Welcome to another Day One-this Day One being the first day of the Fall 2005 university semester. After the day we started high school, we never thought we’d survive another Day One. We thought the same when we started kindergarten. Remember all the kicking and screaming and pouting and cursing and spitting and wetting we put our parents through, as if we were living out a scene from the movie, “The Exorcist”? And Day One of kindergarten was probably worse! Yet here we are at another crux, another crossroads, waiting once again to sell our souls. (Cats have nine lives; do humans have nine souls?) How many more of these Day Ones do we have to endure? How many more Xanax-and-Zantac days are in our futures? Can’t we have some continuity? Stop-start driving is bad for cars, so why do we do it to ourselves? Maybe this “lifelong learning” idea is a good thing: at least we wouldn’t have the trauma of Day Ones any longer.Of course, Day One sympathy is already obsolete because The Nicholls Worth appears on Thursdays, which makes this not actually Day One, but in reality Day Four. But how exciting is a Day Four? Do we celebrate the fourth day of spring each March? Do we encourage people with the line, “This is the fourth day of the rest of your life”? Do military invasions occur on D+4 Days? (Of course not: The enemy would go home by then.)
So, we tend to tell Day One stories and never Day Four stories. But not today! Today we have an authentic Day Four story, carved in stone, pressed in wax and indelibly painted on the papyrus of my memory. Here’s the unforgettable first hour of Day Four of my college career.
6:30 a.m.-The alarm goes off: it’s Springsteen’s “Born to Run” blaring over the clock radio set to KLSU. All of a sudden, I really, really hate that song. I hate all loud songs. I slap the snooze button. There is an unusual silence in the dorm, on the campus, on the earth. Did I miss class? The arms on the clock face mean nothing at this groggy moment, because I was weaned on digital clocks. My brain stands me, but my legs refuse to obey. The floor is cold and hard, just like the lady at the fee collection window on Day One. I crawl to the window. Condensation: another sweaty morning in August in Baton Rouge. I bang on the glass to dislodge some droplets. There on the ground are a dozen or so squirrels, immobile, belly-up and with arms opened wide. Piles of half-chewed acorns and tiny beer cans surround them. It must have been a hell of a Day Three party last night.
6:35 a.m.-No one in the showers. Surely I missed English class. I spend an eternity trying to get that infamous soft water film off me, but to no avail. Shave? I decide not: This is Day Four, and the days of keeping up appearance are over. “So soon?” my ego gingerly asks. “You over there to study!” commands my superego, sounding just like my mom, complete with Cajun accent. “And ‘Ginger’! Mais who’s that?” it asks, “Her parents are rich?”
6:45 a.m.-Back in the room. Jump in some clothes: Can’t remember if it’s Day Three’s clothes or not. But who cares: It’s Day Four now. I reach for the cologne, just in case. “The cologne’s spray is particularly forceful today,” I think to myself. Focusing my eyes for the first time, I read that my cologne kills 99.9 percent of bacteria, molds and viruses on surfaces. That explains that. At least I wouldn’t catch any college-borne diseases today. And perhaps not tomorrow as well if I wear my Day Three’s again.
6:55 a.m.-Perhaps I can still make it to class, at least to get the assignment. But I’m distracted. “Gotta eat!” my brain tells itself. I like how that sounds, so I call my agent. Ten years later it’s the slogan of Rally’s. (My agent works slowly. He may be the organizer of the squirrel beer bashes, I don’t know.) In the cafeteria, I collect a tray of scooped foods: One perfect hemisphere of rigid grits, one perfect hash brown hemisphere and one perfect hemisphere of egg-substance. Three hemispheres: It’s a bad geography lesson. It’s the first trick question of the day-forget the professors; you can’t even trust the cooks to ask a straight question around here! Even worse, they’ve dispersed crumbled bacon-substance within the egg-substance, knowing that no one would eat the latter substance otherwise. The last server hands me a steak knife: “For the grits,” she says, showing her stalactite smile-a complimentary geology lesson. Or was it an anthropology lesson? Perhaps there was no fluoride in her childhood cave. Perhaps simply she’d eaten the hardened grits many times before. In either case, a sit-down breakfast was off. I grab the wad of grits in one hand, accidentally dropping it to the floor but quickly catching it on the rebound, and make off for class. At the cafeteria exit, a sign reads, “No animals are harmed in the preparation of your breakfast.” “None except you,” my brain tells itself.
7:05 a.m.-I am running from the food service demons because, for some reason, no food is allowed to leave the cafeteria. Maybe cafeteria food was causing the squirrel problem. The stalactite lady gains on me, wielding the steak knife. With my brain suddenly alert in fight-or-flight mode, with all sympathetic cylinders firing, I perfectly cross Highland Road just as the traffic lights turn green. I am safe. I now head past the Student Union. At Free-Speech Alley, a skinny guy dressed in Day One clothes from the previous semester screams at me, warning me of something, warning me of everything. My brain tells itself, “Yeah, I’ve seen Life of Brian. Holy Grail is better.” His voice calms dramatically as he asks for a donation-money for gas to escape the demons, which were all around campus. My brain tells him, “Dude, I’m on a Pell Grant.” My superego curses at him in Cajun French; he retreats from the onslaught, and I’m on my way.
7:10 a.m.-I head to the Memorial Tower en route to the quadrangle, aside which my classroom building is located. There’s a shapely woman walking around the base of the tower; she’s holding up a sign overhead and swaying as if she were announcing rounds at a boxing match. She’s wearing a costume like a sports mascot with pointy ears and a bushy tail. “Stay away from things like that!” mom says, remembering those unrated National Geographic specials on PBS I used to watch. But how can I resist? I get closer; I can read the sign she holds: “English 1002 Section 5 moved to 6 Allen Hall.” “That’s your class,” my brain says. I wonder what happened. Was our Day Two essay so bad that the instructor quit? Was she caught partying with the squirrels and dismissed? Had she choked on the grits and perished? But I had bigger questions to answer. I’d already left all my gingerbread crumbs along the path I needed to follow. “Where the hell’s Allen Hall?” I ask the woman. Her nose repositions and shrivels as if she was sniffing me. Was it the clothes? She smiles, but as the smile gets larger and larger, her elongate canines come into glory. She growls like a wolf. Maybe the 0.01 percent of bacteria I couldn’t kill this morning are the really nasty ones.
7:15 a.m.-I know you’re supposed to be calm and slowly back away from wild animals, but if I simply backed away I was going to be late for class. I threw my grits at the she-wolf in the best fastball I could muster without a wind-up and ran like I was trying to steal home plate. I slid into the Middleton Library and thought I was safe. A stack of librarians converged on me with index fingers to their mouths, admonishing me with loud “Shhh!!” sounds like a forest of cicadas on crack.
7:20 a.m.-Running west, I come upon Mike the Tiger’s cage, which was much more spacious than my own dorm room, and the fence around him was definitely more soundproof than my dorm’s walls. Now I was panicking because there were no classrooms in this area of campus. “Lost?” a deep but calm and sophisticated voice asks. “Yes,” I reply to it, trying to catch my breath. “You’ve passed it up. Allen Hall is just next to the library. That way.” The massive, hairy paw was folded in a fist,
with one finger and claw extended toward the east.
7:35 a.m.-It took a while before I stopped feeling like a corn-fed wildebeest downed in the Serengeti, but the conversation with Mike was the most enlightening of all my college years. We waxed philosophic, comparing life at college to life in captivity, and how we both longed for home. We decided that Mike got better food than I did, but at least I had the opposite gender of my own species on campus. He invited me back to the cage later in the evening when the temperature got cooler so that we could relax and discuss poetry over some steaks. Apparently, Mike had majored in Epic Poetry Studies before his capture, and Virgil was his favorite. “Thou art he from whom alone I took the style whose beauty has done me honor,” Mike said of Virgil. “Whatever,” my brain told itself. When I insisted that my steak should actually be cooked, he told me not to worry that he had connections at the Athletic Cafeteria. He asked me to pick up a hunting magazine or two at the Bookstore, and I agreed. “I’ve kept you too long,” he confessed. He grimaced, lifting his right pad of whiskers. “Now, get to class.” I obliged, having never before resisted a command from a large, obligate carnivore. Would I return this night to eat steak with Mike? Would I return this night to be eaten as steak by Mike? Suddenly, all options in life were laid out before me. Truly, this is what college was: Opportunity. I followed his directions and headed to class.
Stay tuned next week for part II.
