Vaseline On The Lens

Yeah, it's Saturday night and I'm sitting here listening to some Dylan. Got in the mood after catching up on the finale of "Mad Men," which played "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" over the end credits.

I think back to being a freshman in college when I play old Dylan. I was at NYU. I was a loner and he got me through a lot of that year. NYU is not really a social school and when I went there it wasn't the behemoth it is now. It had three big dorms and a couple of tiny ones. It hadn't annexed the East Village yet and really was still something of a commuter school.

I was in a triple in my freshman year. My roommates were Pete, a film major from New City, New York who wore flannel every day. He was pre-grunge. I'm serious. He had a closet of six flannel shirts and that's what he wore rain, snow, hot, cold, it didn't matter.

The other roommate was Sung. He was from Taiwan or Hong Kong (sorry, I don't remember). When me and my brother moved me into the dorm Sung was already there with his mother. He spoke little english. I looked at my brother with a "you've got to be fucking kidding me" look and he sighed and said "don't worry, he'll be studying all the time." He pretty much was doing that. What he wasn't doing was bathing. It was at least two months until he finally took one. Me and Pete confronted him and asked if he ever planned on taking a shower (NYU had one thing going for it and that was that each room had its own bathroom). Sung just looked at us blankly and said "shower?" We then motioned to the bathroom and that faucet sticking out of the wall. He then explained in his broken english way that he was using the shower at his mother's hotel (she stayed in the country for the first few months of his freshman year).

Pete and I just sort of nodded and walked out into the hall, went into the stairwell and looked at each other and in unison said "bullshit."

Other highlights of freshman year. Me and Pete on our first night going to a drug store and me picking up a box Trojans and saying in my devilish voice, "maybe we need a few boxes of these!!!" Pete chuckled and said we could probably wait. Unfortunately he turned out to be right. A flannel wearing Queen nut and a loner from D.C. rooming with an exchange student were not exactly hot stuff. It was a dry year.

Someone had carved "when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose" into our bathroom wall (I guess everyone at NYU then listened to Dylan to avoid jumping out the window). I remember lots of lonely walks down to the East Village to buy albums at Sounds. I remember cold days sitting in Washington Square Park. I used to wear a beat up leather jacket in those days and usually had torn jeans on. I guess I thought I was looking tough, turned out I just looked like a white version of Bubbles. One day I was hanging in the park by myself on a real cold day having a smoke and a cop car pulled up and asked if I wanted to go to a shelter. I had to show them my college ID because they didn't believe when I pointed to Weinstein Dorm and said, "I live there."

Once me and Pete got really wasted and I puked out the window and managed to get it into the room below us. A few minutes later there was pounding on our door and Pete opened up and these meat heads came charging in ready to kill. Pete should've been a theatre major instead of film because he started spinning this bull about how our room too had been hit with barf and it was probably some kids on the roof. Meanwhile, I'm passed out at my desk, right next to the window.

I remember the joy of blasting The Jam's "Going Underground" or S&G's "I am a Rock" on my stereo. I was quite the rebel in those days.

My nickname in college was Hater because, well actually that one's pretty self-explanatory. At the time it seemed like one of the worst years in my life but now I realize it was one of the best. Still, it would've been nice to have had to use at least one Trojan!