Before the "Summer of Love": DrLaura's "Bridegroom-to-be's adventures"

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.