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I walked out of Block D at
11:01 PM wearing black trousers, dress shoes, and a black button up shirt. It
was chilly out again, but surprisingly not too bad. I guess there was so much
pot being smoked in Woolf that night that it created a sort of warm air bubble
around the college, trapping in some heat. There was a group of people in the
courtyard in front of my block. Two of them wore black hoodies, one wore a
black pea coat and a black fedora. The other, obviously The Student, wore a
sweater, jeans, and black tennis shoes.
“Look, dude,” said The
Drunkard, one of the people in the black hoodies, “I’m not saying you’re doing
it wrong, but you need to rethink your outfit tonight.”
“You said ‘wear black,’”
said The Student. “I’m wearing black. I fail to see what the problem is.”
“The problem is you look
like normal. There’s nothing to disguise you fro—oh, fuck me, really, Narrator?
Are we going to shul tonight?”
“What?” I asked. “You said
‘wear black.’ I’m wearing black. I fail to see what the problem is.”
“See?” asked The Student.
“Thank you.”
“Can I ask you something?”
said the other man in a black hoodie. He had what could be described as a Jew
nose, and in the brief glance I got of his eyes in that dim light, I saw
unpredictability and the desire to watch the world burn. “Why are all your
friends idiots, man? They’ve got cameras. Everywhere.”
“Yeah, Tuna,” The Drunkard
said, sipping out of a flask, “I know. They’re all pretty law-abiding people,
though. Not their fault—they just haven’t had the same experiences we’ve had.”
“I’ve taken drugs derived
from rhino shit,” said the man in the fedora.
I squinted. “Traveler? Is
that you? Why do you look like a spy?”
“They said to dress in
black. This is all I had.”
“Man,” said the guy named
Tuna, “this isn’t Spy Vs. Spy.”
“Nor is it Let’s Dress Like
Chavs Night, but you two seem to be under that impression.”
A silence passed over
everyone. “I’d kick your ass,” said Tuna, “but you’re funny. Come on let’s go,
I’m bored.”
“We got everyone?” asked The
Drunkard. He looked around. “Yeah, looks like we do. Let’s head out.”
“Where are we going?” asked
The Student.
“Wait,” Tuna said. “You just
showed up because he told you to?”
The Student looked down at
the ground and cleared his throat. “Well, my girlfriend just dumped me for some
other guy, and I don’t have any essays to write at the moment, so I didn’t have
any reason to not to go.”
The Traveler shrugged.
“Sounded like it’d be fun.”
Tuna nodded approvingly at
this. He turned to me. “You?”
“Erm,” I said, scratching
the back of my head. “Well, he, uh, told me to show up.”
Tuna’s eyes narrowed.
“Sheeple.”
I gently coughed out an
apology.
The Drunkard moved towards
Giles Lane, and we followed.
The door was unlocked. This
made our job a whole lot easier, and made me think that perhaps we weren’t breaking
and entering. Maybe someone was pulling an all-nighter on the paper staff and
left the door open so they could go grab a shitty burger at The Kitchen.[1]
I’d never been in this
building. There hadn’t ever been a reason for me to come in, honestly. Some
people I knew said I should have gone in, dropped off a stack of my writing,
and demanded a job—but that was absurd. I’d read Inquire. The paper was put out
on a monthly basis, chock-full of typos, and had leading stories such as
“Students At Kent Want More Opening Hours for The Venue.”
Put short, I don’t think
they would have appreciated my style. Granted, I’d had an Op-Ed column at The
Unversity of Tennessee, so one could make the case that there was precedent for
me being a part of this particular student publication, but that would be
omitting a very important fact: I was fired from that job after turning out a
column calling governors useless and demanding that they be pitted against each
other in something akin to Thunderdome. That was my style. Power outages? A
lesser columnist would have called for the University’s administration to do
something to upgrade all of the generators. I, however, claimed that I’d seen
Gremlins mucking about in them, and that they were—obviously—readying
themselves to kill everyone on campus. The worrying state of Hollywood? Well, I
said, at least they’re not remaking Red Dawn. (This being several years
before the announcement that they were, in fact, remaking Red Dawn. I’m
a Prophet, you see.)
Anyway. The point is that I
was not familiar with this place, but that The Drunkard seemed to be. He led
the charge up the staircase immediately in front of the door and held Tuna back
when he, in some barbarian rage, almost headbutted down a door. “Save the
hatred,” The Drunkard said, “that’s the wrong door.”
Tuna grunted and clenched
and unclenched a fist.
“Narrator,” asked The
Student, “are we going to die?”
“Well, we will all
eventually die, Student,” I said. “It is just a question of when and in what
state.”
“Thanks. That helps a lot.”
“No problem.”
“I don’t think we’ll die,”
said The Traveler. “There is no doubt that our new Turkish friend is built like
The Goddamn Batman, but there’s no reason—” he said as Tuna screamed and
kicked down a door, “—that we should be afraid. You know, just don’t stare into
his eyes. That might be a sign that you’re challenging him.”
“Good man, Tuna Shark,” said
The Drunkard.
The two stepped into the
large room on the other side of the door, and the three of us, languishing
behind and not really sure why The Drunkard wanted us along, followed behind.
The room, when The Traveler
turned on the lights, was the top of the Student Affairs building stuck onto
the end opposite the bookstore. It, I guess, was the headquarters of the
Inquire newspaper. There were three flimsy, plastic desks on top of which sat
old computers with CRT monitors. Against the wall to my left upon entering was
a gigantic printer, out of which—I reckoned—came the newspaper every month. The
rest of the room was given over to some large desks on top of which sat tools
for measuring out and aligning the paper before it went to print. It was one of
these tables that Tuna threw out the window.
The alarm sounded, The
Student fled, and The Drunkard sighed. “Jumped the gun, man.”
Tuna
said, paced back and forth along the windows. “You call me up and you say,
‘We’re gonna wreck some shit.’”
“I said ‘We’re going to
engage in sabotage,’” said The Drunkard.
“Same thing. You say that,
and then you want me to not wreck some shit? You need to work on your
communication skills.”
“Well,” said The Traveler.
“I’m—I’m going to head out, now. Don’t really see the point in hanging around
only for Campus Watch to swing by and arrest me.”
“Man, Campus Watch aren’t
worth the badges they wear,” said Tuna.
“Be that as it may.
Narrator, you want to head out?”
I looked at Tuna and The
Drunkard. The Drunkard was haphazardly smashing at a keyboard on the largest
desk, and Tuna had pulled a face that said, very clearly, that if I left now, I
would forever be branded a coward, and would not have his respect. And I knew,
then, that not having Tuna’s respect would be a dangerous thing. (I didn’t know
at the time that Tuna was actually a really cool dude—except when someone
insulted one of his friends—who listened to opera, of all things.)
“Nah,” I said, “I’ll stick
around. Y’know, bar the door and rappel down the side of the building if needs
be.”
The Traveler raised an
eyebrow. “You’re going to rappel down a building? Y—look, your funeral.” He
lowered his hat over his eyebrow, dug his hands into his p-coat, and left the
building.
“Where do you get your
friends?” asked Tuna.
“We tell each other
stories,” said The Drunkard.
“What, like some gay shit?”
The Drunkard looked up with
a quizzical look on his face.
“Man, I’m joking.” He turned
to me. “Your name is The Narrator, right?” He now had to scream as the alarm’s
volume grew.
“Yeah,” I shouted back.
“What are you here for?”
“Ranting in Literature.”
“What the fuck is that and why are you doing that in grad school?”
“It’s like everything in the
School of English,” I shouted. “It’s an excuse for otherwise unemployable
people to gather around a table and talk bullshit for three hours a week. At
the end of it, we’ll get a degree that means nothing except that we should
probably go for a PhD if we want to accomplish anything in life.”
Tuna laughed. “I like that.”
“All right!” shouted The
Drunkard. He swiped a bunch of stuff off of the desk in front of him. “Let’s
head out.” He walked to the door.
“What were you doing?” I
asked as we passed the door that Tuna had almost headbutted.
“Tweaking a few things on
the next issue of Inquire. See, this organization?” he asked, drawing the
hoodie tighter around his face as we approached the door. “This place is unbelievably
shitty, as you well know. Gents,” he said to the two tall, obese Campus Watch
guards who were standing outside the building, looking up at the broken window.
They looked at us and said,
“You wouldn’t have anything to do with that, would you?”
The Drunkard laughed a merry
laugh and put on a shitty posh accent. “Why, what a humorous question. My
friends and I were just locking up at the Societies Room, what, and happened to
overhear what seemed to be the most awful crash—pip pip, what? When we looked
out into the hallway, we saw some uppity Yank storming out. Believe he had
black contacts in and looked just on the pallid side. God save the Queen.”
“God save the Queen,” the
Campus Watch said in chorus. “This American,” the one on the right—who had the
extremely thin hair—said, hatred dripping out of his voice at the word
‘American,’ “how tall would you say he was?”
“Oh,” said The Drunkard,
scratching his chin. “About my height. A bit thinner. Pallid. So very pallid.
As if Death himself were about to swoop down with his mighty scythe and take
off his head. Would be worried if he weren’t going around breaking through
windows, what what?”
“Indeed,” said the two
Campus Watch officers in chorus.
“Oi James,” said the one on
the left—the one with the ginger hair. “Don’t that sound like that one who been
peekin through windows, what?”
“So it does, Carl. So it
does. Lads,” said the one on the right. “We thank you much and get home safe,
now. See any more Yanks around causing trouble, you tell us, and we’ll head over
and beat em down for you.”
The Drunkard thanked them,
and we went on our way.
Right as we were at the
border between out-of-earshot and still audible to the Watch, Tuna began going
on a tirade against the Brits’ and their “post-colonial mentality.” I didn’t
quite follow him all the way, since I think there was just some need to vent at
something there, but as long as he was content, that was cool.
We got back to Woolf and
Tuna went to “watch Dark Knight, because I need to see something
blow up tonight.” The Drunkard and I hung around the courtyard for a bit
longer, discussing what was going on in our lives. This was aided by a bottle
of Scotch that The Drunkard procured from some deep recess of his hoody, and
two cigars—which also magically appeared from somewhere in his hoody. (I’ve
never quite understood the way that clothing garment manages to always have
much more storage capacity than it should.)
He was having nightly
confrontations with the Frenchmen about their smoking habits and the odd pamphlets
he’d seen sprinkled around the house. “If I’m translating them correctly,” The
Drunkard said after a puff of his cigar, “then they’re tracts calling for the
upheaval of the cultural cesspool that is the British royal monarchy and
complete reversal of the current hegemony.” He sighed. “I don’t know what the
fuck they’re studying.”
“Revolutionary Cliches?”
The Drunkard shrugged.
There came a ruckus from
Block E. We looked over and saw the two morbidly obese Campus Watch officers
pulling a screaming and flailing Stalker from the building. “Fascists!”
screamed The Stalker. “I have rights, God damn you! Where are my rights? I
demand a barrister!”
The officers didn’t respond,
just dragged him out of the building and tossed him—as if he were a rag
doll—into their golf cart. They sped off and The Drunkard and I looked at each
other.
“That’s not good,” I said.
“No,” said The Drunkard.
“That’s probably because of what I did.”
“Probably,” I said.
“Think I should do something
about it?” he asked.
“Probably.”
Time passed. “God damn it,”
he said.
[1] It is a well
known fact that there are very few places—per capita—to get a good burger in
the UK. I guess it’s because they are—overall—healthier than the U,S,m and
thus, the urge to eat fat-ridden red meat is lesser. Still. As an American,
seeing the profusion of the cardboard the Brits called hamburger patties was a
horrible thing. Next time you’re in the UK, tell them that they don’t know what
a good burger is. They won’t listen and insist that Yanks are too stupid to
talk about food, but you’ll at least be trying.
