Slow to Grow

by Lonny Cyrelle

Chapter 9

  Once on campus, they dropped Lloyd off at his dorm, which to him resembled a dreary castle of doom, but was in fact the nicest housing on campus. Unlike the other dormitories, the rooms were big and he didn=t have to share a bathroom with a whole floor of strangers.

  The rooms were set up with a bathroom in the middle and a room on each side of it. Each room housed two people. It was the swanky dorm, for the rich kids, of which Lloyd did not consider himself. But his parents were paying for everything just like most of the other spoiled kids in residence.

  He met his new roommate, so nondescript was he that his name is forgotten to the record books. As they shook hands, Lloyd noticed blaring music and screams coming from the other side of the bathroom. This was not good. Not good at all. He went through the bathroom and introduced himself to the two dudes, Brian and Larry, who reeked of marijuana and zima, and were cackling uncontrollably. They were high school buddies away from home for the first time. High indeed. Lloyd asked if they could maybe, like, you know, keep it down a little, since it was now after ten o clock. They looked at each other and cackled again. Lloyd went back to his room.

  The music continued thumping until 6 in the morning. Lloyd cried into his pillow all night (you would think he would run out of tears) and slept maybe 21 minutes. At one point he screamed, SHUT THE FUCK UP, and all he heard was laughing in response. And then a few minutes later they started a chant. ALllllooooooyddd. Lllloyyyyyyyyydddddddddd.@ and in their drug induced stupor guffawed like hyenas . They knew exactly what buttons to push. This was not good. Not good at all.

  The next day his mom and sister visited him and Lloyd looked like a condemned death row inmate, shuffled along like a prisoner at Dachau. He cried to his Mommy about the noise and begged her to take him back home to Chicago. As they walked to his room the music blared and they started chanting his name again. Lloyd=s mom kicked the door and told them to shut the fuck up. About 8 students saw it happen. So, now, not only was Lloyd the whiny buzzkill, he was also the wussy whose mother stomps through the halls protecting her little boy. But besides that college was awesome!.

  The next night, things changed wholeheartedly and Lloyd got a full 22 minutes of sleep. He couldn=t figure out when Brian and Larry slept. If he had any balls he would have banged on their door at 9 in the morning or something as payback, but he was more neutered than a shelter cat.

  The time had come for his Mom and sister to leave, and as they said their goodbyes, Lloyd crumpled onto his bed in agony. He looked out his window and as they left he watched them get into their car. They looked up and saw a little boy whimpering with tears streaming down his trembling face. They didn=t take the baby home with them. The scene was seared into his brain, and Lloyd would be able to easily envision the harsh memory 20 years later. It was the same with his mother and sister. It was pathetic. He curled up in his bed, trying to shove pieces of the pillowcase in his ears.

  When he got up the next morning after his 33 minutes of sleep he called home for the fourth time in the 13 hours since his family had heartlessly abandoned him. He was nowhere ready to grow up and be on his own. He wanted to crawl back into the womb of his old house and he swore he would even cheer the relentless noise of Mitnek=s leafblower and van slamming. He wandered the halls of the dorm like Nosferatu and sat by himself at meal time. Everyone else seemed normal, like it was no big deal to be away. Some people even seemed to revel in it. Lloyd liked his parents. He liked being at home. He had no friends. He knew no one. No one. A few kids from his high school ended up going to KU, but no one he was close with. Deena Saperstein, the hot girl who watched him careen off the gymnastic rings was there, and strangely enough so was the girl who made out with Henry in the back seat of his car two years earlier.

  He saw lots of pretty girls, but in his current state of mind, he wouldn=t have been able to get hard if they all stripped naked and said hello to him. Usually all it took was an accidental brush across his arm and he was at full strength. Actually even in good times, if that really happened, where some girl came up to him and stripped naked and asked him to fuck her, he probably would break out into a full ass sweat and run away. One person came up to him and asked if someone had died in his family and offered his condolences. Lloyd thanked him.

  He called home 5 times a day and each time he mother would end with her standard, AOh, Eddie. Slow to grow, slow to grow.@ It soothed him in her inimitable way.

  He was still in full panic mode when another incident set him back. A girl came into the TV room where a bunch of people were hanging out and started lecturing about how college was harder than high school and that to succeed one would need to devote about two hours a night to studying and what not. It was like a repeat of his first week in High School and once again he was flustered. He did not want to study that much. In retrospect that girl was probably a kissass and should=ve minded her own business, and Lloyd would be able to pick up on it, but not at this moment. And in the end she was wrong anyway. Four years later he graduated with almost the exact same grade point average as high school, a solid 2.3 out of 4.

  As to the noise issues Lloyd was dealing with, there was a residential advisor that he went to speak with regarding said nuisances. The RA said he would do what he could. In private the RA confided to his superiors that Lloyd was the early frontrunner for biggest wussy whiner in the whole dormitory. Which was a pretty impressive feat considering their were almost 400 in the dorm.

  About a week in he started to incrementally adjust, and there was a slight uptick in his sleep schedule. Maybe 4 hours a night. He calculated his first week and determined he slept a total of 11 hours the first 7 days.

  After about a month in, and after AT&T had renamed a phone line to Chicago in his honor, Lloyd was told that he could move to the nerdy quiet floor. Unfortunately, there was noise there too, but on a smaller scale. Apparently a bunch of 18 year olds living on their own for the first time tend to make a lot of noise. That little piece of information may have done him some good had he contemplated it AT ALL.

  His new suitemates were Joel, a white trash dude with a southern accent and mustache to match, and was proud of his confederate flag hanging on the wall, and Mark, a handsome, waspy, frat looking guy with what seemed a cheesy personality and a charming smile. He had to be biding his time before joining some date rape frat. Every night Lloyd would saunter into their room and ask them to keep it down, be it the Allman Brothers music playing at a normal level or the random laughter that normal adjusted college students sometimes partake in. One of them banged on the door and the walls at all hours on purpose just to annoy Lloyd. It wasn=t as bad as his first room, but it was still disruptive enough to Lloyd who flinched at any sort of thumping noise. Call it the Mitnek Slamming Van Door effect. Each time it happened, Lloyd would go and talk to them, and Mark would slyly gesture towards Joel and roll his eyes, confirming to Lloyd that Joel was the biggest douchebag in the world.

  Lloyd appreciated Mark=s candor, honesty and sincerity. He started to confide in him, and started to consider him somewhat of a friend. Some nights they would talk about their lives and their families. Mark=s dad was a former NFL player and Mark had tons of great stories about his life. Lloyd of course, would vent that he was a virgin and never kissed a girl and he would also complain about being homesick and all the noise Joel made. For some reason Mark didn=t hate Lloyd=s guts.

  As Lloyd began to settle in, he started to notice that there were an incredible amount of hot women in the dorm. It was almost overwhelming. Once the pathetic haze of loneliness and homesickness started to lift from his brain he realized he was in a pretty good situation. Just as long as he wore baggy pants.

  Then there was the whole Aattending class@ thing. Apparently that was what college was for. One glaring mistake he made early on was scheduling his first class for 9 in the morning. High school started at 7:30 so he thought it would be a snap for him to make it to class that Aearly.@ It was not. He was going to bed late and waki
ng up at 8:30 was a chore. From the second semester of his freshman year on, the earliest class he ever scheduled was 11 am. He also learned quickly that blowing off class in college bore no scars. No attendance was taken and most of his classes were held in auditoriums with 200 other students. He probably ended up with a class attendance rate of about 25% after four years. And the old adage, Youth is wasted on the young was true, as years later he regretted not learning more. But it was seriously kickass at the time.

  There was a bit of culture shock in his first class ever. Made him remember he was in cornpoke Kansas. It was a creative writing course and in the first week of school the teacher gave an essay assignment. AWhat do you do on Christmas Morning?@

  Lloyd was stunned. This was a public university with 25,000 students of all ethnicities, creeds and religions and his teacher was this ignorant? He was wondering how the hell did he end up in Kansas if this is the sort of education he was going to get. He wrote the paper as follows:

  What I Do When I wake up on Christmas Morning by Lloyd Kulligan:

  I wake up and am happy I don=t have to go to school, but then I also feel a bit of guilt as it was my people who heinously killed the Lord Jesus and sent him to his crucifixion. But then I feel pissed because if none of that happened then maybe the Christians wouldn=t be so fucking annoying trying to ban this and that, and maybe you know, accept Evolution and stuff. Who can I get arrested for using that term in Kansas? Should I just refer to it as the E word? Seriously, think about it, if Jesus lives as just some rambling crackpot and dies as some crazy old coot rambling about God being his dad, who knows where our country would be today. Abortion for some, Homosexuality for all. It is a shame that Jesus had to die for your sins, because the rest of us have to pay for it.

  On Christmas morning I also get pissed that all my goy friends get gifts and I get shit. Oh sure Hanukkah, is something, but my cheap ass parents gave me a .99 cent gift every night. Woo hoo, a yoyo! Or maybe an Invisible Ink trivia game!

  Henry got a Colecovision. Bunch of bullshit.

  Anyhow, after rubbing the sleep out of my eyes I decide I want to go to the diner for breakfast, so I shower, get dressed, get in the car, and drive all the way there only to find out it is fucking closed because it is Christmas day. So I think maybe I will hit the mall...crap everything is closed. This sucks. So I go home and sit with my family and pray that Wu Sang is open so we heathen Jews can get our Chinese food we seem to crave on Christmas.

  The end.

  He got an F. The teacher said it was disrespectful.

  He dropped the class.