The Dumbest Kid in Gifted Class

by Dan Ryckert

  In the early weeks, a good chunk of the seventh floor would scour the residential areas of Lawrence for anything resembling a raucous house party. We’d enter, give our five dollars for the keg cups (or in my case, find a cup on the ground and clean it out in the bathroom), and naturally begin to section off into our own little groups based on interests and personality. I quickly jelled with a handful of guys on our floor, and we formed a close friend circle.

  Brad was an English guy who loved comedy, liquor, Schwarzenegger movies, hip-hop, and designing graffiti. I wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about those last two, but we shared a love of the rest. Our senses of humor matched up well, and he became my primary actor when I created a sketch comedy show for local television later that year.

  His cousin and roommate was Derek, who was born in England but grew up in Israel. Going anywhere with Derek was equal parts fascinating and infuriating. This was through no fault of his own, as girls would literally stop him on the street just to hear him speak. More often than not, these encounters would end with an exchange of phone numbers. I can’t count the number of times I saw Brad sitting in the floor’s lobby while he waited for Derek to conclude his lady business in their shared dorm room.

  Going to parties with these two played out like a script. All three of us would get blindingly drunk and hope to get laid. My brilliant plan was to get drunk enough to not be nervous in the event that a girl randomly started talking to me. Weirdly enough, this plan never worked, and I’d end my sophomore year every bit the virgin I was when I started college. Brad would get drunk and actually talk to girls, which wasn’t always successful but certainly worked better than my approach.

  Derek’s story was almost always the same. While Brad and I slammed beers and reminisced about our favorite action movies or late-night comedy bits, Derek would just talk. It didn’t matter what he talked about, or if it was even remotely interesting. He could have stood stone-cold sober in the middle of the party and read the Declaration of Independence (or whatever the Israeli version of that is), and the most attractive girls at the party would immediately flock to him. On more than one occasion, I asked Brad about Derek’s whereabouts and learned that he was “bonin’ some chick in the laundry closet.” I accidentally confirmed this once when I entered what I assumed was the bathroom, only to see a girl sitting on the dryer with her legs spread and Derek in front of her.

  Another member of our social circle was Darren. In retrospect, he was the worst designated driver on the planet. Actually, that’s not even fair to say. “Designated driver” implies sobriety, so I guess Darren was just our driver. He drove an old Cadillac and would frequently drive us to and from parties that were beyond walking distance. Every memory I have of being in Darren’s car involves him blaring rap with a gigantic blunt in his mouth and a handle of Tanqueray (or a forty of Mickey’s malt liquor) in his hand. We always got home fine, but the 32-year-old version of me looks back on that and wonders how the hell we thought his rides were really the best option for getting back to the dorm.

  Darren loved drinking forties, and frequently joked about how he was fulfilling a stereotype by being a big black guy who loved malt liquor. On one occasion, he was eating fried chicken and drinking a forty of Mickey’s while wearing a white tank top. He wanted to get a picture of it as a parody of the stereotype. We took a picture of Darren grinning from ear to ear, proudly posing with his drumstick and forty. Later, it would resurface in an unexpected place.

  After he was eventually kicked out of school for poor grades, Darren continued to live near campus and use the rec center’s basketball court. The only problem was that the rec center was reserved for students. Since his student ID was useless, he adopted a brazen approach: casually walking past the front desk and completely ignoring staff members’ attempts to get him to check in.

  This worked without a hitch for weeks until it came to a sudden stop one afternoon. I ran into Darren on my way into the gym and chatted with him as we approached the front desk. Just before we passed the turnstiles, he stopped in his tracks and collapsed to the floor laughing. I looked up at the corkboard above the front desk to see the infamous “fried chicken and a forty” picture plastered up like a wanted poster alongside the text “DO NOT LET THIS MAN INTO THE GYM. HE IS NOT A STUDENT.” They had found Darren’s Facebook account and used this profile picture as a point of reference. Once Darren gathered himself from off of the floor, he walked out the front door and used another basketball court going forward.

  Brad, Derek, Darren, and I hung out constantly, with an assortment of other characters frequently in tow:

  Lenis: Not his real name, but no one ever said his real name once Lenis was coined. Brad mentioned at a house party early in the year that he wished this guy’s name rhymed with something funny, and “Lenis” (pronounced like penis) was born. He embraced it and started to introduce himself as Lenis from then on out. In terms of personality, he was pretty quiet unless the topic of his father owning a bunch of Domino’s Pizza franchises came up.

  Matt: Quiet when sober, loud as hell when he was drunk or arguing with his girlfriend (which was a frequent occurrence). He made more of an impact post-dorms than he did in McCollum, primarily during that time he broke into my apartment and tried to stab me.

  Idiot Derek: We had several Dereks on our floor, so each of them received their own nickname. There was British Derek, Sports Derek, and Idiot Derek. As his name suggested, the latter was a massive idiot. He smelled terrible and spent most of his nights trying to lure young women from Craigslist to his dorm room. This and his tendency to sleep in the nude almost drove his shy, Muslim roommate insane. On one occasion, we convinced Idiot Derek that sour apple candy in an eyedropper was LSD. He put two drops on his tongue and spent hours rolling around on the floor and claiming he could hear colors and see sound.

  Kaci: A fan of frequent drunken dares. When a bar crawl scavenger hunt called for her to shave her eyebrows, she did it without thinking twice and passed out not long afterwards. Her roommates drew angry cartoon eyebrows in permanent marker where the real ones used to be. Kaci woke up late for her public speaking class the next morning, rushing out the door without looking into a mirror. She gave an entire presentation while she had bold, inch-thick angry eyebrows on her face without realizing it.

  Anthony: The single angriest man I’ve ever met. He’d never return a “hello” or even a nod in the hallways. He always slammed his door, and he perpetually seemed half a second away from putting his fist through a wall. His demeanor suddenly made sense when a girl from our floor slept with him and immediately reported to everyone that she “didn’t even know penises could be that small.”

  Ethan: A staunchly conservative guy who would try to turn any house party conversation into a political debate. His love of George W. Bush contrasted with the mostly liberal makeup of the seventh floor and the university in general. Politics aside, he was about five years older than anyone else, and that meant he could buy beer.

  Roy: A tremendously rich kid from Chicago that instantly rubbed everyone the wrong way. He seemed desperate to fit in with our group, but his habit of incessantly talking about his wealth didn’t do him any favors (“I live in the same neighborhood as Oprah” was a common refrain). Whenever anyone was telling a story, he’d interrupt it with his own version that he sold as bigger and better and cooler. As much as he liked to brag, he’d sometimes get too drunk and tip in the opposite direction. On one occasion, he collapsed on a couch in the dorm lobby after a house party and declared that no girl would ever want him because of his “mediocre penis.” He’d eventually get kicked out of the dorms after he stole items from a floormate, but not before trying to save himself by throwing Brad and Darren under the bus. In a last-ditch effort to stay in McCollum, he told management that he could be an inside source for them. They didn’t seem impressed at his revelation that Brad and Darren smoked pot in their rooms, and they carried out his eviction.

  If my circle of friends
from college seemed pretty dude-centric, it’s because I was still a year or two away from being able to have a conversation with a girl without coming off like a stammering idiot. I was able to be funny and comfortable around girls who weren’t available or whom I wasn’t attracted to, but I clammed up in the presence of any girl I had an interest in. For some unfathomable reason, a girl on my floor named Nadia took a liking to me. She was an Indian pharmacy student who took her academic life super seriously, but frequently joined us for house party nights. After a few weeks of pretty obviously flirting with me, she and I wound up making out in my dorm room one night.

  This led to us messing around off and on for years, and she had the patience of a saint for dealing with me during the most stubborn, pain-in-the-ass period of my life. Between the ages of about 21 and 23, I had virtually zero tolerance for opinions that differed from my own. My father has exhibited this attitude for his entire life and I found myself leaning into that aspect of my genetics hard during these years.

  When Nadia and I would go to her room after a party, she’d frequently have top-forty hip-hop and pop music playing on her computer. We’d finish messing around and I’d immediately launch into a discussion about how the songs were soulless and terrible. Eventually, I brought over a USB stick with a playlist of music that I deemed acceptable. Her Ying Yang Twins and Chingy tracks may have annoyed me, but it’s not like the Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Creedence Clearwater Revival soundtrack I provided was any more appropriate for drunken fooling-around sessions.

  My guy friends were more entertained than infuriated by my obnoxious behavior in those days. They had a sense of humor about themselves, and I felt comfortable bringing back some of the rampant griefing that I had grown up doing. An early favorite bar of ours was called Charlie’s East Side. It’s closed now, most likely due to its very public reputation for serving underage college students.

  The basement at Charlie’s was a genuine dump. Graffiti covered every wall, the whole place smelled like urine, and its one pool table was off balance, beer-stained, and torn up. One element of its layout was particularly attractive to me, though. A huge Golden Tee arcade machine sat directly between the doors leading into the bathrooms. I call them doors, but they were really just tall sheets of plywood that were erected to keep people from seeing other people poop.

  Every time we were there, I would eventually make use of the machine. Not to play it, mind you, since I don’t think I’ve ever actually played Golden Tee despite seeing it in at least 95 percent of the bars in the Midwest. Instead, I’d wait for my friends to enter the “stall” and then immediately lower my shoulder into the side of the machine to scoot it in front of the door. This was usually followed by me running upstairs to order another beer or two. Between songs, I could hear the sounds of my friends banging on plywood in an attempt to escape the disgusting basement bathroom.

  Another bar that served minors (although not as openly) was the polar opposite of Charlie’s East Side. It was called It’s Brothers, but everyone just called it Brothers because the actual name was stupid. Whereas Charlie’s was filled with genuine grime and character, Brothers had the aesthetic and heart of a Chili’s and the clientele of a dance club.

  Nothing made me feel more out of place than the nights I got dragged to Brothers. The music drove me insane, with the bar playing “Get Low” and “Tipsy” seemingly on repeat every single night. Most of the patrons were identical, popped-collar frat boys and shrill sorority girls. They’d head to the dance floor and drunkenly grind on each other for hours, with the girls spilling drinks and the guys nearly getting into fights whenever they accidentally bumped shoulders.

  Brad, Derek, and Darren would head to the dance floor once they had a few drinks in them. Derek would have six girls rubbing up on him by the time he finished ordering a beer in his accent. Brad and Darren would try to dance with girls to varying levels of success.

  I took an odd amount of pride in not dancing. In those years I told myself that dancing served no purpose and was only for idiots with bad taste in music. I’d look for some corner of the bar where I could hole up and drink excessively in the hopes of some girl approaching me. To this day, I have no idea why girls weren’t throwing themselves at the shaggy-haired guy drinking alone in the corner, wearing an old Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt and clearly hating being at this bar.

  Drinking was my ticket to comfort in these situations and I viewed it as my only chance to meet a girl. I sure as hell didn’t have the courage to approach a girl, but I assumed I’d be a little more relaxed and funny if I had ten or twelve beers in me.

  Catching a bartender’s attention to get these beers was an infuriating process during weekend nights. I’d always order two beers to minimize the amount of time I’d have to spend at the counter, but it was still an ordeal. Bartenders at Brothers always tended to girls first, even if they had just waltzed up to the bar after I’d been standing there with cash in my hand for ten minutes.

  On one night, I hatched a plan to make buying drinks a bit easier. In my pocket was a three-pack of stink bombs. A friend of mine had pulled a prank on me earlier in the week, so I got him back during the walk to the bar by sticking a stink bomb into the hood of his sweatshirt and breaking it open with a punch. He left his offensively stinky hoodie in the bushes outside Brothers, leaving me with two stink bombs still in my pocket.

  I couldn’t make the bartenders serve drinks or notice me any quicker, but I could sure as hell reduce the overall number of patrons lining up at the counter. Standing behind others at the bar, I slipped a stink bomb underneath my shoe and quietly shattered it. Within seconds, the stench wafted up to my nostrils. I knew it wouldn’t take long for its effect to spread to the rest of the area.

  In a growing circle, people around me started to scrunch their faces and glance at each other. A lot of “what is that?” and “did someone tear ass?” could be heard, and it intensified as the smell lingered for far longer than even the worst fart. Ninety seconds or so passed before a large chunk of the bar’s customers determined that the smell wouldn’t be going away anytime soon. There were plenty of other bars on Massachusetts Street, and they marched out of Brothers and on to less farty establishments. My friends stayed in the relative sanctuary of the dance floor across from the bar and I happily bought beers in a fraction of the time it usually took.

  For all the times I’ve messed with people, I always considered myself to utilize a loosely defined moral code. As long as no one was actually hurt by my actions, I didn’t feel bad. When my friends and I made a fake dating profile to lure a dozen or so dudes in matching blue shirts to a pizza parlor, “Heather” only invited the most aggressively douchey suitors. When I would sprint through giant lecture halls while wearing a shark suit, it was nothing worse than a temporary distraction.

  Occasionally, I’d overstep my self-imposed boundaries, and morality would enter the equation. I was firmly opposed to stealing anything of value, but I would sometimes nab things that seemed silly or inconsequential. An IHOP rug welcomed visitors to my apartment for years.

  During one early morning walk home from the bars, I made an error in judgment that I later felt terrible about. Lenis and I were scaling the 12th Street hill that led to his campus-adjacent apartment when we spotted something odd on a nearby porch. It was metallic and appeared vaguely human in shape, so we approached it to get a better look.

  For some reason, this house had a robot-like figure made of old cans sitting in a chair on the front porch. This oddity fascinated us, and we immediately snagged it and took it to Lenis’s apartment. Our new robot buddy sat silently as Lenis and I had a few more beers, watched Commando for about the 45th time that year, and called it a night. My place was only a few blocks away and I wanted the robot to be a new fixture in it. When it came time to leave, I heaved all four feet of cans and googly eyes over my shoulder and made the trip home.

  I typically woke up no earlier than 2:00 p.m. in college, but Saturdays during football season
were different. Living a couple of blocks from the stadium comes with the added benefit of fighter jets serving as your alarm clock once a week. As was tradition during this time of year, I shot up in bed terrified before I realized what the noise was. This was almost always accompanied by the hangover setting in shortly after the F-15-induced adrenaline wore off.

  On this Saturday, I woke up to the jets, vomited for a bit, and then shuffled over to my oven to make my breakfast. At the time, that meal typically consisted of two Totino’s Party Pizzas (Combination flavor). I’d place one upside down on top of the other to make a sandwich, which has proved to be a great idea to this day.

  As my roughly 12,000-calorie breakfast was cooking, I plopped down on the couch to play some video games. The night before had been a particularly drunken one and I had almost forgotten about my new roommate until I saw him on the couch next to me. My robot buddy had sat upright all night, blankly staring ahead at the television.

  I laughed to myself at first, recalling the silliness of the previous night. I stopped laughing when I noticed numerous spiders crawling out from the joints between his arm cans. After spraying the spiders on my couch with a bunch of Raid, I set the robot outside temporarily while I ate my pizza sandwich. Hypocritically, I was worried that somebody would walk by in the meantime and steal him.

  When I went back outside after finishing my breakfast, I started to feel bad as I looked at the metal figure. This wasn’t some IHOP rug or a glass from a bar that I had stolen. It was clearly some kind of art project. Someone had taken a decent amount of time in making this, and placed it on their front porch as a quirky decoration. I started to think that I should return him to his owners, regardless of whether he was filled with spiders.