During my fourth year of college, I lived in an absolute shithole. Actually, no, calling the place a shithole is probably insulting to real shitholes. The place was awful, simply an architectural, design and decorating abortion of staggering magnitude.
God, I loved that place.
It was called the Shark Shack, so named because my roommates mounted an eight foot long plastic hammerhead shark on the living room wall, as well as a plastic swordfish and a taxidermy failure of, I think, a walleye. There was also a stuffed squirrel, which didn't seem to fit with the marine theme, but we really didn't care.
There were five people living in the Shark Shack, including myself, and I think it's safe to say I got a really raw deal when it came to picking out rooms. They said they "drew straws" to see who got which room but I, conveniently, was not around for the lottery.
Thus it was that I ended up in the smallest room in the house. The room was so small, I really honestly believe it had once been a walk-in closet. I ended up buying a futon for that room so I could actually have just a little bit of space. When the futon was folded out into bed mode, you couldn't even fully open the bedroom door. I had to squeeze through.
For my closet, there was this big white metal portable job that was more of a nuisance than anything else, because it robbed me of even more space. I eventually ended up trotting that clanging annoyance out to the garage and utilized a closet that was out in the hall. This proved to be a somewhat bad decision because, during one of our many gigantic parties, a drunken party-goer, unable to get into the bathroom, opened the hall closet and barfed all over my wardrobe.
It's safe to say that the Shark Shack was one of the better-known party havens in Winona at that time.We held huge parties to help bring down our rent costs. We also loved to fuckin' party.
Anyway, at some point during the year, I can't remember when, one of the roommates, Craig, turned 21. The other roommates took it upon themselves to take Craig out to celebrate the momentous event. I had to decline, because I had a huge project due the next day, so I had to stay behind and toil away in my little closet room.
A couple hours later, the troupe of celebrators returned, and they informed me that they had successfully encouraged Craig to drink 21 shots of assorted alcohol to commemorate his birthday.
"Are you fucking out of your minds?" I asked. "The guy could die."
They informed me that they knew Craig, and that he could handle his booze. As if to augment their point, Craig poked his head into the room, and he seemed, by all appearances, to be doing just fine.
But then, the transformation began to take place.
Typically, getting a good drunk on is a process, and hopefully a gradual one. You drink a beer or two, and you feel a general wash of relaxation come over you. Then you drink a couple more beers, and you start feeling tingly, and you laugh at stuff that's not all that funny. Then you drink a couple more beers and your vision gets blurry. Then you drink a couple more beers and you find yourself arguing with a plastic shark on the wall, and losing the argument due to considerable slurring. Such a process of drunkening usually takes quite a few hours to develop.
In Craig's case, he went throught he process in just under 15 minutes. He went from wanting to whoop it up and party some more, to blowing chunks and drunken dementia from about 11:15 to 11:30 p.m. It was kind of fascinating and frightening to behold.
The dementia stage was the most terrifying, because old Craig started hallucinating. Honest to God hallucinating. He was seeing shit that just wasn't there, and he eventually ended up punching at his mirror.
And Craig wasn't a small guy. He lifted weights and was in pretty good shape overall, so it wasn't like any of us were really all that keen on trying to offer assistance. We were more willing to just kind of shout things into his bedroom from the hallway.
"Hey, Craig, are you okay in there?" I yelled.
"Get the fuck away from me, mmbbmmblllmbbmmbb! Grover."
"Uh, was that a yes?"
*thump*
Craig passed out. And he passed out harder than any man I had ever seen. He was crumpled into a pathetic pile on the floor, and a couple of the other roommates, Troy and Rob, managed to get him into his bed, with his face aimed at a bucket on the floor because, man, Craig just simply had to puke at some point.
Not knowing quite what to do, Troy and I decided to enlist some help from our buddies who lived down the block. We figured Craig would be fine because there were two other roommates at home to watch over him and make sure he wouldn't swallow his tongue and die. It never occured to us that other two roommates, pretty drunk in their own right, would just go and fall asleep in their bedrooms.
Troy and I were over at our buddies' place for about 20 minutes, and the general consensus was that they probably wouldn't be much help, so we walked back to the Shark Shack.
Upon opening the front door, we were confronted with a particularly surreal scene. It was raining in the living room. There was water just cascading through the ceiling and, judging by how wet the floor was, it had been happening for quite some time, like, about 20 minutes. Holy hell.
There are a few thoughts that travel through your mind when you see water raining from the living room ceiling, and you know immediately there's probably a monumentally drunk individual upstairs who is responsible. And, I'm here to tell you, not one of those thoughts is a pleasant one.
I was envisioning Craig, face down in an overflowing bathtub, and that he was dead, and that there was going to be hell to pay, and that he probably puked on my clothes just for good measure.
I ran upstairs so fast, I think I took the staircase four stairs at a time. When I got to the bathroom I did, indeed, find Craig face down in the bathtub, but he wasn't dead. Apparently, he had decided that the bathtub offered an easier target than that maddeningly small toilet, so he let loose with an astounding amount of puke into the tub. Then, he tried to wash the puke away, but he broke the pipe, which was basically spewing forth water onto the floor. For his part, Craig looked pretty calm about the whole thing, passed out again on the floor and all.
I turned off the water, checked Craig's vitals, and went back downstairs to assess the damage. Water continued to trickle down from the ceiling for a good half hour, and we had to kill the power to a large portion of the house to ensure that short circuits wouldn't burn the place to the ground.
The next day, as Craig continued to sleep off his 21st birthday, the rest of us sat downstairs, watching TV. Gradually, we heard a cracking sound, faint at first, but it got louder.
Suddenly, a large portion of the plaster ceiling, about a three foot by ten foot section, came crashing to the floor, revealing the lathe board skeleton underneath and pretty much ensuring that none of us would ever see our deposit on THAT one.
At about 2 p.m., Craig came staggering down the stairs. He assessed the damage and looked in mounting irritation at the mass of plaster on the floor.
"What the fuck happened here?!" he demanded.
"Well Craig," I said. "Let me tell you a story. . . "
Back in 1992, I moved to Tokyo when my parents both got teaching jobs at an international school called St. Mary's.
St. Mary's is an all boys school which, for me--a straight horny youth in his late teens--may just as well have been a death sentence. When you start looking at the female faculty for your daily daydreaming sexual fantasies, you realize just how dire the situation was.
To sublimate my frustrated sexual desire, and to keep from hitting on Mrs. Kim and Ms. Hagenson, I took martial arts classes after school and took extremely long walks at night, and I masturbated like the existence of the world depended on it. Thankfully, there was a porno vending machine located about two blocks from my apartment, so I was set.
Anyway, when it came to actual school life, I was a pretty good student. I worked hard and I got good grades, and I was secure in the knowledge that most of my classmates, and the student body in general, basically liked me. At that point in my life, I genuinely believed that it was possible, if I put enough effort into it, to please all of the people all of the time. Since then, of course, I've discovered that it's far easier, and far more gratifying, to piss off most of the people most of the time.
Eventually, the school year progressed to the wrestling season. Now, back in the States, I had been a pretty good wrestler. Not great, mind you, but pretty good. I probably wouldn't have wrestled in the state tournament but, damn it, I like to think I would have been damned close. In other words, wrestling was a pretty important component of my life. And I'd be damned if I wasn't going to make the varsity team.
As it turned out, making the team wasn't all that difficult. I quickly discovered that being a "pretty good" wrestler in the States translated into being a fairly godlike wrestler in Japan. Plus, since my dad was the wrestling coach, I had the old psychological edge working for me as well.
During the first day of wrestling practice, I basically dominated everyone who was three weight classes above me and everyone below that. I felt like Robocop. It became plainly obvious to me that I could basically pick and choose which weight class I wanted to compete in, and nobody could even think of standing in my way.
That didn't stop people from thinking of standing in my way, of course. When I eventually decided that I wanted to compete in the 148 lb. weight class, I did have to face off against an individual who had his eye on that spot. So, a wrestle-off had to be held.
My opponent was a kid named Hikaru, a junior who I had no previous beef with. He was a mix of Japanese and American parentage, and he was a fairly muscular, if not somewhat uncoordinated, wrestler.
My wrestling experience, combined with my technique, easily outmatched Hikaru's superior strength, and I ended up pinning him within a couple of minutes, thus ensuring my varsity spot. Unbeknownst to me, however, was that, at the moment the mat was slapped indicating my victory, I had basically made an enemy for life.
Hikaru, I was to eventually learn, was one of those unstable youths, a young man who believed the world was laid out specifically to aid him, and any time things didn't go his way, he had no problem bending or breaking the rules to get what he wanted. In short, Hikaru was a prick.
Of course, I didn't know Hikaru was a prick, and I certainly didn't realize that, by beating him in the wrestle-off, I had upset his view that the world was laid out to aid him. As it was, Hikaru had decided to hate me, and he was forever looking for any excuse to confront me.
That excuse manifested itself after the very first wrestling meet. A couple of days earlier, Hikaru had hurt his shoulder during practice. He hurt it, in fact, while wrestling against. . . me. I had applied an arm bar, and he had screamed in painful protest, and I released him, not knowing, of course, that Hikaru was secretly blaming me for everything from his bruised ego, to his hurt shoulder, to global warming.
Well, anyway, after the wrestling meet, the St. Mary's wrestlers were cleaning up the gymnasium and rolling up the mats. Hikaru, with his hurt shoulder, couldn't do very much, understandably. I found myself at the end of a mat, helping to roll it up, with Hikaru working alongside me, doing basically very little beyond wincing in pain every time he made a movement.
"How's the shoulder," I asked him, even though I obviously knew the answer.
"Still hurts quite a bit," he said.
"Yeah," I acknowledged. "It looks like it."
You wouldn't think those to be fighten' words but, apparently, to Hikaru, those were fighten' words. He stood up and walked away from the mat, and I didn't think anything more of the exchange.
Later, in the locker room, I was busy being naked. I was taking a piss in the urinal prior to taking a shower, with a towel slung over my shoulder. Upon completing my piss, I turned around, only to be confronted by a fully-dressed Hikaru flanked by two of his pals.
Now, I'd dealt with bullies before back in my hometown high school, and I knew that they worked in groups of three or so, and I immediately came to the conclusion, standing there in front of Hikaru and company, that I was dealing suddenly with bullies. Which would have been fine. . . except I was naked.
There are certain things that are understood in this life, and they are things that you are probably born with. You magically understand, for example, that fire will probably burn you. You understand, for example, that a knife will probably cut you. And, damn it, you understand, for example, that you can not, under any circumstances, get beat up while you're naked. Humiliation, thy name is a naked butt-kicking.
"You've got a problem," said Hikaru.
"And that would be. . . ?" I asked, totally confused as to what I had a problem with.
"You don't believe my shoulder hurts, you fucker."
"What?!"
"I said my shoulder hurts, and you said 'yeah, it looks like it.'"
Now, I couldn't argue with Hikaru's accurate recitation, but I did take issue with his inflection on the word "looks." Quite frankly, that inflection simply wasn't there when I said it. Hikaru was exaggerating.
I honestly initially thought it looked like his shoulder hurt. However, as I stood there, naked in the bathroom, I came to the conclusion that Hikaru's shoulder, at that time, didn't look like it hurt nearly as much as he let on. Hikaru let me know just how little his shoulder hurt by giving me a forceful shove.
It's curious what you remember of a fight. You might remember a certain sound, or you might briefly be extremely cognizant of your heart beating. For me, what I remember after that first shove, was my penis and scrotum bouncing freely back and forth, slapping softly on my thighs.
The shove skittered me backward between two urinals, and I braced myself with my arms outstretched, accidently flushing one of them. One of Hikaru's buddies started laughing, but Hikaru didn't see the humor in anything. Instead, he threw a punch at me.
It was an easy punch to dodge. It was one of those telegraphed haymakers where he cocked his hand way back in a motion that seemed to take an eternity. By the time his forward motion had begun, I was already pretty much out of the way.
Which meant Hikaru ended up punching the wall. And he was none too pleased with the ensuing pain it apparently caused him. Hikaru crumpled down to his knees, and I used the distraction to run between his cronies, and get free from the bathroom, back into an environment where there were plenty of witnesses. They were naked witnesses, but at least I wasn't trapped in the bathroom by myself.
The fight basically ended there. Hikaru had pretty much bruised his fist, and there was no way his buddies were going to try to beat me up in a room full of my naked teammates. I took a leisurely shower, and I simply waited for my dad to shut things down at the school so I could walk home with him--just in case Hikaru and company were waiting outside the school, which they weren't.
Hikaru never tried to beat me up after that evening, and I suspect it had something to do with my wrestling teammates telling him that there would be a price to pay if he did. But, I still remember that confrontation vividly, because being caught naked in a fight is not something one forgets easily.
I think about stupid things. A lot. Like, every once in awhile, I'll find myself sitting there, wondering what it would be like to be accused of a truly heinous crime I didn't actually commit.
It would be a murder, maybe. A high profile murder, of some sort of important or famous person, perhaps with a decapitation and disembowelment thrown into the mix. And I just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and the most circumstantial evidence just initially points to me.
For the most part, I think I'd end up being exonerated, but the media frenzy and the lust to find out personal information about me would probably mean that I would be found guilty at least in the realm of popular opinion.
The press would get ahold of some sort of psychological evaluation of me that reveals that I spent a considerable amount of time as a child shooting birds, and baby birds, and squirrels, and rabbits, and the occasional cat, with my B.B. gun. And then they'd discover that my brother and I, and some of the neighbor kids, would sometimes get together and play baseball, using toads as a baseball.
newspaper stories would no doubt start out something like: "Ryan Rhodes, accused murderer of Hotel heiress and spread-legged trollop, Paris Hilton, reportedly had a childhood fascination with killing small creatures, according to a psychiatrist's testimony today."
So, of course I would be seen as guilty, because I killed small creatures as a child. That would make me an unfeeling, murderous evil-doer. Never mind that it's pretty common for kids to dabble in cruelty like that. People don't want to admit THAT.
It would be easier to dismiss me as an aberrant youth with a bloodlust for killing small creatures, and that that bloodlust caused me to chop off the head of Paris Hilton. Never mind that I have an appreciation for birds and rabbits now, and the thought of picking them off with a B.B. gun is kinda abhorrent to me. Who would believe me?
Then they'd discover the backyard grenade incident, and the story would be twisted into how I spent time creating pipe bombs and couldn't get enough of fireworks, and how I got a DWI when I was 19. All of this would hit the papers, I'm sure.
By the end of the trial, I'd be found innocent by a jury of my peers, but the court of public opinion would have branded me a disgusting human being at best, and a rap-beating murderer at worst.
And man, that would really suck.
Some seriously fascinating, and frankly damning, developments on Layne-Watch have taken place over at Joshua's blog. Does Layne = Acanit? The evidence points to yes, although there still some tiny little bit of wiggle room. I think the case is almost completely closed myself.
I think the one attendee to this meeting (Anita Something) would be an ideal mate for this guy.
Call me Cupid.
I've never been in debt. Okay, that's not entirely true. Yes, I've been in the kind of debt where I had to make car payments, and I'm currently in the kind of debt that says I have to make house payments.
I've never been in credit card debt, however. Truth be told, I've never even owned a credit card. I don't trust them. I've been conditioned not to trust them thanks to many years of living with college roommates.
Most of my college roommates had this weird outlook on credit cards. Basically, they thought credit cards were magical pieces of plastic that just magically paid for things and that they were somehow immune from the the ensuing debt that came about due to excessive credit card spending.
I'll admit it: I was sort of jealous of my roommates and their magical credit cards. After all, they always seemed to have money and, if they didn't, they just whipped out their credit cards. Books? Put them on the credit card. Food? Put it on the credit card. Night out at a strip club? credit card.
And yet there I was writing checks and budgeting like a fool. I remember thinking that I was doing everything all wrong. I mean, there I would sit, meticulously lording over my finances, while my roommates went waltzing all over town swiping their credit cards with the careless glee of a six-year-old with a loaded pistol.
Then, one year, I was a roommate with a guy named Chad. Chad was actually a former high school classmate of mine. He was, and is, a tech-head. He's one of those guys who was born to know technology. Way back in elementary school, he taught me how to write simple programs for the Apple IIc, and he always just seemed to know everything about computers.
But he didn't know shit about personal finances. He whipped out any one of his many credit cards with the swiftness and ease of a Old West gunslinger. By the time we became roommates, he had already accrued over $10,000 in credit card debt.
I remember thinking what an incredibly large amount of money that seemed to be, especially when I factored in the understanding that he also received financial aid, and that he also worked. Granted, he worked at the local Brach's candy factory on the Gummi Bear line, which paid about as well as you might imagine, but it was still money, so I came to the conclusion that old Chad was a pretty carefree spender.
Well, one day, I popped into Chad's outrageously messy room where I noticed, tucked between two huge bags of pilfered defective Gummi Bears, a credit card notice that was slugged "Urgent!" and another that was slugged "Immediate Payment Required" and still another that read "We Break Fingers And Toes."
Then the calls started coming in, usually two or three a day. "Is Mr. Haugen available? We really need to speak with him." No, he's not here. "Are you sure you're not really Mr. Haugen?" Yes, I'm sure. "Well, when he comes in, have him call Mike at Discover immediately." *sound of shotgun cocking* Will do.
Chad was masterful when it came to avoiding creditors. He always seemed to leave the apartment just two or three minutes before a creditor called. It was like he had some sort of sixth sense. Which was all fine and dandy, except that I ended up being the intermediary between Chad and the creditors, so I got to absorb all the impatient anger and suspicion of basically every credit card company on the planet.
It was the day a creditor appeared, in person, at our doorstep that I realized Chad's debt situation was probably more dire than Chad cared to admit. There was a knock at the door, I answered, and a gentleman in a suit that looked both impressive and threatening stood before me. He asked to see a Mr. Chad Haugen, at which point I heard a little scuffling emanating from Chad's room as Chad scurried out the back entrance which, conveniently, was located at the far end of his bedroom.
We chatted together, the ominous creditor and me, for about an hour, waiting for Chad to get home, even though, of course, there was no way in holy hell Chad was going to make an appearance while that guy was in our apartment. I even had to produce my ID, so the creditor was satisfied that I wasn't, in fact, Chad Haugen.
After that, I believe, Chad ended up getting a loan from his parents, or somebody, so he could pay off his credit card debt at least enough to keep the creditors at bay. He eventually got a job working at IBM, which was a long-assed commute from Winona to Rochester, but paid a whole lot more than the Gummi Bear line.
As for me, Chad's experience with credit cards pretty much scared me away from plastic for good.
