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| Writing this post reminded me of Bosom Buddies. If Skip and I had to wear dresses to stay at the dorm, it would have made a much more interesting tale. |
It was sophomore year, and I was living in the dorms. The way my particular building worked, you lived in a two-person suite that was connected to another two-person suite via a bathroom that connected both rooms. For my freshman year I was randomly paired with a guy named Eric, who was (and, I believe, still is) from a town in south-central New York called (I'm not making this up) Horseheads.
(The town, outside of Corning and Elmira, was near another curiously named area called Big Flats. I liked to ask Eric if that's also how you described the women that lived there. Yes, there was a time when my jokes were actually worse than they are now.)
He and I were as different as a Horseheads resident and Long Islander could be — when he read my full-of-vowels name off the "This is your roommate" card over the summer, he expected to meet a guy who drove an Iroc and wore wifebeaters all the time, he later told me — but we made a great pair of roommates, so we chose to be roommates in the same room for sophomore year.
Our suitemates were a similarly mismatched pair of fellas who I'll call Ken and Tim. Eric and I expected to become closer to Tim over Ken, because on the first night Ken mentioned how much he liked to smoke what he called "the herb," and back then I was an almost militant teetotaler. But for reasons I'll explain in another post, we ended up being friendlier with Ken, Tim ended up befriending some guys in another dorm and moved in with them for sophomore year, and Ken filled the open slot with his friend Skip, who hailed from way-the-hell-upstate Ogdensburg, which probably was to Horseheads what Horseheads was to Manhattan.
Skip was, and as far as I know still is, a blast. But he liked to drink. A lot.
By sophomore year I'd loosened my standards on drinking, so the actual imbibing didn't bother me. But it was the result of his drinking that led to the incident that is the source of this post. So, now that I've finally completed this prologue, let's get to the Story.
HERE WE GO
As a fact that would probably explain the sadness on my college transcript, I never went to bed before midnight. Each floor of the dorm had a small lounge area, and I liked to bang away on my typewriter (remember them?) while watching my fellow students wander by.
One evening, probably close to 1 in the morning, I went to bed on the bottom bunk under Eric, who had been dutifully sleeping since 9:30 or so. I probably wasn't sleeping that long when I suddenly woke up and saw someone sitting on the edge of the side of my bed.
It took a second, but I realized it was Skip, wearing nothing but a pair of boxers.
"Hey, Skip."
Skip said nothing. He didn't move. Then he scooted back a bit, turned, and swung himself into the bed. Next to me.
"Uhh...Skip?"
The bed was so narrow that I couldn't lay flat next to Skip even if I wanted to (note: I didn't want to), so as I was already on my side, pinned between Skip and the concrete wall, I was able to see Skip's face. His eyes were wide open, and he lay there stiff, like the angriest corpse any morgue has ever seen.
I wanted to ask Skip if he was all right, but the look on his face made me think he wasn't much in the mood to talk:. The look on his face made me think he wanted to tear off my face and put it on his face.
I groped my way through the bathroom and into the other bedroom, where I shook Ken awake in the top bunk.
"Skip came into my bed," I said in a panicked whisper.
"Then go into his bed," was Ken's possibly herb-influenced reply before he rolled back to sleep.
I was quietly panicking. It's kind of silly as I think about it in my fat/old age, but back then I was 19, and a lot of things freaked me out. Plus it was like 3 in the morning, so I wasn't in a great mental state, anyway.
I grabbed a notepad and went into the lounge and spent the rest of the morning writing words that likely never amounted to anything.
By around 7:30, Skip shuffled into the lounge, apologizing. He'd been drinking and had a tendency to sleepwalk, and he never even remembered wandering into my bed. In fact, as Eric told me later, this is what happened when Skip awoke and saw Eric's face poking from the top bunk:
Eric: Hey, Skip.
Skip: Hey, Eric. What are you doing in my room.
Eric: No, Skip. What are you doing in my room?
[Skip looks around at his surroundings, freaks out, and jumps out of bed.]
EPILOGUE
Skip and I (and Ken and Eric) enjoyed a number of other adventures that sophomore year, including when Skip and I entered his darkened room while Ken was banging his girlfriend (Skip whispered to Ken that he was with "Rhoda," with whom Skip enjoyed a very physical relationship at that time) and we tape-recorded the action for our later amusement.
After sophomore year, Eric and I moved to an off-campus house, and I started dating the woman who'd become Mrs. The Anthony Show, and I didn't see Skip much again. I remember one time I ran into him at a convenience store chain called Wilson Farms. Skip was on his way out, awkwardly holding a couple of 12-packs and a six-pack and a 40 -- all of it Budweiser. We exchanged hellos, and I said, "Looks like you've got your drinking in check." He smiled sheepishly and said, "Well, it's not all for me" in a way that told me that it probably was.
I don't think I ever saw Skip again.
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