I’ve noticed some other Bethany University (née College) Xangalings complaining about how vacant it is in their halls now that the semester is over. I have no such luck. Half the guys in Burnett South are still around.
With nothing to keep them occupied, lately they’ve been poking around the fountain outside the library, hunting frogs. I don’t know why; you can’t hear the croaking from our hall. Maybe it’s to lick them—certain frogs and toads secrete a natural hallucinogen as a form of self-defense, and some idiots discovered you can get a cheap high by licking them. I once wrote a sketch for a church drama group called “Finger-Lickin’ Good”: Three lads went on a casual frog-hunt, and one had inappropriately brought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken to lunch on. This made their fingers too slippery to catch frogs. Pretty soon the three were seeing the trees drip blood. My youth pastor decided it wasn’t appropriate material. Killjoy.
Anyway, you know what they say about idle hands. Most of them have nothing better to do than eat a lot of awful food and watch a lot of awful TV.
Tomorrow we have to move all our stuff to Gerhart Hall, where we’re all to spend the summer: women on the ground floor, men upstairs. Then, in theory, maintenance can fix the rooms. In reality, minor cosmetic changes will be made and then the students will return to those tiny little rooms with their 10-year-old mattresses.
That’s right, 10 years. My first year at Bethany as an undergrad was in 1995, and we arrived to find the mattresses newly arrived, still in the plastic wrap. Since that time, either I or one of my siblings have attended Bethany and the mattresses have not been replaced in that time. That’s an estimated 5 to 20 people’s worth of body soil embedded in each and every mattress; a veritable feast for bacteria, dust mites, skin mites, and the other vermin that feed on mites and bacteria. Bedbugs and fleas come next.
For some, it’s worse than others. My friend Harlan never put sheets on his mattress. He was in the regular habit of working out in the gym; then he’d go back to the hall and sleep, unshowered. Eventually, his mattress developed an ungodly grey-brown sheen that triggered the gag reflex in everyone that saw it.
“Be on the lookout for that mattress,” I warned everyone at the beginning of the next school year. “You’ll want to burn it.”
Sadly, half the semester had passed before Robert, my next-room neighbor, flipped his mattress over and discovered the Harlan-stain. His shouts of horror and repulsion could be heard from the other end of campus. The mattress was quickly disposed of.
Now, that’s a worst-case scenario, and a more obvious one. Others have been more discreet in their various unsanitary behaviors. There are some who have partially sheeted their beds, some who have never washed their sheets, and some who have hidden accidents of one sort or another. (Once my brother had a guest stay in his roommate’s bed overnight, and the guest wet the bed and didn’t say anything about it. I believe that mattress was disposed of, but I’m not completely sure. Rumor is it may have been salvaged by an unsuspecting RA, and is somewhere in Swanson Hall.)
Knowing what I do, I made sure to wrap my mattress in foam padding before I sheeted it. I’m not comfortable with the idea of a thin layer of 150-count fabric between me and that foam core spring-filled Petri dish.