The Memory Hole

bullet belt.

Circa fall 2004 - spring 2005.  freshman year.

We were playing airsoft at the time.  Evan was one of the regular players.  We went to the nearby CQB place, and I noticed Evan had a belt which he claimed had real bullets.  His dad was a cop, you see, and he had access to real bullets, or something.  Now that sounds fishy but apparently four years ago I believed him rather than figuring that more likely they were fake bullets from some hot topic belt, but I digress.

I snapped at him and gave him a ton of shit about how it was really dangerous to be playing with real bullets, how if the primer somehow got struck in the wrong way he could kill somebody, and I didn’t want to be involved until he took them off.

He took off his little bullet attachments.  I probably didn’t really care.

drunk man on the can.

John, your latest tweet reminded me of this little incident.  I wonder if you remember it.

It was senior year.  Probably Spring 2008, although theoretically it could have been Fall ‘08.  Definitely living in Wainani.  I want to say it was a Tuesday night.  It wasn’t entirely late, like maybe seven or eight at night when this happened.  John had been out drinking somewhere, and came back, and proceeded to make friends with and hug the toilet when he came back.

I don’t drink, but I’m fine with people that do and I guess sometimes you just drink too much, you know?  I’m all for letting an intoxicated person do what they have to do with the toilet—I’d much rather it be there than all over the living room carpet or something like that.

The problem was… he stayed in there.  For a good while.  For some time there was the lovely sound of spewing, but after a while, nothingness.

Being the responsible college students that we were, Andy, Evan, and I did pretty much nothing.  Actually, we got irritated, because damn man, there’s only one bathroom in the apartment.  But we were pretty much also passive aggressive and lazy so we didn’t do much.

In truth, I had to take a leak, but I also had to buy something at Walmart.  I remember distinctly, in fact, I had to buy a rechargeable battery for my Xbox 360 controller.  So I headed out to Walmart.  I remember getting a text from Andy at some point while I was on my Walmart trip that was something to the effect of “He’s still in there.”

Well, when I finally got back from the battery trip, he was still in there.  I don’t want to sound like a hero, but goddamn at least I finally took some action.  That action was to walk up to the door:

“John?  What the fuck man? Are you alive?”  No response.  The door was unlocked.  With some slight trepidation and the other roommates looking on, I turned the knob and pushed the door open, only to have it stop quickly.

It was banging against John, who was kneeling at the base of the toilet, apparently passed out.  The bathroom was small, so it was impossible to open the door more than like an inch or two before it hit John.  If it was bigger, perhaps we could have like, moved him or something.

Instead, doing the responsible thing, I proceeded to spend like a minute just whacking the door against him with increasing intensity.  ”Get up, man!”  No response.  We all looked at each other, probably with two concerns: 1) When will we be able to freely shit and piss in our apartment? and 2) What the hell do we do about it if he’s dead?

Needless to say, it must have been a delayed response, as all responses tend to be when one is drunk, but the door jolting must have worked.  A few minutes later he mysteriously emerged from the bathroom, walked to his bed, and collapsed.  The next day I believe he was fine.

residential evil.

Another freshman year story.

I had a Nintendo Gamecube in my dorm room that year.  It was the only console I owned back then.  Honestly, there weren’t a lot of good games for it and it wasn’t a very good system in general, but I guess back then I was just a helpless Nintendo fanboy.

Evan was really into the Resident Evil video game series, something I never really got too much into myself.  One of the Gamecube’s more well-known attempts at branching out from the “just for kids” stereotype that Nintendo had earned was a remake of the original Resident Evil game on the Gamecube.  It had really good graphics for the time and as I recall actually had to be put on two of those little tiny gamecube discs.

Anyway, so one day Evan asked me if he could use my Gamecube to play Resident Evil if he bought the game.  I said sure—it wasn’t like I used it very much anyway.  So he bought it, and he was hanging out in my room playing the game.

Evan, I love you dude, and obviously I would learn to eventually live with all your little foibles (and you with mine, I’m sure) when we ended up as roommates for our last two years of undergrad, but at the time, I was used to having my own room to myself and I didn’t have to deal with anyone else normally.

The thing was, Evan would play it in long runs.  Like, three or four hours at a time.  It was no big deal, it’s not like I had anything else going on.  But after a while, having the TV on blaring Resident Evil was getting annoying.  He would really get into it and have it really loud.  Sometimes he’d yell in reaction to something that happened—I guess it is a “horror” game and enemies would pop out unexpectedly, resulting in a cry of surprised and frantic working of the controller.  I remember there were like permanent sweat marks on the controller after all was said and done—that’s how into it he was.

No big deal, I thought.  All I had in my dorm room was my pissant little 13” TV, but one cool thing about it was that it had a normal headphone jack right on the front.  I told Evan how the sound was bothering me a bit, so I offered up my headphones and asked if he’d play wearing them.  Evan’s a cool guy and he understood and obliged right away.

It was great.  Silence permeated the room.  Aside from the hum of the TV, there was really no sound in the room.  I was really getting used to it, and I was thinking that actually him playing Resident Evil in my room wasn’t going to bother me at all—he could now play till the Gamecube burned out for all I cared.

Some time went by, maybe twenty minutes.  And then, suddenly, out of the calm silence, Evan’s shout suddenly filled the air, coupled with frantic movement of the sticks on the controller.  I guess an enemy had popped up unexpectedly or something.  The thing was, while the game itself could be put through headphones, Evan’s own reactions couldn’t.

This was worse.  Before, the noise was annoying and constant, but at least when he would have a loud reaction to the game, it wasn’t such a break in the atmosphere.  It could almost be expected.  But now, I had quiet tranquility pierced by the occasional “OH FUCK!  SHIT!!!” or something along those lines.  Honestly, I wasn’t even playing this game and it was still scaring me, because Evan’s unpredictable and unexpected reactions would surprise me and make me jump too.

It went on like that for the night.  I think in the future I just told him to forget the headphones, I’d rather just put them on myself, play some music, and block out all sound.  Fortunately I think he beat the game to 100% completion within the span of a week or something, so it wasn’t that bad.

Those were the days.