Another blast from the past: the second in a series of five pieces about my checkered employment history. Enjoy!
The Many Jobs of Monsoon Forecast: Volume Two
Thursday, 26 October 2006
In my junior year of college, in preparation to become a Resident Assistant (RA) in my senior year, I took part in a new program implemented by the Residence Life office. The Housing Director had the idea to put upperclassmen into the freshman “residence hall” (as we were told to call it), so that the “first-year students” (as we were told to call them) would have us to look up to in addition to their RAs. As a Role Model (RM) the parameters of my job were ill-defined to say the least, but generally included basic counseling, directing the students to on- and off-campus services, and basically setting an upstanding example for my tenderfooted neighbors in Crowell Hall. And RMs got single rooms, so that was sweet.
The problem that emerged with the RM program straightaway was that those students who’d been enlisted into this bold experiment were of widely varying restraint, integrity, and rectitude. One of the RMs (there were approximately six of us in the coed dorm) was growing weed in his closet. Another RM who was a junior—and is currently a trusted educator of youth—began dating a freshman girl who lived right down the hall from him. Others helped their dormmates get into alcohol-soaked fraternity parties at the Albright Woods, an apartment complex on the edge of campus. Probably not exactly the kind of ideal guidance or exemplary modeling that had been visualized by the Housing Director when he began the RM program.
But in early 1994, one Role Model in particular put all the other questionably qualified RMs to shame, and distinguished himself as one of the all-time outstanding dunderheads of his generation.
I was sitting in my room at the west end of the first floor with my good friend and former roommate Dave, who at the time was actually an RA in another building. We were in all likelihood talking about our next move in our campaign to hasten the downfall of Greek life on Albright’s campus. (We had written an editorial about why fraternities are divisive, and the process required to join them humiliating, in Albright’s newspaper; the license plate of Dave’s truck read “GDI,” which stood for God Damn Independent. Not surprisingly, one of Albright’s fraternities assigned the stealing of this plate as a pledge activity.)
All of a sudden, we heard an extremely loud noise that I said at the time sounded like someone had taken a large metal desk and dropped it from the ceiling. Since this was my third year living in a dorm, I had become sort of inoculated to clamor and cacophony. Dave recognized more immediately that there may be a serious problem, though, and we bounded curiously out into the hallway—which was rapidly filling with smoke that seemed to be originating from the opposite (east) end of the hall.
As we hurried down the hall toward the smoke, pounding on doors and shouting that folks should make their way out of the building expeditiously, we saw a figure emerge from the room that was apparently the one emitting all the smoke. This charred, dazed figure staggered past us and out the side door. Dave and I looked at each other incredulously. “That was Don Bitting!” I said, referring to one of my fellow Role Models, a quiet, aloof fellow who lived at the opposite end of the hallway. “His eyebrows are off!” Dave observed. And, as I made a point of verifying later when I saw Don, they were.
Dave and I covered our mouths with our shirts and rushed to the room from which Don had issued forth in a stunned stupor only moments earlier. We halted at the threshold and would have gasped at what we saw, except that we would have aspirated a lungload of smoke and collapsed. The walls were charred, the ceiling was charred. Nearly every loose object in the room—cups, pillows, books, posters, Cheetos—had been pulled into the center of the room, where they lay in a charred pile. There was only smoke (no fire) and it was beginning to dissipate a bit, so we could see more clearly what had been wrought in the dorm room. We got out of there just as the fire whistles and emergency sirens began to wail urgently in the distance.
Once everyone was outside—dorm residents, RAs, RMs, RDs (Resident Directors), emergency personnel, campus police—a clearer picture of what had happened began to come into focus. A singed, perplexed, and comically browless (but all in all, uninjured) Don Bitting was being simultaneously treated by paramedics and questioned by campus security and fire police.
It seems that Don—who was, it bears repeating, living in Crowell Hall as a Role Model—had been trying to make a bomb in his room. (He was apparently constructing the incendiary device simply for kicks, and did not bear any ill intent in terms of its potential use.) The key blunder in Don’s recreational pursuit was that he was building the bomb on top of the desk in his room, right in front of the heater. The high temperature from the heating register somehow ignited what he had finished of da bomb, triggering a massive implosion, or a violent collapse inward. Unlike an explosion, in which matter bursts outward, an implosion causes matter to be pulled toward the center of the vessel that is imploding; hence the bizarre mess we found inside Don Bitting’s room after the loud noise we heard.
[Above is a typical Albright dorm room, for illustration purposes. Don was doing his little science project on the desk right under the window, over the heating vent.]
According to the firefighters, Don’s little exploding surprise was not even a quarter finished; if it had been, the resulting blast could have taken out half the building. The aftermath? Don’s eyebrows grew back, the building didn’t sustain any major damage, no one was seriously injured. Albright’s housing department came through in fine style. Even though Don endangered the lives of all of his fellow residents, and broke innumerable of school regulations and actual laws, he was allowed to pay a small fine and move into another room in campus housing (but tragically was stripped of his Role Model status). Because I felt it was ridiculous that he had not been expelled, or even robustly disciplined, I gave Don the stinkeye every time I saw him about campus.
Since I had not been a filthy letch, had a ganja garden in my room, or nearly blown the building to Kingdom Come, the Housing Director adjudged me fit to serve as a Resident Assistant (RA) in Crowell Hall, again the freshman dorm, during my senior year. Nearly every day of this job was filled with what would be considered “typical” RA fare: Performing initial room inspections in August; yelling at the residents throughout the year for clogging the commode with the gastrointestinal remnants of their bacchanalian exertions, littering beer cans (and actual beer) on the floor, playing their music too loudly, and behaving like inconsiderate slobs; and performing final room inspections in May.
Fortunately, I was afforded some opportunities to go beyond these administrative and executive duties and actually help them adjust a bit to college life. I provided career counseling (despite the fact that I was about to graduate with no clue as to my own career aspirations or qualifications), academic guidance, and the like.
One October evening, however, fomented a dramatic exception to this otherwise-routine experience. First, dear reader, permit me to acquaint you with the principals in this little tragicomedy:
- Ozzie, a Role Model living across the hall cater-corner from me, was an African American junior at Albright. The low timbre of his voice, his rather robust physique, and his status as a starter on the football team projected an intimidating image to some. In actuality, though, Ozzie was an exceptionally gracious and considerate person with a fantastic sense of humor.
- Angelo, a freshman student of Italian heritage who hailed from northern New Jersey, was pleasant enough, but was easily led and had a predilection for exercising remarkably poor judgment.
- Angelo’s brother, aged approximately 23 years, had not attended college; he was visiting his younger brother on the weekend in question. He was rather huskily built, had slightly below-average personal hygiene, and well below-average natural intelligence. I cannot recall his name, but I’m going to call him “Bruno” because it fits well with what I can recall of him.
At 2:30am, very early on a Sunday morning, there was a knock at my door.
“Glen, you in there?” My initial impulse was to ignore the knock. Whatever it was could surely wait until morning. I had almost fallen completely back asleep when there was another, more insistent knock. Annoyed, I shuffled over to the door.
“There better be somebody dead out there,” I bellowed in the most authoritative voice I could muster at this ungodly hour, angry at having been disturbed from a sound slumber.
“There’s about to be,” I heard from the other side of the door, and my heart sank past my stomach and into my knees. That sounds like Ozzie’s voice, I thought.
“Coming,” I managed.
When I opened the door and squinted into the harsh hallway light, there stood Ozzie in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt, looking fairly peeved. Next to him stood a sheepish, disheveled, nervous-looking Bruno, reeking of beer and holding a roll of paper towels. Ozzie spoke first.
“I woke up and this dude was pissin’ on my desk.”
Now fully awake, but not entirely believing what I had heard, I looked to Bruno for argument or clarification. His silence spoke volumes: Ozzie’s brutally succinct summary of the situation had been precise.
When Bruno disappeared with his paper towels and found a bottle of cleaning solution, I realized with a start that it was my responsibility as the RA to figure out how in happy hell to handle this explosive matter. I vacillated between laughter and tears, never quite succumbing to either. After waking Angelo to help his brother clean Ozzie’s room, and depositing Ozzie in my room to become calm—though it must be noted that, all things considered, he handled this incident with uncanny grace, restraint, and understanding—I set about the monumental task of answering the questions swirling within me: What the…? How in the…? But why…?
After a long early morning of baffling interviews and staggering revelations, I pieced together what had happened. To explain it to you fine people, a diagram will need to be employed:
Having passed out in Angelo’s room after spending an evening earnestly pursuing a state of extreme intoxication, Bruno was awakened around 2:20am by an intense pressure on the inner wall of his bladder. He dragged himself into the hall and made a right toward the lavatory, which was at the end of the hall on the left. Unfamiliar surroundings and intense inebriation conspired to impair Bruno’s sense of spatial reasoning, however, and he made his left two doors too early.
Opening Ozzie’s unlocked door, Bruno made his way over to the desk that spanned the width of the room under the window (see “typical Albright dorm room” illustration above in the implosion tale). Feeling certain that he had reached the approximate location of the urinal, he relieved himself with full force and prodigious volume. Bruno soaked the top of the desk. Ozzie’s CD player. A book. Soon his pee spilled into the heater. Onto the floor. Into one of Ozzie’s sneakers.
Friends, to help you further envision what took place here, let me provide you with another diagram, this time a layout of Ozzie’s room:
Ozzie was roused by the sound of liquid splashing on hard surfaces—and when he sat up in bed, he was greeted by the sight of a chunky figure silhouetted against the window in the moonlight, and the unmistakable odor of urine composed mostly of alcohol.
“What the [heck] are you doing?” he yelled, and turned on the light. Having been jarringly snapped out of his bladder-voiding reverie, Bruno zipped up, stammered an unintelligible explanapology, then fell silent as the produce of his wayward whiz was harshly illumed before him.
Soon thereafter, I heard that knock at my door.
The aftermath of this adventure was, for the most part, pedestrian. I filled out a write-up form, citing Angelo for failing to control his brother’s leak-taking, and submitted it to the housing office. Angelo and his brother spent much of the early morn cleaning and disinfecting the surfaces in Ozzie’s room that had been despoiled by Bruno’s mislaid tinkle; Angelo made at least one subsequent visit to ventilate and more thoroughly clean the affected areas. It was determined by the housing director that Angelo would be financially responsible to replace Ozzie’s CD player, book and sneakers—but to his credit and my amazement, Ozzie did not pursue this course of action. The CD player still worked, he said; the sneakers were old and ready to be discarded anyway; and only the cover of the book had been wetted, so it was fine.
About two weeks after the episode, a final meeting was held to wrap up this sordid affair and move on with our lives. Angelo and I met with the Dean of Students, Dr. Carolyn Brooks, in her office. Dr. Brooks hailed from the Deep South—Alabama or Mississippi, I believe, and she retained a thick accent. She was one of the most approachable (and one of the only capable) administrators I met while at Albright, but her stout frame and firm, authoritative drawl engendered fear in those who slipped up or crossed her. She was an admirably forthright kind of woman.
[Selwyn Hall, site of Dr. Carolyn Brooks’ office]
After briefly reviewing the circumstances that led to our meeting, Dr. Brooks asked Angelo to describe what he and his brother had done to rectify what wrongs had been done. He chronicled the disinfecting, the airing out, and apologies; Ozzie’s graciousness and unwillingness to insist on being compensated for his trouble. Dr. Brooks seemed satisfied with this outcome, but underscored the infractions that had been committed to ensure that the young man sitting before her grasped the senselessness and impropriety of the episode.
“Son, do you understand what I’m sayin’?”
“Yes, Dr. Brooks,” Angelo replied.
“I mean, we just can’t have people pissin’ on desks.”