The Couch Guy

Ah, September, when the autumn leaves of America’s college campuses begin to turn color, and some of the Commonwealth’s mommas and papas nurse anxieties over how their freshmen kids are faring in distant universities.

Well, relax. Nothing can possibly go wrong when your 18-year-old kid leaves the island homestead for a campus almost half way around the world…where beer, booze and hormones flow freely like rivers of sin through Gomorrah.

But it doesn’t take a Saipan-to-America leap to disorient a student. A leap from, say, Indiana to California will suffice. You know of California. As for Indiana, it is sort of southwest of Greenland.

Meanwhile, the epicenter of the northern hemisphere’s most hopeless chaos was our college apartment in west Los Angeles. Housing was cramped and expensive, so four of us—Biggs, Joe, Steve, and yours truly—were packed into a one-bedroom apartment. Biggs and Joe got the bedroom. Steve and I lived in the dining room. The living room had the apartment’s only furniture; a pool table, a bar that apparently predated the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, a Radio Shack Clarinet II record player, and a yellow couch that belonged in a bio-hazard waste dump.

The apartment was dubbed the Cave, and was such a hopeless mess of anarchy that nobody bothered to lock the door. This had its advantages, namely, that stray kegs found themselves to a perpetually iced tub by the bar. Occasionally we’d spray paint the walls. On rare occasions we’d pay the rent. The landlord had given up. We didn’t aspire to be the building’s party ghetto, but we didn’t really resist it either.

We’d find ourselves in a serious Bacchanalian fog, and would live in it for about a week at a time. People we knew were always over. People we didn’t know were always over. If you managed to get any sleep, you could awaken at 3am to the boozy human wreckage of people passed out on the couch, pool table, or any spare plot of carpet.

Meanwhile, amid the known and unknown girls and party buddies, one partier seemed to always be snoozing on the couch when I’d be heading out the door in the morning. Nice guy, the Couch Guy, but he looked more haggard as the weeks wore on. I mentioned it to Biggs eventually.

“Dude, your guest looks partied out. He’s going to die on that couch soon.”

“My guest?” said Biggs. “I thought he was yours. Or maybe Steve’s.”

“No on both counts,” said I. “So he must be Joe’s.”

“No, Joe thought he was yours.”

That evening was relatively tame, so we could actually find and identify said Couch Guy. I asked him how he had found his way to the Cave.

“I wanted to visit Los Angeles for spring break,” he said, “so I came out. I’m a sophomore at University of Indiana. I didn’t really have anywhere to go, so last month I just sort of wandered around the campus housing area here, figuring I’d find something to do. I heard a party here, so I crashed it.”

And stayed. The place was too chaotic for anyone to really notice, much less care.

We had a few pitchers of flat, kegged Lowenbrau, as the Couch Guy gave us a rambling, disjointed speech on how California was even better than he had pictured it; free beer, nice people, great weather, no rain, and the women liked to party and best of all didn’t have thick ankles.

Then the Couch Guy volunteered that he had already blown off too many classes in Indiana, so he was pretty much screwed…his parents would not see the humor in a four-week California bender that flushed him out of college.

At which point we figured that we owed him no student kinship. He was now just a bum, and had an instant air of failure and doom about him. So we 86’d him.

It started to rain the minute he hit the street.

The Cave only lasted for an academic quarter. The electricity was eventually cut off. The landlord 86’d us. We scattered like rats.

Hey, if it looked like the Promised Land to some poor mook from the Midwest, that wasn’t our problem.

So don’t worry about your college kids. They’re fine.

Maybe.

(Ed Stephens Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. E-mail him at Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com.)