Phil, one of my best friends for years, and as you can see, stoner.
Richard and Doug once tied up our very pretty, twenty-year-old, dorm manager to a chair and put her in a closet screaming for several hours. She’d come up from the fifth floor where she lived on some complaint and went to their door first, to complain. They didn’t like it, grabbed her, tied her to a chair and carried her into the little utility closet right outside their room, at the end of the hall. Some of us heard her screaming but they stood in front of the door guarding it until they tired of this prank and finally let her out. I’m surprised charges weren’t laid. But nothing came of it.
But another night charges would certainly have been laid if I hadn’t prevented it. There were four of us stumbling home from an all-night hot dog stand called ‘Top Dog’ just a block from the Dorms. It was often run by a Dwarf, a very feisty fellow who loved to get into heated political debates with his customers as he flipped hot dogs. We often stopped there on our way home from a drink fest, which was just the case that night. But in the lobby of our dorm, by the elevator, there was a long bench and on this bench that night there was a pretty girl, completely passed out, laying on it flat on her back, with one leg hanging over the edge of it, her shoe touching the floor. She was wearing a short dress and in this position you could stoop down a little and see right up to her panties, which Doug and Richard immediately did. It was very late, around four A.M. No one was around or likely to be around.
A debate arose, Doug and Richard wanting to take quick sexual advantage of her. Doug already had his hand up her skirt. I objected loudly, saying it was wrong, criminal, and that I would report them to the police if they did. They tried to plead with me saying she wouldn’t even know it, but I stood firm. Finally Ron D., who’d been silently watching and thinking who knows what, stood up for my side and the matter was settled. We left her there and went up the elevator to our rooms and closed the doors. I went to bed but I’ll never know if Richard and Doug slipped down again to molest her. I hope they didn’t, but I suspect they might have. They were probably the horniest guys on our floor and a temptation like that would have easily addled their brains beyond the restraints of decency.
Doug, George and Ron D. in our dorms, all memorable players in these histories.
We had fire extinguisher fights many Saturday nights. There was one on each floor. We’d collect them all and eight of us would hide and rush around squirting each other till they were empty. But one night someone nailed Phil, the odd man out without one. So he took out the big firehose, turned it on and drenched us all, filling the hallway and some rooms with a few inches of water. The next morning we tried to fold it back into its box. But being wet that didn’t happen. It had to be dried out, and the only place for that was the roof.
We weren’t supposed to have access to the roof. It was a locked door at the top of one more flight of the stairs that also led to the elevator motor room. I somehow found out the key to my door, 805, also fit this lock. No one else’s fit so I was called upon to open it when anyone wanted up there. I let Hiram up once to set up his antenna for his wireless radio. But we weren’t supposed to be on it, ever. It let you in the mechanical room over the elevator shaft, from a door on the roof that was never locked. Now on this morning I opened it for Phil. Zeebo and he carried out the hose and stretched it to dry in the sun. But Zeebo, in some quirk of curiosity went into the elevator room where there was a heavy metal grate in the floor right over the shaft. He wanted to peer down the shaft so he lifted it up, but it slipped out of his hands and fell.
Unfortunately, the elevator happened to be on the first floor at that moment. So the fifty-pound grate fell seven stories, hitting the crossbeam with such force it wrapped around it, scaring the hell out of two guys who were in the elevator at the time, who promptly came up to our floor knowing full well that when anything went wrong, it was us. We retrieved the mangled grate, took it to the roof, but there was no way to unbend it. So Zeebo (you wonder how some people get into Berkeley), covered up the two and a half foot by four-foot hole in the floor with a piece of cardboard, unbeknownst to us who were standing in a circle on the roof staring at the mangled grate and scratching our heads, trying to figure what to do. We decided we’d have to buy a new one. We left it at that and went downstairs.
Monday morning, while most of us were in classes, a rather fat, middle-aged elevator maintenance man came to our building, entered the room and stepped right on the cardboard, falling up to his armpits through the hole, barely catching himself with outstretched arms from certain death. If he weren’t so fat, he might have perished. But the hole was just his width and his arms caught on each side. He pulled himself up and came down to our floor in a state of shock and with torn arm muscles aching, to tell the few of us he could find about his narrow escape and to go get help. Unfortunately, the first person he ran into was Grant, who laughed at his story and told him to go do his pull-ups somewhere else, insult to injury.
He filed charges, an investigation was made, confessions were taken, including mine, as I had the key. Seven of us were fined a few hundred dollars and the affair closed.
The most costly damage we did to our dorm came at the end of the school year. Craig decided to paint a large replica of the zig-zag man on his door, in gray, and I must say he did a fine job. Others tried to match his artwork along the walls. Many of us took up the challenge. I tried to copy a picture by Gauguin of a tropical island in all its colors but had just begun when the dorm administrators caught wind, came up and told us we had to paint all the walls white again. They even supplied the paint in two five-gallon buckets, with rollers.
A few days later it was a Saturday and a special one. It was the end of the school year and an extra-large party was in order. We even made up leaflets to advertise it and posted them around our complex. A few of us had already started to whitewash the walls and the two five-gallon buckets of paint were left sitting in the hallway, poorly closed. The attendance was huge, filling the hallway and every room with people. Hours into the party and mass inebriation one of the buckets was kicked over, making a large puddle of white paint on the carpet in the middle of the hallway. But most people were too drunk to notice, walked through it and spread white footprints everywhere, even to other floors. I remember sitting in my room when a girl came in spreading white footprints across my floor. I noticed them, glanced out in the hall, but by now it was far too late to do anything. The hall was a disaster. If the quarter were not days away from ending, and this had happened at any earlier date, I’m sure we’d have been kicked out of school, so expensive was the damage. But we were told by letter that all our names had been put on a special list, and that none of us would be dorm members ever again. That didn’t bother my sentiments at all. We’d partied so hard that year I was sick of it and didn’t want to live in a group of twenty people, where anyone might decide to get high one night and insist you join in. I had a hard time saying no, so it was my recipe for disaster. The next year I lived alone and my serious studies and progress in literature began, while most of my dorm mates hooked up with their best friends, rented apartments and partied on.
