They’d been on trips through this dorm before, but he didn’t
have a clear recollection of the RA from the previous time. After that trouble with
her in the foyer he had been a little on edge but since he was with a couple of
other like-minded wholesome, virtuous citizens he felt they had strength in
numbers. As they walked down the hall he was impressed by how much thought had
gone into the patterns in the carpet: The detail was intricate and had many
tiny dots that seemed to rotate in his peripheral vision but when he went to
focus on the spot that had been moving everything seemed to stop…
His concentration was broken when suddenly he heard someone
say, “Hey man! What are you doing here?” It was a friend of his that lived in
this dorm that he’d met during orientation and they’d subsequently had more
interesting conversations than he would have with his classmates, and it formed
a bond between them. The friend was a Good Guy, but he wasn’t Like Them: He was
in ROTC and sported a flat-top, and when it came to social issues and following
convention he was a bedrock conservative – his dad had been in the Air Force
and he was a traditionalist. Of course, this tradition also included imbibing
massive quantities of alcohol.
“Hi!”, said the morally-impeccable guest. “It’s great to see
you! We’re just visiting. These are exquisite carpets – have you ever thought
about how they chose them? I could spend hours in this hall looking at the
patterns.”
“Yeah, that’s great,” said the less-perfect-but-still-good
host. “I’ve been watching some martial arts, dude – they are bad-ass! My dad
used to tell me about these guys in the military and they’d get in these big
fights and everyone would be chanting. Blood everywhere!”
“Wow,” cleverly observed our main character. “Intense… I can
visualize the carnage… Blood everywhere… A slaughterhouse… Or maybe like chickens
with their heads cut off. Which reminds me, last time I was at the Smithsonian
I remember seeing a concept for a guided bomb from World War II with a chicken
in it. They made it so that the target looked like bird seed and it would peck
at the controls to keep thing aimed properly. I’ve always wondered how they
trained the chickens to do this without developing vertigo. Do you ever talk
about that during ROTC get-togethers?”
His ROTC companion had stopped listening and was immersed in
his own deep thoughts, and so he imagined what these erudite discussions at the
ROTC gatherings were like. But then suddenly his friend said, “I’ve been
drinking too,” and before the halo-bearing main character had a chance to clear
things up, his ROTC friend ran over to a glass case that had a fire
extinguisher and a sign over it saying “break in case of emergency” and punched
it. Glass flew everywhere and he turned with wild eyes and said to his celebrated
guest, “I kicked its ass!”
 |
| Artist's Rendition of the Proceedings |
Blood rushed into the praiseworthy visitor’s head as he
experienced a moment of extreme clarity, and with flawless judgment he said,
“We have to get out of here! Let’s go – act sober,” and, as if he were a
guardian angel tasked with preserving his friend’s ROTC scholarship, he hustled
his wounded charge away to the cadet’s room, with the hubbub steadily growing
behind them as other students and the RA appeared on the scene.
As they neared the wayward conservative’s room, the selfless
protagonist looked up and saw another friend of his: A very pretty blonde, he
had started to develop a bit of a crush on her but had never had an opportunity
pursue it. Now, mentally preoccupied and with an injured ROTC drunk in tow, he
was in no condition to do anything about it, so he chivalrously said, “Great to
see you! I’ll be back after I conquer these rivers of blood!”, leaving her with
a puzzled look on her face and golden tracers streaming from her head. In an
effort to clear things up, he called over his shoulder, “Imagine that I have
wings!”, and, like the gladiator Maximus before him, his bravery and essential
right-ness was apparent.
Amazingly, after washing off his hand, the helpless aspiring
officer had only sustained minor cuts, although upon closer inspection they all
looked to our hero like peck-marks. Perhaps the pain had sobered the
traditionalist up a bit since he gave his savior a sheepish look and said, “Was
that over the top?” Our saint’s mind was on to other things and he must have
been verbalizing his internal narrative as the military man queried, “What
sheep are you talking about? And did you just ask me something about chickens
in ROTC?”
Just then our role model’s fellow travelers arrived on the
scene and the first said, “What a lot of commotion! It feels exhilarating! I
feel like I could run a marathon!”, and the second agreed, “Yes! A steeplechase
with fire-tipped arrows raining down!”
By now, the exemplar-of-rectitude had forgotten all about his
crush, and seeing that his work in the infirmary was done, they took their
leave. One of his friends remembered from one of their earlier trips through
this dorm that there was a girl nearby that had glow-in-the-dark nail polish.
“Let’s go find her - she has a hookah too!”, the friend said, and there was
hearty agreement all around that this other enticement was only for looking at.
They headed off down the hall and were passing one of the
laundry rooms when one of the less-spoken-about companions said, “Hey, check
out the dryers!” They looked normal enough, but then the fearless leader
noticed what looked like karate belts unraveled on top of the dryers. He had
assumed that the martial arts were on TV, but maybe his ROTC friend had
actually seen this stuff live – the traditionalist had been pretty animated and
he’d just been drinking, so the paragon-of-virtue was certain that the
officer-in-training wasn’t seeing things… Alas, his train of thought was broken
by one of his other minor-yet-worthwhile-mentioning traveling companions who
exclaimed, “Dude, they’ve got snakes on the dryers in here!”
Suddenly, the RA that had showed up at the scene of the
crimes (both in the foyer earlier and more recently at the fire extinguisher) had
magically appeared before them and said, “Hey, do you guys know anything about
the broken glass? And how about all this discarded packing tape on the dryers?”
“Nope”, “Nope”, said the leader’s friends and then the leader unwisely said
“No, but these are some great carpets!”
“What?” , she said, and then her eyes narrowed and said, “OK,
come clean. You’ve all obviously been drinking.”
Suddenly the human-embodiment-of-moral-perfection felt a
surge of indignance. “What are you talking about!”, he shouted at the top of his
lungs in a most compelling way. “I haven’t had a drop of alcohol! You can give
me a breathalyzer – RIGHT NOW!” “Yeah!”, “Totally!”, said his friends.
She was taken aback and stammered, “Uh, uh, okay, I have to
ask, you know…”
“Well just remember, it doesn’t pay to judge a book by its
cover!”, the exemplary leader said sternly, and turned and strode away with
purpose. Fortunately, his lieutenants followed suit, and as they rounded the
corner at the end of the hall, he stole a backward glance and saw that she was
gone. One of his friends said, “We really showed her!”, and he said “Yeah!”,
and the third member said, “Yeah! All that emotionally healthy vigorous
laughter and imagined lightning bolts were hours ago! And beer doesn’t count,
right?”
And they all lived happily ever after. The end.
