Brian was my roommate during our freshman year. We were
second semester sophomores at the time.
He was a varsity weightlifter with a C- average and dated a different
girl every week. However, because he dated Farrah Fawcett once and was
considered by many somewhat of an expert, albeit mostly self-declared, in the
field of women, we occasionally acknowledged his opinion.
Brian had an overall look that attracted women like flies
to honey. Of course, once they scratched
the surface of this particular Adonis and discovered the 90 IQ-like thought
processes with the one-track mind, most of the flies flew off to other
treats. Although, some didn't.
On this one especially warm spring evening, Brian,
several other brothers and I had spent about two hours and a case of beer out
in the beer garden, “dormitory watching”.
The fact that this obvious invasion of privacy made us all, technically,
voyeurs was the last thing on our minds as one particularly accommodating co-ed
entertained for an exceptionally long period of time. I was depressed that particular evening
because the news reported Sophia Loren had just married Carlo Ponti in Paris,
thus taking her off the market. When I
fantasized about women, Sophia was always in the scene. She was older than me by a dozen years but
she was just flat gorgeous and erotic like no other woman of our time.
“She’s in love with me!”, Brian proclaimed, totally
convinced that this girl in the window was putting on a show just for him. The rest of us laughed at his hubris. “I am going over there”, Brian declared. As usual, no one paid much attention. At this, he staggered out of the beer garden
and made his way along the parking lot behind our house to the edge of the
dormitory. Downing the rest of my beer I
went back to thinking about Sophia until I saw Brian on a thin ledge that was
on the third story of the dormitory, inching his way toward the girl’s window,
36 feet above their parking lot.
“Oh, my God!”, I exclaimed as we trained the binoculars
on Brian. The ledge was narrow, 6” at
best, and a fall would have certainly meant serious injury or possibly even
death. These facts were most likely
beyond both the practical and intellectual capacity of Brian to comprehend,
especially in his current state of inebriation, coupled with unbridled
lust.
Hushed calls for Brian to get off the ledge and abandon
his mission were met with waves of his arm and a slow, yet steady progress
toward the window of his desire. “Well,
I have had enough of this”, I said, “Call me if he falls and kills himself…..or
if he gets the girl”, I concluded, admitting to myself that once Brian set his
mind to a conquest, it seldom went unrequited.
I walked across our lower parking lot behind the house
and went through the back entrance up to my room on the third floor. As I entered, I saw my roommate, Gene McMullen,
sitting on his bed, lights out, rocking back and forth as if he were in a
rocking chair. The reason I could tell
he was rocking was the periodic glow from the end of a cigar he had in his
mouth which weaved back and forth in the darkness. “You're home early”, he spat with his usual
dry humor, “run out of beer?”
“No” I said, “Brian is out there trying to kill himself
and I couldn’t watch anymore”. I plopped
myself down on my bed with my economics textbook and clicked on my reading
light, leaving the rocking Gene mostly in the shadows, sucking the last bit of
smoke out of his Corona. Two pages into
the exciting text with my eyes already starting to droop, our door flung open,
crashing on the wall and bringing me bolt upright in my bed.
“If anyone asks, I have been in my room studying for the
last two hours!”, Brian screamed at us and dashed down the hallway, leaving
Gene and I with bewilderment on our faces.
About the time Gene was starting to ask me what the hell was going on,
we heard this incredible sound of shattering glass. My first thought was that Brian had broken
the huge mirror in our bathroom. I got
up and raced down the hallway to the community restroom and showers. The guys in there brushing their teeth had
the same look of surprise and foreboding on their faces as they stood in front
of the still intact mirror.
My mind racing through the alternatives, I returned to
the hallway and made my way down to the spiral staircase and looked over the
railing to the foyer that was surrounded by two-story high, floor to ceiling
glass on two sides. There I stared
incredulously at the scene below.
Sitting in foyer at the foot of the staircase in a random scattering of
large and small glass shards and a growing pool of blood was an Austin police
officer. His legs were sprawled out and
he was bent over holding his face in his blood-soaked hands. There was a huge hole in the two-story glass
window behind him. Accompanying this ghastly vision was an eerie silence in the
house.
Before I could even move, another Austin officer stepped
through the ragged, gapping hole in the window and started to lift the wounded
officer to his feet. At this point I
dashed down the staircase three stairs at a time, my mind racing with what
could have happened. When I reached the
foyer the two officers, one helping the other, were hurriedly rounding the
front corner of the house and heading down the driveway to the lower parking
lot. By this time several of my brothers
were on my heels as we followed them through our parking lot, down the grass
embankment to the girl's dormitory parking lot below ours.
The scene at this time was chaotic. Most of the girls from the dorm, in various
states of dress, were out in their parking lot and residents of the various
other fraternity and apartment complexes that surrounded our neighborhood were
starting to filter into the asphalt paved area strewn with cars. The officer, helping his wounded comrade, sat
him down beside their patrol car, lights still flashing, illuminating the otherwise
dimly-lit area, and leaned him against the rear wheel. Someone offered a towel to the downed
policeman and he used it to try to stem the flow of his own blood from a nasty
gash across the bridge of his nose.
At this point, an ambulance reeled into the parking lot
followed closely by another police cruiser, lights flashing and siren blaring,
responding to the “officer down” call from the first car on the scene. The ambulance driver wheeled his vehicle to
the left between rows of parked cars and threw his transmission into reverse,
planning to back up to the injured officer.
The second squad car pulled straight up directly behind the first police
cruiser. Then, as if from an episode of
the Keystone Cops of silent movie fame, the ambulance backed up quickly, with
people all around screaming a belated warning, and rammed the side of the
second squad car with the officers still inside.
Again, there was a deathly silence and a quick look
around the crowd of people gave the impression that everyone’s jaw gapped open
in a single instant. Then the ambulance
driver pulled forward and got out of his vehicle. With not the slightest recognition of what he
had done, he and an assistant proceeded to open the doors of their unit,
extract a gurney and wheeled it hastily to the fallen officer. The policeman in the damaged car just sat
there shaking his head, adding to the surreal nature of the scene. Then he tried to open his crushed door and
discovered that his exit would have to be on the other side of the car. His expletive could be heard for blocks.
All this time, Brian is nowhere to be seen and for good
reason. As the whole story unfolded, it
seems Brian, making his way along the ledge to the aforementioned window of his
desire, passed several windows where co-eds were not accustomed to seeing a man
outside their third story dorm windows.
Several calls to the police forced the dispatch of the closest squad car
and, as it turned into the dormitory parking lot, Brian made a hasty retreat
back down the narrow ledge, scrambled up into the DU parking lot, sprinted
around to the front of the house, came through the front door and bounded up
the staircase with the officers huffing and puffing in hot pursuit behind
him. The officers began the chase as
soon as they saw Brian leap off the ledge and head up the steep hill and
through our parking lot. However, as the
officer leading the chase rounded the corner on our front porch, running flat
out, he lost his footing and, going too fast to make the turn, crashed his entire
body through the two-story window adjacent to our spiral staircase in the
foyer.
A huge shard of glass above him came straight down and
caught him, squarely, across the bridge of his nose, bringing him instantly to
his knees and then to a collapsed position on the marble tiles, which is where
I saw him for the first time. The
officer, though injured severely, was getting the proper care and was going to
be all right.
The police, who were somewhat embarrassed about how this
call had proceeded, let alone the eventual outcome, told our fraternity
president that if we produced the offending party, he would not be prosecuted
and they would ask for a light sentence when they reported this incident to the
University and the Fraternity Counsel.
The initial reaction of the bothers was noble. We met and all agreed not to turn Brian in
but, to his credit, he gave himself up for the promised lighter sentence for
the fraternity.
The fraternity was suspended until the end of the
semester (only 3 weeks) and we would still be able to rush in the fall. All in all, it could have been a lot worse
and Brian was back in the beer garden with his binoculars the day before final
exams.
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