Oneonta Confidential

Part 1

After a weekend of heavy drinking and general unhealthy activities, I drove back from Oneonta on a Monday morning without going to the bathroom first. After about half an hour, I felt a seismic rumbling that was coming from several places between my groin and chest. Squeezing my legs together, I desperately looked for a gas station, an empty field, a mailbox - anything. By the time I reached Walton, the next town along Route 28, I was in severe distress, sweating despite the cold weather as the excesses of the weekend made their collective presence felt.

Walton, New York is a sleepy town, and as I pulled up to a red light, I saw a diner to my right. There was no time to even park the car - I left it running at the red light. I was lucky to get the car door closed behind me, doubled over from a weekend full of plastic cup after cup of cheap beer, Russ's spicy sausage and peppers, Marlboro Lights and congealed pizza. I entered the diner, clutching my abdomen, and quickly realized a few things.

One, everyone was staring at me as if I had strutted unannounced into Paul Castellano's social club wearing a fairy costume. Two, there was a single unisex bathroom. Three, that bathroom was about four feet from the counter, which had about six stools, all occupied. Four, there was no lock on the bathroom door. All of these were considerations, but not major considerations - any port in a storm, right?

Those diners were subjected to 25 minutes of the most violent evacuation imaginable - it is conceivable that in the time I spent in that bathroom, a woman could have given birth with less effort, less noise and fewer items being knocked off the walls. I won't belabor the point any further. Briefly debating buying something at the dinner just out of consideration, I instead just put my head down and walked out of the diner. My car was still at the light - people were going around it. I drove the 2½ hours home without further incident, enveloped in my own shame.

Part 2

There's an office down the hall a ways from mine. They claim to be a marketing firm - that's what the sign on the door says, but I of course have my suspicions. So I've been watching them closely for the last three or four years, and I've noticed some very interesting patterns. First, a lot of people go in and out, but nobody over the age of about 30 or so. Second, almost everyone seems to arrive for work between 5 and 6 in the evening. And finally, everyone who goes in and out seems to be very good looking. There's also often loud music.

My first thought was natural: they're making porn. Some porn company rented out an office and is filming there under the guise of being a legitimate business. I soon discarded that due to the fact that the guys are a little too clean-cut. Also, when I went behind the bushes and peered in the back window one night, I didn't see any beds or lighting or anything. So there went the porn angle, as well as my next choice (prostitution). At this point, I believe that a fraternity or a sorority (or perhaps one of each, in cahoots), rented office space in a corporate park to drink and carouse in the evenings.

Last week, as I passed by on the way to the men's room, the door opened and several attractive 20-somethings exited. The muffled noise I had heard through the closed door revealed itself to be Meatloaf's "Bat out of Hell" album at a very loud volume. This lent additional credence to the college frat theory, and it took me back to Oneonta.

I arrived at Binghamton in the autumn of 1988, a fresh-faced, terrified boy with no concept of possibilities, limits or direction. They gave me a roommate, and he was gay, and he had the same first name as me, so for the next three years I had to field questions like, "are you the gay one?" I shaved once a week with a plastic disposable Bic razor and tried to figure out which of my friends were friends just due to the whims of the Residential Life's placement computer. I skipped classes I should have gone to and went to classes I should have skipped. And I partied.

By the second month of college, I was failing most of my classes, I had gotten myself a girlfriend and had broken up with her (as evidence that my head was planted firmly up my ass at the time, I essentially broke up with her because she had too much hair on her arms and it bothered me. She was a pretty girl, but by senior year she was a knockout, and now she's a doctor in private practice in New Jersey. I'm typing this in the car with a rubber hose running the exhaust back in through the window).

My roommate and I split the cost of a $20 carpet from K-Mart, and someone puked on it and then proceeded to cut a 2 square foot hole in the carpet, as if to remove any and all DNA evidence of the event. I wasn't steering the boat, and I didn't know where the current was taking me.

Sometime in October I decided to visit my friend Russ in Oneonta. Oneonta is 58 miles due east along Interstate 88, which is one of the shortest interstates in the country. Oneonta was roughly the midpoint between Binghamton and Albany, and if it sounds like I know a fair amount about this particular section of road, it's because I subsequently went to Oneonta perhaps twenty-five times over the next four years.

Oneonta is a small city, perhaps a quarter the size of Binghamton, with two schools crammed within its borders: SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College. There are probably more bars than there are year-round residents, but my story begins on campus. Upon arriving, I noticed that Oneonta was quite different than what I was used to. There were no Koreans hunched over Advanced Calculus texts, their noses almost touching the page. There were no bearded students passing out pamphlets imploring you to turn your closet into a compost mulch. This was a party, with actual girls, right in the dorm.

Friday night at 7:00 and the keg was one-third gone, people were dancing to Meatloaf. Russ tried to introduce me around, but it was too loud and I was too self-conscious anyway. Russ had a roommate named "Sauce", and when Sauce never came back that night, I took his bed. We were both very drunk, and Russ made me promise to wake him up if he started puking. When he started puking in his sleep, I lay there and laughed. He woke up and got out of bed, scooped up the vomit with a frisbee, cursing, and went to put his sheets and quilt in the washer while I thoughtlessly went back to sleep.

The next night, we went to a frat party that was almost over. I decided I wanted a pledge mug as a keepsake, so I took one that was lying around and emptied the beer all over the stairs. On the way out, someone yelled "HEY!" and we ran as if our feet were on fire and our asses were catching, an entire squadron of drunken upperclassmen giving chase. In retrospect, it was probably just one frat brother, too drunk to chase us more than twenty feet.

One night in Oneonta, drunk and tripping on psilocybin, we wound up in the common room of the dorm, watching music videos. This room was directly next to the entrance to the dorm, which was locked at night, and at around 3 AM, I heard a rapping on the glass door. It was some drunks who had forgotten their keys, or lost them in a dark bar or in one of someone else's orifices. Between the hours of 3 and 6, the people knocking on the door grew more and more drunk, disheveled and incoherent. Russ passed out around 4:30, so I was just watching videos by myself, hallucinating mildly, and getting up to open the door for someone every 10 minutes or so. At a quarter to 6, I opened the door for a guy who was completely nude. He slurred something and headed off, I suppose, to his room.

Russ's move off-campus brought a new dynamic: house parties and trips to the Old Spanish Tavern; drunken evenings spent "stair-diving"; mornings waking up on a beer and bong-water soaked shag rug, searching for cigarettes and lighting one without opening my eyes; endless games of Zoom, scrounging up enough change to run to the Center Street Deli for a single roll of toilet paper, Pete Collins and Moot funneling, the guy who looked just like John Denver, Rinaldi and the guy who looked like Rinaldi, which drove him crazy. I spent more time off-campus, but it was those visits Freshman year, whether for factors internal or external, that I remember best.

I wouldn't trade what I have now for what I had then, or who I am now for who I was then. But I think about it an awful lot.