How I Learned to Hate Andy

continued from A Man in the Groove of Georgetown

Whatever criteria that the Georgetown residence staff had used to match roommates that fall may have produced some perfect pairings---as I said, I got along fine with my initial roommate---but in the case of Pat, it failed hard. The match-up produced nothing but misery and drama, and kicked off a series of events that would lead to me getting a new room and a new roommate in Xavier Hall.

Pat hated being in Andy's presence from the moment they met---not Andy B., who would become my second roommate, but the other Andy, who came from North Carolina. I'd read Look Homeward, Angel, and very much enjoyed it, to the point of designing my high school graduation announcements based on that theme, but at the time, Andy was the first person I had ever met from that state. I think he was from Raleigh.

He was large--as tall as Pat, but instead of the loose-limbed slackness of a bass player, his frame was expansive and big-boned. Walking around his room, he took large encompassing strides like a basketball center, his long arms, moving in outwards to take up as much space as possible. He shook your hand with a solid grip when introducing himself, which he did unabashedly, in the thick tidewater accent of his state, and with a voice of extraverted confidence. He was like a giant friendly dog, one with sparkling clear blue eyes that gave him a blissful faraway countenance even while he looked right at you. Above all, he liked to talk.

"Hah thair, y'all! Ah'm Andy from Nowth Carahlahna!" Pat would screech, in the rankest imitation of his roommate's tidewater accent, while gripping the sides of his head in anguish. It was torture for him to be in the same room.

Not surprisingly the worst clash was over music. Andy was much less interested in the esoteric multitrack masterpieces in Pat's collection. He had his own music, and his tastes ran to hard-driving Southern Rock. He wanted to play it out loud and fill the room and hallway with it, to create atmosphere. One of his favorite artists was called the Marshall Tucker band, which Pat mutated into its obvious vulgar insult parody, spitting the name out in disgust.

Within twenty-four hours of moving in, Pat was going nearly insane, and he made no secret about it. He drew sympathy from a gang of friends he assembled in those first few days, from others on the first floor he took into his confidence--Dan F., Karl from Long Island, Andy B., and me---as well as a Trina and Vanessa, two girls who were roommates on the second floor.

Almost immediately we were all aligned against Andy, and this is the part of the story, looking back at this, where I am ashamed to remember how easily I fell into this opposition to Andy, because of Pat's dislike for him, even though Andy never did a thing to me directly to make me want to dislike him. In fact, it was just the opposite. Andy was never anything but friendly. He seemed impervious to any knowledge that anyone disliked him, or could possibly dislike him. He seemed to have no off button, and was eternally upbeat. It was as if Pat could insult him right to his face and Andy would react as if Pat were speaking a foreign language and would go on with what he was saying, filled with eagerness to explain everything about himself and his own life.

It was a character flaw of mine---no small one--that I could be drawn into ganging up on someone like that, someone whose worst sin against me was trying to make friends. I let Andy become a cartoon figure in my imagination, and I never questioned what that meant in a moral sense. Looking back I wonder who he was, and if he was wounded at all by our ostracism. If he was, he never seemed to show it.  His clear blue eyes seemed to see beyond the pettiness of the moment.

The reason I went along with it, however, is obvious to me. I wanted to be a part of that group in the dorm. It was like an intoxicating drug, to belong to a posse of other young people my same age, and to be accepted by them as an exotic piece of the puzzle of fellowship. Those first days in the dorm, when everyone is away from home for the time. is magical. It is at this moment that long-lasting friendships can be formed in a way that is less available even as one goes through college, and become almost impossible in one's later adult life, except in rare circumstances.

To be fair, Pat never made antipathy towards Andy contingent on his own friendship. I doubt he wouldn't have cared at all, if I have befriended Andy on my own. To Pat it was all about the fact that it drove him crazy to be inside the same eight-by-ten-foot room as Andy. Everything could be solved if that situation was changed. If it felt like disloyalty to my new friends, to consider Andy anything less than obnoxious, that was purely in my own imagination. I enjoyed the emotional drama of it.

At least I'm spared from having to know that we caused Andy grief by our behavior. As far as I know, he adjusted well to the room switches we would later undertake, and he didn't give us any further thought.  I hope he didn't. I get the idea that he found plenty of activity outside of Xavier Hall in the wider campus, through his classes and other people he met. No doubt he introduced himself to everyone on campus at one point, until he found enough like-minded souls who weren't put off by his brand of extraversion. He was better off for it.

 If I met him today, I'd probably want to apologize for being a jerk, or least projecting that attitude, but I suspect he would have long since forgotten it, which is to his credit.