King Arthur - King of the Merry Iguanas

It was pure luck that put me in the smoking hall at Conklin. I smoked cigarettes occasionally, mostly when I was drinking beer, but would have never requested a smoking room. Nonetheless, the same envelope that informed me that my roommate would be 'Larry Jo Hrab' also contained a card that declared that I would be living in the smoking hall. I didn't know it at the time, but this little 6"x4" card would completely alter and define my college experience.


A few numbers up front to put things in perspective: In 1990, there were approximately 20,000 students attending BGSU. Of these, around 7,000 lived on campus, mostly freshmen and sophomores (older students tended to move to apartments). There were around 15 buildings that housed students on campus. While there were a few select 'smoking rooms' scattered around campus, only one dorm building contained an entire hall where smoking was permitted. This was Conklin.


A four story dorm building, it had inexplicably devoted half of its second floor to what we would eventually term 'the smoking ghetto'. If you went up the central staircase and turned left, you would enter a normal, every day dorm hall; blaring music, notes left taped to doors, bulletin boards advertising dorm 'events' that no one would attend. If you turned right, however, you would enter 'the smoking hall', where the rules lived upside down, and insane behavior was expected.

I lived there happily with my roommate Larry for two years. Somehow we both managed to maintain above a 3.0 GPA, but that wasn't because Conklin wasn't trying to distract us.

It usually went like this. There were around 25-30 rooms in the smoking hall. So, at the beginning of each semester, 50-60 guys would arrive. By the end of each semester, only 20-25 guys would remain. The rest would have been tossed out unceremoniously for a variety of infractions.

The interesting thing about the smoking hall was that some dudes just couldn't handle the smoking hall. While I say there were no rules, there actually were rules, its just that some of the guys in the smoking hall found ways to work around them. Beer was easily smuggled in, carried in over sized knapsacks. The smell of pot was easily countered with the old 'fan and pillow in the window' method. Women were snuck in through popped side doors. The guys that understood how to break the rules got to come back. The guys who couldn't adapt and went all insane got the boot.

Some of them were ejected for the usual slew of drug offenses. On occasion the university police would bring 'Bunny' the drug sniffing dog to roam up and down the hall, and we would all stand around and chuckle because the dog couldn't pick out a room with drugs in it. Bunny would just run up and down the hallway, turning in circles and whining. Eventually, she would stop and identify one of the few rooms that didn't have drugs in it, and the cops would give up and go away for a while.

There were fights and arrests, blood and vomit. There was one memorable incident where a guy fell down in the bathroom and knocked out his two front teeth on a sink. I clearly remember crawling all over the bathroom floor with him, blood gushing down his chin and all over his shirt, looking for his teeth. When the cops arrived to help him, he climbed on top of their car and peed all over the windshield.

There was a ring of guys selling guns imported from Toledo. There were the football players who got in an actual gunfight right in front of the building (interrupting the Spock episode of 'Next Generation', for which I will never forgive them). Then there were the idiots that made secret porn tapes, filmed from the closet without the knowledge of their unwitting, mostly passed out co-stars, which were then copied and distributed all over campus. One guy would whisper suggestions (Dude! Dude! Get the gourd!) to the other guy, who would then do as he was commanded. Their 'artwork' ended up getting us all questioned by the police.

Arson, vandalism, assault and battery, armed robbery, they all had their time in the smoking hall of Conklin.

The handful of guys that managed to not get thrown out would shake their heads and then come back for the next semester to greet the new crop of fools that had popped up to take the place of the idiots that had been tossed. These survivors are the guys that I remember most from my time at BG.

There were Matt and Brett, the twins that lived down the hall. Their parents were instructors at BG, so they got free tuition, room and board. Even though their parents lived in Bowling Green, the chose to brave Conklin instead. There was Randy, 'Lord of the Night', a friendly, over sized guy that had a 32" TV (huge at the time) in his room, which regularly attracted visitors at all hours. You could usually stagger down to his room after a hard night at the bars to find a bunch of guys laying around watching a movie.

There was Briggs, the enormous red-afro-wearing sasquatch across the hall, who rarely appeared out of his nightshirt/mumu, and who would randomly thrust a thick arm out the door to snag passersby and drag them physically through the door, forcing them to do hits from the 'Kraken'. There was poor, sad, Andy Davis, an amiable hippie type who eventually disappeared after his girlfriend was killed in a car crash on the way back from a Dead show. There were Ravi and Jim and Pepper and Jeff and Scooter and Jay, and a bunch of others I could tell about. We were the smart ones (or at least the lucky ones), the ones that knew how to work the system. And that's what made it so shocking when one of us finally got taken down.

****************

I first met Don during the 'summer retard program', the trial period that Bowling Green offered to bright underachievers direct from high school. We didn't become fast friends. In fact, he barely registered on my radar, as I spent most of that summer attending classes and then squirreling back to my room to hide. The only lasting impression I had from our few encounters was his rumbling voice, which pretty much sounded like a dump truck depositing a load of gravel in his throat.

My first 'real' semester at B.G., my roommate Larry and I spent hiding in our room and drinking beer. I had a few other friends on campus, and Larry went home weekends to work landscaping and see his girlfriend. We had other social outlets, so we really didn't spend a lot of time with the dudes in the hall. That was before one fateful night when I came home drunk and found Larry at a party down the hall. Six hours, a mountain of beer, and one stolen girlfriend later, it seemed that we were going to know these people after all. And the friendliest and most outgoing of these was Don.

Don was the biggest personality I had met at Bowling Green. I don't mean that Don was loud, or boisterous, or funny and incredibly personable to everyone he met. No, he was all of those things, but that's not quite enough to cover Don. No, Don was more like something out of a movie. He was a force of nature.

He sucked Marlboro Reds down like they were going to disappear off the planet the next day. He wore a leather biker jacket with zippers all over it, and before long, he showed up with a bike to match the jacket. His parents were both cops, and growing up in their jurisdiction gave Don a healthy disrespect for law and order.

Larry and I would be sleeping peacefully in our bunks some Thursday, and the door would kick open at 3:00 AM.

"Wake up motherfuckers!" Don would come marching through the door. "I'm drunk and the chick I was going home with disappeared and we're going to smoke this WEED! GANJA! Get up!" He would meander over to the stereo, put in a Metallica tape, and crank it all the way up. "Who's cigarettes are these? I'm stealing them! HAHAHAHAHAHA! Get the fuck up! Ba-Bow-Ba-Bow-Bow-Bow!"


"Go away, Don," Larry would say. "I have a test in the morning."


"Dude, seriously?" Don would say, looking slightly hurt. "I think you should say FUCK THAT TEST, and GET THE FUCK UP, and let's DRINK SOME BEERS!"


So we would.


There was really no defense against Don. Our sophomore year at B.G. he was randomly roomed with a recovering alcoholic, and that pairing was no good for obvious reasons. He began spending more and more time in our room and away from his 'bum-out' roommate. We could lock the door, but he had quickly discovered (through random experimentation?) that our lock was the only lock in the hall that had been installed backwards, so he could just slip his student ID through the crack in the door and come bursting in whenever he wanted.



Not that we really minded. Or should I say, not that I really minded. Larry might have been another story. No, to me, Don was good fun, and a spark of life when things got gloomy.



"Dude, let's go get some beers."



"I can't, man, I'm sick. I have snot actually running down my lip and into my mouth."



"Fuck that. Smoke all these smokes until you feel better, and let's go get some beers. Smoke 'em! SMOKE 'EM! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"



So I would. I always had a blast with Don, reeling from one ill advised adventure to another. We dated two girls that were roommates for a time, and the four of us would hang out for hours on end in their room, burning incense and watching their tiny TV. Don and I would skip class for days on end, in an endless battle for Tetris supremacy. Don and I would arrive at a party hours before it was scheduled to begin, and eat all the jello shots before anyone got there.



We had a pretty wide circle of friends eventually, but Don was my favorite. There was a kindness in him that he kept carefully buried under all of his gusto and bravado. He was fiercely loyal, and had a sort of code of honor that he lived by. When you were friends with Don, you knew that he would never, never stab you in the back. He was energetic and funny, and had just a touch of danger to keep things interesting. With Don, you felt you were always about three steps from getting arrested. His complete and total disregard for the rules had the disconcerting effect of making everyone with him feel untouchable. Don quite simply did whatever the hell he wanted to do, whenever the hell he wanted to do it. And if you were with him, so did you.



****************



"Dude, I have an iguana at home," Don said one day, while we were just hanging out and smoking Larry's cigarettes.


"Really?" I asked. "What is that, like a salamander or something?" I was inexperienced, iguana-wise.


"No, dude, it's like a big evil fucking lizard. His name is King Arthur-King of the Merry Iguanas. With his tail he's almost two feet long. He eats mice and shit. My mom has been taking care of him while I'm at school. I'm thinking of bringing him from home."



"I don't know, dude," I said. "I thought the biggest thing you could bring here were fish."



"I also have this fucking crazy mutant dog," Don said, completely ignoring me. "It's half German Shepard, and half wiener dog. It's like someone took a German Shepard and smashed it down, and then streeetched it out." He blew out a puff of smoke. "It's awesome. Genetic freak. Freak show! Nightmare!"


I started laughing at the idea.



"We should go to my mom's house and get the dog high, and then come back with the iguana," he suggested.



And so we did. We went to Don's house for the weekend, got his genetic freak show German-Shepard-weiner-dog high (which was actually kind of sad, it just laid there looking pathetic), had a huge party with his sister and their friends in Cleveland, and returned to B.G. on Sunday with the iguana.



Carrying the tank into the elevator, I mentioned the pet rule again to Don.



"Dude, you shouldn't let too many people know about this. You are breaking about six different rules here."



"Whatever, man," said Don. "King Arthur is fucking awesome. No one is gonna care."



"Still, though, dude, it's a stupid thing to get in trouble for."



"Fine," he agreed. "I'll keep it quiet. But watch, it's no big deal. You'll see."



And I believed him.



****************



I came home from class the next day to find about 14 dudes down in Don's room, all gathered around the aquarium.



"What's going on?" I asked.



"Dude, you're just on time! We're feeding King Arthur-King of the Merry Iguanas a fucking mouse! I bought a mouse down at the pet store, and my iguana is about to eat his shit!"



I looked into the tank. King Arthur-King of the Merry Iguanas was perched on a branch of driftwood, completely ignoring the tiny mouse huddled in the corner of the cage. He really was impressive. He was leaf green, with an evil glint that glared permanently from his eyes. Part of his tail had been broken off at some point in the past and had grown back a different color, which helped with his overall badass image.



We watched for a while, but when it became clear that King Arther-King of the Merry Iguanas wasn't hungry, the crowd began to get restless.



"Dude, he's not eating the mouse."



"Dude, I gotta get to class."



"Dude, your iguana SUCKS!"



And so on.



Finally, some brilliant sick mind came up with a grand idea.



"Dude, hogtie that fucking mouse with dental floss, and whack the iguana in the face with it!"



A murmur of excitement went through the crowd. It was generally agreed that if the iguana was going to provide us with mouse-eating entertainment, we should hogtie the mouse and whack the iguana in the face with it. How had we not thought of this plan before?



Dental floss was procured from a neighbors room, and it was quickly discovered that hogtying a mouse was much more difficult than it sounds. Eventually, it was done, and after whacking King Arthur-King of the Merry Iguanas in the face about fifty times, he roused himself enough to take a half hearted chomp at the mouse.



A cheer went up from the crowd, and the secret of King Arthur-King of the Merry Iguana's existence was officially out of the bag.



****************



A few days later, Don came storming into the room. Larry was at his desk doing homework, and I was reading a Piers Anthony novel in my bunk (I have since sworn off of them). Plopping down in my desk chair, Don lit a cigarette.



"They found out about the iguana. They want me to get rid of it," he said.



"No surprise there," said Larry, glancing up briefly from his reading. "You aren't allowed to have anything bigger than a fish."



"I know, dude," Don said, "but it's in an aquarium, so it's just like a fish. I mean, what's the difference between a tank full of fish and a tank full of iguana?"



"An iguana isn't a fish," observed Larry.



"I'm aware of that," Don said. "But still, it's a stupid rule. For all the other stupid shit people do around here, and they're going to get on me about an iguana? It's pointless."



"So what are you going to do?" I asked.



"I told them that I was going to take it home to my mom over the weekend. They seemed okay with that."



"Are you really going to take it home?" Larry asked.



"No way, dude!" Don said. "It's a retarded fucking rule. What are they going to do, throw me out for having an iguana?"



****************



And so the iguana stayed. Under constant threat of being thrown out, Don began moving the iguana around the dorm, from room to room. This had the effect of keeping everyone on their toes. It became normal to go into someones room and plop down in a seat, only to hear the iguana suddenly hissing at you from two feet away. He wasn't a terribly friendly creature, and I was actually kind of afraid of him. I tried to give him a wide berth.



College students are destructive pigs, and it wasn't uncommon in the winter time to go into the communal shower and find that someone had used pizza boxes to stop up all of the drains in order to create a steam pool. One chilly morning, I stumbled to the shower and mumbled in approval that the steam pool was at it's maximum depth, and was overflowing into the dressing area beyond. With all four nozzles spraying and full force and an unlimited hot water supply, it was so steamy in there that you couldn't see the wall three feet away. With my glasses off, I was effectively blind.



I splashed into the steam room, and happily shoved my face under the nearest sprayer.



"Dude, watch out for the iguana," said the only other guy in the shower. He grabbed his towel and left.



I looked around in a panic. The iguana was in the shower? Was he just swimming around? I scrambled to the corner of the shower room, slipping and falling through the four inch deep water. I huddled in the corner of the shower room, peering about anxiously. I scanned the water, but didn't see anything. Squinting through the fog, I looked at all four walls, but there was nothing to see.



Suddenly, I heard King Arthur-King of the Merry Iguanas hissing directly above my head. Looking up, I saw that he was perched to the wall in the upper corner of the shower room. Yelping, I moved to make my escape, running towards the doorway. My feet slipped out from underneath me, and I went down flat on my back. The water broke my fall for the most part, but I still conked my head a good one on the floor. From my prone position on the floor, I looked up at the iguana. He hissed again and jerked in my direction. Convinced that he was about to spring, I scrambled on hands and knees out of the shower area, grabbed my towel, and fled.



****************



The warnings continued, and Don's assertions that he had 'given' the iguana to this person or that person were losing steam with the dorm staff. They knew the iguana was his, and they wanted it gone.



Finally one day it all came to a head. Don threw open the door, and came into the room holding a sheaf of crumpled papers, held together with a paper clip. Larry was at his desk studying. I was in my bunk reading a 'Myth-Adventures' book (I have since sworn off of these as well). Don plopped down in my desk chair and lit a cigarette.



"They want to throw me out of school," he said.



"For what? The iguana?" I said. I had come around to agree with Don that it was a stupid rule.


"Yeah, and a bunch of other stupid shit," said Don. "But it's all about the iguana. They just can't stand that I have the iguana. It's not like he's hurting anyone."



"They told you to get rid of the iguana like two months ago," Larry noted.



"Yeah, but it's not even in my room anymore," Don said. "I keep giving it away. Its not my fault that people give it back."



"What about the other stuff?" Larry asked.



"What other stuff?" I wondered.



"Oh, just some stupid shit that happened around the dorm that they said I did. No big deal."

"Like what?" I asked.

"Like someone taped the water fountain in the 'on' position and it overflowed," Don said. "And someone set of the fire alarm the other day. Shit that happens every day around here and they just want to pin it to me because they hate my iguana."

"Did you do it?" I asked.

Larry looked at Don, and Don shrugged.

"Does it matter? Its all about the iguana anyhow. This place is run by dicks."

****************

Don had a few days before he had to go in front of the board that would decide whether he would be thrown out of school. We hatched various schemes for his defense, and though they sounded good at the time, as the day got closer we realized just how paper thin our arguments were. Don became more and more nervous with each passing day.

Finally, a couple of days before his hearing, he relented and packed the iguana back up and took it to his mom's house in Cleveland. It was too late.

The day of the hearing arrived. I was nervous all day, almost as though it were my neck that was on the line. His appointment was at 11:00, but hours passed before Don came back with the report of what had happened.

Don kicked open the door to our room, and stood in the doorway, red-faced and silent. I could tell that things had not gone well. He pulled an envelope from his back pocket and threw it on the ground in the middle of our room, turned on his heel, and left.

Larry and I sat motionless for a second. Then I bent over and picked up the envelope. Inside, carefully written in familiar handwriting, was a testimonial from Larry witnessing the acts of vandelism by Don. I read it to myself in shocked disbelief. It said that Larry had watched Don tape the water fountain with a big group of guys. He had also seen Don set off the fire alarm on the floor below ours. At the bottom was his neat and precise signature.

I stood there silently.

"They came to me last week," Larry said quietly. "They had some stuff on me. Buying you guys beers and things like that. They said that if I wrote out a testimony against Don, they would drop the stuff against me, and consider me for an R.A. position next year. I can't keep going home every weekend and working landscaping. I just can't. Its killing my grades to not be here. He really did that stuff, but they were going to kick him out anyway over the iguana. He was already gone. It didn't matter that I wrote it."

I just stared at him. I was utterly speechless. He just sat there, looking at the floor.

****************

So in the end, Don got the boot for 'other dumb shit', and not for having the iguana. He was only suspended from school for that semester, and resumed classes cheerfully in the fall, living off campus with our friend Jay in an apartment that quickly became ground zero for a variety of antics. That apartment became a place of legend, and even now when I drive through Bowling Green, I sometimes get off the highway and drive by it slowly.

Don went onto have a variety of interesting careers, before settling on 'deep sea welder' down in the gulf. He likes to refer to himself as an 'underwater superhero', which is surprisingly apt. He remains a dedicated and loyal friend, even though I suck and keeping in touch with people.

My friendship with Larry eventually recovered. He was trapped between a rock and a hard place, and with a little time and perspective, I came to understand that. Things normalized between us with time, but it was rocky there for a bit.

The dorm, however, never recovered. The loss of Don seemed to dispell whatever magic was hanging over the place. There were only a few months left before summer at the time that Don got the boot, and as far as I know, none of the 'regulars' returned in the fall. While most of the guys from the hall stayed in touch, most of us never set foot in Conklin again. I hear that it is now used as an office building, so people are now working in our rooms, having no idea of the things that went on there.

It's funny, the nostalgia I feel for the place. At the time, I don't think I realized just how great life was there. We lived in a beautiful, landscaped paradise, where everything was done for us and all of our needs were met. We had food cards to eat as much as we wanted, whenever we wanted. We had endless free time to goof off and do whatever struck our fancy. We bounced around, breaking rules and laws without a care in the world. And every once in a while the real world would intrude and smack someone down. Sometimes that person would stand back up, and sometimes they would simply disappear. Don stood back up.

I eventually disappeared.