Me at 24, with Heidi & Ruben. Yes that is a 'this is your brain, this is your brain on reggae' shirt.
Heartland, Wisconsin. A place with a mid sized Uni the undergrads call UW-Zero. A place I lived for 2 years. A place where I studied from morning until midnight, most of those days. However, during those two years, this is what else I experienced. Buckle up.
- Briefly lived in the dorm, until I couldn't take it. My roommate was a Pakistani guy we'll call Tashfin. Nice mellow guy, good roommate. His pals called our room incessantly. The first few days I answered the phone not w/'hello' but rather 'he's not here.' A few days later I unplugged the phone entirely.
- Across the hall was a guy we'll call Chris Mullin (like the NBA player). Chris had a nasty temper issue I suspect was from his mom drinking whilst preggars. He had the facial features of FAS. I'll skip ahead (constant freakouts) to the money shot: I was with 3 classmates heading to a study session in the stairwell with him above us, shouting loudly, and I quote verbatim: "I'm going to break your Jewish face!" My last recollection of him is him being tackled & pinned by a campus cop. All the best.
- A couple doors down, I walked by an open room. 4 black guys in there, listening to music, don't recall it but must have been something interesting. I stood in the doorway, asked what it is. Instead of answering one asked me the universal white guy coolness question, know what it is? It's this: do you like Elvis? I instantly replied with the truth: nope (I'll do a separate post on Elvis but the gist: Elvis was an entertainer, mainly a good singer. World is full of them). So I became pals with John, we played music for each other. One memorable visit to my room was me playing 'La Raza' by Kid Frost, one of the best songs of all time, with all of us jammed in there grooving, me the only white fella. So one day I go to my room and John is there bleeding from the head, campus security all over. Some other guy wrapped soda cans in a towel and attacked him, swinging it into his head. Just another day in the Oshkosh dorm.
- Meeting the first epic love of my life, we'll call her Heidi, pic above, randomly in the cafeteria. Turns out, she had a baby iguana in her dorm room. I had a Texas Indigo snake, name of Ruben, also in the pic, in my dorm room. What are the odds?! It was fate. Inseparable for a year. And yes, that's me at 24, wearing a 'this is your brain, this is your brain on reggae' t-shirt.
- Heidi's roommate was maladjusted, mostly mute, with a mentally ill non-student boyfriend, we'll call Don. He was a 90 lb bag of bones, with a knack for yelling at everyone in his path. His dad would leave messages on the answering machine, we heard one when we didn't answer the phone. Those two were warring, it was sad. My last recollection was me & Heidi, and those two, and a police officer, all 5 of us in her room, because he was complaining about something, I think me. Or Heidi. Not sure. No matter. I remember the cop thought it all ridiculous & pointless.
- I found a cheap room a few blocks off campus, in a then empty house. Heidi moved in. A month later, this guy from Turkey moved in. He married an American, they were divorcing, 2 kids, he was bitter as fuck. Heidi told me he made a pass at her, he denied it, the situation deteriorated until we actually started brawling. I remember flinging him airborne against the wall, he came back at me, he was small but weirdly wiry, and I subdued him and he wised up. He moved out the next day. Left me with a $100 phone bill, which at the time seemed like Gordon Gecko money.
- Moved to main street downtown, over a couple bars, too handy. Her iguana was giant by then, several feet long, roaming free around the apt. He would climb up her jeans when she was making him food. Ruben grew to 6 or 7 feet, they're hard to measure. I used to walk downtown daily in summer with Ruben over my shoulders, listening to screams coming from the cars.
- We met a guy on the street, holding a 2 ft lizard called a Tegu. We'll call him Wayne. We all hit it off, and after Heidi & I had a row, he came over and got her. She stayed at his place, and kept staying there. And that was that. I found out months later she was pregnant, and he split on her. She wanted to get back together with me, but that wasn't going to happen. She moved back in with her mum, went on welfare, and raised her boy.
- We met a guy at a reptile store in Milwaukee, we'll call him Kevin. Kevin bred big boa's & pythons. He invited us over and he had this big basement, filled with reptiles (for breeding / sales). He asked me to help him bathe the Anaconda, which was around 12ft, which I did. He had this 55 gallon drum with a bottom drain, that he would half fill w/warm water and put them in there, basically a big jacuzzi for them. Kevin later brokered a deal to land me an adult Mangrove Monitor (an exotic lizard, semi-tame). Unfortunately for me it had to have been wild caught, as it wasn't as tame as hoped. Kept for a few months, then gave back to him for re-homing. Their defense mechanism was explosive shitting btw, for real. Jelly?
- So for the absolute lowlight of my 2 years, the following ethical dilemma. The smartest student in our program, we'll call her Heather, was invited to a group study session before the end of semester final, in explicit violation of the program's rules. She was invited and ordered 'don't tell Scott.' I walked by her on campus and she stopped me and told me about it. At the time I just laughed and smh. But it really started gnawing on me: the violation of trust the professor had placed in us. I called Heather & told her it was bugging me hugely. She said 'same here.' We agreed to inform the prof, but not name names (in hindsight, that last part was a mistake). The both of us had a sit with the prof and put her in a tough spot, because we wouldn't name names (there was only 10 of us in our class, 2 yr program) but also that it happened at all. What the prof did was inform us all at the next class that if she heard of any more violations she would fail all of us. That of course, is the worst possible reaction, as it doesn't stop cheaters, it stops truth-tellers.
- This put a sizable strain with me and my classmates the following year. I became friendly with the 10 new incoming students. But I had lots of strain with 2 classmates, one we'll call Mike Jr, a drunken idiot who only made grad school because he was an undergrad there. Mike Jr: animal, vegetable or mineral. He in fact started a smear campaign against me, or tried to, with the 1st year students, who collectively thought him a complete idjit (the incoming dug me, because I treated them like adults, not kids). One time he called Denise, whom I was sitting next to, to warn her about me. She just laughed at him, hung up on him, and we resumed necking. The other was an anti-semitic good old boy from the deep south we'll call Scott. A classic maga closed-minded refrigerator light, long before maga was a thing. He loathed me for outing the cheating ring.
- My highlight of those two years was successfully re-creating the Asch conformity experiment live to my classmates even after explaining how it worked (I inverted the cohort instructions). Those that conformed, 5 classmates, hated me even more for being duped (technically duping themselves) in front of everyone. Sometimes science isn't pretty.
- I moved into another apartment, with 3 undergrad dudes. One guy, we'll call him Blong, was a weightlifter / drunk, who came home late one night with an entire parking meter, ripped out of the sidewalk. Had a giant ball of cement at the bottom. A week later I opened the door to find 3 cops outside, who somehow knew all about it, and wanted him. I pointed down the hall, he's in there. They used to come home late night with other bar drunks, put on Billy Joel's 'piano man' and all sing along at the top of their lungs. It was pathetic. When I was a freshman, I was listening to the Velvet Underground, Neil, Bob. What matters is not what you're like, but what you like.
- Had a practicum project each semester (pro bono gig for a local business). One was with we'll call them Craig & Cheryl. Cheryl vanished every weekend to go fuck her bf in Milwaukee. Craig & I took our studies more seriously and studied/worked 7 days/week to stay afloat. So Cheryl has a private sit with the professor complaining that we had the gall to work on the weekends when she's gone. The prof has precisely zero sympathy for her, saying 'it's grad school.' So now we can add Cheryl to my list of haters. Craig & I got along great though, and neither of us cared in the slightest she fell behind. Priorities.
- Post Heidi, now 25, I met another at a party, a tall drink of water that stuck for a year, we'll call her Tina. And that's a package of Drum rolling tobacco in my shirt, sweet jesus.
- We lasted a year, until I moved back to Mpls, after finishing my thesis. But, funny story, heavy with heartbreak from Heidi, a 1st year classmate in my program took a shine to me. We'll call her Denise. Eyes like chocolate. Anyhoots, my 3 undergrad roommates would see me retire for the evening with Tina. I would drive Tina home at 3am (she was a high schooler). At 7am, I would wake up with Denise in my room crawling into my bed. We would emerge from my room for class at 8am and my 3 roommates would all stare bug eyed at her, then me, then her. They thought I was Gene Simmons at that point. Or maybe David Copperfield. I put an end to the 7am visits after a couple weeks because even I couldn't take it, I needed sleep badly. But moreso, she was insistent I impregnate her. In bachelor land this is what we call a 'walkaway.'
- Lotsa weird drama shit happened there, but fast forward to the summer. I stayed to finish my thesis, had the place to myself. Except! A friend of the roommates, a wrestler, we'll call him Ray, brings over an 'African prince' named Charlie (according to Charlie). So neither of course were tenants. Lease violation. Charlie turned out to be nuts, of course. The last straw was when he was mean to Tina, like nasty, and I must have called Ray and told him to get his ass out of there. The quote Ray told me later was that Charlie said 'if anything happens to me, 10 white people in my country die.' You cannot make this shit up (and I'm not).
- Final note: at that last apartment, I would get woken in middle of night from extremely loud banging coming from downstairs unit. This went on for months, at least weekly. One night I heard screaming, several of us went down there, must have been past midnight. The tenant there was passed out drunk, with a .44 revolver handgun next to him with bullets all over, in the open doorway. Nobody was shot. Just another night in Oshkosh.
--
On a lighter note, I had awesome professors, became lifelong friends with one (irritating my infantile classmates) who hired me a few years later and started me on my career path, learned a ton.