continued from How I Learned to Hate Andy
Each floor of little plain brick Xavier Hall was a square hallway that went all the way around to connected back on itself. The rooms were all on the outside. On the interior side were windows that opened onto a central well that went from the basement up through the three floors. It was an old building, so one could open the windows and lean out into the interior well. The interior on the ground was not normally accessible to us, and it filled with bits of garbage at times over the semester but otherwise featureless.
The main door had been moved from the street basement level on Prospect Street to face the interior side of the building on the enclosed quadrangle of East Campus. It accessible by a small set of stairs that went up from the cement plaza of the quadrangle to the the first floor of the rooms, at the wet corner of the building facade onto the quadrangle. One accessed the interior with a plastic university id card that was like a computer punch card, which one inserted into the slot in the metallic card reader so that the little light turned green, and the door unlocked. At most times during the day the door was propped open and entry from the quadrangle was on the honor system.
The room where I started out living with John was almost directly inside on the door on the first floor, to the right as one came in, and thus its window faced on the dark narrow space between Xavier and another non-residential campus building to the west along Prospect Street.
Andy B.'s room was in the back of the first floor, along the side of the square that faced south onto the Prospect Street, and thus he had a window that looked out with a fine view across the street and even through the trees to the far Virginia side of the Potomac. I wanted to have that view like that, with sunlight, and I got it soon enough.
Like Pat, Andy---Andy B., that is, or Ohio Andy, the Good Andy, the Andy we liked---had come into the Arts Hall under the banner of music. But he was not an audiophile like Pat. He didn't get his musical enjoyment from large headphones and a turntable of electronica. He cared little for Pop hits. His appreciation of music was classical, the bookish introspective type that came from have learned to play an acoustic stringed instrument, the cello. He didn't bring this instrument with him until the following year, so I didn't see him play it at first, and thus I didn't come to associate him with that instrument until later. But now it seems perfectly in line with his character, to let his thoughts go and to immerse himself in the vibrations of the wooden cello brought into being by his own bowing of the strings, akin to the way Conan Doyle describes the reverie of his famous violin-playing detective.
He was tall and lanky, but without the bass-player solidness of Pat. He was more able to bend like. a reed in the breeze. He was spry, even as one might mistake him as a pure intellectual who shunned extreme physical activity. He wore John Lennon-type glasses for his myopia, and kept a mop of blonde hair. This all seemed normal until he opened his mouth and out came that mid-Atlantic accent in a baritone, that you couldn't place, but which you would never place as coming from Dayton, Ohio.
Like Pat, Andy didn't get along with his roommate, who was Jay, a phlegmatic and stocky-framed young man with a nasal voice that was difficult to appreciate if one listened to it for very long. This conflict between Andy and Jay was a slow boil compare to the emergency situation between Pat and North Carolina Andy. Nevertheless it gathered momentum quickly. Jay's voice was the drone of steady self-monologue spoken to anyone with whom he engaged in conversation. It took Andy a few days to catch on that Jay rarely stopped talking when he was in the presence of somebody else.
To be sure, a lot of the rancor we came to have for Jay---and I think Jay noticed this much more than North Carolina Andy--was driven by Karl, a junior who studied Chinese language the School of Language and Linguistics, who had a single in the room next to Andy and Jay. He was unique among us in being an upperclassman. He had lived in Xavier three years running, which boggled my mind in contemplating that someone would voluntarily keep signing up for this place.
Karl was phlegmatic, stocky and also with his own nasal voice. He was Jewish and from Long Island. He was an out homosexual. He had put a small lavender triangle on the name card on his door. He was the first out gay person I ever knew personally in my life, outside of a couple incoming sophomores in high school, who were in the drama club, and had who shocked the school during my senior year by declaring themselves to be bisexual.
Karl was our revered elder, our placid unmoving fixed point while the rest of us scampered about in our dewy freshman way like newborn calves jumping in a grassy field. We gathered in his room more than any other, since he lived by himself, and it was here that we plotted schemes.
He was at ease talking about his homosexuality in a matter-of-fact way. He never discussed the specifics of his sex life in my presence. But it was fun to hear him describe the geography of the local gay culture in Washington, D.C., and the various neighborhoods that had quietly become the nucleus of an open gay community amidst the otherwise grey and dull offices north of the White House and the State Department. Dupont Circle, the location of one of the nearest stops Orange line metro, had become notorious among those in-the-know as the "Fruit Loop." Likewise nearby Farrragut Square had redubbed with the obvious vulgar play on words.
Pat loved to draw out references from Karl to his gayness which became the subject of Pat's warped sense of humor. New Chinese vocabulary words that Karl learned in his linguistic studies were fair game for gay double-entendres which would make Pat roar with laughter. Karl once volunteered the verb "to penetrate deeply into" as being a good subject Pat's glossary. Pat learned it, reproducing the tones faithfully, so he could sing it along in a parody version he made up of "You Can Feel it All Over," a famous hit by the musician Stevie Wonder.
There was a yet another pairing of mismatched roommates on the first floor of Xavier Hall that would participate the Grand Roommate Switch we would engineer, the two Dans in the corner of the first floor, directly opposite my room, at the east end of the hall where the rooms faced out onto Prospect Street. They were not at each other's throats, but they were as unlike as any two Dans of the same age could be, who were both freshmen at Georgetown, which of course narrows the range of Dans quite a bit.
Dan F. was a chiseled windblown young man from San Diego, not overly tall but solid of muscle and with a squinty gaze. He never spoke above the same steady tone of voice, reflected in the distinct style of Southern California, and influence of a moneyed background, He was the son of a high executive of a regional airline based in San Diego, and he shone with the low-key confidence of his origin and upbringing, that is, in the unpretentious way of that era, dressing in the type of clothes as the rest of us, albeit with a California preppie style. As far as I remember, he came to Georgetown without any special set of possessions his family's money would have afforded him, But in those days, outside of a new expensive automobile---which had been all but forbidden to freshmen to bring---it was difficult to acquire anything that an eighteen year old would want, that could be brought into a dorm room, and which could not be bought with the proceeds of a summer job.
Yet it was startling the first time, to be talking about helicopters in a movie, and to hear him mention that he himself a trained helicopter pilot. It had never occurred to me that someone our age could have accomplished that. That kind of sober competence among youth of his class would became apparent to me over time, and highlighted the material difference in my background from his, that seemed much more real than I imagined. Yet, as I said, the Eighties were egalitarian in a way like no other time in history. It never occurred to me that I lacked anything that would allow to get as far in the world as I cared to, as far as he could, based on my own gumption with the opportunities I had been granted so far. We were all at the same starting line, I figured.
His roommate, the other Dan---I don't remember where he came from--was not a part of our clique as was Dan F., but neither did we spurn him as one of adversaries. Unlike preppie San Diego helicopter Dan, this second Dan was as close to a hippie as one could get in that day. He had long uncombed hair and wore loose clothes, sometimes with a leather vest, that seemed to give him a perpetually unwashed atmosphere. Unlike other music folks in the dorm, he had brought an instrument with him---his acoustic guitar. In the evenings and weekends, during times of obvious leisure among the students, he played it while strolling through the first floor hallway of Xavier in shorts and sandals.
But he was not in fact a hippie. In those years, hippies did not exist, at least not in Washington, D.C.. They had been banned from the culture for several years. So when Guitar Dan walked through the halls playing one of the old counterculture anthems, he did so mockingly, in scorn of that earlier era of starry-eyed idealism, to make us all laugh at it with him, singing Good morning, starshine. The earth says hello!
Certainly helicopter Dan complained of the weirdness of his throwback roommate. His nose was probably the most offended sense, as he sometimes wondered his roommate took regular showers. But Dan F. was the type would naturally seek to change rooms of his own accord. He would quietly bear the burden in stoic reserve until he could arrange better accommodations at a convenient later date, which he did when he signed onto the Great Roommate Switch.
The last two members of our circle were the female component---Vanessa and Trina, who lived in the second floor room almost directly above me and John.
They were both from somewhere in the Northeast. Vanessa was from New York or New Jersey I think. She was curvy and ample of figure, but without crossing into the realm of obesity for that era. She had a husky voice that spoke of cosmopolitan experience, and could project a come-hitherness even while speaking in normal conversation. Trina was the opposite in frame---thin and waiflike, with a round pixie face and freckles that seemed like permanent sparkles on her cheeks. Her brilliant eyes spoke of living in an ethereal realm of delight in all that New York City could offer to a pretty young woman. Her art was dance. She had held an internship with a famous ballet company there, and she had many tales of what professional ballet dancers were like backstage. It was the kind of New York-only experience that inflamed a hopeless envy in me, that I was already behind in life in some way.
They were the only roommate pairing who gone along well and had no desire to switch. One thought of one and the other together. They even pushed their separated beds together in their room to make one big giant sleeping platform for the both of them. One day coming into the room I found them on the bed between Pat and Dan F., all fully clothed and innocent, yet evocative of a lurid move from the 1960s. It seemed like the perfect natural configuration for the four of them.
There were others involved in the drama that would play out, notably two Resident Assistants (RAs) who lived in the dorm, one male and one female, and who be our link to the university residence department during the negotiations and demands that followed.
There was also of course Father Tom, the Resident Jesuit (Rez Jez, as they called them), who was the priest who was assigned to live in the dorm with the students. Many of the dorms, such as New South where Charles lived, had one per floor. We had Father Tom for all three floors of the Arts Hall. He was, I think, in late Twenties or in his Thirties, with a phlegmatic body without being overweight. He was affable, and was friendly with the students when he met them coming or going, and he seemed to be on our side in general, but one had the sense that he didn't care to be bothered by us very much, He had his business elsewhere, which is typical of priests of his order. He had gone to seminary Omaha, which I thought was interesting, but in seemed of little interest on his part to talk about it.
He was a beer drinker. Dan F. once saw him coming back from Weissmuller's Grocery ("Johnny Weismuller's" as Pat called it), which was across the street from East Campus, and carrying nothing but a six pack of his favorite lager.
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