“Yeah, we’ve been over that part. What’s your name?”
He relaxed at that. “Oh, yeah, my name’s Jim Connolly, but everybody calls me Buddy. What’s your name?”
“Carl Buckman.” Like I told you the first time.
“Great, Carl, let’s get the party started!” He made another move towards the fridge.
I stepped in front of him again. “Hold it. That fridge doesn’t belong to the college. It didn’t come with the room.”
He looked at me curiously. “It didn’t? We don’t get fridges in the dorm rooms?”
“Not unless you buy your own,” I answered.
It took a few seconds for that to sink in. “You mean you bought that fridge?”
“Precisely.”
His face lit up. “Well that’s really great! We can keep our beer cold!” He moved to open it again.
“Wait!” He stopped to stare at me. “That was my beer. That wasn’t our beer. My beer involves my money. Our beer involves our money. Follow me?” He had a puzzled look on his face. “If you want some of my beer, you can ask me first. Okay?”
He shrugged. “Jeesh, it’s only beer. Whatever. Can I have another beer?”
“Of course.” I opened the fridge and took out two beers, popped them both open, and handed him one. “Cheers. Welcome.”
Once again he downed his beer is a single prodigious swallow, which was then followed by an equally prodigious belch. Buddy began to start putting his stuff away, but after a few dispirited minutes, he opened the door and marched off down the hallway, greeting new people, leaving our door open. After five minutes I went to the door and looked around. There were masses of milling freshmen, but no Buddy. I shook my head and closed the door.
Five minutes later, Buddy was back and pounding on the door. “How come you closed the door?”
“Buddy, you’ve been gone fifteen minutes. Close the door when you leave the room.”
“Why?” Buddy put away some more of his stuff and then headed out the door again. This time I was able to call out to him to take his key with him and to close the door after him. I got him to take his key, but he was gone before he closed the door. I didn’t bother closing it.
Ten minutes later, Buddy came back. “See, I didn’t need to close the door! Hey, want another beer?”
“Uh, sure.”
“Great!” Buddy opened my mini-fridge and pulled out another couple of beers, handing one to me and popping the other. I should have expected that. He puttered around some more, putting away more stuff, and then wandered down the hallway again. Fifteen minutes later he was back, and this time he closed the door behind him. I put down the book I was reading and watched curiously as he rooted around in one of his drawers before pulling out some rolling papers. Then he pulled a baggie of pot out of his pocket and started rolling a joint. “I found a guy with a stash.” He lit the joint and took a deep draw on it, sucking down almost a third of the joint, and held it in longer than I thought humanly possible. “Want a hit?” he asked.
Oh Lord, give me strength. I didn’t have anything against smoking pot, and God knows I smoked enough of it when I went here the first time, but there was no way I was smoking dope in the middle of the afternoon with Buddy Connolly. “Thanks, but no thanks.” I got up and cranked open the windows.
“You don’t smoke pot?” he asked.
“Not in the middle of the afternoon, and not when parents are wandering around the hallways. You don’t think anybody can smell that shit?”
“Hey, it’s no big deal!” Buddy finished the joint and rolled a second. “You sure you don’t want a hit? Payment for the beer?”
“Thanks, Buddy, but no.”
He shrugged and said, “Okay, maybe later.” Then he set up his own stereo, a cheap piece of shit with one of the speakers missing the foam cover, and started blasting Aerosmith through it.
He must have had that thing set to 11, and the fillings in my head started coming loose. I yelled for him to turn it down a couple of times, but his eyes were closed and he was totally zoned out. I got up and turned the volume down to about halfway on the scale. “Hey, what’s wrong?” he asked.
“Too loud.”
Buddy shrugged and wandered down the hallway, leaving the door open again, the reek of the pot followed him like a cloud. He came back after a few minutes. “Where’s the phones?”
“There’s a pay phone down in the lounge,” I told him.
“Oh.” He wandered out. The album was ended, so I turned off his stereo. Five minutes later he was back. “Hey, there’s a phone down the hallway, but it doesn’t work. You can’t call out.”
I remembered that. It was a Centrex system designed to only allow people to call around the campus. That was the theory, anyway. Putting a system like that in a college full of nerds and geeks was like waving bloody meat in front of a wolf. By the Christmas break somebody had managed to figure out how to call anywhere in the world for free, and the school yanked all the phones out of the dorms when they saw the bills.
“I know. It’s a Centrex system. It only calls around the campus.”
He looked at me funny. “How come you know so much about phones?”
Because I spent thirty years running telecomm networks. “Because it says Centrex Telephone on the label on the phone.”
“Oh.” He wandered away again.
I shook my head in disbelief. A few minutes later I decided to get out and wander around myself. I ended up down two doors and across the hall, drinking beers with the residents. They were in the process of emptying some beer cans through their kidneys, so they could fashion a cannon out of the empty cans. Sounded like a fine idea. We cut the ends of the cans off and managed to stuff the ends one into another so that they were stacked together as a long tube. Then one of the guys poked a small hole in the closed end. We balled up some newspaper and dropped it down the barrel, and then squirted some lighter fluid in through the hole. We aimed the gizmo out the open window, yelled ‘Fire in the hole!’, and held a lighter up to the hole. There was a satisfying ‘WHOOMP!’ and a flaming ball flew out of the cannon into the center of the freshman quad. Everyone gave a loud cheer, and more people crowded into the room for a second shot. Eventually we ended up with a bunch more cannons and a duel with Cary Hall, before being shut down by the Resident Advisers.
I headed back to my room just in time to meet Buddy coming back. “Hey, did you know there were flaming cannons around here?” He smoked some more dope and drank my last beer, and then fell asleep on top of his still unmade bed.
Okay, so the guy was an idiot, but he was an amiable idiot. The thing was, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember him from before. RPI isn’t that big a school, and by the time you graduate the odds are you have at least seen everybody, even if you don’t know their names. I was already able to look at the guys in the dorm and at least remember seeing their faces around campus. I couldn’t remember Buddy Connolly for shit. That left me with two options: either we had managed to get through four years of a small school without running across each other or, more likely, Buddy didn’t last. I was definitely going with Option Two. No way was I going to last with a drunken stoner roommate.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all that terrible. Buddy could be annoying, but he didn’t have a mean bone in his body, or a smart one. He was constantly drinking up all my beer or scarfing down any snacks I had around, but it wasn’t like when Hamilton took my stuff to destroy it. Buddy was just a party animal and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t. I stopped buying beer, and kept my liquor and some small bottles of mixers in my foot locker, which I kept locked, along with anything else I didn’t want him to eat or drink. He didn’t seem to mind when I came in and turned down the stereo he had blasting heavy metal.