Late one pre-summer afternoon amidst the thick bustle of nervous tension that can only mean final exams, I removed a “borrowed” white board pen from my pocket and for the second time ever, wrote something on the white board of the door. It was a crafty advertisement for a service: Freddie’s Awesome Airport Shuttle. For $10 + optional tips, I ferry you and your precious cargo to LAX in style and comfort only a VW can provide. For small compensation, I would also give the curbside baggage checker the patented Evil Eye when he tells you disapprovingly that you simply cannot check five four-hundred pound duffel bags. Although I was not adequately compensated for this service, legend has it that one look from said evil eye can kill a man from the inside, utterly destroying and deferring any and all dreams in a manner similar to small dried grapes basking in solar energy.
I should note that this post might be seen by most people as somewhat crude. “Awesome,” I hear you thinking.
The college white board, it seems to me, is in many ways a relief measure for the inevitable build up of male hormonal tension that being cooped up in a dorm engenders, for here finally is a benign, non-destructive, completely erasable canvas where the inner artwork of the male psyche can be expressed. This inner artwork is comprised entirely of renderings of the phallus and the endless variation of shapes, sizes, and textures that the two simple elements of cock and balls combined can create.
Apart from the future Georgia O’Keeffes, you never see the college female engaging in crude renderings of their genitalia on their white boards. From my experience, the messages on the girl’s side of the hall consisted of cute messages to the person across the way. Lauren and Ana got into a maddening war of Kimura-Wong Reflex conditions, wishing each other good mornings and nice days to the tune of curly orange letters and happy sun faces.
Perhaps the reluctance to render the female genitalia owes in part because of the comparative difficulty in creating a satisfactory caricature to what is a much more complex system. Evidence: in the seventh grade Life Skills class, the “What’s Happening to my Body” book for girls was, in addition to being a much more entertaining read, sixteen pages longer than the boy version (No, I didn’t dig up my copies – I checked Amazon. I’m strange, but not a perv like that). Representation in artwork of the vagina consists of O’Keeffes’ aforementioned flowers, requiring many years of technical training to master oil painting, whereas representation in artwork of the penis consists usually of large rocks or trees stuck upright and generally pointed at and laughed at.
On a related note, I used to doodle a lot in class, rather than take notes. In taking a psychoanalytic lens to this habit, I realized with some chagrin that should my notes fall into the wrong hands, one would assume that I was a pervert, as my doodles were all either phalluses or vaginas. Further contemplation of this revealed that nearly all doodles can be classified into those two categories – closed shapes are vaginas, and pretty much anything else is a penis. Dismayed, I stopped doodling and my grade point average shot up several points.
Thankfully, my white board did not degenerate into a wasteland of crude phalli and ejaculate renderings, mostly thanks to the fact that there was not a whiteboard pen freely available. Max and I, constantly testing our inane social hypothesis, theorized that a figure on a whiteboard will be endowed with a phallus within two hours of unsupervised display. This number is drastically lowered during Thursday and Friday nights, where guys full of booze and the need to impress the boozed up broads they have with them are more likely to engage in such wanton acts of vandalism. To test this, I drew a crude figure staring in horror downwards towards his crotch on Max’s board, which he bravely volunteered for the sake of scientific inquiry. Checking back on the experiment later in the day, our hapless figure was indeed gifted with a brand new coiling member that, when outstretched, would approximately triple his height. “No wonder he’s so horrified,” I think.
But thanks to finals and stress, our halls laid empty, and would be vandals sequestered away in a last ditch effort to justify their parent’s money. Soon I had a small base of clientele which I would deliver to the airport on the day of their flights in a timely manner, thereby funding my portion of the gas money for the long drive back up to Seattle with Reed and Angee.
This task taken care of, I set upon the greater one of cleaning up my room. Although I take pride in my supposed monk-like thrift and rejection of worldy objects, I am forced to acknowledge that I really did acquire a great deal of shit during the year. A sampling of these objects, both necessary and completely unnecessary are as follows:
I half-heartedly engaged in the vigorous task of weeding through what will be stored, thrown away, and brought back. There was a mountain of stuff, and our trash rooms were overflowing. I would wager this is the case in all the colleges – kids can’t bring all their shit home, so they throw away thousands of dollars worth of goods. Thank God Deputy R.A. Jen put some large bags out for Goodwill donations. They were filled to the brim almost as fast as she laid them out. The dorm halls were a mess of crap, and moving about required deft maneuvering around the unfortunate byproduct of the volatile teenage spending demographic. It’s amazing how much crap we accumulate.
Brandon, a true forward thinker, had gotten rid of nearly all unnecessary items when he flew back home for winter break. His room was a true monk’s den: bed, desk, laptop, clothes, and a few DVDs. We passed his open door with sneers of burning jealously, like demons passing by the gate of heaven itself.
I volunteered to help Polish Jen (like the hot dog, not the cleaning motion employed on fine silverware and candlesticks) and Ana and Jason move their extra stuff into a nearby public storage facility. The car absolutely laden with bags full of goods, we took several trips back and forth to get it all in. At one point, Jason had filled my car’s rear (seats down and all) plus my rocket box (or canoe, as most people seemed to think it was) full with clothing. “Holy crap,” I told him, “why do you have this many clothes?” He riposted: “But didn’t you notice how varied my wardrobe was,” to which I told him that I wasn’t the type that really notices that sort of thing, and he could have worn a bright orange prison jumpsuit all year with nary a peep from me. He was crestfallen, I could tell.
The stuff I had amounted to a few small boxes plus my lusty stallion (skateboard) and my weapons of mass destruction (guitars). I finished around fo
ur in the morning, the morning of move-out day, and got four hours of sleep.
Move-out day was just a tad less chaotic than Move-In day, partly because people had been leaving throughout the week, but mostly because any frustration one might perceive is dampened by “Hey somebody threw this away, I guess it’s mine now” moments. Watching parents move boxes out of their kids rooms, I was reminded by clowns piling out of old VW Bugs, and thinking “How the hell did they fit all that in there?” The cleaning staff combed the hallways for goods as I loaded up my car with eager kids heading to LAX. One carload after another, I sent friends on their way, to be met again in a few short months.
I was supposed to send Ed and Jason on my last trip around five in the afternoon, but I had to get going to Pomona and meet up with Reed, so I begged them to take a cab. Plus, Jason, going along with the theme of “Holy crap, you have a lot of stuff” just about filled my car up with massive bags. After much hemming and hawing, Jason finally agreed to get a cab. “What’s wrong with a cab?” I asked, “it’s about the same price I’m charging you if you share the fare with Ed.” He looked around furtively, before confessing that, frankly, he just doesn’t like cabs – “something about them.” I sensed deep-seated childhood psychological trauma involving perhaps the color yellow, so I thanked him for his flexibility, loaded my car up, and rode off into the sunset like the complete badass I fancied myself to be. Burning rubber, hands on the wheel, leaned back in my seat, and sailed smoothly eastward towards Pomona.
Well, except for that one point where I was in the middle of the intersection and the light turned red, and this Mexican guy yelled stuff at me and honked his horn and shook his fist and called me a puta, and I was really embarassed, but other than that I think it was pretty much 100% badass. Yeah.
Next time, I’m talking about road trips, lustful European exchange students, and why Reed, despite his political and moral beliefs, says that McDonalds isn’t a bad company at all.
-f.w.
Of note: America has been safe from the Evil Eye since the early 1980′s thanks in large part to the efforts of Ronnie James Dio. By then, his popularization of the mano cornuto ensured that America’s metal fans have done enough anti-cursing to keep our nation safe from blue-eyed witches for years to come.
Also, in the name of science, when the man with no testiclites was first placed on my board, he acquired a set of genitalia within a time window of seven hours and thirty-five minutes. To be fair, he was drawn in the late afternoon, and most phallus doodlers do not rise until about 7 PM.