Reminiscing, Chapter 1

Yesterday I saw my old friend Blanc get married. In a suit. In a church.

To understand why I am still reeling from the reality of that, it's necessary to hear a few stories about Blanc...

I met Blanc at Pomona, where he was a freshman and I was his sponsor. At Pomona, your freshman year you spend as part of a sponsor group. Sponsor groups are formed by taking 6 freshman boys and 6 freshman girls, and pairing them with a sophomore boy and girl. The sponsor group of boys and the sponsor group of girls together constitute a core group, and you all live together in a hall in a dorm for your entire freshman year. You go through orientation together, etc., and it basically creates for you an instant family upon arrival, which helps make the adjustment process easier. It's particularly helpful at a place like Pomona, where everyone is super smart and super quirky, and the atmosphere is kind of intense, creating the potential for stress in making the adjustment to college life.

For the vast majority of freshmen, you are assigned a roommate. For instance, this is how I met Laszlo; we were in the same sponsor group and were roommates. But, a small fraction of the freshmen population is deemed, based on the housing forms that everyone fills out upon acceptance, to be somewhat ill-suited for the roommate lifestyle. Or, perhaps a better way to say it is, they're deemed much better suited to living alone. These freshmen are all given singles in the same dorm: Albert K. Smiley Hall.

It's possible that over the course of your life you've wondered: "What's the oldest continuously functioning dorm west of the Mississippi?" The answer is: Smiley. And because of its age, and its function of housing those who stand out as being misfits at a college where the baseline student is already kind of a misfit, Smiley has developed over the decades a storied tradition of
creative mischief.

Smiley dorm has 3 floors, and Smiley 3rd floor has historically been the worst of the bunch. For whatever reason, when I applied to be a sponsor I was accepted, and assigned to Smiley 3rd floor. And, I was assigned a group of students who, even relative to Smiley 3rd floor's long and lurid reputation for causing trouble, eventually came to stand out as one of the most mischievous groups ever. Blanc was one of those.

Roughly twice as many people apply to be sponsors as the program can accept, so it's a pretty competitive process. I eventually got accepted because of two factors whose relative importance I can only guess at: (1) I made an articulate, impassioned case for my desire to give back to a program that I believed to be instrumental in my feeling happy and almost kinda sorta fitting in for the first time in my life, and (2) the head of the selection committee was the girlfriend of my sponsor, and I had given footrubs to her on several occasions. For the record, I give good footrub.

During the application process, there is an interview, during which at some point you are sternly reminded that being a sponsor is a full year commitment, and you have to be ready to be there for these young men and women at any point during the course of the year. Whenever I think of the moment I heard that, I laugh, because for me it's turned into a 17 year commitment and counting, for at least 3 of the 6 of them.

Here is the cast of characters:

Chris: tall gangly white dude, very nice, clearly determined to do whatever it took to overcome being a little socially awkward. He is now a doctor, I think in Minneapolis.

Byrd: short black dude, well-meaning, but possessed of a rare gift of being able to alienate virtually everyone he came in contact with in a way that was both swift and difficult to identify precisely. Although I liked him, it was not hard to see how others might get annoyed by him. He eventually became a lawyer, as I think all people with his particular gifts do.

Zhian: by far the strangest of the bunch, he didn't speak a word for the first month he was on campus, and only left his room rarely during that time. He teaches English in Japan.

Joel: wicked smart, kind, and virtually devoid of any observable social skills. He had the room right across from mine. He is about to finish a master's degree at the University of Singapore.

Blanc: also wicked smart, very sociable with people and ideas he liked, and on a mission to eradicate from the face of the earth any people or ideas he didn't. He had the room next to Joel's.

Blanc.



















Nasr: a 6 foot tall, bald black Muslim guy with a fetish for all things Japanese. Extremely sociable. I estimate, quite conservatively, that within 48 hours of arriving on campus he knew 80% of the female population at Pomona and 50% of the male population. Of these, easily half the women and maybe 10% of the men actively wanted to sleep with him. Nasr had the room next to mine.

Although stories abound for all of them, I will limit myself to stories that directly involve Blanc, in an effort to keep this under book-length. There are that many stories.

In no particular order, here are some random memories of Blanc...

Smiley dorm has a unique location on campus. All the underclassmen dorms are located on south campus, and all the upperclassmen dorms are located on north campus. Smiley sits on the path between north and south campus, precisely in the middle. So, at some point over the years a tradition has developed that as people walk by Smiley, they yell out "Smiley can't party!!" at the tops of their lungs.

Blanc, who spent essentially his entire freshman year either drunk, or high, or, most frequently, both, immediately took a dim view of this tradition. He did not take kindly to anyone impugning his ability to party. So, on perhaps day 2 of school, as we were standing in the hallway, some random group of freshmen walked by and yelled "Smiley can't party!!", and Blanc got incensed. He ran to my window, leaned way out, and started screaming at them. It was an almost poetic rant, most of which is lost to history, but I do remember the bit about how he was going to "rip your tongues out with fingernails laden with radioactive cum!" The rant went on for a few minutes, during which the poor freshmen apparently decided Blanc was insane (accurate), and skedaddled.

Blanc's gift for creative self-expression extended also to writing, which he pursued with vigor, typically using the whole world as his parchment. By "the whole world", I mean "the floors, walls, and ceilings of Smiley 3rd floor". This, coupled with Blanc's love of extreme death metal and his hatred of any and all social institutions, most especially organized religion, led to a lot of creative slogans materializing around the hall. This was most evident in Blanc's war against the PCF.


Summoning the dark powers...


















The PCF is the "Pomona Christian Fellowship". The PCF is that subset of the Pomona student body that believes strongly in Jesus, and further, believes strongly that you ought to believe what they believe about Jesus. They have a clever strategy for finding new converts: the dorms are assigned according to a lottery system, with seniors getting the first numbers, then juniors, then sophomores. Juniors and seniors inevitably pick rooms in the north campus dorms, to be with other upperclassmen, even though there are some very nice rooms in the south campus dorms. What the senior PCF-ers do is use their high lottery numbers to station a pair of themselves in every freshmen hall they can, and then proselytize hard when the freshmen first arrive, and are emotionally vulnerable and looking to make friends as fast as possible.

Troy and Todd were the PCF-ers in Smiley dorm, and they lived in our hall, in the rooms next to Nasr and Blanc. They did eventually ensnare Byrd, largely because he had pretty much alienated everyone else in the hall, and Troy and Todd were striking out hard with the rest of the group. In particular, Blanc took their efforts to proselytize to him as an open declaration of war.

One day I came home and found that Blanc had unrolled all the toilet paper from every roll in the dorm and fashioned large upside-down crosses from them, which he hung at the border of the hall to separate us from Troy and Todd, and presumably, to ward them off. Another morning, I was walking down the hall and noticed that 'someone' had written on the wall, in 6 foot high letters, in rapidly congealing pancake batter, "Abort a fetus for gay Christ!" It must have taken an entire family-sized box of Bisquick to make that.

I think that was the first time I got a call from the Dean of Students, informing me that we had 24 hours to get that the hell off the walls, because the cleaning people sure as hell weren't going to do it, and if it wasn't gone, heads were going to roll. The second time was not much after that, when the phrase "french fried fetuses" was written in tiny letters over and over and over in an unending chain around a sizable fraction of the hall. That took for fucking ever to scrub off.


The dark forces of nature are marshaling...











Speaking of fetuses and things on walls, another day I came out of my room to find Joel and Blanc conducting "science", which consisted of experimentally testing what would happen to Frary food (Frary was the north campus dining hall, where we all ate), when you nailed it to the wall and left it there. For weeks. There were not a lot of surprises; bagels last a long time, fruit doesn't, etc., but Frary jello turns out to be indestructible. That stuff just hardened around the nails and became impossible to dislodge. So there were little cubes of hardened jello nailed to the hall walls for several months.

But food was just one of many things that got nailed to the walls. My now-deceased grandmother was a sweet old woman, who was militantly, rabidly, anti-abortion. I'm talking Wahhabi level fundamentalist about it. She had a giant pile of these little pink plastic molds of 10-week old fetuses, which she would show to people with little to no provocation as a way of trying to shock you with the reality of abortion. In fact, she wore one of the little fetuses sewn onto the back of her jacket, nestled in a little pile of strips of cloth which simulated blankets. It was the creepiest thing _ever_.

Early in the spring, she got it into her head to mail me some of the plastic fetuses, so that I could spread them around and join the fight against abortion, despite my clearly saying on multiple occasions that I had no interest in doing so. So when I got a package full of little fetuses, I did what anyone in my position did: I gave them to Blanc to see what would happen. What happened was, they all got nailed to the walls in the hallway as part of some "artistic expression of the Judeo-Christian willingness to sacrifice people to its campaign of domination and eradication of free will blah blah blah (this is where I typically started to tune out)". Eventually, someone not from Smiley 3rd had the misfortune to wander up to our area and apparently freaked out, so that was another call from the Dean, and we had to remove the fetuses. I have no idea what Blanc did with them after that, and frankly, I don't want to.

As a postscript to that story, 2 years later my grandmother's house was destroyed by the flood of '93. A helicopter came and landed on her farm and told her she had 30 seconds to grab whatever and they had to leave, because a levee had burst and a wall of water was coming down the valley. Her house was half underwater for a month. Among the many casualties were the 100+ year old baby grand piano with real ivory keys that I stood to inherit, but which after being 90% underwater for a month was firewood, and about 500 little plastic fetuses, which washed away. So I have always had this vision that even today, somewhere along the banks of the Mississippi, you can go for a hike and maybe come upon a little pink plastic fetus bobbing along the shoreline.

As I mentioned before, Blanc spent pretty much the entire year either drunk, or stoned, or both. For instance, we had a communal bathroom, which was next to Zhian's room, and in the morning when I went to take my shower, I could always tell which shower Blanc was in- it would be the one with the bong on the shower wall. Every few minutes a hand would reach up and the bong would disappear behind the shower curtain, and then reappear a few minutes later. That was just how Blanc started his day.

At some point in the middle of each day, he would transition from smoking out to drinking. The drink of choice on Smiley 3rd was Milwaukee's Best, or "The Beast". All I can say about The Beast is, if it really is Milwaukee's best, they should just save themselves a lot of hassle and expense by shutting down all the local breweries and instead hiring people to piss directly in cans. It would be a lot cheaper, and it would improve the taste significantly.

One Friday night late in the first semester, I was in my room at about 10pm and although I had been invited to go out, I decided to stay in and get work done. The semester was winding down, and I was wa-a-a-a-a-a-y behind in all my classes. So I figured, everyone will be out, so I can sit in my room and actually focus on making some progress toward getting caught up.

About half an hour later, I hear a loud THUD come from down the hall, followed by a short burst of yelling/cursing/laughing. This being somewhat typical for Smiley 3rd, I ignored it and went back to my physics homework. Then came another round of THUD, followed by yelling/cursing/laughing. Then another round. And another. And another.

Finally, I got up from what I was doing and looked out in the hall. Way down the hall, toward the girls' rooms, are Blanc and Zhian. Also down there is one of the drop ceiling tiles in a million pieces, and Blanc and Zhian appear to be eyeing the next one. So I run down the hall to quickly Assess the Situation, and Establish Control.

It turns out that Blanc and Zhian have been drinking with The Beast since about 3pm. There are cans everywhere. At some point, Blanc decided to see how many times he could punch the wall before the pain got unbearable. There are multiple craters in the drywall, and his hand is actually bleeding profusely. Zhian apparently decided to punch something a little more pliable than the wall; i.e., the drop ceiling, which has caused a part of that to come crashing down.

So, I politely but firmly inform them that the Wanton Destruction Party is over, and it's definitely time for them to go to bed. Blanc immediately slumps on my shoulder and starts hugging me and apologizing profusely. Given that his hand is seriously bleeding, this action is smearing blood on the left side of my nice white shirt. I stagger down the hall toward Blanc's room, keeping him upright, while shouting at Zhian to follow me, which he does.

Once in Blanc's room, I notice that his bed is full of shit so I just park him in his chair, wipe down his hand to get the blood off, and then turn to see where Zhian went. Looking out into the hall, I see that Zhian has kept going, and is now at the other end of the hall, puking his guts out on the floor. I look back at Blanc, and see that he is slumped over in his chair, so I figure he's not going anywhere, so I go down the hall to do something about Zhian.

Blanc as I left him. I came back later and took a pic. At some point he got himself into bed and didn't emerge for a lo-o-o-ng time...





When I get to the end of the hall, Zhian is face down on the floor, but appears to be done puking.

Me: "Zhian, are you OK?"
Zhian: "I'm a beautiful butterfly!"
Me: "Uh, right... let's get you back to your room."
Zhian: "I'm going to fly away... fly! Fly!"

At this point, he starts waving his arms up and down along the floor, while still on his belly, and, despite all this talk of "flying", starts "slithering" along the floor back down the hall toward his room.

Zhian: "I'm a beautiful butterfly..."

You might be tempted to attribute the strangeness of that interchange to Zhian's being drunk, but actually, every conversation with Zhian went like that. He spoke in Penguin. As in, penguin jokes. As in, surrealism. If you don't remember penguin jokes, they go something like:

Q: How many penguins does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Two- one to buy the cheese, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.

To be honest, that conversation with Zhian probably came closer to making actual sense than any other one in the semester up to that point.

Anyway, I watched him slither for a few minutes, and then decided to help him up, since slithering is only really efficient if you have a very flexible spine, and I didn't want to be there all night. So I helped him up and let him lean on me as we walked down the hall to his room. As we got to his room, he looked at me suddenly and said, "uh oh," and then proceeded to vomit all over me. I mean, hard core vomit all down the right side of my body. I can't even begin to tell you how disgusting that was. Thank God he had already let most of it go earlier.

So I waited it out, because really, he couldn't hold himself up and moving him would only increase the amount of surface area he vomited on. When he was done, I helped him inside his room. His room had absolutely zero decoration in it, except for a single poster of Greta Garbo just inside the entryway. As we walked through the doorway, he suddenly stuck his arm out, with surprising strength, and stopped us in front of the poster.

Zhian (looking up at Garbo): "I'm sorry you have to see me like this, baby."

Then, the last strength went out of him and he let me put him in his bed. I stripped the outer vomit covered layers off of him, plus his shoes, and threw a blanket over him. I think he was unconscious before I got his shoes off.

I went back out in the hall, and began the process of cleaning up vomit. Troy, the PCF-er, was actually very helpful, though he had some incentive to help since the site of the first vomiting was the doorway to the bathroom all of them at that end of the hall used. Half an hour later, vomit all cleaned up from the floors/walls, I stripped out of my bloody/vomity clothes and took a long hot shower, after which I decided that tonight was a total loss, and I should just go to bed early, and get up tomorrow fresh. So I put on my favorite pair of boxers, stood at the edge of my bed (which was 3 mattresses arranged in a row on the floor), and did my impression of the Nestea plunge.

Then, and I am not making this up, in the scant moment between when I fell forward and when I impacted my mattress, the fire alarm went off.

I hit the mattress and bounced back up immediately. I was praying for this to be a false alarm, because everyone else on the floor was out partying as far as I knew, and I had two unconscious guys that would need to be evacuated if the building really were on fire. I raced out into the hallway, where all the fire doors were closing. A quick run around the floor determined that if something was burning, it wasn't likely to be on our floor. I ran down the central stairs to the second floor. As I reached the second floor, I heard a bunch of running and screaming, and then a couple of girls came running by, followed by a guy holding a fire extinguisher. The guy saw me staring at all the commotion, pointed the fire extinguisher at me, and sprayed me.

Now, fire extinguishers work by spraying a bunch of concentrated carbon dioxide, since fire needs oxygen in order to continue to burn. So, if someone surprises you by spraying you full in the face with a fire extinguisher, just as you are drawing a breath of surprise, what you will find out is that it's not possible to breathe concentrated carbon dioxide. It's like having the wind knocked out of you. I fell to ground gasping for breath, and the guy took off.

When I recovered, I got up and quickly assessed that nothing on the second floor was burning, so I went down to the first floor to verify nothing was burning there, and then join the folks who had dutifully gathered outside the building as fire drill protocol demanded. I was thankful it wound up being a false alarm, since I wasn't looking forward to having to go back into a burning building to rescue Twiddledee and Twiddledum, but I was also ready to kill someone- specifically fire extinguisher dude. I got a lot of funny looks from the people outside, since I was dressed only in silk boxer shorts, with a jungle, tigers, and other fauna on them, plus the whole upper half of my body, including my face and hair, was white from the fire extinguisher spray, but I just glowered at everyone and no one asked me any questions. People from the other 2 floors had long ago learned to give 3rd floor people plenty of space.

So, I eventually went back in and took my second hot shower of the night, and finally got to go to bed. But that was the worst day of all my time as a sponsor- getting bled on, vomited on, and sprayed in the face with a fire extinguisher all in the same night.

As a postscript to that story, I had the girls do recon for me, and they were able to eventually identify who it was who had pulled the alarm and run around spraying people with the fire extinguisher, since the dumbass insisted on bragging about it to his friends. Once I knew who it was, I went to his sponsor (Angelike), who was a friend of mine, and told her that I knew it was him, and that he had lost his Smiley privileges, and that if I ever heard even anecdotally that he had set foot in my dorm again, I would personally beat him to a bloody fucking pulp. I am told that the message got through loud and clear, and he never did show his miserable face in my dorm again.

Those are the highlights from 1st semester... second semester also had its share of drama.

Blanc had by this time given me a nickname which I continue to use today: "sugthoth". He got that by taking "gus" and spelling it backwards, and adding the suffix "thoth". Thoth was the Egyptian god whom the Egyptians credited with creating science, math, and writing, and who also designed the motion of the stars in the heavens. He also mediated in the struggles between good and evil. I liked the name for those reasons. Blanc liked it because it sounded demonic.

With the start of the new semester, a new guy came to live in one of the rooms at the end of the hall that was empty. It turned out he was a senior, and had moved out of his previous room because he thought the area was too noisy. Apparently he was totally out of touch with what went on on campus, because no one in their right mind would have chosen Smiley 3rd if they were looking for quiet. But I suppose there probably weren't a lot of available options mid-way through the year, and no one warned him.

His first day was not bad. He introduced himself as "The New Guy", politely declining to be more specific, and so that's how we always referred to him. To this day, I have no idea what his actual name was. But he seemed nice enough.

Day 2 was not so good. On that day, Blanc, Joel, Nasr, and I all were home. We all liked to listen to music. Blanc favored hardcore death metal, Joel favored movie soundtracks, Nasr favored gangsta rap, and I favored 80's pop. The only thing we really had in common was that we liked to listen to our music _loud_. In particular, Joel, who was a technophile and customized his system, had a stereo that was equivalent in power to the systems inside small movie theatres. He would routinely generate noise complaints at times like Sunday afternoon from the dorm half a block away- the same dorm that held all of the frat parties in its basement. So those people were used to noise.

So that fateful Day 2 New Guy came down the hall and started asking us to turn down our music, which all of us did, somewhat. Soon enough, he came back and asked us to turn it down more, which we did, but still apparently not enough. Finally he came back a third time, and threatened to file a complaint if we didn't turn down the music to a point where he couldn't hear it at all.

Bad move, New Guy.

Personally, I didn't give a shit. Annoying as it was to be asked that in the middle of the afternoon, I'd've turned down the music further and shut my door. But Blanc went ballistic and made it his mission to drive New Guy away.

"Of course you realize, this means war!"












The campaign against New Guy lasted about a week. One of the early salvos involved a band called Nuclear Assault, who had a rendition of the Mr. Softee Theme. It lasted about a minute, and ended with a blast of heavy guitar distortion and a death metal voice screaming "ICE CRE-E-E-A-A-M-M" at the end. Blanc would wait until New Guy was in his room, and then he'd put his copy of The Mr. Softee Theme into Joel's stereo, put it on repeat, point the speaker out the window so that the sound waves would bounce off the wall of the gym and focus on New Guy's window, crank up the volume, and then they'd close the door, lock it, and leave. For an hour. That whole time, every time the end bit would blast, the walls of the entire dorm would shake. And for the life of me, though I viewed all this with some amusement, I ended up hearing that damned tune like 3 million times, and I can still hum it in its entirety today. New Guy, of course, would come running out of his room, and bang on Joel's door, and scream bloody murder, but of course no one was ever in there to hear him.

The second front in the war against New Guy involved Little Green Man. Little Green Man came to Joel from one of his 3 grandmothers (don't ask- I barely understand it myself) who was somehow involved with pharmaceuticals. He was always getting pharma schwag in the mail. The Little Green Man was a magnetized little man shaped like a gingerbread man, only he was green and made of plastic, and he had a little space in his back where you could stick an important piece of paper. If you did, a little watch battery inside him powered a little beeper, so that Little Green Man would beep once every 5 seconds or so, just to let you know he was hanging on to something important.

Little Green Man lived on Joel's door, along with a bunch of other crap, and sometimes we would stick stuff in him just to hear him make that annoying beep. One day, I came home from classes and came up the far steps, so that I hit 3rd floor at the end by New Guy. When I got to the 3rd floor, I saw New Guy standing on a chair, and fully half a dozen of the drop ceiling tiles from the area around his front door lying on the ground, and him muttering, "Where is that damned beeping COMING from???" And sure enough, a couple seconds later I heard Little Green Man beeping, from somewhere in the ceiling above New Guy's door. More of Blanc's handiwork.

New Guy did eventually find Little Green Man, and of course, we never did see him again. He was a casualty in the War Against New Guy (the WANG). Collateral damage, as they say these days. But he nobly sacrificed himself to protect our god-given right to blast music at any time of day or night.

The WANG ended up being over pretty quickly; New Guy capitulated in about a week. We can infer from this that he was too tough to be French or Italian, and too weak to be Greek, Yugoslavian, or German. I figure he was probably Polish. But he applied to move again, and they granted his request.

Of course, every victory comes with a price. And the price of victory in the WANG was a letter from the Dean, instead of a phone call. The letter went to everyone currently residing on Smiley 3rd. It said that the Dean was no longer interested in identifying which individuals were responsible for which individual acts, and that for the first time in Pomona history an entire floor was being put on probation. If there were any more outrageous acts of terror or gross violations of rules or commonly accepted standards of decency, even by one individual, the entire floor would be summarily thrown off campus, and we'd have to find our own places to live. And our room and board would not be refunded.

So, I had to have a meeting with my sponsees. We agreed on a two-part strategy to minimize the risk of summary expulsion: (1) we'd put up signs actively discouraging people from coming up to 3rd floor (we got a number of our complaints from random people who wandered up to 3rd floor and were traumatized by what they saw or heard there- Blanc would routinely greet new visitors to Smiley 3rd by threatening to fuck their rotting corpses), and (2) confining all creative expression to a bulletin board in the central hallway, so that the physical floors/walls/ceilings would be spared any further damage. I used as an example the smiley face that had been burned into the reddish carpet at the head of the stairs using bleach. [That smiley face lasted many years, until a few years ago when they completely renovated the dorm.]

Blanc contributed many things to the central bulletin board. For instance, catchy slogans like "Necrophilia is Way Cool," and "Sheep Anus Now!" And, the Bowel Movement Log. Every time you had a bowel movement, you noted the date, time, consistency on a scale of 1 to 10, and any special notes ("had corn at Frary last night", etc.) So, with this sanctioned outlet for his creativity, we were actually able as a floor to lie low for awhile, in a sort of Pax Smileycana.

Pax Smileycana- simple, wholesome, kiddie-pool fun. [Me, Nasr, Byrd, Wendy, Beth, Paula, Karen, Babra, Chris]





Then one day, I was taking an afternoon nap in my room with the door open. I was blissfully asleep, until suddenly there was a thunderous BANG from out in the hall. I jumped up and stepped out into the hall to see what was going on, and was almost decapitated by a projectile.

BANG

I turned to look, and I saw what appeared to be an orange rind falling to the carpet. The fire door was closed, and there was a fine citrus-smelling mist rapidly diffusing in the air. I turned the other way, and saw Blanc, Joel, and Zhian with one of those giant slingshots that take 3 people to operate, that they typically use in arenas to fire T-shirts into the upper decks. They were approximately 8 feet from the fire door. Basically, they were accelerating oranges to 9/10 the speed of light, and colliding them with the door to see what would happen. You know, maybe discover a new exotic particle or something.

Wanting to nip this in the bud, because I really didn't want to have to find off-campus housing for the next 3 months, I sternly told them that they were NOT allowed to use this thing inside the house. Go outside! They looked dejected and said OK.

About half an hour later, I heard Blanc's voice among several others coming from the front door of the dorm. My room was directly above the main entryway to Smiley, so I stuck my head out. There was almost the entire group, including the girls, following Blanc. He had the slingshot, and everyone else was carrying what seemed to be water balloons.

Me: "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU GUYS UP TO???"

(sheepish silence)

Blanc: "Who me? Nuthin."

Me: "Whatever you guys are up to, I am NOT going to bail your asses out of any trouble you get in to. I wash my hands of the whole business, whatever it is."

Blanc: "Who me? Nuthin."

So, what they eventually ended up doing was climbing onto the roof of the Art building, which sits across a wide street from the President's house, and shelling his house with the water balloons. Amazingly, they managed not to get caught doing it.

Who needs something as high-tech as a slinlgshot? A refrigerator box can be just as much fun... [Blanc, Katie, Byrd, Zhian, Wendy, Syd]





The slingshot was also used to combat the ongoing "Smiley can't party!" tradition. I came home from class one day, and as I was approaching Smiley, I could see/hear a group yelling "Smiley can't party!" from the main walk. Suddenly, I saw a large projectile explode on the sidewalk near the kids. They screamed and took off running. Two other projectiles narrowly missed them. Upon inspection, the projectiles turned out to be whole heads of lettuce, fired from the slingshot from Nasr's window. Blanc apparently nicked them from Frary because hey, you never know when you're going to need a few whole heads of lettuce.

Fortunately, we managed to lay low enough to survive the year without getting thrown off campus. I imagine I used up the last of my good karma balance ensuring that. And so my sponsees went off to their summers, and each followed their own paths through the rest of their time at Pomona.

But Blanc managed to stir up trouble even when he wasn't actually at Pomona. Blanc, though determined to be a writer, supports himself through his freakish talent with computers. To illustrate what I mean by freakish, let me tell you what he did that summer.

Blanc, who like me and virtually everyone I am close to, reacts very badly to boredom, and so that summer, bored by whatever mundane job he had, he started off by hacking the University of Houston's computer system and creating one or more false accounts for himself. Using these, he then hacked the National Weather Service's mainframe, and from there got into the East Coast power grid, and the outer layers of the Department of Defense. He didn't sabotage anything; he was mainly just interested in the intellectual exercise of whether he could get in.

Fortunately, this was a pre-9/11 world, and so he didn't wake up in an underground Syrian prison getting his fingernails ripped off by some guy named Mahmoud. In fact, it took the Federal Marshals over a month to work the hack back to the original source, by which time Blanc had already left Texas to come back to Pomona. So, early in his sophomore (my junior) year, a contingent of Federal Marshals descended upon Pomona's campus to detain Blanc.

Since he didn't actually damage anything, and was basically just a kid, and we were still in the days of pre-9/11 innocence about things, the Feds informed Blanc that they would not put him in jail, but that he would be more or less on lifetime probation, and if he ever did anything even remotely like that again, they absolutely would put him in jail for as long as possible, and they would further ensure that he would never be allowed to touch a computer again for the rest of his natural life. So Blanc's career as a cinema-worthy hacker was tragically cut short.

Amazingly, Blanc and the rest of my sponsees all managed to graduate. Katie, one of the girls in our core group, was the valedictorian of their class. I went to their graduation, as the picture below shows:

Chris, Zhian, Me (still with hair!), Byrd, Blanc, Joel











Blanc and Joel- Iconoclasts R Us








In the 13 years since they graduated, I have kept in touch with Blanc. For instance, some years ago I visited him at his apartment in the Valley. When I saw him, he hadn't left his apartment in about a month. He had all his groceries delivered, supported himself doing web design, which he could do from home, and he grew all his own... "plants". He had a dedicated room, with lots of light, and about a dozen cages full of mice. The mice, you see, breed quickly, require basically no maintenance, are super cheap to feed, and give off lots of CO2. The CO2 makes for much richer "buds" on the "plants". As I kicked my way through piles of wood shavings from all the mouse cages, I decided that Blanc re-e-e-e-a-a-a-l-l-l-ly needed a persistent female presence in his life.

Some years later I was sent a link to an online article in which the author had gone to the MacExpo and run across Blanc. He had taken a first generation Mac, one of those old ones that looks like a little toaster with a screen on it, and made it into a bong. That way, he could walk around the Expo holding it, and no one would know that he was not, in fact, a diehard Mac freak, but in fact was smoking out continuously. The author took a picture of him with his iBong, and I wish I still had the link, but I can't find it.

Eventually he moved back to Texas, to his native Houston. He continues to write, and his stuff is good, though it demands a pretty determined intellect and so may run into difficulties finding a mass audience. He continues to support himself doing freelance web design and other computer related thingys that I only barely comprehend. It appears he has solved the problem of a persistent female presence in his life...


Me, Christin, Blanc













...he met his wife at a hacker's conference, so I'm sure they'll do well together. And although he was in a church, and his skin didn't sizzle, the moon didn't turn red, and the statues in the church didn't bleed from the eyes, a couple of guys dressed in a horse costume did make a surprise visit to the reception:
















He said he couldn't tell me the significance of that while in the church with Christin's (his wife's) family present, but promised to explain next time he and I and Joel are together. I'm sure it will be an interesting story.

And that's Blanc. Someday I'll tell stories of the others...