The radiology waiting room at Mission Hospital is not so bad a place as hospital waiting rooms go. Granted, it’s no Lexus of Greenville, but on any given Tuesday night you could do worse. Brocephus, Libs and I piled in there last night to keep a vigil over DJ who had come in a little earlier with a busted leg. The broader context being that DJ just came down to the Valley of Love and Delight this year, so we his local cousins are kind of on standby in case he should, say, go to the hospital.
So there he is, first semester of freshman year, all banged up in the hospital. And there we were, in the radiology waiting room with its multi-colored carpeting that can absorb diet Dr. Pepper and show no ill effects. We checked. We also discovered that we all had traumatic first semester of college stories. Libs’ involved a cut knee and blood poisoning. Brocephus was in the back of a U-Haul in Northern Viriginia with 60 some odd fraternity pledge candidates when the truck went over and several kids died. That was the end of his greek career and part of a chain of events that led Robert O’Neil to overhaul rush at the University of Virginia and REM to write “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine.)”
What mine lacks in severity compared to those two, I think it makes up for in style and true freshman panache. In 1991, I was living with Pat in the lower level of the Courtyard of Love and Delight (destined to go up in smoke a dozen years later.) The rest of the guys down there were hard drinking baseball players and as far as I can tell, the college decided to sacrifice me and Pat to their backwoods bacchanal in the hopes of saving the rest of the first year class. We were dutiful in our roles as scapedrunkards.
On the night in question, we had not yet begun to defile ourselves when Ramona came by to take Pat out for a walk. They had not gotten very far — in fact they got as far as the back of the building, when they reached up to the window 5 feet from the ground and tap tap tapped. Looking out through the glass, which ran basically floor to ceiling in the room, and down at them, I was greeted by the New Jersey salute.
Pat being from New Jersey, I thought he might not know any better than to deliver that insult, and I wanted to show him how we conducted ourselves in the dirty south. So I whipped around and saluted them back with a full moon. In and of itself, this would have been a non-event, except that the moon is of Kentucky and I am of Tennessee. We are more famous for our hams, and not wanting to neglect Tennessee pride, I decided to deliver a pressed ham.
Being from the country, you probably know that October is hog killing time. This was November and the time had passed. It was too cold for a pair of hot hams to be pressed against cold glass, but not being a physics major, I did not understand the risks. I pressed ahead and the window shattered, sending shards raining down on Pat and Ramona with the real possibility of me following. It was a choice between holding my pants up and holding on to the window frame. I chose the latter.
Which meant that the cuts were mostly constrained to my back and cheeks. There was no damage to the notcha or anything forward. Not that this prevented a fairly uncomfortable ride to the very same Memorial Mission, or a very awkward conversation with the triage nurse. And a very awkward conversation with the insurance. And a very awkward conversation with Mama who was coming to visit her baby boy at College for the very first time the very next day. “No, no that window was not like that when we moved in.” “Well, it’s funny you should ask because there is an interesting story about that.”