So this weekend, I’m heading up north—to Albany—to visit my buddy Dave. Dave and I were friends throughout college: classmates, drinking buddies, and—for three weeks in Greece and the whole of my senior year—roommates.
A few weeks after that, I’ll be paid a visit here in the city by another roommate o’ mine during college, John. John was actually the first from our little coven of friends to move east after graduation; by the time I arrived in New York a few months later, John was already living and working about an hour away in Connecticut. He would visit me about once per month, and we would usually end up acting like jackasses or morons, and—on particularly good nights—both. John’s back in the Midwest now, and I haven’t seen him in nearly two years.
To be sure, I have other very good friends from college: Brent and Clint and Blair and maybe some others, but I’ll have to admit that these two upcoming weekends have made me a little bit wistful. I was trying to explain that to someone the other day, but they grew up in New York and have always had a lot of friends around. They couldn’t understand how hard it can be to stuff as much as you can into a duffel bag and move halfway across the country into a city with 8 million strangers. Make no mistake, I don’t have very many regrets in my life, least of all about coming out here. I have a job I (mostly) really enjoy and I’ve met someone who turned out to show me more patience and love than I ever deserved to have. But still, I want to be able to tell a story to someone about something retarded we did one boring afternoon and have them realize how Goddamn funny it is, even if they have no idea what the hell “Shovel Face” means.
So that’s what I’m gonna do here.
Not every story, of course, because there are far too many. But two. They may not be the best stories out there, but they’re the ones I’m thinking of right now.
Spring 1999. Brent, Clint, John and I are living in the Dirty Buck, the name affectionally given to Buxton Hall, our residence of one semester. In a way, Buxton was better than where we were previously living because it had its own bathroom, but on the other hand it fell upon our wholly incompetent shoulders to keep said bathroom clean, which we proudly did not. The toilet was an unmitigated terror; the shower was inexplicably worse. (After all, aren’t showers inherently clean? They’re filled with hot water and soap, how could they not be? Anyway.) About halfway through the semester, we started to notice a very strong, very unpleasant odor coming from the drain. What began at first as a sort-of-funny lark (“Hey, dude, what the fuck is that? Pass the Kahlua.”) quickly evolved into something much worse, as the shower was right next to the little roomlet where we all slept. We started pouring stuff down the drain—first shower cleaner spray, then bleach, then industrial-strength drain cleaner—nothing ever worked. Whatever caused the smell was completely immune to all previously-known forms of chemical attack. Even Brent and Dave, both ordained clergy in the Universal Life Church, were unable to rid our shower of the smell through intense prayer. We never did get rid of that smell. I’ll bet it still smells today. Sometimes, when the wind is right, I walk outside and think—just for a moment—that I can still smell whatever it is. And it haunts me.
One more. Of course, there’s the story about the band of obese guys that dropped by our room one night to kick Clint’s ass but couldn’t get close enough to him because of his giant foam cowboy hat. But you all know that story already. Then there’s the story Dave likes to tell about the time in Greece when I threw his toothbrush in the garbage can, but if I don’t remember it it didn’t really happen. So I’ll tell a little story about the final week of my senior year.
Dave, Brent, the Fat Bastard, and I were all living in Detroit Rock City, a laughably small “apartment” just across the street from campus. Some time earlier in the semester, out of frustration or sheer lack of inertia, I had hurled a book across the room. Not surprisingly, it knocked a gaping hole in the wall. [Pause for snicker at my use of the term "gaping hole." Continue.] We may have covered the hole with a poster, we may have just let it stay, my memory becomes fuzzy at this point. (And, I believe, I may be getting two “hole in the wall” stories mixed up.) Fast forward to final week of the semester. Brent is gone, spending a semester in London. Fat Bastard is gone, off trying to molecularly fuse himself to his girlfriend. Dave is out, probably not going to class. I stand in the middle of the apartment, trying to figure out what to do with the hole in the wall. The hole I created. I’m nothing if not a) resourceful or b) an idiot, so I stuffed the hole with newspaper and the cardboard from a case of beer until it was approximately flush with the wall, and then paved the whole Goddamn thing over with plaster donated by the art department supply closet. A can of paint found in the basement matched close enough, and by the end of the night we had us a brand new wall. I’m sure the apartment has been re-painted since then, but I’d venture to guess that my newspaper-and-beer-case patch job is still there, probably keeping the whole damn place from crashing to the ground.
More than four years removed from that night, standing in my apartment with nothing but a stack of newspapers, an empty case of beer, and a dream, a lot has changed: some of my friends got married, the rest of us have jobs and house payments and all the other shit that comes along with getting old and selling out. I may not e-mail or call my friends as much as I used to, but I don’t think they hold that against me. I definitely don’t get to see them as much as I would like, but when I do, we always have a good time. Even as our lives continue to grow further and further apart, I look forward to visiting Dave and his wife this weekend, or having John and his wife over in October, or hanging out with Clint around Thanksgiving, or maybe seeing Brent once every six years, knowing that—like the smell in our shower at the Dirty Buck or the slipshod patch job in Detroit Rock City—they’ll always be there.
-sam.