated on our porch. With his unkempt hair and wild beard he looks like someone you wouldn’t want to sit next to on the bus. I remind him that he is the garbage man this semester.
“That’s why I’m guarding it from the animals,” he retorts. I explain to him that trash needs to be disposed of, not guarded. I try not to sound too patronizing but my patience is waning. Recently a whole porch full of garbage disappeared without explanation. Some of my housemates were thrilled. I felt ashamed. I have a hunch that the trash fairy was the dignified older man who lives next door. I imagine the view from his kitchen window was his incentive. I can barely fathom what he thinks of us.
My housemate is sitting on a couch (the arm of which recently had to be amputated after someone threw up on it) doing dip as he yells at the squirrel. He has just cracked open what will be the first of many beers. It is not yet five o’clock in the evening.
“Git!” my housemate shouts again, this time tapping his long fingernails on the window, against which the bold squirrel brushes its tail as if trying to taunt him. All of the sudden I feel a swell of tenderness for both creatures, both so helpless, so completely unaccountable for their actions; feeling entitled to exist as they please. Despite the tapping, the squirrel doesn’t budge. He is home. So are we.
Leave a Reply