Win On Diagonals

Gary was my first College roomy at a two year agricultural college located in Western NY. I almost immediately had an unhealthy hatred of Gary due to a long drawn out misunderstanding. We were both freshman, unaccustomed to the life of roommates. Although both of us hailed from small/rural towns, Gary took much more pride, or put differently, embraced his rural background with open road aplomb. He was studying to be a dairy farmer. Gary went to bed with his muddy boots on and always wore overalls and an old mesh hat, as some younger people wear today or did at some point (celebration of ‘rural common folk?,) to express their depth of comical stock image know-how and irony or whatever it was.  I’m no sociologist, I’m Chinny Ray.

My first roomy was a very quiet fellow who thought cow-tipping was something citified amateur shit heads did. These kids needed to have their necks broken. Gary always talked about breaking people’s necks. It was like ‘pass the sugar’ to him.  He was always threatening to do such a thing, or suggesting that such a thing would be a good thing to happen to certain individuals or groups of people, women or men, professors or cleaning staff, Senegalese or Seneca Indian. No one was safe from the neck breaking farmer student.

I couldn’t always understand him, because it seemed Gary was drunk and swerving his speech, muffling his words. I wasn’t sure if he was poking fun at me, using a queer disrespectful bending of pitch, marble-mouthing a reply, or employing a deep mocking incomplete sounding of vowels and consonants, or simply feigning stupidity. I often thought Gary was imitating his interpretation of some fugitive Western, NY Chinese accent that I never knew was stealthily docked within me. Distrust was sewn in those early months of our collegiate lives.

Things would get worse. Gary had a penchant for urban, African American music, or perhaps that’s presuming way too much or overstating. He was no reader of Malcolm X or champion of affirmative action, or browser of Nina Simone records, but did enjoy the scatological and richly perverse lyrics of the Floridian group 2 Live Crew. The 2 Live Crew was notorious for their explicit lyrics. They made headlines sometime in the 1990’s here in America, and perhaps beyond. Here is a portion of their song entitled ‘The Fuck Shop:’

i know a place just down there two streets.
Baby, they’ll ask you no questions and give you clean sheets!”…..it goes on:

(gong noise)

It was awful.  I heard this track most often. Many a pencil would go over-sharpened and break, many sentences highlighted till they were no longer legible. I tried pretending to enjoy it, but it was incorrigibly offensive, and worthless. It was hard to brace against it, especially at that fanatical volume. Gary often sang along in that same irritating way in which he spoke to me, a sagging and hugging ding-dong sing-along, replete with embarrassing hand gestures and inept farmer fucky-funkless-dancing. True, I never heard Gary speak in any other way to anyone else, but I just didn’t think. The only other music he possessed was a tape cassette of a Cheap Trick cover band called Dirty Trick. It was almost as terrible as the Two Live Crew, and was blasted from Gary’s shoddy stereo with the same disdain for all life as we know it. One day in late February, with the snow heavily packing us in on campus in a town where the funeral director was also the pizza place boss, DJ at the one awful night club, and owner of the stationary store; I had words with Gary.

“Would you please turn down that music?

“May ooser ow, cannns— ott Lau fudda…”

“What? You could at least stop singing over it. I wanted this to work Gary. You hardly say a word to me, and when you do… it’s like you are trying to just shut me up by mumbling nonsense. I asked you to eat with me at the dining hall yesterday, and you just get in my face, staring at my mouth, and then saying: Ah noo, AW gant really, you gobe, gggghhh… What was I suppose to think? Why are you mocking me?”

“Nall e doose isp tawwc, mouth clope, break you’re fucking neck.”

That’s right. I always heard ‘break you’re fucking neck,’ without struggling with a single letter of the oft repeated threat. Were these the only words where he would allow himself to ditch that jackass mumbly-umph speech?

Gary responded with a few words to his defense after the neck breaking part. I really couldn’t understand him. He never really lowered the music. I know, it sounded like I was breaking up with Gary, instead of giving him my ‘I give up rant.’ I was way too sensitive about it. Gary just twitched the radio knob slightly. I said some things I shouldn’t have said to him. I was frustrated, and insecure. I just wasn’t paying attention to something I should have detected. I requested to be moved to another dorm. The Resident Assistant (the person who handled roommate problems and the like) was not thrilled to have to move me, especially as I was kicked out of my last room for having beer (I was a minor.) I had been ratted on by some holy-roller from Staten Island of all places.

The RA granted my move request, avoiding a conversation on the matter, because his girlfriend kept asking him to come back inside his room. Our meeting took place in front of his first floor apartment. I could see his impatience, his disinterest in me and my story. I wish we could have spoken about it in some detail. That dismissed conversation would have saved me some embarrassment to this day.

I was moved to Helyar Dorm diagonally across the way. Shortly after moving in, I had a conversation about Gary with a friend who was enrolled in the same dairy science class as Gary. I might be remembering this slightly differently, but in essence my friend said: “No man, Gary’s pretty cool. All that neck breaking bullshit is just friendly chatter to him; fill in joke-jerking, probably had an uncle that joked around like that, and loved the dude or something…. No man…..the way he talks. You dumb fuck, Gary’s basically deaf. You didn’t?”

There you have it. He was ‘basically’ deaf, and possibly a sworn enemy of Sam ‘Game Nut’ Forskrenn. Sam was one hell of a freak living in Helyar Hall. Helayr was a dormitory known for its hyperbolic collegiate pranks. Large swaths of its dwellers were removed from campus. Sam was not. I must be clear about him. He wasn’t a total total asshole, but a scary asshole when he was a total asshole, which was during ‘game time.’  Game time was most of the time, and very often unannounced to the rest of the world.

Sam tried to kill me once. Well, maybe not kill.  But I wasn’t sure what he was going to do to me. He was just sitting there with this three bladed thing far away in a wicker chair, an empty room in some unused farm house out on Route 20, he used the whole floor to draw out this game. I didn’t want to play, but then he talked me into playing, and….. I’m freaked out by it all… This was before I knew about the game he was created about me without my knowledge. Listening to his voice, calling up radio programs at WDTIX, a lot of the scene came back, conversations with people that knew him that I had over the years. I sought them out. I remembered them. Those were very unusual calls.

Gary might have stuck his tongue in the mouth of Heveilah Low, spinner of music made by Syrian exiles in Canada and the US, and distributor of foreign language pills. I know it sounds crazy, and I will add the proviso that I never took one of these FLP’s, but I have seen people take these pills, and almost spontaneously speak another language for a momentary clip of time. The pills would gradually annihilate one’s own native language skills, and if severely abused, even eradicate an ability to decipher symbols. Talk about downsides. Who wanted to be temporarily amazingly fluent in High Icelandic for some hot date who only spoke the latter, for the price of not being able to say ‘pass the bread’ or ‘finish me,’ in your own tongue permanently after the damage of such pills took their levies to a permanently buried chest? If one kept doing them, popping them…then… Everything uttered would become hardened into meaningless glyphs, melted down in the next breath to fiery folderol swashing about some a-lingual bucket of warmed over polygloop dross.

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