Dad drove me down and left when the car was unpacked. He’d been telling me that college would be the best four years of my life. I was put in Williamson, a storied freshman cesspool. Brick, tall, sweaty and germy. I assume Williamson was a good old sport. Very toff, I bet. The carpets were firmer than cement and the furniture, I know you know it. Stiff grainy wood and battered cushioning. And that smell! That smell that will be described, in the court papers for the class action suit, as a sort of gluey smell. An industrially gluey glue smell. An odorous omen of cancer to come! It pervaded and the rooms felt a bit like cells but that was ok I guess.

Billy and Noah were my roommates. Billy was a handsome dog and we made fast friends.

Noah was an oleaginous ghoul with webbed fingers and velveteen wings. He seemed to glide, ghoul-like, from some dark corner to whisper some ghoul-like aphorism only tangentially related to whatever we were doing. And when he turned corners he did not veer left or veer right, he leered left and leered right, ever leading with that crooked grimace of his. His nose, like a wind sock, was tuned finely for wispy odors of unwashed cunt. Their curiosity doomed to his cocoon of sadness. [Read: Noah slept in a sleeping bag. No top sheet, no fitted sheet, he had never fucking heard of a duvet. Just a sleeping bag on one of those crinkly thin twin mattresses. A bag only barely big enough to contain both his reedy carcass and the poor jumble of sinewy tendons that comprised whatever anime sodden coquette upon whom his hex-like charms he laid.]

Ghoul that he is, he did have a sort of anti-charisma. A reverse charm. I was drawn to him as I am to the smell of my own farts, as I am to the smell of the locker room after a good skate. I oft wondered what may occur should one equip garlic or wooden stakes in his presence.

At night, Billy and I go to a party with his cousin Meg, a sorority girl with all As and two B[cup]s.

We walk to Young Drive with Meg and her best friend Ellie. Ellie was blonde and hot and ignored me. Our cadre swelled gradually as we neared and Meg’s friends couldn’t have been more polite to what I assume they assumed was Billy’s make-a-wish pal. I had had an entire coors light by then so as the afternoon air cooled to crispness, I flushed with hope and optimism, tingling at the unknown. And when the poor sap on door duty ushered our gaggle into the breach, the world opened wider.

It opened wider and hot, hot, stale, sweaty air beckoned and coaxed me so deliciously into the maw of hedonism I have made my home these past years. How does one describe such a treat? The taller, tanner, hotter, looser girls with black and blonde and whatever colored hair. The low-cut shirts and high-cut shorts and converse shoes. All this sex and lust and alcohol-with-tinges-of-artifical-fruit-flavor-breath and cheap makeup with no panties and holy fuck all these fucking LEGS suffused together in a, to be fair, fairly well-made colonial style living room with old hardwood floors that flexed and bowed under the kinetic inevitability of white girls popping their asses and pussies herky-jerkily to Lil Jon’s Get Low. And me in the middle. Thin, alabaster, and untouched, both in mind and cock.

[[Look, don’t read this and the following and think to yourself my-oh-my he is perversely, descriptively, irredeemably—no, CLINICALLY, horny. It’s like this, if Bambi were to write a memoir. Which one would you read:

          Option 1: Born. Legs not good yet. Slip on cold. Loud bang, Mom is red and asleep always.

          Option 2: Could it have stayed all dream-like if Mom was never taken? My soul ever after stained
          like the crimson wash of her punctured breast on morning’s fresh snow.]]

[[[Shit, tough call]]]

Meg brought me ‘n Bill upstairs to Seth who bragged about the price of the bottle of scotch on his sill. And he poured the scotch into that holy chalice of ours, the red solo cup, and I sipped and maybe it was just because the second Coors of the night had polished off any of my remaining faculties but I actually liked the stuff and I told him so.

You know exactly what his room looks like don’t you? Those full-wall tapestries, practically a pre-req for the burgeoning bourgeois. Spirally and psychedelically inclined. There is always one and maybe three. Then the Celtics, Pats, Sox or Bruins take their space. Floor-to-ceiling life sized men. Or pennants, or pucks, or balls. Or a coveted jersey signed by some old legend that “my uncle knows.” Sometimes you’d get the odd fish tank, a novel treat for the soft, blonde, Alabaman rube who’s never seen the ocean and trusts too readily that her Romeo really did free dive several hundred feet to ensnare the dangerously poisonous and slippery betta that now fins within. Neon lamps, blackout curtains, lingering pot and crushed-in couches. Not one inch of space is forgone, even from the closet door hangs a flag. It’s Don’t Tread On Me [my little patriot!] or it’s from Croatia where his father vacationed in the 80s and where he returned 20 years after the marriage to cheat on the wife.

Back downstairs, I was in awe, I just looked. Cuz I don’t understand it. I don’t quite get why that girl over there—the one that looks like a demented caricature of her Italian ancestors [orange]—looks up at that shlub with this emotion in her eyes. What is that? Hopefully horny, I think.

Could he be the one? That dusting across his upper lip. The Timbs, the flannel, the gut!

And hell, I think I’ve become fond of these two. Because fuck it, hopefully horny is better than—well, we’ll get to that. But the point is that she put herself out there, dammit! And I really did figure that his IQ was comparable to the proof of the Jack and Coke he was slamming but actually I think he was playing it cool because he was hopeful in his own way. Are they so provincial if they make it work?

And that’s a sweet melody isn’t it. A housewife cosplaying a whore. Then the harmony comes in: her best friend, who is also dressed like a whore but actually is a whore. Her gaze like a gatling gun, she fires round upon round with practiced coquetry. And with her pick of the litter, she’ll receive round upon round with practiced cocketry. I think I’ll name this woman. No, not her government name, you vagabond, you fiend! But we’ve got to title this class of woman. Whore is not right, I think we’ve got to go old school here: Minx? Yes, minx.

            Minx /miNGks/
            an impudent, cunning, or boldly flirtatious girl or young woman
            “you saucy little minx!”

That’s the end of the party. I didn’t get laid. Nothing happened. It’s like if you ever got interested in geology as a kid and you went out in the back yard with a hammer and broke open a rock. The rock probably turned out to be not a geode or an emerald or a diamond, it was just a fuckin rock; granite maybe. And, shit, is this a life lesson? It doesn’t have to be a geode or an emerald or a wet teen pussy.

After the party we headed back to Williamson. Meg and Ellie accompany. Billy gabs with Ellie and I spill my dreams to Meg who is sweet and good, so she nods and agrees and takes seriously my ramblings.

We sleep.

We awaken. We are not hungover.

– Kaelen Caggiula