[Ed. Note: Some time ago, I shattered my tibia skiing the Skiway. While I lay in a hospital bed in Hitchcock, cursing the East Coast ice, I was placed next to an aged senior, who, after several gap years and off terms, had been presenting his senior thesis when he unexpectedly fell out of the third floor window of Kemeny. To pass the time, I asked him to tell me some story, some piece of advice, or some ancient tale. After sufficient thought, he provided this story from his freshman winter to me, which I have reproduced in full, and without comment. I soon recovered, but for all I know my hospital-mate is still there, regrowing his ribs and refining his proofs.]
Consciousness insisted upon me like my dealer – Kevin, I’ll pay you back when the Dartmouth Library pay period ends this Friday – and I found myself in Novack at about 9:30pm or so with the remains of a terminally unsatisfying General Tso’s Chicken and unexpected back pain. I put on my little thinking cap and traced the stabbing pain around my lower right spine to a vigorous spot of drugged-out ultimate Frisbee either that morning, or the day before, or never at all. Satisfied with my logical exertions, I stirred two dulling ibuprofen into my lukewarm coffee, ate another bite of the bitter poultry, and noticed that it was snowing. I was not, of course, wearing a coat.
My room, when I returned to the Choates, was already crowded with the expectant devotees to be thrown before Juggernaut. I brushed aside roommates, well-wishers, pushers, pullers, prospects, plugs, and hangers-on and put together an outfit. Beach night is a straightforward straight theme and I even put on my Hawaiian shirt facing forward. The baseball hat went on backwards, and the swim trunks clung a little too tightly to my thighs. Had I put on weight? I dispelled this thought with a circulating hard cider and confiscated a dab pen. It’s called applied redistribution of wealth. Others merely talk about aiding the less fortunate, but I put it into practice on a daily basis. Can one ever be fortunate enough to turn down militarized charity? Sufficiently revived, I chased out the clinging nabobs.
I drank a white claw or three for the road, then realized immediately that the snow and my flip-flops disliked each other. It was a cosmic rivalry, I’m sure. As a neutral arbiter, I was called to settle the dispute, but being personally fond of both my old spa shoes and my second favorite white fluffy powder, and being incapable of a single coherent thought beyond the relentless drive to Alpha Chi, I called it for the status quo ante bellum and sacrificed my toes to the dread revelry.
Hop the chains, push past the iced over car, jaywalk in front of the SNS car – ACAB! the Review writer next to me shouted – and there was already a dimly-visible line through the blowing snow at the end of Webster Ave. Obscenities having been muttered, we sharpened our elbows. I was beginning to suspect that there had been something more than MSG in my stirfry and tried to reconstruct events. A half-formed vision of a specific fungus I had improved my dinner with was dispelled by arriving at the end of the line, and I magnanimously forgot about it again, as I am often wont to.
Melee and combat turned from ironic to half-hearted to trenchant in a matter of moments. Pain (among, to be brief, psychedelics, sex, skiing, and vomiting) cuts through the relentless wave of obfuscations and cynical layers that dominate so much of life. I set aside the Earth flag in my dorm and found the crimson standard of war. All manner of disciplines were combined in a single brutish thrust. The heights of cunning, treachery, violence, and stamina were summoned up inside my drifting, spiritual frame. There, to the left, a sharp stomach jab. Up, to the right, I saw my tripee and attached myself to him. Back to the left, defend the newly acquired position with a roundhouse. Tripee pushed back off the stairs, clear room for me. An old friend? A lunge, a perfect dive, a kick, a kiss, and, alive by no grace save my own coursing adrenaline and stolen adrenochrome, here I was at the head of the line. It was 11 on the dot, according to my faithfully unfaithful watch. The snow shuddered around us in ineffable patterns, and the hairs on my arms stood at solemn attention. Hail Caesar, those about to die salute thee!
Now, the door. Inside, through the smoked glass, brothers in red tracksuits and lifeguard getup stolen from some unfortunate shark-infested Cape resort stumbled their dates up the stairs and resolutely ignored the throngs outside. This was unconcerning. In the crushing mob I identified two members of my Writing 5, someone from my drill class, a face without a name that I recognized immediately, three floormates, a tripsitter, a ski buddy, and a triple legacy with an aquiline nose and a Hapsburg sneer. It was, in other words, the usual crowd. I nodded to them each in turn, and pushed into their packed heat, burrowing like something small and furry with little sharp teeth. A vole, or a stoat, perhaps.
Someone pressed a flask into my hands and, without the slightest hesitation, I took my priestly tithe before moving it along. There is no hard alcohol at Dartmouth College; this was merely mouthwash mixed with pink lemonade. I could smell the warm vomit rising up from the snowbanks. It hit you like a solid retching wall, and was not entirely unpleasant. At the moment, of course. It’s a simple matter of set and setting, you understand. At 10am, coffee crisply roasted, binders stacked, laces tied, vomit repels you. Now, a mystical thirteen hours later, it attracts you with a fly-like delight. Besides, I didn’t even have laces to tie. The same flask, or a different one, came around again, and the cloying cinnamon caught me off guard. I coughed.
A brother approached the door and the crowd twinged with orgasmic excitement. He opened the door, or at least tried to, as we were packed in the Alpha Chi porch. The brother, who had a moustache rejected by three separate Fascist dictators and a hairstyle to match, pushed his head through the crack he made, allowing me the pleasure of envisioning us pushing forward with Jacobin fervor and severing his skull from his spine. Tragically, my colleagues did not share my sudden alcoholic bloodlust. They clambered over each other to circus height to hear the pronouncement.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said, “we’re pretty crowded right now.” Before the door could snap shut, he escaped.
The crowd roared its displeasure, then did nothing at all. Never expect much from a mob. This time, a dizzy joint was circulated. Spontaneously, the crowd burst into one of the stadium anthems you know, poorly timed. A classic rock song defiled, they turned to one of the more singable Taylor singles.
“Is that Kai?” someone called out next to me. Indeed it was. Just through the glass windows, so shatterable, was Kai Watanabe, a floormate, inexplicably good at pong. He was one of us, or had been an hour ago, and now he was in there, plus keystone and crop top.
“That rat bastard,” spat a bystander. “Fucking traitor. Text him.”
“Just dm’ed him,” reported Hanover’s finest. “He says it’s full, and he can’t get anyone in.”
“I’m going to tear out his intestines and strangle him with them,” said his roommate. The joint came around again. I took a mutinous drag on it and texted, in succession, my trip leader, a running partner, and a fellow who had once spotted me while I did bench presses. No dice. “If I was in there,” lied the roommate, “I’d let everyone in. Throw open the doors. I’d be a hero.”
The only mistake Kai Wantanabi had made was he was where we ought to have been. We would have traded our souls for a place in there, and, I think, we all admired his decisive spirit in refusing us entry. I, for one, wouldn’t have let any of the rifraf sweating and condensing around me in. The only rule of king of the hill is winning.
Once more the door was pressed open against us. In an instant, the threats, violent and otherwise, dissipated. The congregation awaited the merciful pronouncements of some solemn priest.
“SNS is on our ass tonight, but we’ll try and get you in soon,” he said, and vanished.
Riled on cheap alcohol, oregano mixed with weed, whatever it was that was making me see geometric patterns in the doorframe, and a burning, incandescent, overwhelming desire to get into Alpha Chi, we turned to desperate solutions. I noticed a sensible econ major eyeing a loose brick and the thin windows. Yes, I wanted to shout, smash the glass and let us in! Shatter it with a will my cowardly trembling fingers lack and embrace the orgiastic thrill of it! But he didn’t.
“What if I show my tits?” asked a gender studies major. “Just sort of press them against the door’s window?” She shrugged off her jacket. “For like a moment. That would get me in, right?”
I spotted an ancient keystone wedged in the icy snow and, with no regrets, downed it in a gulp. I have to confess there was no sexual thrill left in me. Where I once would have paid rapt attention to the door’s window and any bodily appendages hypothetically being pressed against it, I shrugged and checked my phone again. There’s no need for sex when I had something just as good: an avalanche of unknowable chemical delights and intestine-knotting nausea. Well, maybe not quite as good. Maybe better.
My one-time gym acquaintance had the decency to tell me there was no chance, and the runner had just apologized. Betrayal of betrayals, my trip leader had read my message and declined to reply. At that precise moment, or perhaps an eon later, I looked through the windows and saw him, a bitter Judas inside. He saw me too, and smiled a powerful knife-twisting smile. I wish I could say I felt rage, but all I felt was a hope that I too would one day deny entry to my own trippees and smile, and also that I needed to pee. One weighed on me more heavily.
“The side door!” someone cried, and it was like a firecracker went off. That was the only thing on our lips now. The zeitgeist had shifted. A single thought consumed our minds.
“To the side door!” It was the battle cry of the forlorn.
“Around the side!”
“They can’t stop us!”
“They’re letting people in from the side!”
While what seemed like a stampeding cavalcade of humanity turned to the right, I found myself jumping off the porch to the left, in three sudden divine inspirations. These were prophetic revelations, to be sure. It was as if the nauseating drugs had finally opened a direct line to the heavens, with instructions incoming in Solomonic precision. As I said, my goals were tripartite:
ONE, to avoid the crowds storming the side door, which I realized was to be just as packed and as futile as the front door, and instead find a loose window to shimmy through.
TWO, to rescue what appeared to me to be an entire case of Smirnoff Ice’s floating, lonely and abandoned, through the drifting dunes of muddy snow.
THREE, to pee obnoxiously on the side of the wall, and also, with sad resignation, to vomit. Midnight isn’t the best time to vomit, but I can certainly say it isn’t the worst, which, for me personally, had to be – another time perhaps.
These goals were partially realized. To begin in no particular order, the case was empty, an abyss, terra nulla, tabula rasa, tragedy. The peeing was marvelously successful, and I almost believed I wasn’t about to vomit, but then I had to surrender myself to the triumphant squeezing and vanish in an ecstasy of self-abnegation. I don’t mean to be crass, but I’ve always hypothesized a connection between the orgasm and vomiting. I always forget about this insight of mine when I’m sober, which is a terrible shame, because it could make a good thesis.
The window, my final and ultimate goal, was blocked by what appeared to my unenlightened eyes to be a saffron-robed Theravada monk in pursuit of Anagārika. I might have been losing it and he might have also been a shirtless brother wearing wide-bottomed khakis. Certainly, at least, he was sitting cross-legged with bare feet on the snow. He examined me curiously, as one might examine a raging lunatic prophesizing the end of the world and lacking a good shave. I was disheveled, wasn’t I?
“Have you ever tried LSD?” he presently asked me, after looking at my puddle of shame along the wall.
“Can you let me in?” I asked.
“It’s all interconnected, you know. Sensation, sound, and sight.”
“Connect me to the loose window you hippie hack,” I bellowed, and reverted to the feral violence that always bubbled up in me with my bile. His haymaker was swift and severe, and I regretted doubting his monastic orders. Never doubt the capacity for pain of a shirtless white boy in the snow.
As I spun backwards into the dizzy snowbank, he stood up, nodded at me, and opened the window. On my stomach, 0.2 BAC blood trickling down my face, I writhed like the exiled serpent towards the welcoming reek of the basement. My head and right arm made it through, and I gazed into the gardens of the Ummah. Eternal pleasure unfolded before my watering eyes. Pong table, packed crowds, case after case of keystone–why, it would make you weep too, if you had been there. A brother noticed me, and, with that fraternal spirit that has always characterized his kind, he tossed my suspended torso a beer. I could have kissed him. I cracked it open and drank it with my eyes closed. In that noble darkness, I heard a terrible creaking and crunching, and I began to tilt forward towards the sticky cement below…
Well, I don’t quite know what happened. Pandemonium, in my experience, is never logical. But there I was, vomiting as usual, in an unfamiliar parking lot. To my right, a hostage in a stained suit with a burlap bag over his head. To my left, that damn dictatorial mustache and hairdo combination again, this time, to a more sober delight, a few articles of clothing down. The fat man on the throne in front of me nodded appreciatively at my offering, and the grape vines curled from his fist.
In all, a highly successful on night.