en mi primera noche de la universidad, mi compañero de cuarto urinó en mi piso

Five years ago this week I started college - it was on a friday, i think. That's how it works, right? Yale people? Anyway, i got back from my FOOT trip, met my parents, found my room, and met my roommate, a hulking Lacrosse player from a toney Fairfield County shore town with four names followed by a roman numeral who litened to Leo Kottke, had insisted on bringing a Television, on which he would later enjoy watching George W. Bush's campaign speeches, immediately referred to a student Computing Assistant as "that little Chinese girl," and before long was on the phone talking to friends from home about "the Spics' house." I was perturbed, to say the least, going so far as to nervously joke to the mother of a friend from high school that my roomate, with his teutonic-sounding four names, might be a nazi. Crass, i know, but forgive my youthful ignorance - or chalk it up to paralyzing fear of Yale's shaded avenues and acid-worn gothic fortresses - fear that I was subjecting myself to indoctrination into his world, or that subconsciously i had always been a part of it, that beneath my veneer of black-clad NYC Jewish anarchist lurked a yuppie asshole waiting to be born.

That night i walked around the Yale campus. I went to Ivy Noodle for the first time ever. I met some people. I found a friend from high school. I was visibly shaken by the amount of wealth and indifference people were displaying on the trek out to the BD house or whatever frat party people went to on the night first years show up. Still wrestling with my self-righteous antipathy towards controlled subtances and my idealized view of myself, my family (or at least my mom's side,) my high school, etc., i went to neither, and wound up back in my fifth floor Lanman-Wright double exhausted and in desperate need of a lot of sleep.

At approximately four in the morning, the door opened. I was still mostly asleep, but i realized there were two people standing in the doorway. Totally out of it, I mumbled something like "is that my roomate," at which point the older of the two silhouetted figures was clearly laughing at me, thinking I was drunk or something. This I resented greatly due to my aforementioned antipathy to controlled substances, but I was beginning to wake up, and I understood that yes, the bizarre and improbable scene at my doorstep did indeed involve "my roomate," and the other individual was either a security guard or police officer. (I would subsequently learn that he was a police officer, though whether he was a Yale cop or a member of the New Haven PD, I don't know.

The police officer left, and i watched the roomate's silhouette move across the dark room and fall onto his bed, sitting up to remove his shoes. Bewildered, still exhausted, and frustrated both at being woken up by this and very daunted at the prospect at having to live with him for the next year, I asked him if he was okay.

"I'm fine," he replied. "It's just the Negro police."

I was completely awake now, and completely silent for a second.

"What?" I asked loudly.

"Oh, don't get me wrong," he replied, "I love Negroes."

I wasn't particularly reassured. Actually, i was freaking out. But i was tired enough, and, i guess, white enough, that all I could really do was go back to sleep, assuring myself that I would have to find some way to deal with this once I'd slept and, perhaps, when my roomate was sober, or other options could become available.

Two hours later I was awoken to a loud, strange, trickling sound. I looked around and saw Johnny Four-names, his back to me, standing in the middle of our large dorm room, his legs slightly spread. It didn't take me very long to figure out that he was peeing all over the floor, probably still drunk to find his way down the long hallway to the bathroom.

After that, i could no longer sleep. I checked my email. I checked it again. I browsed amazon.com. I read the Times. I showered. I went back to my dorm room. Eventually he woke up, got out of bed, and after apparently slipping in his urine and rolling around on the floor in his urine for a few seconds, he got up and walked to the bathroom. When he came back, i confronted him about the pee. He denied everything. He hadn't peed on the floor, he "was just really sweaty last night."

"No," i told him, "I saw you pee." After a few minutes of this, he apparently took my word for it. He told me he had some Lysol and a rag. Convincing him to mop took several more tries over the course of a few hours. I never talked to him about the racist things he'd said about the police officer who escorted him home the night before. I didn't know what to say, and I was scared of having to live with him and i didn't really want to broach the subject. In retrospect, i wish i had done so as doing otherwise was ultimately possible only by clinging very tightly to a white privilege which allowed me, however uncomfortable, to not feel constantly physically threatened while in his presence.

That morning, i saw my friend from high school and her mother again. "How's your nazi roomate?" her mother asked. So i told her. And i told most of the folks i met, because I really didn't know what else to do, and didn't see any particular reason not to talk about it.

And so that was how i entered the world of higher education, in a puddle of urine, intimately close to a barely restrained racist drunkard, who, the next night, slashed open his thigh while attempting to drunkenly scale the fence around Old Campus, having become so inebriated as to have forgotten how to use his ID card to open the gate.

In some ways, it was a good thing it happened so early - not because of the two months spent barely speaking to eachother culminating in the second time he peed on the floor (and on his printer) and his eventual forced migration to a room with an in-suite toilet on the other side of campus and all the discomfort and drama surrounding his departure ( i spent most of the mights immediately preceeding it on an ex's futon, to the consternation of her suitemates. No, whatever use i draw from my membership in the fraternity/sorority of psychotic, racist, and/or incontinent roomate survivors (three of my four roomates the next year had previoulsy lived with floor-peers) i link, somewhat tongue in cheek, to its usefulness as both a metaphor and an illustrative incident in understanding the contentious relationships and politics of globalized universities and deindustrialized cities. As traumatic as all this was to deal with, I guess i should be thankful that whatever rosy-colored glasses I might have otherwise developed got ripped off my face pretty quickly.

That's pretty much the pee story. Thank you for reading.