StupidIs Classic: Scat Time!
Are you guys in luck. I have here, for your reading pleasure, the greatest story ever told. It's from an email I wrote three and a half years ago, and I include it in it's full, unedited entirety. Read and learn...and understand that my state of being whilst writing this was of unbelieveable rage.</p>

The Dorm Room on Poo Corner.

See, it's my belief that the college experience exists purely at night, for as I think about the college experience, I think of A) late night paper writing, B) late night, long, philosophical discussions such as "Superman and Jesus: Same Guy?, and C) late night hospital visits.

Well, needless to say, I've managed to finally accomplish all three of those. Fear not, this isn't about me. Last night, being Halloween, is a massive party night here in New York. They have a big parade in the Village, and parties are going on constantly. I felt like crap, frankly, or otherwise I'd have gone to the parade. No, i stayed at the school for a while, then went home and took a heavy duty painkiller. It was probably stress induced, but my shoulder and head on my left side were just in utter agony. I took some medicine, and I'm fine. The rest of the idiots, I knew, were getting quite plastered, but they promised to stay in the Village. I value their drinking time, as it's just about the only time I get to myself these days.

So it's around 11, and I'm by myself, relaxing, on the computer and getting ready to write a paper for my poetry class. All of a sudden the door bursts open, and this mass of people swarm in, carrying my roommate Dave. I've not mentioned Dave too much, as in secret I don't care for Dave in the least. He doesn't know this, but just about everyone else in the world does. No matter, I can live with him, I just don't like who he is (misogynist, alcoholic, idiot). Point being, Dave is piss drunk, blubbering on and moaning.

"Yeah, Dave's pretty drunk, we're just going to bring him in and let him sleep, he really needs to sleep." Which was plainly obvious, so we throw him on the bed, pull off his shoes and try and get him to sleep. He gets up, and blindly stumbles to the bathroom, where my other roommate Shane was peeing.

"Shaaane...please hurrry."

Needless to say, those were the last intelligible words anyone would hear from Dave for about nine hours. So after Shane ends his ten minute piss, Dave locks himself in the bathroom, and thus the real trouble begins...

After about five or ten minutes of us yelling "Dave, come on, open the door or say something, anything man," the RA, Ryan, notices there's a commotion. God love him and all, but Ryan's a naive idiot. He comes in and essentially gets in the way, as we try and figure some way to coax Dave out. But to no avail. We all decide, at one point, that we have to break the door down.

Great. This establishes a whole realm of problems.

First being that Dave, at his heart, is an alcoholic. Every night he drinks, every damn night, and for some reason he's left several cans and bottles in the bathroom, where he's at. The ones that had been left from that evening's entanglements I managed to hide before the RA came in. Now the RA is supposed to write us up upon sight of cans or bottles or any sort of evidence of drinking, regardless of when or where or who did the drinking. Whatever room it's in, they write everyone up. That's their obligation, and I respect that. However, I don't drink, and I'm sure as hell not going to be written up for it, sooo, I know that while we have to get Dave out, we have to be careful not to get our own asses in a sling.

And I, I am a smart boy. Ryan was the oncall RA, and the oncall RA is supposed to carry a beeper when they're on duty, so that anyone that has an emergency can get ahold of them. I slip out of the room while everyone's still huddled around the door, trying to get Dave out, and I use a neighbor's cell phone to page Ryan's beeper, drawing him out of the room. This works, of course, like a charm, and as soon as Ryan leaves the room to check on the page, I dash in, shut the door behind me, and our friend Andy breaks down the door.

What we saw was, to say the least, horrifying. Think of Elvis dead on the toilet, except make him a 19 year old, 5'4 blonde kid named Dave, and make him unconscious rather than dead, and most importantly, most disgustingly, most inevitably, make his pants, and himself, and the floor, and the sink, and my David Letterman book, be covered in shit.

Yes, you heard me right. Shit. Poo, as I've called it ever since, as the word shit really is overused, and for the shit I've been dealing with for some time now, a new, more light-hearted word is extremely necessary. So Poo.

Where do you begin in a time like this? The smell of shit is horrendous, and it just creeped out and infested the room, and you've got him, there, on the commode, slumped over and gurgling, and what do you do? Our first priority, of course- our asses. We take the bottles and cans out of the bathroom, and we throw them and any other bottles onto, of course, Dave's blanket. I wrap it up and place it off to the side, where no one will legitimately mess with it. That was all me, I saved our asses there, and of course it all comes back to the fact that I wasn't even responsible for the bottles. But moving on...

The RA returns with the head RA, Trevaras, who I dislike for some reason. I have this feeling that he's not only utterly incompetent, but that he, being a full time employee of the school and not a student, does a crappy job. Every imaginable drug is done in this building, and quite blatantly, but who cares.

So we decide he needs to go to the hospital, so I get ready to call 911, but nooo, after inspecting the official list of emergency numbers, THEN calling the front desk to have them call for emergency, THEN being rejected by the foreigners at the front desk, THEN Trevaras decides to call 911. 911 tells Travaras to have him laid on his side, so Travaras tells me and Shane to pick him up and lay him down. I'm not exactly fine with this, but I'll do it since no one else is going to, but I tell Travaras flat out "you're going to help too, right?" (twas more of a command than a question). So we lay him on the ground, Poo-filled pants around his ankles, and he pukes a bit, which is all fine.

Eventually the fire department arrives first, and they get quite a kick out of good ol' Dave. They're followed by the police, and after that the actual EMTs arrive. At one point Dave has this burst of near-consciousness, and rushes to the bathroom yet again. He goes in and locks the door behind himself. Great.

So the EMT breaks what's left of the door down again, and it seems that Dave, not having the best balance, has not only broken the Poo-encrusted toilet, but fallen INTO the Poo, smearing it across the floor. At this point, Poo is everywhere in the bathroom. Great.

Dave is now strapped into a gurney, then taken out and downstairs to the ambulance. Shane, Andy and I ride along with him, my first ambulance ride by the way. This is the point where I start to calm down. While all that precedes was happening, I was fuming, fuming, fuming angry, so mad I could have Pooed MYself. But no, I HAVE control over my rectum. People would call on the phone and I would snap at them, and I was really not fun to anyone. When it was decided that we'd go to the hospital with Dave, Travaras asks me if I'd been drinking too, and I about freak out on the man.

"No!"

"Have you....? Really?"

My eyes flame red for a split-second and as close as my voice gets to being purely devilish, I say "NOOOOOOOO!" Then I blow my breath in his face. I hope he remembers that breath.

But before I left, I grabbed a full 2 liter of the Lipton Ice Tea stuff, and within a half-hour, hour, it was empty. And I, I was fine. All you need is caffeine.

So we arrive at the hospital, and I have his wallet and while he's being taken care of, I register him. This was oh so thrilling, really. No, but I get him set up with insurance and all, and it was good to learn how some of this stuff works, as you never know when you need to do it again. Sad that I was the responsible one in this group. Around this time three girls, Kelly, Hallie and Jamie from another floor show up. Apparently the cops had run into them and when they mentioned that they were friends with Dave, they gave them a lift. They got lights, the lucky bitches. Dave could have been bleeding out his eyes and the EMTs wouldn't have given us lights.

So even though I never requested her help, Kelly decides that she's going to help find Dave's mom's phone number, so her big contribution is all of the three remaining minutes on her phone card. However, of course, Dave has nothing in his wallet that would indicate what his home phone is, except for his gym ID, which has his mother's name (misspelled) and a phone number as emergency contacts. We call the number, and is it their home? No, so far as we can tell it's a nursing home. I infer that his mom works there, so I beg and plead with the LPN to give her home phone out, which finally she does. I call them collect, and after talking with his 13 year old sister that sounds 5, I talk with his mother, who reminds me of Marge's sisters from the Simpson's. As I tell her that her son is in the hospital, nothing seems to register in her mind as significant, it's just "ohh, that's not good", or "ohhh, too much to drink, that's true." Ugh. She was probably drunk herself.

I check up on him at this point, and find that he's not getting his stomach pumped or anything, they just threw him in a bed to have him sleep it off (health care in Brooklyn is not precisely exemplary). So we've more than fulfilled our obligations to him, and we go home, knowing we're going to need to return later that morning. There is no sleeping done in that room, oh no, not the Poo Room. I sleep in Andy's room and Shane sleeps elsewhere. I, of course, can't really sleep, so it's around 330 or 4 before I get anywhere close to it. Around 8 or so I'm awakened by George, our Greek neighbor, who tell us, duh, that Dave called and needs us to bring him clothes. We'd been planning on this anyway, so Shane and I go and bring him clothes. And there, it ends up, that I discover, as I'm walking down Henry Street with a barely sober 19 year old with no shoes on (they had Poo on them), that this is life, this is the unsanitary (indeed), unvarnished truth to life: Poo.

The End?

So OTHERWISE, it's been an average day. I wasn't able to really shower, as I didn't even want to be around when he started cleaning the Poo up (and oh, we left it for him alright). I actually left the hotel, for the first time ever, at 9 AM. I just came to the school early, sat around and read. I wasn't able to do my paper ever, but I explained to the professor and I'll do it tonight. But yeah, I feel raunchy and dirty and smelly, and I can still smell the Poo for some reason, even here in the computer lab. Ugh.

So it was a horrible evening. Horrible enough to fill a thousand evenings. I don't want to go back to that room, don't want to be around that fucker ever again. Naive little Jamie, the California valley girl was like "guys, really, you should be nice to him about it, it would really hurt his self esteem if you were upset about it."

To which I respond: "HE SHIT ALL OVER THE PLACE." Ergh. That is all.