It’s 2001, and I have just arrived on campus at the University of North Dakota in the city of Grand Forks for my first year of college.
I am excited, slightly nervous.
Grand Forks is only 81 miles North of my hometown, Fargo, and several of my friends are going to be here as well. This will be a lot like high school, only better, I assume, but I don’t know, really. Most of my knowledge about college life comes from Saved By the Bell The College Years and I can’t imagine that’s very accurate.
I’m excited to learn, I’m excited to party. I would very much like to lose my virginity. I am very typical.
I’ve driven to Grand Forks in my Cobalt Blue 1994 Chevy Cavalier, a terrible plastic car. I wanted to, as a joke, get a personalized license plate that said FNKYDVA. I am now glad I didn’t do that.
My father has followed me to Grand Forks to help me get settled. He and my mother have just divorced. I am glad to not be in Fargo for all of that.
We unload my stuff. Some books, clothes, a gorgeous blue iMac, fresh from Best Buy. We say some unsentimental goodbyes, and I sit on the curb to smoke my first cigarette as a free man and contemplate my new life.
My prospects are good. I’m out of the house, finally. My parents are divorced, finally. That was a long time coming. This isn’t the greatest college in the world, but it’s fine. I’ll maybe stay here for a couple of years and then transfer somewhere else. What do I want to be? A writer, mostly. Maybe a teacher. I think most writers also teach. Journalism? Maybe journalism. I’m not so concerned about any of that now. My social life is what I’m concerned about. Meeting girls. I want to meet girls. And I want to drink. Drink to meet girls, that’s the goal.
I am intelligent but not smart.
I am perhaps the most free I have ever been or will ever be. I could get in my car and leave here. That option has always been in the back of my mind. I could, theoretically, walk up to any kid here, theoretically start a conversation, and begin a new life path.
I don’t do this.
My friends begin to arrive. Brady, Jake, Jamie, Travis, Tony. I’ve known all of these guys since we were kids. I have not gone far outside of my comfort zone.
Once we’re moved in, we gather in Jake’s dorm room to make plans for the night. Jake’s dorm will become a central meeting point as he will soon have driven his roommate out with a plan of making himself impossible to live with and leaving dildos everywhere. Jake’s room will soon become barely inhabitable. One night, ripped on whiskey, with whiskey left, but out of chaser, we will take some pudding cups out of his mini-fridge while he is in the bathroom and chase the whiskey with that. He will be furious that we have stolen his pudding. He will become more furious when he notices that we are getting cigarette ash all over his floor, as though he’s not the worst offender. He will yell at us. Jaime, who is an asshole, will look him dead in the eye, drop his cigarette on the flour, and grind it into the rug with his foot. Jake will lose his mind and kick us all out. By the time I get back to my dorm, just down the hall, he will have left a message on my answering machine. It goes like this:
“I’m sick and tired of you guys coming into my room, eating all my pudding cups, and putting out cigarettes on my floor!”
He will then call my mother at 2 in the morning and make the same complaint to her.
This quaint anecdote is my freshman year of college in miniature.
This is a digression.
Tonight, we are all excited. We’ve obtained alcohol – a bottle of Windsor Canadian Whiskey, our staple. We are free, and we have booze and cigarettes and a lead on a party – at a frat house down the road. We know some people there, from the class ahead of ours.
We are not frat guys, but we don’t necessarily know this yet.
Okay, here’s where I get to the real part of the story and stop writing like some half-ass college bro Hemingway.
So, we get sufficiently liquored up – shots and more shots all around, something to ease the nerves – and head out, as a group to this party. This is how we almost always travel in college, none of us confident enough yet to make the leap to any kind of truly independent existence.
We get to this party at around dusk, and it is pretty massive. People outside, people inside. College Girls. Dudes that looked so much older than me talking to those girls. There’s a karaoke machine outside and this lunatic – who I’ll encounter again later – is singing a Bloodhound Gang song and everyone is eating it up. He is the king of this party, clearly.
Near him, people happier than I have ever been or ever will be are playing volleyball. It’s all just so fucking typical.
At some point in the night, very drunk, I am separated from the pack, which is not my preference. I need the comforting strangeness of my friends to make me feel comfortable and less strange.
I somehow started talking to this guy I vaguely know from high school – two years older than me – a “COOL GUY”, and completely obnoxious.
He says, “You having fun? See any girls you like? Are you a ladies man?” Shit like that. I’d respond “Kind of, obviously, and no” if I were being honest, but I’m not.
So he says, “That girl over there. Go talk to her.”
This is an obnoxious thing to say.
I resist, but ultimately cave. Maybe this guy knows something I don’t. So, far too drunk, attempting confidence, no idea what to do, I approach this girl, who is in a group of four girls, chatting, and – I cringe to even say this – I put my arm around her shoulders and say, “How’s it going, ladies?” To which one of the other girls responds.
“Don’t FUCKING touch my friend!”
The guy that urged me on is watching and laughing, and all the girls laugh.
And so I decide to leave the party. It’s really my only option at this point, and the decision is not even made consciously. I am bodily repelled from the party.
Really, the only reasonable option would be to laugh along and apologize and have a conversation, but I’m not particularly emotionally mature at this point. So, I walk back to the dorm, in a blind shame panic.
When I get to the dorm, my situation becomes worse. I don’t have my keys. I have locked them in my car. I have the key to get into my room, but not the dorm. And it is very late, and nobody is around. I wait, hoping for someone to open the door for me, but a half hour goes by and no one comes.
I head back to the Frat Party, try to remain inconspicuous. Head down, I make my way inside to find the one guy I actually know who lives there, Jeremy. I explain to him that I am locked out of my dorm and just want to sleep. He generously offers up his room, which he shares with the Bloodhound Gang lunatic.
And so I lay in his bed. This is not how I imagined the night going. People are still having fun outside of this room, but I am hiding in a dude’s frat house bunk bed, listening to Eliot Smith, trying to sleep.
The door opens, and the Bloodhound Gang Lunatic comes in. He is tall and lanky and has a wild beard, long before wild beards are popular. He LOOKS like a madman. He doesn’t know I’m there. He seems upset. He is crying. He grabs the cordless phone, and climbs to the top bunk, almost steps on me on his way up.
In his bunk, he dials a number and immediately begins to scream at the person on the other line.
“You fucking lied to me! I know you fucking lied to me! You always do this!”
From the phone I can here a girl, frantic, sobbing, denying.
“You fucking liar! I’m going to kill you!”
He hangs up the phone, hops off the top bunk, tosses the phone on the bed I’m lying on, and storms out.
Now I am left with a decision. Should I warn somebody that this man is potentially going to kill his probably girlfriend? Is this my problem? Is there a moral obligation? My confidence is shot. I convince myself that there’s no way he’s actually going to do anything. I try to go to sleep. I cannot.
A half hour later, the phone, still on the bed, rings, and, unthinking, I answer it.
It is a sobbing, scared girl.
“Help me! Help me! He’s going to kill me!”
I say, “Um, hey, I’m just in Jeremy’s room. Were are you? What do you want me to do?”
I can now hear pounding on a door and the Bloodhound Gang Lunatic screaming.
“I’m locked in the bathroom. Fuck. He’s going to kick the door down. Tell Jeremy! He’s going to kill me!”
She hangs up the phone.
I hop out of the bed, take a large swig from a bottle of booze on a desk, and head out to find Jeremy. This doesn’t take long. He’s playing pool.
“You’re up!” he says. “Grab a beer!”
“The guy that stays in the room with you is trying to kill his girlfriend. She told me to tell you.”
“Oh, fuck. I’ve gotta go!”
And he leaves. Everyone else scatters.
I sit down on a filthy couch, suddenly alone in the rec room of a frat house, and drink some more, until around 4 in the morning, when I decide to try again to get into my dorm.
This time I get lucky, the first luck I’ve had all night. A janitor is entering through the back and I ease in behind him.
I go up to my new room, smoke a cigarette at the window, sloppily, blowing smoke inside and leaving ash everywhere. I strip down to my boxers and go to sleep on top of the covers.
I am awoken at 8 AM the next morning, when the door to my new room opens. It is my roommate. He is with his family – Mother, Father, Sister. They look nice. They look like maybe they’re going to church after this. I am just about naked, my penis is very probably hanging out the flap of my boxers. I look like I’ve been up all night drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes. The room smells of whiskey and cigarettes.
I smile, say hello, pull the covers over myself, and go back to sleep.
Freedom is hard.
The end.