Chapter 40: Time Flies By

Back at RPI, things began to move in a blur. I spent huge amounts of time down at Amos Eat-Me studying and working with Professor Rhineburg. Since a lot of what I was doing involved the computer system, I spent more than a few nights down there as well, after hours, when the system was at the lowest utilization levels.

I continued working about one Sunday in four as a cook at Kegs, trying to time them with the weekends when Marilyn visited. I kept trying out upsized favorite recipes of mine and trying them as new recipes for the guys. Mostly they went over well (beef tips with mushrooms proved popular) but not always (pork roast with a curry glaze was sent back - airborne!)

It was sad in some ways, watching friends and brothers who weren’t going to make it academically, as their college life went swirling around the bowl. Andy Kowalchuk and the Cisco Kid were the worst, but forget about telling them shit, they knew better. I laid way off the dope this time around, not out of any great moral issue, but because I just didn’t have the time or inclination.

I did introduce Marilyn to it one weekend. She was very nervous, but we were sitting around in Kowalchuk’s and Gravy Train’s room playing bridge and listening to the Monty Python and the Holy Grail soundtrack, and they started passing around a bong. I took a hit and then showed her how to do it. It was hilarious to watch her reactions. After a bit she lost her nervousness, her eyes got a little glazed, and then suddenly she got very ... amorous. I had once told her it tended to make people horny, but she had just laughed it off. She eventually dragged me upstairs and ripped my clothes off me, and then rode me hard and put me away wet! An amazing night, and I teased her about it mercilessly the next day. “Someday you’ll have children, and what will you tell them when they ask, ‘Why can’t I smoke pot? Did you ever smoke pot?’”

It happened, too. Alison was never a problem with drugs, since she was handicapped to begin with, and Parker never got into it, although he did like his beer. It was Maggie who was the wild one, and she bugged us about dating as soon as she hit puberty, and we know she smoked pot and drank. On the other hand, she didn’t do anything stupid and never got into trouble. The most hilarious moment was when she and Jackson moved into a fixer-upper apartment, and she showed us a dresser she had stripped and stained. I promptly opened the top drawer to look at the construction and she screamed since I had found her stash. I just buried my head in my hands to try and stop laughing, while Marilyn huffed and puffed.

Near the beginning of April, a new brother joined the fraternity. A small mutt wandered into the back yard and took up residence. At first, he hid in the corner, but then, as the day wore on, he got a little more adventurous and came out of hiding. By late afternoon he had wandered up to the back door, where we still had the airlock set up, and when the door opened, he scurried in before anybody could stop him. He sniffed the cooking in the kitchen and trotted on back, and promptly sat down and whined piteously. Mrs. Clarity ordered him out, but he kept whining, and when a couple of the guys tracked him down, they took pity on him and fed him some of yesterday’s leftovers.

That was how we adopted Jefferson, or how he adopted us. He was of an indeterminate breed, what my parents called a Heinz, as in Heinz 57 varieties. He was short haired, a brown and white mix that had elements of a small hound and something larger. He was young, and mostly housebroken. Our initial thought was that he was a runaway or lost, and that we would find some flyers up or hear something or see it in the paper. At least that was what we told ourselves, which became a big, big problem. ‘We’ll take care of him for a week and try to find his owners.’ Nobody tried to find them. Jefferson, named that by Ricky Holloway (a Texan and the only southerner in the house besides me) for both Jefferson Starship, the band, and Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was a very nice little dog, and we quickly fell in love with the little mutt.

Unfortunately, he was not universally beloved. Jerry Modanowicz, in particular, took exception to dog crap in the back yard. By the end of the week, Jerry took Jefferson down to the pound, basing his decision to do this on the statement that we were only going to keep him for a week until we found his owners. No owners, the week was up, and so was Jefferson’s time with us. Jerry never told anybody about this either. By the time we figured all this out, enough days had passed that the pup was put to sleep.

Maybe not everybody wanted a dog, but nobody wanted him killed, and Jerry was thrown out. It was not considered a grave loss. He had proved a real pain in the tail, lived in a single on the first floor of the main house (the Underground Railroad room), and thought his fecal matter was not possessed of an aroma.

That was all on the first time through. Now I could do something about it. That Friday afternoon, when I noticed Jefferson was missing, I looked around for him. Nobody had seen him all day, and Ricky got worried and started asking around also. “Where in the world did he get to?” he asked.

“Where’s Modanowicz?” I asked.

“Why?”

Marty had joined us by now, along with Leo, and listened in as I said, “Wasn’t he complaining about Jefferson, and how we should get rid of him at the end of the week? Do you think he might have done something?”

“You’re kidding me! No way!” said Leo.

Marty was silent, but Ricky asked, “Like what?”

I shrugged. “The pound?”

Ricky’s eyes widened at the thought, and he went into the hallway to the house pay phone and leafed through it until he found the phone number for the dog pound. He fished out a quarter, and as we watched, he called and asked if a small brown and white male dog had been brought in. His eyes lit up when the answer was positive, and he asked them to hold onto him until we got there.

“I can’t believe that son of a bitch did this!” he exclaimed. “I swear, I’m going to kill him!”

“Hold your horses,” cautioned Marty. “We don’t know he did it, not for sure. What do you want to do?” Marty was a senior like Ricky, and highly respected among the brothers.

“I want to go rescue him, that’s what!” said Ricky. I nodded in agreement.

“That means you are adopting him into the house? What if the house doesn’t vote to let him in?”

I looked over at Leo, not figuring that answer. “I vote yes,” said Leo.

“Me, too,” I added.

“Listen, I’m a senior. We don’t have time to take a formal vote. If the house has a problem, I’ll take him when I leave,” answered Ricky.

Marty nodded. “Okay, listen, you two go grab Jefferson. I’m going to figure this out and talk to Bill and figure out what we’re doing. Get going!” Marty grabbed Leo and told him to start asking around over in Grogans’, while he did the same in the main house.

Ricky and I got into the Galaxie and headed into town. Curiously, Ricky had grabbed the fraternity portrait off the wall of the formal room. Once we got down to the pound, we went inside and told them we had called about the brown and white dog. We were taken to a line of kennels, which was a truly piteous sight, and there we found Jefferson. He immediately went crazy when he saw us, jumping up and trying to lick us through the chain link kennel side. I went to open the kennel, but I was stopped. “Hold on there, we have to do some paperwork first!”

We told Jefferson we would be back for him and went back out front. First, we had to buy a dog license, and then we had to have him neutered. Bitches got spayed. He needed rabies shots and other vet stuff done. And we had to cough up some cash to pay for all of this. Fortunately, they had a vet on tap to handle all these things, so if we wanted, they would arrange everything, but we wouldn’t be able to take Jefferson home for another couple of days. Ricky agreed and I grabbed my wallet.