My Ceramic Torture Chamber

"Hey man, is that your bae?

 

“Who you mean?”

“Dat gurl who's always in yo' room.”

“Oh, naw man, she ain't mah bae, we juss slammin all da time.”

“Oh. Coo'."

 

For those of you who are not familiar with black culture, the above conversation is a rough example of an English dialect called Ebonics. I'm proud to say I speak it, but I'm not proud of how I learned.

I live in the ghetto.

So, when you think of ghetto, you're probably thinking of a somewhat unfortunate, perilous neighborhood with gangs and whatnot. Yeah, so do I. And that's how I live, currently.

Actually, let me start over. I am a college student, and I pretty much hate everything about my dorm. When I was first setting up my residence here, I was hoping against all reason that I would get a room in one of the suite-style dorms, because they are new and you get a semblance of respect when you live in them.

Instead, what I call home is often considered to be the crappiest dorm on campus. 

I come from what many people would derisively call a one-horse berg. This is actually quite untrue, however, because there are A LOT of horses. And pigs. And cows. And sheep, goats, even freaking alpacas, and pretty much every other farm animal you can come up with. Cars are often pick-em-up trucks with "Proud to be a Redneck" bumper stickers. The land smells of chicken dung, and that's how everyone likes it.

So I did the logical thing for any city-bound metrosexual like myself: I moved to the college closest to my hometown.

I'm also a rather small person. To provide some perspective, I still have to wear child-sized underwear and I swore off Old Navy men's clothing, because even the small is too large. I'm not a midget or anything, I'm just more slender and shorter than the average giant.

Which is why I nearly crapped my pants when I learned I was to be rooming with a 300-or-more-pound, 6'3" inner-city Philadelphian guy named Avion.

He was pretty cool, and he clearly dominated the building: just about everyone was bullied by everyone else, but I never heard anything negative said about him. And I was invincible by association, because we were roommates.

This is a good thing, right? Living in an abusive building with a hulking black bodyguard is a good way to live, right? Right? Uh, nope!

Avion couldn't exercise power over everything, and somehow, everyone in my hall was from inner-city Philly, so they (that is, my roommate and hall-mates) of course had to be friends. Friendship can be good, and making bonds with everyone creates a pseudo-family. But this family never slept. Ever.

8pm quiet hours? Pf, whatever, I'm gonna blast my rap music! Resident Assistant banging on my door at midnight telling me to turn off my recordings of primal screaming? Not gonna happen! Police responding to a domestic disturbance call solely because of my 1980s-style boom box at 3am? What'll they do, put me in jail again? Maybe, but I'm keeping the music on!

I learned something very weird about the human body in my first semester at this crapshack: sleep functions as fuel. Who knew, right? Not me. Until I went three days without it because there is a constant cacophony of caterwauling coming from every frigging door in this accursed hole of torture.

Now, I could get over the lack of sleep. It was difficult, but it wasn't an unsolvable problem. (Translation: I have a very large knife in my room.) There was something that was a little more difficult to get over, though: everyone in my hall is a knuckle-dragging, drooling, grade-A r-tard.

A few months ago, there was a prank war going on, which in itself sounds like a lot of fun. Whoopie cushions here, pies in the face there. . . maybe if this were the 1950s. In the twenty-first century, however, we rig up pellet guns to sensors. This is how Avion met his demise.

Well, he didn't actually die. But he did get shot in the head. . . four times. This quickly prompted him to move out of the room, the hall and the entire building, and I had a single for like six weeks. That was cool.

So you know I live in the ghetto, but my dorm is also a prison: my room's walls are painted cinder blocks, I live with one other man and I have a really crappy bed that would better be suited as a cot at an impoverished Scout camp. However, my sentence is more like house arrest than incarceration. I can leave the building, but I always have to come back and check in with the almighty desk people, and there are SO many things that are considered contraband. As if that stops us from having: large microwaves, hot plates, knives, alcohol (well, I keep my liver intact), drugs (still, not me) or whatever hundred other items they disallow us.

To be more concise: I live in a ghetto-jail. I've lost a large portion of my hearing in this felony hut, and I have become a horrifying zombie-creature due to no sleep. My protection was quite literally shot, so now I live in a room with a computer game addict, the only one on the planet that is able and capable of banging every night, but don't tell his kid or fiancée. And I may not make it out of here alive or, if I'm very, very fortunate, sane.

 

"Yo, mutha, I know you di'n't jus do that! I know you di'n't jus do that!

“So what if I did? Whatchoo gonn' do bout it?!”

“Boi, I'll whip you upside o' da head!"

Right. And I've learned Ebonics since I've lived here. Plus one on the "Pros" side of the scorecard.