I had to go to University in 1976 and there were all these terrible red fake stone dorms, the towers that went up so far and everything was awful like you got date raped and then the dorm girls teased you about your new boyfriend because he kept fucking coming around.
It took me a few months to find my people. The weirdo dorm. The really ugly one that we devoted to art defacing.
The first time I found them was at their annual Halloween party. I remember one guy who was dressed up in cobalt blue skintight rayon, he was very neon, he was a devil. Dude was a clear signpost. So I transferred. Late.
I wound up in a coveted dorm room hand-painted by the previous inhabitant but she had to bail at the last moment so suddenly this desirable single was available, and I was popped into the slot. Bureaucracy. This was not overall a popular decision. I was but a leaf in the stream, though.
It was so cute, how she'd painted it. Caterpillars crawling across concrete beams, a green and blue pretty tree on the door. This whole dorm building had been absolutely blown through by all these painter artists a couple years earlier, who did stuff like meticulously reproduce Grateful Dead album covers on the babyshit brown-painted dorm hallway walls and otherwise express their artistic concerns and interests.
And then a lot of them just left, leaving we younger ideological siblings behind to read very personal, angry graffiti, still on the walls, about how this used to be a wonderful place but now it's so not a wonderful place anymore thus we are leaving.
The people who still had not left, were overall nice. The weirdo short guy who had somehow managed to get his large dog into the dorm, a dog who regularly shit in the hall, that guy was nice. The dog was nice. We managed. He probably massively changed technology everywhere and we'll never, ever know about it. The tall pretty guy who had a crush on me and I didn’t know it. The woman who loved him. The woman who took on being in charge of this dorm floor that I still dream about sometimes, who knew how to talk to me when some asshole knocked me down outside.
I had been recently before in a somewhat disturbing small town in southwest Massachusetts, and all this feral shit was just balm to my soul. All I wanted was community, community, please finally don't take it away again this time this is so good.
And it was. They were nice. The two weirdo guys who were probably gay who played headball volleyball with me. We did this for months. The rules were that once you got the volleyball up there you had to hit it back and forth with your heads, or the play was over. We did this instead of going to classes.
We got really good at it. We came out in the summer to help interview a new dorm mom. We asked her whether her socks matched. We asked her whether she was a racist. We all got academically suspended.
Those people got me into campus street theater, where we'd just go around on foot in bunches and troll people. We had this "Can I Hide?" deal where we'd target somebody, somehow, and then send someone up to knock on the door, and ask to be hidden. Plead. Please hide us. Then you send another person, and another.
What do you do when a stranger knocks on your door, and asks to be hidden? What do you do when this keeps happening, when they keep coming?
The last move of the game, if the target plays along, is you send up the last person to knock on the door and demand to know whether anyone is hidden here?
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“Miranda” 2016
