Chinook
by George Hosier  - April 30

Roommates

An old college friend called me this week. We reminisced together until we fell asleep on the phone. Biff and I had been roommates at a tiny divinity college that was cut out of the middle of a cornfield in central Indiana. The way I understand it, the place was founded by an eccentric scholar and retired athletic shoe salesman named Oskar Smorkstini.

The venerable founder had fulfilled his dream to build a place where entire generations of underprivileged kids could be trained to wear coke-bottle glasses and pocket protectors, while conjugating Koine verbs from the Septuagint and exegeting a homiletical sermon from a soteriological hermeneutic.

There was a huge picture of Oskar Smorkstini on the wall of the Student Union building, right beside the ping pong table. It was almost creepy to try to play a game of Round Robin with the old patriarch peering down at you from under his shaggy brows. Founder Smorkstini’s brows in real life were almost indiscernible, but in the wee hours one morning, somebody had enhanced the portrait with a permanent marker.

When Dean Hotchkiss discovered the wanton vandalism, he nearly swallowed his dentures. He summoned the entire student body to the cafeteria and spent the next three hours trying to elicit a confession. He threatened, he bribed, he cajoled, and he pleaded. At length, he collapsed into a chair to fan his perspiring face with his toupee. Nobody ever found out who was responsible for the eyebrows. Biff and I weren’t about to confess.

I’m not proud of the childish pranks I pulled in college. In fact, when I remember them, I experience a profound regret that washes over me like a mournful autumn wind, laced with snickers of glee. Because Cornfield Gospel College was a conservative religious institution in a rural area of the Bible Belt, 20 years ago, we didn’t do the drunken orgy thing. The kind of fun we created for ourselves didn’t require a tray full of antibiotics, an urn of black coffee and $20,000 bail to repair the next morning.

For instance, I’ll never forget the time Biff and I, now veteran sophomores, took on a couple of freshmen roommates down the hall in a contest to see which team could hijack the others’ sleep in the most creative and startling manner possible.

It began with a simple short-sheeting. Kids nowadays don’t even know what short-sheeting is, let alone how to perform the technique. I won’t divulge the secret, especially since I have a teenage son living in my house who might get the petty idea to do it to Dad some evening. Let’s just say that the prank involves sneaking into somebody’s bedroom and remaking the bed in such a way that a person can’t get under their covers any further than their knees.

It’s a simple thing to rig, really, but the beauty of it lies in the fact that it remains undetectable until that moment when the victim is the most vulnerable. It is particularly effective on bleary-eyed freshmen who are trying to catch a couple of hours of sleep after cramming all night for a Psychology exam. Their howls of frustration bring sheer joy to a sophomore’s heart.

Unfortunately, Biff and I were not successful in restraining our mirth, which gave us away. A couple of evenings later, I dove into bed only to discover that I was sharing it with about 50 pounds of crushed ice. Biff wasn’t so lucky. His bed was full of sand. I just threw my sheets in the dryer, and that was the end of it, but little granules of sand were still working their way out of Biff’s mattress 4 months later.

Naturally, this unprovoked meanness called for retribution. The next night, Biff and I picked the freshmen’s lock at about 4:00 AM, and emptied two five gallon buckets of ice water over their sleeping forms. That got a little ugly, because the freshmen responding by throwing moldy pizza crusts and warm Gatorade at us, chasing us out of the dorm in our underwear and locking the door behind us. We had to huddle on the porch until the night guard came by to let us in. Of course, he reported us to Dean Hotchkiss who called us into his office and allowed us to witness his eloquent disappointment.

The real kicker was that the Dean made us spend the next week cleaning Gatorade stains out of the carpet with a toothbrush and an eyedropper. Biff and I never forgave the Dean for that injustice. We weren’t even the ones that threw the Gatorade, for crying out loud!

After that experience, Biff and I decided the gloves were coming off. No more mister nice sophomore! We went to a bait shop and bought 12 dozen minnows. We dumped them into a big plastic tub, wrapped it in several layers of black trash bags, and set it in the window of our room, where it would accumulate maximum solar energy. We waited about two weeks, until the freshmen began to think that they had won the feud.

Then, on a given day, we ducked out of class and pre-positioned the tub under one of their beds. We then engineered a ripcord that would tear the lid off of the bait tub. We ran the end of the cord along the baseboard of their room, through the crack at the bottom of their door and tucked it out of view under the baseboard in the hall. Then we set our alarm for 3:00.

When it buzzed us awake, we tip-toed down the hall and quietly wedged chocks under their door, effectively trapping the unsuspecting suckers in their room. We felt giddy with our own cleverness. I gave Biff the honor of pulling the rip cord. It wasn’t entirely an altruistic gesture. I wanted to be able to hold my nose.

Biff jerked that string, and nothing happened! We looked at each other disappointedly. We had no contingency plan for a malfunction. Biff jerked it again. It pulled free in his hand, and when he reeled it in, we discovered that there was a note attached to the other end. The note read, “Gotcha!”

Time stood still. Our eyes locked, neither willing to voice the horrified realization that we had been outpranked. We sprinted for our room, but it was too late. As we opened the door, a thick, green wave of stench rolled out of our room, picked us up with a slimy hand, and body slammed us against the opposite wall.

We hit the floor retching. When we were finally able to wrap our shirts around our faces in a makeshift mask and stumble through the fog into our room, we found awaiting us, in a pile on the floor, the contents of our carefully prepared minnow tub. Dean Hotchkiss made us replace the carpet in our room at our own expense. Even so, we couldn’t get any dates the rest of the semester. No one felt like having dinner and a movie with somebody that smelled like Valdez at low tide during a silver run.

After that, we kind of took a sabbatical on the practical jokes--at least the hardcore ones. There was still the occasional habanero sauce in the toothpaste, or dirty underwear fluttering from the flagpole at sunup, but they were but insipid shadows of our former glory. The carpet purchase had really eaten a hole in our recreational budget, and the slump in dating activity effectively restructured our sense of humor.

We began to try to figure out something else worthwhile to do with our time at college. I think it was Biff that, quite by accident, read one of his syllabi. We had previously assumed that the professors had given them to us as an emergency source of spit wads and paper airplanes. As it turned out, though, there were a bunch of activities listed in them. We decided to try some of them, since we had nothing better to do.

Amazingly, just completing the activities in each syllabus wound up killing most of our spare time. Then, next thing you know, we started passing exams and our grades began to crawl upwards. It was a heady feeling. It wasn’t exactly the adrenaline rush that comes from offering somebody salt-laced candy, or putting a whoopee cushion in a pretty coed’s chair, but it in a way it actually felt better.

One day in class, about halfway through my junior year I had just successfully conjugated a series of Koine verbs on the blackboard. As I turned around, the professor was looking at me with a strange expression. His lips were parted and his teeth were showing. At first I thought he was snarling. Suddenly I realized that he was smiling at me. I hadn’t even known that professors were capable of smiling!

You talk about a rush! My brilliant work had actually made a professor smile! Suddenly I was a popular man. For the rest of the day, complete strangers would walk up to me and slap me on the back. I had finally crossed over. I was a Big Man on Campus. It wasn’t until that evening when I was getting ready for bed, that I discovered the awful truth. As I pulled my shirt over my head, something rustled on the back of it.

It was a note that had been stuck to my back. “Smack Me!” it read. I was shattered. That was why the professor had been grinning at me. That was why total strangers were pounding me on the back. I looked at Biff’s bed. His covers were over his head, and he was facing away from me, but his shoulders were shaking like he had malaria, and every once in a while a little snorting gasp would escape.

He thought he was a real funny man! No problem. I just waited until he was asleep, then I spiked his shampoo with N’air.

 

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