Ride the High Waves

Incessant, prolonged, drill-like cacophony pounded throughout the dorm room, blazing my ears as if some berserk triphammer junky had decided to begin an early demolition of the ancient building called MBK. The creaking dormitory might have been built when the Visigoths roamed Southern France in the fifth century.

The alarm clock from hell.

Alan Stakes’ answer to sleeping in.  My answer was to snore, preferably for a good long time.  But my roommate had proved to be an early riser.  Early bird catches the worm, he’d often say.  I thought it served the worms right for getting up before the birds.

Early morning light shot right through the drapes.  The sound of dawn risers waxed a distinct rhythm, a first-day-of-classes frenetic sweat that gripped the air like a C-clamp.  Footfalls pounded the hallways of the old wooden structure, a sound just short of a pack of Clydesdales.    Place looked like a firetrap. Worked like some sort of primitive amplifier, a whisper the same as a shout.  Smelled of mold and mildew and ancient jock straps, marinated in a brew of cheap discount cleansers.

“Rise and shine.  Chapel in just half-an-hour,” Alan said happily.

“Hmmph--” I muttered, rolling over, trying to avoid the megaglare of the suddenly opened drapes.

“First day of classes for us lowly freshman.  Gonna be a great day!”

“Erphhhhhhhhhhh--” I mumbled.

Moments later, Alan was out the door, ready to conquer the campus. Though when I thought about it, it seemed he had already done so during the days of orientation that preceded this day we would begin to play for keeps. The old paper chase, the pursuit of GPA.

The pursuit of women.

Alan excelled at that.

Chapel started with a bang, interspersed with groans.  I think I heard what sounded like prayers of panic coming from a superannuated elder statesman of the university, whose name I didn’t catch.  Had he just witnessed apocalyptic finality?  Was he trying to shout it down?  Or was he merely deaf?  I felt like I had newly arthritic knees, the result of kneeling for eons; a supplicant attempting to preserve head and neck in the face of a raging medieval guillotine reaching out from the podium.

What came next was exactly the opposite. What a boring speaker--  Dr. Towler should be bottled and made available for rent to big time insomniacs.  He droned on and on about what terrible people we were; so flawed that we should be burnt to a quick crisp by a bolt of heavenly lightening.  I might have enjoyed it if he were a fire and brimstone speaker.  It is hard to describe what a monotone bereft of life is like when the vocalist is denouncing your every being.

“Self-absorbed asshole,” I muttered.

But, he suggested, if we worked hard, followed the precepts of the university, and bowed to the guy upstairs most of the day, we just might escape perdition.  And avoid at all costs any kind of impure thoughts, he droned. At least, that’s what I think he said.  With every sentence his voice dropped more vitality.  By the time his sermon was over I thought he might be a cadaver with a dying loudspeaker implant stuffed inside his emaciated body.  He finally shuffled off.  I think Buffalo might have been a good venue. I believe I must have nodded off.  I felt a shoulder nudge.

“Do we have to put up with this every morning?” asked the pretty girl sitting next to me.  “And you’re right; he is a self-absorbed asshole.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it any,” I said, as a touch of consciousness bathed my mind.  “Good chance to catch a few winks, though.”

“Before the school year is out, I’m going to get some alarm clocks and pie pans,” she whispered.

“Sounds tasty.”

“Nah.  I’ll hide the clocks all over the auditorium, and you sit them on the pie tins, you see, and then when they go off--”

“Devilish,” I gave her a whispered grin.

“Oh yeah!”