Chapter 23: Freshman Year

I tried reaching Jeana for the rest of the summer. I did a few drive-bys and called every girl I knew who knew Jeana. The response was the same. They could get in to see her, but Jeana was on lockdown, and going to parochial school, a private girl’s parochial school, in the fall. She was depressed, but otherwise okay. Whenever one of the girls mentioned my name, Jeana would sigh and or cry, but she didn’t ask to see me or send me a message. It was over in more ways than one, I guessed, but it was very depressing.

Tusker came over one afternoon. For the last year he had known about my apartment, but he kept it quiet. “I heard you and Jeana broke up. Her old man do that to your face?”

“Mom joined in, too, but yeah, her dad tagged me pretty good.” I gave him a condensed version of what had happened, though I left out some of the graphic details. “I’m worried about her. I can’t see her or talk to her, and nobody knows anything,” I finished.

He nodded silently, and then went to my refrigerator and grabbed a couple of beers. “You ever think that maybe this wasn’t an accident? That maybe Jeana had this planned out?”

“Huh? What?” I just stared at him; my bottle frozen halfway to my mouth.

He shrugged. “Hey, you’re about to go away and she isn’t going to want to wait for you, is she? So maybe she managed to get caught by her parents, and that breaks you two up nice and neat?”

I rolled my eyes at this. “You’re shitting me, right?”

“I’m just saying, are you sure?”

“You think Jeana managed to time this so that she was buck ass naked and sitting on my face getting hosed with a facial just in time for her parents to walk in?” I exclaimed.

Tusker’s face lit up. “You’re kidding me, right? You gave her a facial while her parents were coming in the door? No wonder they went nuts! You’re lucky to be alive! Oh, that’s tremendous!”

I was less than thrilled by being able to liven up my friend’s afternoon. Still, I wondered, could Jeana have been cold-blooded enough and ruthless enough to manage our breakup in such a way? I couldn’t imagine she would have ever wanted to be caught the way we were, but what if she had been planning on me getting caught just ‘fooling around’ with her, my hands down her pants or her top up around her neck? What if our timing was off or she got hornier than planned? I just didn’t know what to think.

I stopped bothering her or her friends.

I spent the balance of my last free summer finishing my classes at Towson State and getting ready to move to Troy. I hated moving. I did before and discovered I still hated it now. I split things into two separate categories, stuff I would take with me and stuff I would put into storage. I rented a small storage locker/building out in Timonium and bought a bunch of storage boxes. Even though I had been renting a furnished apartment, I still had spent the last couple of years accumulating a huge pile of shit. I rented the storage unit for a year and paid in advance.

Moving into the freshman dorms was going to be a wrenching change. I could have afforded an apartment, but RPI required all freshmen to live on campus. The only exceptions were students whose parents lived nearby, and I only ever met one guy who qualified. Everybody else lived in the freshman dorms, which a national college guide had described as being constructed in ‘the neo-penitentiary style.’ I could attest to that. Short of bars on the windows, the freshmen dorms had all the coziness of Alcatraz. The rooms were small, able to fit in two small desks, two single beds, and not much else. They had two built-in closet/dresser assemblies, one on each side of the doors as the inmates would enter their cells. Linoleum flooring, and cinder block walls completed the charming atmosphere.

I began packing up what I was going to store. I also brought out one of my trusty foot lockers, for the trip to Troy. I would fill a footlocker and bring it, my IBM Selectric, and a small half-size refrigerator which I picked up at a local appliance store. Those were allowed, although hot plates or toaster ovens were not. I would also bring several cardboard boxes holding my clothes, which I would chuck once I was unpacked. Lastly would be my stereo, a small but very nice Bose system.

Everything else went to the storage locker in Timonium. I called Tusker and he came over with his dad’s pickup truck, and we loaded it all up and drove over. This was just returning the favor I had done him. After graduation he had gotten a job tending bar at a place in Towson and was also working at a repair shop. He had moved into a small apartment in town. A bunch of us helped him move, four fellow bikers, and me, the preppy college kid. Fuck it, we moved him, finished off a couple cases of beer, and fucked around and arm wrestled. I won a few and lost a few.

After we moved my stuff, we went back to the apartment and drank all my beer, finished off my open jugs of cooking wine, and ate or threw out the last food in the fridge and pantry. I was ready to travel by August 23, a Thursday. Freshmen could start showing up on Friday August 24, but most wouldn’t show until Saturday August 25, which was when the Freshman Dining Hall opened. The following Monday, the 27^th, class registration would happen, and classes would start the next day, Tuesday August 28. My plan was to drive up on the 23^rd, spend the night in a motel, and be first in line Friday morning. I wanted to be in the dorm room and unpacked by Friday afternoon. Saturday was going to be a fucking zoo! Worst of all, RPI has very few parking spaces. I needed to have the car parked Saturday before a zillion parents and kids showed up to drop Little Johnny off at school.

Mom, Dad, and Suzie came over Wednesday night to say good-bye. Dad and I hauled the stuff I was taking out to the Galaxie. The only heavy stuff was the footlocker, the Selectric, and the mini-fridge. They took me out to dinner and then we got the hugs and handshakes out of the way. I promised to write. I ducked any questions on when they would see me back home. That night I slept in my clothes on the bare mattress. Early the next morning I showered, dressed in my clean travel clothes, and stuffed everything into a duffel bag. I handed my keys to my landlords and was off.

I stayed the night at the same dump motel I stayed at in Watervliet when I came up for my school visit. I was up bright and early Friday morning and had breakfast at a diner in Green Island. I in the parking lot between the Student Union and the Armory by 8:00. I looked around with quite the sense of déjà vu all over again. I wandered around the campus for a bit before heading into the Student Union for check-in.

Physically, Rensselaer is split into several different sections. You have the old school area, which borders on Sage Avenue and 15^th Street, with a residential quadrangle for upper classmen and a number of stately brick and ivy-covered buildings dating back to the 19^th century. You can see these buildings for miles around because they are on the side of a big hill and have green copper roofs. South of this section is a newer academic area, where the new chemistry, physics, materials science, and library buildings are. The old school was engineering and architecture only.

East of 15^th Street was a vast area that had been developed by the college during and after World War II. The Student Union was here, a three-story modern building, the Armory (which had a fully functioning tank lift in the basement, in case your M-4 Sherman needed a tune-up!), and all of the newer student housing. The freshman dorms were over there, along with the dining hall, as well as some newer grad student housing.

I grabbed my paperwork and went into the Student Union about 9:00 or so, and the line for check-in was mercifully short. Tomorrow it would be much, much longer! This was still in the pre-Internet, pre-computer days, so it was a matter of standing in line until you got to the table, where somebody would pull out paper files on you and check you in. Still, I was an early bird and the people at the desk weren’t going crazy yet. By mid-morning I was marked as present and accounted for, had my room key for Hall Hall (The residence hall was named after a guy named Hall. Go figure.), and I had registered the Galaxie and had a parking sticker for the student lot (And the student lot only! The campus police were vigorous in their detection and prosecution of cars where they weren’t allowed.)

The Student Union was a fair-sized building. Check-in was on the second floor, which was the main level, and normally had meeting rooms and a large dining area for formal college uses or small concerts. Upstairs was where the student government lived, along with rooms for clubs and the school newspaper. The basement held the bookstore, a branch of Key Bank, a small bowling alley and billiards room, and the Rathskellar, or Rat, which was a sandwich and pizza shop you could get a beer at. Before I left the building, I went downstairs and opened an account with Key Bank, funding it with a certified check I got when I cleaned out my accounts at Clifton Trust.

Next, I was off to Hall Hall. By getting there a day early, I was able to snag a good parking spot near the main entrance. In those days, the key was an actual physical key, not a card. The main door was unlocked, and I grabbed some stuff and wandered up to the second floor. I was going to be in Room 206. My roommate wasn’t there yet, so I grabbed the left side of the room and tossed my duffel on the bed.

I wasn’t the only one checking in early, so I made nice with my new neighbors and offered to help them move in if they returned the favor. This was readily accepted, especially after they noticed I had a small fridge and an unopened case of Budweiser in my car. I promised we would work on that later, so that got carried in first and set up, and then loaded with beer to cool down, while we went back out and finished bringing our shit in. After that, the guys gathered in my room and we cracked open a few cool beers, cool but not cold, since that little fridge was a bit anemic. Nobody cared.

It was all guys in the room. It was all guys in the dorm. It was all guys in all four freshman dorms! This place had the highest testosterone factor I had ever been around, at least until I went through basic training in the Army. Up until about five years ago, RPI had been men only, sort of like The He-Man Woman Hater’s Club for nerds. Historically, the only time women had ever attended the school had been for things like World War II, when no men were around, and they needed women engineers. As soon as the war was over, the women were sent packing. As it was, in 1973, after five years of co-ed education, it was still 14 to 1 guys to girls. You didn’t go to this place to get laid! There were so few women in the freshman class (40-50? Less?) they were all put into the graduate apartments, where they had private bathrooms!

The dining hall wasn’t open until the next morning, so after we got hungry we all got into the Galaxie and headed down to Hoosick Street. There was a strip mall there I remembered with a Price Chopper and a few other stores, but also a small Italian place we could order a couple of pizzas. When somebody asked how I knew about the place, I just replied that I had spotted it coming in from 787 off the Hoosick Street Bridge. In a different life I had taken girls down there to wine and dine them.

Saturday dawned sunny and bright. The dining hall was open, which was fortunate in that I didn’t want to have to drive into town. It was unfortunate in that, well, the dining hall was open! Imagine the worst meals you ever had in your high school cafeteria. Now, imagine them as an adult, seven days a week. Exactly what was being served at any given time was decidedly questionable. Nobody was ever able to prove anything, but most people noticed a suspicious lack of stray dogs and cats in the local area. That’s probably not what really happened, since I’m positive they would have tasted better. There were reasons I moved out of the dorms sophomore year, and the dining hall featured prominently in those reasons.

I woke up early and pulled on gym shorts and jogged around the campus for a bit before heading back to the dorm and showering and changing. Then I wandered over to the dining hall, where I grabbed some OJ and an apple. Part of my strength and weight control conditioning was that I usually skipped breakfast. I don’t know who came up with the crap about breakfast being the most important meal of the day. Whenever Marilyn gave me that shit, I would always ask if she worked for the American Breakfast Board. By the time I got back to the dorm the day’s rush was started and an enormous number of cars were trying to cram themselves into the parking lots, as parents tried to get rid of their offspring. Nobody showed up in the morning, and by noon I was hungry enough to go over to the dining hall and eat a real lunch.

I got back to my dorm room to find the door open, and somebody’s crap on my bed. Whoever that somebody was I had no idea, and he was nowhere to be found. I threw his stuff on the other bed, the one conspicuously empty, and closed the door. It seemed as if I wasn’t going to be running a singleton, but as I remembered back, that was never going to be the case anyway. Back when I did this the first time, I hadn’t been early acceptance, and for the first few months, until Thanksgiving, I was in a temporary dorm carved out of a corner of the lounge on the first floor, sleeping on a bunk bed and living like I was in boot camp. By Thanksgiving, enough students had flunked out to let us move into real dorm rooms.

Ten minutes later there was a loud thumping on the door. I roused myself off my bed to greet my new roommate. I opened the door to look out and found a fellow about my height, maybe a touch less, and about ten pounds smaller. He had a soft look to him, though he wasn’t quite pudgy. His hair was long, down to his shoulders, and very curly, and he had a wide, round face. He looked at me and asked, “How come the door was shut?”

What a fucking moron! “So that nobody would come in and take anything,” I replied.

He laughed and pushed his way inside. “Nobody would do that!” Then he noticed his stuff was on the right side of the room. “Hey, how come you moved my stuff over here?”

“Because I already set my stuff up on this side yesterday. Didn’t you notice it when you came in?” I asked.

“Oh. Yeah, I guess so. Who are you?”

“I suspect I’m your roommate. Carl Buckman. You’re assigned to 206, also?”

He gave me a funny look. “Yeah, why else would I be here?”

“Okay then, pleased to meet you.” I stuck my hand out and he absent-mindedly shook it, even as he was looking around the room.

“Yeah, great.” His eyes found my mini-fridge and lit up. “Hey, we’ve got a fridge! Wow! That’s great!” He immediately went over to my refrigerator and yanked the door open. “Wow! Beer, too!” He reached in a grabbed a can of Bud, before I could say anything, and popped open the top. Next, as I stood there in disbelief, he threw the door to our room open and yelled down the hallway, “We’ve got some beer in 206!”

Enough of that shit! I moved past him and slammed the door shut before I was mobbed. Even then it shut in the face of a pimply kid from across the hall. My roommate stared at me. “What’s the problem? Let’s have a party!” He drained the can of beer in a single long swallow and moved back towards my fridge.

“Hold your horses. Let’s get a few things straight,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like who the hell are you?”

“I’m your roommate,” he said.

“Yeah, we’ve been over that part. What’s your name?”

He relaxed at that. “Oh, yeah, my name’s Jim Connolly, but everybody calls me Buddy. What’s your name?”

“Carl Buckman.” Like I told you the first time.

“Great, Carl, let’s get the party started!” He made another move towards the fridge.

I stepped in front of him again. “Hold it. That fridge doesn’t belong to the college. It didn’t come with the room.”

He looked at me curiously. “It didn’t? We don’t get fridges in the dorm rooms?”

“Not unless you buy your own,” I answered.

It took a few seconds for that to sink in. “You mean you bought that fridge?”

“Precisely.”

His face lit up. “Well that’s really great! We can keep our beer cold!” He moved to open it again.

“Wait!” He stopped to stare at me. “That was my beer. That wasn’t our beer. My beer involves my money. Our beer involves our money. Follow me?” He had a puzzled look on his face. “If you want some of my beer, you can ask me first. Okay?”

He shrugged. “Jeesh, it’s only beer. Whatever. Can I have another beer?”

“Of course.” I opened the fridge and took out two beers, popped them both open, and handed him one. “Cheers. Welcome.”

Once again, he downed his beer is a single prodigious swallow, which was then followed by an equally prodigious belch. Buddy began to start putting his stuff away, but after a few dispirited minutes, he opened the door and marched off down the hallway, greeting new people, leaving our door open. After five minutes I went to the door and looked around. There were masses of milling freshmen, but no Buddy. I shook my head and closed the door.

Five minutes later, Buddy was back and pounding on the door. “How come you closed the door?”

“Buddy, you’ve been gone fifteen minutes. Close the door when you leave the room.”

“Why?” Buddy put away some more of his stuff and then headed out the door again. This time I was able to call out to him to take his key with him and to close the door after him. I got him to take his key, but he was gone before he closed the door. I didn’t bother closing it.