Psychopredation in Dormitory Tubes
It was fun
to sleep in the tubes. Randy took the
fun so far that he hung up a couple of pictures of Fee Waybill, but none of the
other residents knew who that was and when it was explained to them they
started putting up pictures of their own: pictures of Darth Vader and Shaun
Cassidy and Ace Frehley and Cher in her Martian batwoman costume. One guy even put up a picture of Elvis
Costello, but it wouldn’t lay correctly against the curved interior wall of the
tube and had to be mailed back home to Monster Island
“You think
you’re so goddam smart, don’t you?” This
was the usual accusation made against those who publicly denounced the tube
system. Even I, who had at one time
championed the arrangement, now was charged with ironic “smartness.” I had a t-shirt printed up with the slogan,
“No, I think I’m so goddam cute,”
just to counter these encounters. I
would jerk my coat open, exposing the phrase and dare my accusers to chase me
back into the tube of my choice. The
back of the shirt bore a picture of Godzilla in a zoot suit just in case I was too tired (or loaded on pain
medication) to run very fast, but, again, this image was either misinterpreted
or utterly incomprehensible to many of my fellow residents.
“These
tubes are no substitute for the foam tunnels inside the Chloromorphus,” I
complained in the pages of Lo-Proc Croc,
the newspaper I cofounded with my friends the Pharmacists for just such
complaints. Little did I know then that
the tubes would one day lead directly into the labyrinthine innards of that
great beast whose form was riddled with tiny independent record stores.
.
