Gangstalene

It was move-in day, freshman year of college, 1994. My room was the first door on the left, in a long, dark hallway with spotty fluorescent lighting and dingy brown carpet, threadbare in patches where coeds had tread since the early 70s. My roommate was a wisp of a human, a lean cross country runner who had taken up residence the week prior, due to early arrival for all fall athletes. My parents and I hauled in a foot locker, duffle bags, pillows, lamps, and a microwave just large enough for heating up ramen. They gawked at the boys entering and exiting the bathroom directly across the hall, still adjusting to the concept of co-ed living at the age of 18. I wondered if the bathroom would be too soggy or stinky to use in the middle of night, rather than sleepily weaving my way to the opposite end of the hall, where the girls’ was located. The debate over gender neutral bathrooms had not made national headlines by the mid 90s. Call us renegades. We wiped and washed our hands like all humans should, and we didn't give it much thought beyond that.

The day was sweltering hot, and even with ancient, window air conditioning units cranked to the max, the air smelled of sweat and stale beer. The trash can in the stairwell was overflowing, as I stopped to mop my brow before heading outside for another load. I pushed open the prison grade metal door, and plowed into a hulking sized redhead carrying a battered, old, oscillating floor fan and a guitar case. 

“Meet Gangstalene,” he said. 

“Is that the fan or the guitar?” I asked, “Or are you speaking in the third person?” 

“Oh, the fan,” he replied. “The guitar is 40oz.”

“Do you name all your inanimate objects?” I inquired.

“Only the ones I can’t live without.”

He winked as we squeezed by each other, awkwardly navigating the doorway, guitar, fan, and our bodies. I asked, “What room are you in?”

“115. You’ll dead end into it if you don’t turn for the bathroom at the end of the hall,” he explained. “What’s your name?”

“Kathryn.”

“Kate, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Fly-Ry.”

“I…um…Fly-Ry?”

“Ryan. Catch you later, Kate.”

My first night in the dorm was unremarkable. I graduated from boarding school, so living far from home was familiar and comfortable. I had met my roommate over the summer, and we joke to this day that the admissions office never matched a more unlikely pair, who became instant besties, and still speak weekly, after thirty years of friendship.

The first morning I woke up in the dorm, I was jolted out of sleep by a high pitched, screeching, thumping, almost whistle-like cacophony, blasting full volume… “Insane in the membrane, insane in the brain, insane in the membrane, crazy insane, got no brain.” My introduction to Cypress Hill. My roommate was out the door at 6am, en route to a ten mile run with the cross-country team. 

I traipsed down the hall in flip-flops, an oversized t-shirt, my shower caddy and a towel draped over my arm, and caught a glimpse of Fly-Ry, sprawled on his bed, door wide open, with Gangstalene feebly oscillating in the corner, blowing on his feet as Cypress Hill blasted from a boombox on the floor. 40 oz stood perched in the corner by his closet. A skinny, ghostly pale, blond kid, who came to be known as “White John,” was playing video games on his desktop computer at the far end of the room. For the record, there was also a “Black John,” who lived caddy corner from the bathroom at my end of the hall. They nicknamed themselves. No one thought twice about it, as the labels prevented confusion among our freshman year social circle. 

Fly-Ry waved me in and offered me a cigarette. We all smoked in 1994, even the athletes. I remember getting buzzed on Natty Light that night. It only took two. I long for those days. We would alternate between that and Busch Light. Molson Ice seemed a step up as freshman year progressed, and later on, Corona with lime. Boone’s Farm and Franzia box wine was for pre-partying before fancy formals, when we would stumble down gravel paths in strappy heels, come home with blisters on our pinky toes, and order pizza via landline from the late night campus pub. The boys drank Mad Dog, and what happened in the bathroom across from my room in the wee hours of the morning often left an odor I would not soon forget. Our freshman hall would collectively be stricken with a hangover from the sickly sweet alcohol, that we would sleep off until noon the following day, and then head to the dining hall for tater tots and waffles.

It was the era of mix tapes and “all-stu” campus emails that people would use to send messages at 3am, posting everything from “lost underwear at ‘fill in the blank’ fraternity house” to “who stole my f***ing bike outside the library?” I often thank the higher powers that cell phones did not exist en masse when I was in college. I have always been a chatty, sentimental, alarmingly filterless drunk, and the messages I am certain I would have sent to any and everyone in my contact list are too horrifying to imagine. It was the era of Friends, ER, 90210, Melrose Place, and for me, meeting a guy who became one of the most important people in my life, along with his two prized possessions– Gangstalene and 40oz. 

Over the next four years, I listened to Fly-Ry strum his guitar on the quad, sitting in adirondack chairs on a warm, spring day just weeks before we all headed off to summer jobs as camp counselors, or traveled abroad to improve our French. He had grown up “Downriver,” outside of Detroit, the son of a blue collar worker and a stay-at-home mom. I grew up in Asia, the daughter of a corporate executive and a full-time socialite. We had maids and drivers, and traveled to places like Bali and Paris. He fixed up old cars and used phrases like, “That shit is clayne.” He was the smartest kid on campus, and a force to be reckoned with in a debate on anything he cared about, which was primarily music, politics, and philosophy. Junior year, he studied abroad in London, while I gallivanted through Ireland. He brought me an ashtray from Amsterdam and regaled me with stories of meeting Oasis at a dive bar in Manchester, or finding a stray dog in the Red Light district and sneaking it into his youth hostel until he could figure out where to take it the next day. Years later, he toured the country with a famous rock band and opened to crowds over ten thousand at stadiums in every major city. His manager plucked me out of the crowd at one show and took me backstage, where I met the band and wondered where to stand and what to say in a room full of half-naked strippers. I have never been as cool as he is, but every time we meet up for drinks or sit around the bonfire on a warm summer night at my lake house, we pick up mid-sentence where we left off. 

“You know what I love about you, Kate?” he always asks.

“Everything?” I venture. And he smiles and winks like that first day in the stairwell freshman year.