Totally. This is like after we moved into the dorms in the fall and kind of got to know each other pretty well and then we sort of got bored with shit like staying around the dorms all the time and going to classes, so we went to this place where this guy made us fake IDs “for amusement purposes only, not a legal form of identification,” and we tried to use them at this bar downtown but the guy just laughed at us and took our IDs and we were out forty bucks. So we were walking back to the dorms and Kevin said, “College sucks, dude. I’m totally fucking bored with this shit, there’s nothing to do, nothing ever happens.” And I said, “We should have pledged a fraternity,” and Kevin said, “Yeah right, like they’d take us.” So we were pretty depressed.
Then the next morning I woke up in the sleeping room where there’s bunk beds and you have to like share the room with the two guys who live on the other side and they both study all the time and are carrying 4.0 GPAs and I went into our main dorm room and there was Kevin hanging upside down in the air. He was just hanging there like on one of those gravity boot machines that were like the hip thing back in the day, only he was just hanging upside down there in the air with nothing attached to him. I said, “Kevin, how are you doing that?” and he said he didn’t know and I told him his face was pretty red and he should probably turn over and he said he didn’t know how.
I thought that was pretty funny so I laughed for a minute but then he really did look like he was about to pop a blood vessel or something so I said, “Why don’t you try bending your knees like on a swing, you know, get some locomotion happening?” So he did that, and it was just like he was on one of those flying trapeze things; he looked like he was in the circus, but finally when he got going good enough he tried to swing himself around but he only got halfway and busted his ass on the floor. So he didn’t want to try it again for a while but after a while he did, and pretty soon he got better and better and started doing flips and he would hold his legs tight together like a ball and spin really fast. I thought it was pretty cool, so I went and knocked on some other guys’ doors around the hall and they came down and watched and pretty soon started calling their friends and everything and by that afternoon we had like this humongous crowd of people in the room watching Kevin spin around in the air. There were even these frat guys who kept saying it was a trick and so I told them to try it themselves and they all did and just kept falling over on the floor and everyone laughed at them, even the girls, and one of them actually hurt himself pretty bad. It was definitely a very entertaining day, and that night Kevin even got with this little hottie Kristin who was a junior and I swear had only hooked up with maybe three other guys the whole time she’d been in college from what I heard.
Kevin went to her apartment and didn’t come home until about 4 a.m., but then he shook me awake in my bunk really early because he wanted me to watch him do a swan dive, but when he jumped up nothing happened and he came down and cracked his knees on the tile floor. So he was yelling in pain and the two fags we shared the room with woke up and started complaining. I got out of there and went in our room in my underwear. Only when I got in our room, there was this very grizzle-haired old black guy with sunglasses sitting on our couch and it scared the shit out of me. He didn’t even act like he noticed me, though, like he was practically frozen there with his hands on his knees, and I put on some sweats and a T-shirt and by that time he was starting to look pretty familiar. I slipped back real quiet into the sleeping room where Kevin was kind of hobbling around. “Kevin,” I said, “Ray Charles is in our dorm room.”
“Who?” he said.
“Ray fucking Charles,” I said.
“Who’s he?” Kevin said. “Is he an RA?” And he looked kind of worried for a second.
And I told him no, Ray Charles was like this really kick-ass musician from way back in the day who might even supposed to be dead now because they made a movie about him and who my Uncle Doug was always trying to get me to listen to when I was little because he said my dad had really bad taste and would listen to like Bob Seger.
So we went out in the room and there was Ray Charles sitting on our couch. “Told you so,” I said.
Ray Charles seemed to kind of hear me then, like his hands moved and he sort of turned his head in my direction, and Kevin went over to him and stuck his hand out for him to shake. Only nothing happened, and I tapped Kevin on the arm and kind of made this motion like, “Check out the sunglasses,” and then I put my hands out in front of me and shut my eyes and groped around the air to say to Kevin, like, “He’s blind.”
So Kevin nodded and he went up next to Ray Charles and said, “Mr. Charles, I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. I’m Kevin. Can I shake your hand?” And Ray Charles seemed sort of startled but he put his hand out and they shook.
Then we asked him if we could get him anything and he said a glass of water so Kevin got him one. Then we asked him if he was feeling OK, and he said yes, but he was a little confused about where he was and what was happening, and he had things he was supposed to do today. So we went ahead and explained to him how Kevin was like flying around in the air yesterday but how he couldn’t do it today so maybe it was only like a one-day thing, and Ray Charles kind of smiled and waved his head around and said OK, then, he would just hang out with us “cats” that day. So he did, and it was awesome. We had the whole big crowd over again and lots of people got his autograph and there were even some grad students who came by that actually really liked his music and asked him questions about being dead and stuff, but it got to be sort of a hassle because they wanted to bring this one professor of theirs by to “verify the phenomenon,” and we had to tell them like, “No fucking professors, no way.” And then they were cool. We got Ray Charles to do a piano performance in the student lounge down the hall where they have a piano and a whole huge crowd was there and people seemed to like the music and even Ray Charles seemed to have a good time. And that night we drove him to the store and he bought us beer. And me and Kevin by now were like the coolest guys in the whole university.
Part Two
Next morning we woke up and Ray Charles wasn’t there — but in his place was this huge spread of real homemade breakfast foods, like right there on our desk. Waffles and bacon and ham and all kinds of fruit and French toast and blueberry pancakes and these drinks in tall glasses that we didn’t know what they were but they definitely had alcohol in them. When we called Kristin and her friend Heidi to come over, Heidi said it was mimosas. And the best part was as soon as you ate or drank any of the stuff it would all just reappear or there would be different good stuff in its place.
By about noon we were already pretty drunk and a bunch of people had come by again and there were these really excellent sandwiches like you’d get from a catering service or something and still lots of fruit and lemon meringue pie for dessert and beer. So we had this big party. The only uncool part was when the two guys who shared our sleeping room from next door complained to the RA about the noise and how there were so many people around all hours of the day and night, but Mike, the RA, was a pretty cool dude and he just came and told us to keep the noise down. And then when he saw how this totally awesome thing was happening with all the food and the drinks he stayed around and got drunk with us and the weenies from next door had to go to the library to study.
Around seven o’clock there was suddenly “Beef Wellington” according to Mike and these really dusty bottles of wine that Mike said were probably worth like a thousand dollars each and they tasted OK if you guzzled them fast and then “authentic Cuban cigars.” Then later when the party was getting really huge a keg of Heineken appeared and these incredibly excellent margaritas started blending themselves right there on the desk. Then to top it all off, when most people were leaving because they had to go to class the next day, a huge baggie of killer weed that like totally fried your brain on one hit but you could still maintain and hold a conversation. Then we went to bed.
I was the first one up in the morning and when I went into our room to see what the day’s events had in store there was nothing there, just our regular dorm room, except that all the empties were magically cleaned up and put in the recycling bin. But that was it. I was like freaked out because you could already hear a whole bunch of people out in the hall waiting for us to wake up and unlock the door and like initiate the entertainment. I went in the sleeping room and woke Kevin up and told him, but when he came out with me there was suddenly this gigantic blue and yellow butterfly like perched on the back of his chair. So I figured out then it only happened when Kevin woke up, not me. I was kind of disappointed, but then I thought, you know, how Kevin was an awesome dude and my roommate and my best friend.
The butterfly wasn’t quite as exciting as the other days. I mean it just sat there kind of spreading out its wings and making these loud sucking noises like it was hungry but we didn’t know what to feed it. But still, it was a huge butterfly with about a 5-foot wingspan so it was pretty impressive, and tons of people came by to see it and like marvel at its amazing, vibrant colors.
That night Kevin and I were talking and I said, “Dude, this is all about you,” and he said, “I don’t know what I did, man. What did I do?” And we couldn’t come up with much of an explanation except that Kevin said maybe he had like reached this utter peak of boredom, like he had become more monumentally bored than any other person in the history of the world and this had all happened as a result. Then we went to bed.
The next day was extremely cool. I heard this sound like firecrackers going off and I got out of bed and Kevin was already in the room sitting in a chair and there was like this huge battle going on with all these soldiers that were about one inch tall, and they were spread out in formations across the floor and up on the couch and everywhere. They had machine guns and tanks and hand grenades and everything. And they really died, too, like they would bleed when they got shot or exploded and scream out in agony and everything. Mostly it was guys who hung out that day, because the girls got really upset and cried when the little guys died or got wounded and moaned in pain and shit. It was an incredibly awesome battle, though, and you could actually pick the little guys up in your hand and they would totally freak out like they didn’t know what was happening to them and would try to shoot your hand. It was hilarious. This one guy Alex squished one of the soldiers between his fingers and the guy’s head popped off and that was pretty gross so we didn’t do it anymore. By nighttime the room was totally filled with smoke so we had to open the window, and then the battle stopped and Kevin and I went to bed and you could hear the little guys going around to pick up the dead and wounded and little people like crying and moaning and there were little torch lights you could see under the crack of the door. Like they say, war is hell.
We were worried about losing our supply of females after that day, but the next day we got all of them back over because our shower turned into a jacuzzi and Kevin’s iPod became this awesome stereo and we had a big screen plasma TV with like a million channels in HD, including porno. And that night there was an unlimited supply of beer and tequila shooters and we had the biggest party ever. The guys next door went home for the weekend because they couldn’t stand to be around us anymore, so Kristin and Heidi stayed the night and Kevin and I both got laid, but I don’t remember it too well.
This had all started on a Sunday and so now it was Saturday, the seventh day, one full week. When I woke up the girls were still sleeping but Kevin was already out of bed. I found him in our room talking to an old dude in a dark brown suit, who was sitting on our couch with one leg folded over the other and a briefcase next to him. When I first saw him I thought it was like the president of the university, but whoever it was I knew by the look on Kevin’s face that the shit had hit the fan. He looked really scared and his voice was like all queasy when he started talking to me. “Rock,” he said, which is what everybody calls me since I busted my head open on one in a diving accident when I was 14, “this is the Avenging Angel of the Everlasting Lord, Almighty God,” and I could tell by his tone of voice that I shouldn’t crack a joke or anything.
Kevin said, “We’re kind of in trouble here, Rock,” and I said, “Why? We didn’t do anything wrong,” and the Avenging Angel of the Everlasting Lord, Almighty God said au contraire.
Part Three
I knew this Avenging Angel wasn’t, like, part of the regularly scheduled entertainment or anything but he was still a pretty interesting guy once you got to know him. He’d already talked to Kevin but he went ahead and told me now about how God in his infinite wisdom had created the universe according to an established set of principles that he, this Avenging Angel dude I mean, called the eternal verities, and how human beings during their comparatively short historical span on this particular planet, Earth, had solved a fair number of the essential mysteries God had intended to remain undeciphered, but how they had done this through disciplined scientific inquiry and extensive experimentation, and how although God was not exactly thrilled with this unforeseen development He admired humanity’s spunk and ingenuity and was willing to tolerate it, at least for the time being. But what Kevin and I were doing was “out of the box.” We weren’t scientists or philosophers and we hadn’t devoted our lives to scientific discovery or metaphysical speculation. We hadn’t, according to him, even studied for our History of Western Civ midterms, although that wasn’t totally true, because we did at least go over the quizzes. But then this Avenger dude went on to say that while God had not sent him to smite us in His righteous anger, He could certainly do so if He chose, and in case we needed examples of the consequences of such smiting we had only to review our Old Testament, and he asked us if we had one. We said no and so he unsnapped his briefcase and took a Bible out and gave it to us (and it was a really good one, too, black leather with like this gold tint to the pages and a little bookmark that was soft like silk). He said we would see that God could definitely “smack our fannies.”
Then he asked us if we had any questions. I looked at Kevin and he didn’t seem like he was going to ask anything, so I went ahead and said, well yeah, how did all of this happen anyway? And it turned out we were right more or less, that Kevin’s monumental boredom had created a sort of vortex that dislodged objects in the space-time continuum according to his (sometimes subconscious) whims, or some shit like that, blah blah, and Kevin said, “I told you so.”
And then the Avenging Angel of the Everlasting Lord, Almighty God left. And needless to say, the party was over.
Although after a while, when Kevin and I would look at all these stories in the Bible like the guy told us to, and especially if we’d had a couple of bong hits, they started to seem like what my high school English teacher wrote in the margins of this fiction story I once had to write for class “implausible,” like you just couldn’t believe this shit really happened to anyone. So we told Mike our RA about the whole thing and asked him what he thought and he said how did we actually know this was the Avenging Angel anyway? After all, according to what we’d told him, Mike I mean, this guy hadn’t disappeared or like combusted in a holy flame or anything, he had just walked right out of the door to our room and me and Kevin stood at the window and watched him get into a Nissan Maxima in the parking lot and drive away, which was true. But all we could say was that if he’d been there like Kevin and me, he would definitely know something was up with this dude.
So Kevin quit fucking with the eternal verities. Sometimes we still get pretty bored, though, but what we do now is sort of make secret plans for how we might start up the whole thing again, because it was definitely pretty cool and like got us a lot of attention. If we can get off of academic probation from when we missed a whole week of classes last semester while all of this stuff was going on and got like practically invisible GPAs as a result, we’re going to try to talk our parents into letting us rent an apartment next year, and we’re thinking that maybe a change of address will get God and the Angel guy off our backs for a while. We talk a lot about what shit we could do next, and I think we’ve decided the first thing will be to like make Mariah Carey and Nicole Kidman appear, because we both admitted to each other once that we had a thing for older babes.
In the meantime, things are OK. One good thing is that even though we aren’t dating Kristin and Heidi anymore, per se, they still think we’re decent guys and come over to see us every once in a while if we ask them to, and we taught them how to play backgammon on this awesome board Kevin’s parents gave him for Christmas before they found out about his grades. So that’s pretty cool. And no matter what, I can always go outside and look up at the night sky and like cherish the memory of how my awesome roommate Kevin like tore a fucking hole in the fabric of the universe, right through the dark and empty space between the moon and all the stars.
