Loud White People
I was back at college and it was the first day, where all of the freshman and their parents oggle the campus together and there are usually a cluster of random activities where everyone sits on the local huge patch of grass at talks about how awesome college is. Only I had already graduated and I was going back. Again. To start from the begining.
I didn’t know anyone but my mother and the president of the school, who were walking me through the enormous, newly constructed freshman dorm, shaped like a ring. No walls divided the rooms in this ring so the dorm was one endless hallways lined with bed’s of varying, alternating degrees of opulence and rickety (there was no clear way to decipher who got the nice beds and who got the cheap ones, althought the girls did seem to consistently get the nicer ones).
This hallway was flooded as everyone was moving in and everyone was going insane over the “innovative” way this building was constructed. I was actually kind of cool but I was too angry to say so outloud. I was playing along with the whole thing for my mother and for the president of the school but I knew, somehow, I wouldnt be here for even the length of a semester.
As people started to settle in, celebration began to erupt eveywhere. It melted into an enormous dinner party where no one paid any attention to the festivities. I was though, while I trying to formulate, in my own mind, why I couldnt return here.
As this thought continuously failed to form in my mind, a fair skinned Polish family took the stage. Still, no one paid any attention. The family smiled a lot and watched each other, laughed and muttered things for a while until I heard a low hum coming from one of them. The hum slowly broadened into words of another language, and sounded like a silver panflute whistling on the wind. Soon the whole family was swaying and singing, so quietly yet joy pour from their eyes, nodding their head to each other in mutual understanding.
I found myself rocking back and forth, smiling wildly, and before I knew it I was beside them. I’m not sure any of them noticed me, I’m sure they were used to this kind of thing. I looked into all of their faces, each one hidden by much hair, long sandy blonde on the women and mousey brown bushels on the faces of the men. When i looked at the boy beside me, I found him starring back at me. As soon as our eyes met, I fell into a brief hypnosis, as if the room around us had crumbled back into the dust it had formed from to leave us in the piece we deserved.
He eagerly introduced me to his family amidst the chaos of loud white people. They all nodded in appreciation. He walked me back to my mother, smiled at her, and returned to his family. “I don’t think I can do this.” She hadn’t seen the family’s song, she hadn’t seen me coursing through my little wolf’s gaze and she wore all the bloated ignorance afforded to her by her upbringing. She began to respond but her words mattered not, she never looked me in the face, only around the room for the president of the school. Her face had only ever listened to one person a day in her life, he when she lost his attention, the rest of the world lost hers.
My mother left and I went to go find the Polish people but they were gone. My heart sagged a little. I had considered them my escape plan, my last hope. So I wandered outside to this already familiar city. It was scattered with wandering children and I even befriended a few of them. They were all so eager to see everything. When I tried to point them in the right direction they resented me and one by one, they ditched me.
After a brief meeting with my sister and her husband at their hotel room, I headed back to the dorms. I found my bed and an old friend was in the bunk above me. We talked about little things, and I was about to wolf whistle at a boy who walked through our space when I turned to notice a wall of bone-wire bunk beds filled with young, blonde boys. The heads were poking up through the bed sheets and the watched us like a row of silent prairie dogs. I didn’t know what to say. I suddenly felt as if I had been about to curse in front of a child. MY old friend just laughed when he saw my hesitation. “They’re pretty funny.” One of them leapt out from under the covers and mooned me, to the delight of the others. “We call him eeeehhhhhlll” the boys clamored. “What is Eehhll?” I asked. Then the boy turned again and pointed to his asshole and yelled “EEEHHHLLLL!!” over his shoulder. The other boys fell into giggles and I decided I needed to walk a while.
I strolled through the endless hallway until I found a window where two very slender ladies sat in slinky black dresses. Their shoulders where sharp and their hair was shiny. They leaned into each other, barely whispering into each other’s ears. I noticed through the window, we seemed to be travelling away from some enormous body of water, as if the window was at the back of a moving train. The air beyond it was fuzzy and green, like a broken tv, but the silhouettes of trees and stars were clear as glass. I walked up to inspect this curious window up close and one of the ladies noticed me. She rolled her eyes and parted her lips and leaned into her friend, who never acknowledged me but continued to watch out the window at the shadows gliding past.