Carnage

Don't kid yourself. This is a war story.

We may have looked like college students, carried around books and went to classes, dressed like vagrants and smelled like death, but we were soldiers first. We were the Romans, and we went to war with the Greeks.

I'm writing the story as I remember it.

I guess that makes me a war correspondent.

Yeah, it's me again. I made it to a college in the midwest. I was slightly better at hygiene (when I bothered to commit hygiene), off the anti-psychotics but floating on mood stabilizers, and locked into a series of surprisingly effective obsessive compulsions.

(Will explain as we go)

To explain the title of this first chapter, my room was across from Mitch's. He was a six foot six, gorilla-faced steroid abuser who was getting a biochemistry degree. His door was always open.

My door was always open.

I could see Mitch staring at himself in the mirror. I'd talked to him a few hours before and his eyes were bloodshot, digital, and fluctuating. He told me he'd been up for 26 hours straight, studying for a final. He started chanting in the mirror.

"Lead poisoning, anal sex orgies, donkeys worshipped like gods, monkey priests and random acts of murder!"

I watched him uncap a bottle of Visine and drip it into his eyes.

"Egyptian Goddesses of sex! Suicide as a career option! Mothers who love their children too much!"

Brave Dave, who lived one room down, was half-asleep in the hallway when Mitch got loud. He sat up, shook his head and spit on the shitty rug.

"What the fuck are you screaming about?"

Mitch stomped into the hallway with a lit cigarette and slid down the wall next to him.

"Roman history. I'm sick of it. All I can remember is the sick shit. The interesting shit. I'm supposed to be able to look at coins and name the emperors, but I can't even see...Fuck! Everything is blacking out!"

He waved his cigarette hand around in a panic until he hit the door to his room.

Brave Dave looked at his watch (this was 1985, people still wore watches). "You don't know it by now...four thirty AM...you are fucked my friend. Thumbs down."

Mitch took a deep pull on the cigarette and stubbed it out on the thin, frayed green carpet. "When's your first final?"

"Two days. History of American popular music."

"That's real educational."

"Don't fuck with me, bitch. I am version four point zero-"

"You going home for Christmas?"

"Maybe."

I noticed the little fingers of smoke rising from the rug first.

"Hey, uh, guys?"

Mitch's phone rang, so he stood up and went in his room. Brave Dave slid down the wall away from the smoke and curled up in a fetal position.

"Brave? You might want to move."

I could hear him snoring. Little flickers of orange flame flowed toward Mitch's room. I ripped open my mini-fridge, which was under my desk. Empty.

"Mitch?"

Then Mitch went full savage mode and started screaming at whoever called him.

"Yeah? I saw you, so what? You couldn't get it done! When you had your chance to prove it to the world, you failed! You're a loser! I'm not gonna lie for you!"

I ran out in the hall and kicked Brave Dave until he woke up. He saw the flames and spider-crawled away, whimpering like a baby.

"Goddamn Mitch! Turn around!"

He turned around and saw the flames streaking up his walls.

"There's a fire in my room."

"No shit, genius..."

He jumped over the flames, knocking me back into my room, ran down the hall and punched in the firehose glass case with his giant bare hands. I could hear him running back and the hose unwinding on its metal coil.

"I'm calling the fire department!" I shouted.

He appeared in the doorway with a nozzle and a few strands of crumbled firehose in his hands. "Yeah, that's probably a good idea, why don't you do that?"

So you're probably asking yourself, how did this start the war? You should probably think of it as a class war. The Greek houses were mansions. We were the poor dorm.

No one gave a shit about us.