The Dumbest Kid in Gifted Class

by Dan Ryckert

  One night, Bryce smuggled bottles of McCormick’s vodka and a case of Keystone Light into our room. We were on a floor filled with 18-year-olds who had just left home for the first time, so this proved to be a highly effective way of getting most of them to hang out in one place. Lucky made sure that a variety of identical-sounding electronic tracks played from his absurdly expensive speakers. Bryce put a DVD of Spy Game on the TV for some reason.

  With very little drinking experience under my belt, I felt uncomfortable in situations like this. This wasn’t because I was uncomfortable with drinking. On the contrary, the idea of getting drunk sounded really fun to me. It was because I never knew what to do. I didn’t like the music that was playing and I had no idea how to dance. I was too shy to approach a girl, even in the rare instance that one would be looking at me and smiling.

  On this night, a girl named Rebecca made it easy for me. Among the various posters of rappers and Hawaiian Tropic models that Bryce and Lucky decorated the room with, there hung my large Led Zeppelin tapestry. I was also wearing the “Led Zeppelin 1977 Tour” t-shirt that every teenage classic rock fan had back then.

  “Oh cool, you like Zeppelin?”

  The voice came from my left and temporarily snapped me out of worrying about where to stand and what to do with my hands. A girl had actually approached me, and she was cute.

  Maybe all those college movies were right! This is how it works!

  Also, she liked Led Zeppelin? College seemed great.

  Well, maybe she didn’t like Zeppelin all that much considering that she responded with “‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ‘Free Bird,’ all of their stuff!” when I asked about her favorite songs. I absolutely wasn’t going to let a lack of classic rock knowledge get in the way of my enthusiasm. She was cute and she was talking to me. That was basically third base for me back then.

  We spent an hour or so in a basic “whoa, it’s crazy that we’re in college now!” chat before the crowd started to dissipate and head out of our room. Looking back, it didn’t seem like Rebecca and I had an awful lot in common, and I don’t remember the conversation being particularly noteworthy, but it seemed promising at the time.

  Over the next couple of weeks, we occasionally hung out in the dorms. When Rebecca came to my room, I assumed that the best way to impress her was to show her a bunch of my stupid short films and constantly complain about how I had never had sex or even kissed a girl. If there’s anything girls love, it’s guys who have no idea what they’re doing sexually and spend their time making a bunch of short films about homicidal gorillas and armless hitmen.

  For some reason, she continued to hang out with me. She laughed at my movies—in a good way—and assured me that there was no reason to feel bad for being an 18-year-old virgin. As we talked about this in the lobby one night, she assured me that “most guys don’t even have the slightest idea how to finger a girl the right way.” I assumed this train of thought would conclude with “...and now I’ll take you to my room to teach you.” At least, that’s what would have happened in those college movies that were starting to seem less accurate by the day.

  No fingering occurred that night, but I started to feel more comfortable with Rebecca, and asked if she’d want to see a movie. She said yes, so we made plans to see Minority Report when it opened over the weekend.

  I don’t remember an awful lot about the movie. What I do remember is spending 145 minutes wondering if it would be alright to lean over and kiss her. My confidence wasn’t high enough for such a bold move, so we silently watched the movie and headed back toward the dorm afterward.

  As I started to pull into a prime parking spot right in front of the dorm, she stopped me.

  “Hey, park a few rows back.”

  “Why? There’s a spot right here.”

  “Trust me.”

  Any sane, horny teenager would have realized what was going on here, and sped to the most secluded spot in the lot. Instead, I was baffled.

  “But there’s a spot right here!” I said.

  “Seriously, trust me. You’ll like it.”

  “There couldn’t be a better spot than this one! It’s right in front of the door. I don’t understand why we’d park further away than we need to.”

  “Dan, do you want your first kiss or not?”

  “Oh…”

  Feeling suddenly dumb and also horny, I drove to the back of the parking lot and kissed Rebecca. It wasn’t a spectacular, passionate, tongue-filled kiss but I was thrilled nonetheless. We weren’t “making out” as much as “pecking at each other for about 45 seconds with the slightest perceptible hint of tongue.” It didn’t matter. For the first time, something was happening in this area of my life.

  It didn’t take long for the reality of the situation to become evident. I thought that this would be a step toward my first relationship, but it fell apart within a week. She’d alternate between being thrilled to see me and completely ignoring me, sometimes several times a day. After we had lunch one afternoon, she told me that when we got back to the dorm, I was to enter the building long after her so that no one would see us together. Naturally, I asked her why.

  “I don’t want my boyfriend to see us together.”

  Oh! Okay!

  I never found out who this boyfriend was. Similar stories involving Rebecca’s erratic behavior became a recurring theme among most of the guys on our floor. To this day, I don’t know if the boyfriend existed, or if it was her way to end things with one guy and move on to the next. It confused the hell out of me for the remainder of the month, but I moved on, happy to finally get the “first kiss” monkey off my back.

  One month of living in college dorms didn’t end all of my social woes, but it did make me more optimistic about the next four years of my life (it wound up being closer to six years, but I didn’t know that yet). I finally had my first kiss, I loved the KU campus and the town of Lawrence, and I could definitely see myself getting into the whole “drinking alcohol and being social” thing.

  Since I was still heavily into video production, I made the decision to major in Film Studies. I landed on Hashinger Hall as my living quarters for the year because of its reputation as the “creative” dorm. I assumed that the artsy dorm would be the easiest one to find collaborators and actors in for my short films and comedy sketches.

  I wasn’t completely wrong. During my time at Hashinger, it was rarely difficult to grab people who were enthusiastic to show off their acting chops or appear in a stupid comedy bit. What I didn’t bank on was the sheer amount, and intensity, of eccentric personalities. Some of them seemed very legitimate while others felt like a college persona that was chosen and donned like a suit prior to moving in.

  Students at Hashinger viewed themselves as true individuals, not like the business majors, communications students, and future frat and sorority members at Lewis and Templin Halls. Its reputation came with plenty of behavior that you’d expect from the artsy dorm. Entering the building meant avoiding eye contact with patchouli-drenched bongo players. Walking through any of the floors’ hallways forced you to brave a gauntlet of incense smells barely masking the copious marijuana smoke that lingered beyond most doors. No matter where you got off the elevator, there was an 80 percent chance that you’d be met with the sounds of at least one acoustic guitar playing in the lobby.

  Other dorms would host presentations for students that focused on how to navigate the crowded fields of their chosen professions. Hashinger hosted exhaustingly bad slam poetry nights with themes that rarely strayed from “Let me spit some truth about 9/11” and “I do not like President George W. Bush.” That same stage also hosted a tribute to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which summoned an entirely different (and far more genuinely despicable) element to the dorm. Hashinger was an easy target for the foot soldiers of Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church (the “God Hates Fags” people) because it was a stone’s throw from Topeka. On more than one night I had to make my way through a crowd of hyper-religious big
ots before walking through a smelly hacky sack circle just to get into the building.

  “I need to get the hell out of this place” was a frequent thought.

  Once inside, I actually enjoyed a lot of my time there. I lived on the top floor and the variety of personalities (good and bad) ensured that no night was boring. I could dedicate a chapter to almost everyone I met on the eighth floor of Hashinger Hall, but I’ll opt for a few highlights from this rogues’ gallery:

  Andy: A short guy with a lazy eye who was almost always on some kind of psychedelic drug. He was kicked out of the dorm for doing mushrooms; putting a Chipotle burrito-sized piece of human feces in a Pringles can and delivering it to the sixth floor; and then lying on his stomach in the lobby and repeatedly slapping his own bare ass. All three of these things happened in the span of about five minutes.

  Ben: Smart but socially awkward, Ben was always wearing a South Park shirt and looking for new ways to get high. This usually involved homemade remedies because he never wanted to spend the money for actual drugs. I watched him eat several tablespoons of nutmeg, snort crushed Halls cough drops, swallow a mouthful of liquid air freshener, and eat full packets of Morning Glory flower seeds from Walmart. Sometimes these message board recipes worked, and other times he’d be pale as a ghost and vomiting all night.

  Peter: A stocky hippie with a robust beard and long, shaggy hair. In a dorm filled with pretentious stoners, his genuine demeanor was a welcome relief. He was always the first to answer any kind of silly challenge, whether it was chugging a gallon of milk or breaking into a snobby scholarship hall to steal economy-sized containers of nacho cheese from their fridge. His time at KU ended after cops caught him having late-night sex with his girlfriend in an apartment complex’s swimming pool.

  Evan: If Peter was the happy-go-lucky stoner, Evan was the stoner who got a little too deep into the drug scene. I considered him a friend, but his behavior grew worse until he was kicked out of the dorms due to lack of attendance in class. On one occasion, he became angry at me because I refused to drive him to his first attempted heroin pickup after he found a “promising” Craigslist offer.

  Eric: Our floor’s quietest resident, who surprised everyone by taking mushrooms and sailing a canoe onto Clinton Lake in the middle of the night. We found him in a panic, rambling about how his hair was penetrating into his brain and making him lose his mind. When we got back to the dorm, he immediately shaved his entire head.

  Finch: While most of the dorm residents wanted to come across as tortured artists, Finch was all about flaunting how much of a sensitive soul he was. On the first day I met him, he was wearing a backpack adorned with pins and patches of every social cause I’d ever heard of, and many that I hadn’t. Within five sentences of introducing himself to me, he said “I want you to know that I won’t even say the word ‘retarded.’”

  Pearboy: A strict and sober Christian, Pearboy always seemed like he wound up in the wrong dorm by accident. We knew two things about him: He was shaped like a pear, and based on his foot positioning under the bathroom stalls, it seemed like he pooped while somehow facing the back of the toilet. This mystery was never solved.

  My roommate was Adam, an oaf of a man who towered above everyone else on the floor. He had been one of my video production classmates in high school and had attempted to transform himself into a misunderstood artist in the three-month span before moving into Hashinger.

  High School Adam and Hashinger Adam felt like wholly different entities. At the end of high school, Adam wore polo shirts and jeans, kept his hair closely cropped, and listened to a lot of Godsmack. When he walked into Hashinger in August, he had grown a curly mop of hair that he partially hid under sideways baseball caps. His polos were replaced by hoodies that he covered in his own hastily airbrushed graffiti, and he loved to talk about how it represented “Phase One” of his new graphic design company. Godsmack and the like were permanently ousted from his music collection because he was suddenly an expert in underground hip-hop.

  In high school, Adam was just a kid who shared an interest in video production with me. He was neither friend nor enemy, so I didn’t hold any ill will toward him. Hashinger Adam was another story. I couldn’t stand his obviously put-on persona and his behavior frequently made me want to deck him. I probably would have if he didn’t have nearly a foot and a hundred pounds on me.

  My tipping point with Adam came on the night when I hoped to get Kiss #2. During one of the regular “let’s all drink beer in a dorm room” nights that occurred prior to anyone being 21, I had a conversation with a girl named Lily. We had a fun chat that ended with her saying we should watch a movie together. Since Adam was planning on going to a house party the next night, I asked if she’d be interested in watching Die Hard in my room. She said yes and I was optimistic about where the night would lead.

  I was still nowhere near comfortable when it came to talking with girls, so it was time to acquire some alcohol. For those of us in the dorm, that connection was Malik. He was a tall, skinny, dreadlocked artist who was a regular in bongo circles at the front of the dorm. Rumors around Hashinger had placed him at anywhere between 21 and 30 years old, and some said he had lived in the dorm for many years. Others claimed that he loved the ease with which he could hook up with freshman girls, which kept him hanging around. I always got a shifty vibe from the guy, but that didn’t stop me from throwing in $20 whenever he was running around the floor taking orders for the liquor store on Friday nights.

  Malik returned early in the evening with a case of Milwaukee’s Best, and I slammed a few in preparation for my romantic dorm room Die Hard date. When Lily arrived, we each grabbed a beer and sat on the small loveseat that Adam and I had barely squeezed into our tiny living quarters. Halfway through the movie, I was feeling good about the rapport between Lily and me. We had been laughing and joking and generally enjoying each other’s company when Adam suddenly burst into the room, clearly drunk and home early from the house party.

  Instantly, I was disappointed that this doofus had returned before I expected. My disappointment quickly turned into anger when he stumbled over to the loveseat and sat down on my lap with all 275 pounds of him. I struggled to push him off me as he put his arm around Lily’s shoulders.

  “Hey, who’s this?” Adam mumbled at Lily, who understandably recoiled and stood up.

  I wiggled out from under him and stood next to Lily, trying to keep my cool despite this idiot thoroughly ruining what had been a nice night up until his entrance. He became belligerent and defensive when I explained that he was acting like an asshole, and he refused to move from the couch. Lily saw that Adam wasn’t budging—literally or figuratively—and said we should finish the movie another night before retiring to her room.

  With no desire to put up with Adam for another seven months, I put in an official request to change roommates. Across the hall were Tyler and Logan, two kids who seemed mismatched from day one. Tyler was from rural Kansas and he leaned pretty far into the artsy side of the spectrum. Logan was a shy chess fanatic who stayed on his computer while Christian rock music played in his headphones. I correctly assumed that Tyler and Adam would get along thanks to their interests and pretension, and that I’d coexist more peacefully with a religious shut-in than with the drunken yeti who had sat on me.

  All parties agreed to the move. Adam and Tyler were certain that they’d become the Jobs and Wozniak of crappy airbrushed hoodies, and I was excited about the prospect of sharing a room with someone whom I wouldn’t want to punch in the face every time I saw him.

  Logan and I got along fine despite our lack of common interests. He wasn’t much of a fan of video games, but he’d occasionally take the headphones off and join me for a round of Super Smash Bros. Melee or watch me play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Although we weren’t close friends, I saw Logan as a good guy who fell outside of the pretension of the rest of the dorm.

  Few things besides class motivated Logan to get out of the dorm room, and we
ekly chess club meetings were one of them. This group of enthusiasts would meet up at the student union building every Wednesday night and they usually didn’t return until late. One of these Wednesdays coincided with new roommates and best friends, Adam and Tyler, getting higher and drunker than usual and bursting into my room.

  “Ooh, is Logan at his gay chess meeting?” Tyler said as they sat down on the lower bunk to watch me play video games.

  Their attention was quickly diverted when they realized it was a prime opportunity to mess with Logan’s stuff. One of my roommate’s favorite items was a fold-up chess board that he frequently played with in our lobby. Adam and Tyler grabbed it and excitedly mulled over their options.

  “Dude, let’s just take a shit in it and fold it up!” Tyler said.

  While I’m all for a good prank if it’s harmless enough, or if it targets someone who deserves it, I wasn’t about to let something that gross happen to my harmless roommate. I grabbed the chess board, called them dipshits, and told them to get out. Before leaving to go smoke some more, they opened my room’s mini fridge and took Logan’s 12-pack of Cherry Coke (he was rarely without a can of it in his hand). I tried unsuccessfully to grab it before they left, then accepted that a few stolen Cokes were less damaging than turning Logan’s favorite chess board into a turd sandwich.

  With the soundtrack of Adam and Tyler’s giggling and yelling coming from across the hall, I eventually turned my GameCube off and hopped into my top bunk for the night. I’m not sure how much later it was when Logan returned, but I awoke to the sight of him gingerly holding the top of his twelve-pack with two fingers and asking me if I knew why it was dripping wet.

  It didn’t take long to process what had happened between the time Adam and Tyler took the Cokes and when I woke up. I had foiled their turd plan, so their minds clearly went from number two to number one. All dorm rooms in Hashinger could be easily jimmied open with a credit card, so they must have snuck into the room after I fell asleep and placed the soda box back into the fridge.