Chapter XIV: Hook Hands and Doobie Get High

I loved Kendra and The Professor, and I miss them every day. When I think about them, I can’t help but feel especially sad when I remember what they brought to our lives and what they meant to each other. But whenever I think about Hook Hands and Doobie, the only tears that I shed are from the laughter that they brought to me during the short time I knew them.

It was hard to laugh some times at Morgenthau, and I always felt that too many people didn’t appreciate their sense of humor. They smoked way too much pot and were too lazy to really worry about the abject squalor they lived in. They had somehow amassed a harvest of marijuana and they paid their rent easily by selling it to the residents, many of whom complained that it was bogus. But for the most part, they smoked their own stash, frequently baking out the third floor, which angered The Professor to no end.

Hook Hands and Doobie moved into the third floor of the Main Residence Hall with The Professor the spring after Winston had come to Morgenthau, around the time the snakes had escaped from the science building and had begun to colonize the jungle of weeds that had once been the quadrangle. At first, The Professor was ambivalent about the two dopes that had moved down the hall. At the time, the ceiling didn’t leak and the third floor wasn’t a bad place to call home. It only took a few weeks for The Professor to completely lose his patience with the middle-aged bastards.

Herschel Levy and Paul Doogan came to Morgenthau because they had become persona non-grata all over the men’s shelters in the Tri-Towns. Herschel, who had developed the nickname Hook Hands because most of the fingers on his right hand were permanently recoiled into a fist, with the exception of his index finger, always curved like a hook. He always smoked with his bad hand, carefully holding the joint or pipe with his thumb and his semi-functional index finger. Hook Hands was about as creepy as his name suggested. He over six feet tall, but he was lucky if he weighed more than 150 pounds. He was in his early to mid forties, but he looked much older. His hair was a wild mess of gray and light brown, loosely tucked under a thick winter cap that he wore regardless of the season or temperature.

As for Doobie… well, you can guess how he got his nickname. Doobie, an Irish-Italian mutt from The Bronx, New York had never finished school, avoided jail because of a talented family attorney, got involved in every hair-brained scheme and worked with mobbed-up contractors who got him construction jobs where he sat around on his ass all day.

Eventually, Doobie’s apathy got the best of him. He had made a few bad deals, embezzled from his bosses and got his kneecaps broken. Without the mob lining his pockets, he started hustling on the street, conning old ladies and unsuspecting dopes into giving him large sums of money. He ran phony charities and accepted donations in the name of foundations that didn’t exist. He did all of this while living out of the back of a station wagon he had stolen from his sister-in-law.

Herschel was always a few pennies short of a dollar. He lived with his elderly mother in one of the quiet suburban homes on the outskirts of the town where his duties included making sure that his mother’s pack of wild neighborhood cats were fed on a regular basis. Hook Hands’ was as creepy as he was dim, and when his hand crippled up, his usefulness as an employee began to wane.

His most rewarding job had been a night watchman at Morgenthau during the university’s final years. He worked the graveyard shift from Monday to Friday checking student IDs and making sure that nobody like him tried to get onto the campus. Of course, Hook Hands abused his position to a certain degree. He was known to take long walks during his breaks around campus. His security guard’s uniform gave him the appearance of an authority figure, so he did not startle the young women they walked back from late-night study group sessions, or taking the walk of shame from some frat house party. He would approach them and ask if they wanted an escort back to their rooms, mostly on the off-chance that one of them might be drunk enough to invite him up. But even freshman rushes don’t get that drunk, and as a result, the girls usually stated that they felt much more comfortable without the escort and quickly scampered back.

When Morgenthau closed, he got a similar job at a local county park, but felt that the job’s location and perks were far less rewarding.

He met Doobie one night when the conman was hiding out from the authorities by leaving his car parked overnight inside the park. On a routine walk across the property on an early fall evening, Hook Hands came across a car with fogged windows that gave off the unmistakable scent of marijuana. He was ready to radio into the cops before hearing the sensual moans of a woman inside the car. Having not seen any action this hot since the days when he followed young co-eds around the darkened streets of Morgenthau, Hook Hands crouched beside the car and tried to peer through the windows and have himself a free peep.

It was only a matter of minutes before the sexy ruckus was interrupted by the girl’s loud scream at the sight of the lascivious loon sporting a wide, horny grin peering through the backseat windows. A half-naked, half-staffed Doobie burst out of the car, ready to attack Hook Hands before he saw his Rent-A-Cop uniform and briefly mistook him for a cop.

Hook Hands, upset that the fling had ended so abruptly and without him, was ready to alert the police and have this bum taken downtown before Doobie offered to get Hook Hands high in exchange for letting him go. A reluctant Herschel accepted and ended up spending the rest of the night with the couple, although the events of that evening depended on which one of them was telling the story.

For reasons known only to those two, a budding friendship began. With Herschel’s mother practically comatose in her house, Doobie convinced the lanky creep to help him jumpstart his pot-dealing venture by growing the plants hydroponically in the basement, as well as naturally in his mother’s backyard. They made quick cash, but it was only a few months before a spark set the growing lights ablaze and burned down Hook Hands’ mother’s house.

Hook Hands was now homeless, but he continued to follow around Doobie because he always had an answer for every question and a sure-fire plan that would get them out of any situation. They kept trying to sell pot to whomever they could, and they found a growing market within the homeless men’s shelters in the Tri-Towns. In addition, Hook Hands started a mini-forest of pot plants in a clearing in the park where he worked, but it was only a matter of time before some lucky teenagers discovered the clearing and harvested the plants.

After the men’s shelter kicked the both of them out permanently, Hook Hands brought Doobie over to Morgenthau where they would spend the rest of their lives.

Within a few months of their arrival, the duo began selling pot to the hopeless, drugged-out rejects at the university. Nobody quite knew how they grew they obtained the drugs, but the rumor around campus was that they had to be growing it somewhere because the smoke had a real herbal, natural kick to it. There was nowhere on campus that wasn’t completely overgrown by tall weeds and infested with those evil snakes that had escaped from the science building. They could have possibly grown their stash somewhere in the woods, but there was no way that the addicts would let Hook Hands and Doobie get away with it.

However they obtained it, the duo made a descent business at Morgenthau, and ended up smoking most of what they had themselves. In the winter—presumably when the growing season had ended—their supply was in short stock, forcing them to rely on their reserves to get high. As soon as the temperatures began to climb back to normal, they would be flush with new product once again.

The last time I saw them was on the night that Alistair burned down the fieldhouse in a stunning, awe-inspiring spectacle. As Alistair danced around his creation singing and waving his hands in the air, Herschel and Doobie traded asthmatic laughs with deep, bellowing coughs. The night after the fieldhouse fire, that brief burst of spring was brought back to reality by an icy blast from the north and it caught just about everyone off-guard. With no weatherman to warn us about the warm spell’s brevity, we had no idea that the night would suddenly dip below freezing. I had left my window open to take in what felt like a spring evening, but shortly before dawn, I awoke to the sound of my own teeth chattering, as an arctic high set in above the campus.

I managed to close the windows and put on a couple layers of clothes, insulating myself under the heavy tarp that served as my blanket. Herschel and Doobie were not so lucky. The duo had been battling a flu bug that they kept giving back to each other, and even with the jubilation that came along with the fieldhouse going up in flames, they just didn’t have enough energy or sense to get up and close their windows.

Their ugly room—filled with old pairs of clothes, dirt, a couple homemade bongs and two garbage-salvaged mattresses—suddenly had turned into a meat locker. It was a couple days before they were finally found, and by then, they were almost completely frozen.

Willie buried the two in the Gardens without any real ceremony. The great precession and silent eulogy we gave The Professor about seven months later was very uncharacteristic of most Morgenthau residents, and spoke more about The Professor than it did about us. Even after Kendra’s murder, there were people who visited her grave, but even she had not been granted a proper funeral. Hook Hands and Doobie were not nearly as revered as Kendra, and some residents quietly celebrated their passing. I’m probably the only one who ever really missed them.

I miss their late night stories when Grover would cook us soup over a makeshift stove in the second floor common room. They were always the first ones to sit down with Grover and always the last to leave, always greedily asking for seconds and thirds before everyone had a chance to have firsts. I missed their constant berating of the residents, most notably, that of The Steve.

“Doesn’t it bother you, Chinese Steve?” Hook Hands asked The Steve one night as Grover reheated a tin of chicken noodle. The Steve refused to acknowledge the remarks from the lumbering pothead across the circle. “You walk around in the city and all ya see is these smokin’ hot Chinese bitches, and they’re always holding hands with some asshole white kid.” The Steve started eating his soup faster, hoping to get out of this conversation as soon as possible.

“But it’s really gotta piss you off that you never see any smokin’ hot white girls grinding up against a Chinese guy,” concluded Hook Hands. The Steve looked up at him with an uneasy, perturbed glare and proceeded to slurp down the rest of the bowl so that he could leave abruptly. Not satisfied with silence, Hook Hands continued. “I mean, what’s the matter with you guys? White girls date black guys and Mexican guys… shit, I’ve even seen white girls with Pakistani men… but you never see them with Chinese guys. What’s the matter with your people? Not enough cream of sum-yung-guy?”

The last line brought a chuckle from Doobie and a few others, including myself. The Steve lowered his head and simply exited the room, not giving Hook Hands the pleasure of knowing that he had gotten to him.

My other favorite story was one of Doobie’s tales from his career as a plumber for a Mob-run company. His most famous tale involved a job at the New York School for the Blind, where a blind and deaf student had accidentally walked into a closed-off bathroom where Doobie was working and proceed to unzip his pants, unaware that there was a plumber in the room taking care of a backed up pipe.

“So he bursts into the door and I’m yellin’ at the kid, but he don’t hear me, cuz he’s deaf on top of bein’ blind,” said Doobie on another one of Grover’s soup nights. “Next thing I know, the kid is unbucklin’ his belt and starts pulling down his drawers.”

“Why didn’t you tap him on the leg and let him know you were there?” asked Alistair.

“I couldn’t, I was working behind the throne and I couldn’t reach him. I freaked out, I didn’t know what to do. So, just before he was about to let it all fly, I reacted and just kicked him right in the ass. He screamed and ran out the stall door and crashed into the sinks.” With this, a mix of disgusted gasps and laughs broke out among the residents.

“How could you do that to a poor blind kid?” bemoaned a disgusted Kendra.

Despite the accusations of being heartless, Doobie stayed firm. “Hey, not for nothin’, but the kid tried to shit on me.”

After their death, soup night was a lot quieter, but it lacked a certain element that had made the gatherings truly meaningful. Hook Hands and Doobie weren’t really anybody’s friend. They were more like the inconsiderate, inappropriate uncle that showed up at Thanksgiving and told jokes about blowjobs and herpes at the dinner table. Everybody’s got somebody like that in their family. We had two of them.

After their deaths, spring eventually came to Morgenthau, and with it, a long, rainy season, including the tumultuous rainstorm where Kendra marched through the downpour to confront Nolan about the subject of his illegal rent. Around that time, The Professor’s room on the third floor had started to leak. The Professor passed the problem off as a nuisance brought on by the lack of maintenance done to the building since it’s closure. However, many other buildings had not been maintained, yet similar problems did not persist. The Professor—who always had to get to the bottom of even the smallest of conundrums—started to figure out why the roof was leaking when a root started growing through the ceiling and dripping water into his room.

Herschel and Doobie had been growing their pot on the roof of the Main Residence Hall, and the roots of the plants had found a way to dig through the cracks in the ceiling and into The Professor’s room. Of course, by the time The Professor discovered this, it was too late to fix it. Even in death, those sons of bitches had found a way to piss him off.

For two idiots, the plan was brilliant. On the roof, the plants had access to plenty of sunlight, water and most importantly, privacy. Nobody ever went up to the roof, and somehow, they knew it. Growing the drugs on the roof allowed them to keep the source of the stash a secret.

When I thought about it, I had once caught Doobie climbing out of his third floor window on my way to get some pipe tobacco for The Professor.

“What the hell are you doing up there?” I asked the pudgy lunatic as he climbed onto a small ledge.

“I’m… taking a shit.” He said.

“On the roof?”

“Yeah, why not.” He said, and climbed up to the roof. What a conman! How else could he know that that was the one phrase that would make me never want to go up onto the roof? And boy, could I have used a good smoke after Kendra was killed. By that point, the secret was out and the desperate lowlifes had yanked out every plant, stalk, seed and bud from the rooftop pot garden. After that, it always seemed to be raining on The Professor, both figuratively, in his mind and literally, from the ceiling of his leaky room.

Chapter XIII: Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow

When Morgenthau closed for good, Grover was one of the students who stayed in protest, living in complete darkness in the cavernous Main Residence Hall. Having nowhere else to go, Morgenthau’s decrepit squalor seemed to be a better, more honest existence than begging his parents to take him back.

Morgenthau effectively closed after its final class graduated in May. However, some faculty and a hundred students lived on campus full-time had lease agreements that lasted through the entire summer until early September when the new semester would have begun. With all summer classes cancelled, this lame duck period was allotted to allow most of the full-time residents to find new places to live. The Grassos wanted the faculty out quicker than that.

On a sunny June morning, the professors that still lived on campus were served with eviction notices. Their homes on Regents Row—a line of old townhouses that housed a dozen professors, the deans and a few staff members—had been slated to be demolished. They would be relocated from the plush splendor of Regents Row to the sweaty confines of the student dormitories over by the library and the quadrangle. The Grassos meant business. They wanted everybody out, and fast.

The Professor and his colleagues would not take it lying down. They intended to stick out the remainder of their leases and then some. They joined forces with dozens of students in the dorms to form an alliance that would stick it out through the summer and into the troublesome winter that was sure to follow. For a few days, there was a realistic belief among the residents that they could actually convince the public to lobby the state to save the college. But soon, anxiety and doubt began to fill the ranks. More than half of the protestors jumped ship the day before the lease expired.

Grover was one of the students who had remained in the dorms to protest the Grassos. He made it as far as the middle of November before he decided to leave the college when the dank building became infested with a flu epidemic, one that Grover knew could possibly kill him if he wasn’t careful enough to avoid it. The winter was coming quickly, and it was in his best interest not to endure the bone-chilling temperatures on a limited amount of T-cells.

He packed up his nicest clothes and walked into the Tri-Towns to stay at one of the men’s shelters along the famed “desolation row.” Grover could stay at the shelter, but only from dusk until a little after dawn. During the day, he found himself walking the streets of the Tri-Towns, getting solicited by hustlers and dealers, getting scoffed at by yuppie mothers and business suits. He sat alone in the waiting rooms of the commuter railroads and got used to getting kicked out by the police, by transit workers and by other homeless wanderers.

One night, he wore his blue shirt, the only one that was still somewhat clean, to the Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow soup kitchen on a tip that they served delicious soup. Inside, the small cafeteria was hot, sweaty and smelly. The soup didn’t seem the least bit appetizing when juxtaposed with the aroma of a dozen streetwalkers who had ten times more dirt and grime than Grover.

Grover waited to stand on line, but a church worker came behind him and slapped him on the back. “Timothy, you’re late!” said the deacon of the local parish. “Get back there and put an apron on.” Grover, not ready to begin explaining himself, did as he was told and stepped behind the counter and began to serve soup to the dozens of homeless men that streamed through the door. He desperately wanted to have some of the soup that he scooped out from giant pots, but he did not want to blow his cover.

The deacon had no idea that this Timothy character was actually Grover Ellis. Timothy was an ex-con who had been placed in the halfway program run by the local parish. The deacon was his sponsor. He had arranged for the convict to take this position at the soup kitchen, but Timothy had taken off for Mexico.

Following meals, Grover was sent to the back of the kitchen to clean the dishes. As soon as he was back behind closed doors, Grover gorged himself on the soup, sucking it down like it was water after a marathon. After swallowing as much lukewarm soup as his hungry stomach could handle, he carefully wiped his lips clean and began to clean the pots, pans, ladles and bowls. As he dutifully cleaned the kitchen, he noticed giant, tins of pre-packaged soup on the shelves in the kitchen. The tins contained army surplus soup that was simply reheated and served to the homeless. The parish ran these shelters with funds from the city and state. Because they didn’t pay their volunteers and bought low-grade soup, the parish pocketed a pretty penny for their charitable service.

Before he left, Grover asked the deacon if he could come back and work again.

“You don’t have to come back and work at the kitchen again,” said the deacon, “You only had to come and help us this once as part of your community outreach.”

“But sir,” said Grover, “I really enjoy helping people. I really felt a great sense of purpose, even if it was just serving those men soup and washing the dishes. Please, sir. When can I come back and help again?”

“Well,” said the deacon, curiously, “I suppose you could come back this Sunday and again on Tuesday. Our kitchen is open Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays.”

With that, Grover shook the deacon’s hand and began walking back to the men’s shelter.

“See you at church on Sunday, Timothy.”

“Please, my friends call me Grover.”

Grover needed a sense of purpose in his life, and he found it at the soup kitchen. He continued to go there long after Timothy’s parole officers required him to be. He had become such a fixture there that everyone knew him as Grover. After that first winter, he moved permanently back to Morgenthau and reoccupied his former room on the second floor, right underneath The Professor.

In time, Grover began stealing some of the giant, army-sized jugs of soup and carrying them back to the university where he would heat them up over an open flame and serve it to whoever was hungriest. It was during these meals that he got to know a lot of the people who lived at the University.

His soup nights became a social event for the small pocket of residents who had banded together, first out of hunger, then for a small sense of togetherness. He already knew The Professor, but over soup, the old man discussed his upbringing at the Dean’s residence on East Campus. When Winston appeared the following fall, Winston talked about his painting career and about the ghosts that lived in the library. Eventually Grover entertained numerous other guests, including Alistair, who helped him build a makeshift stove in the second floor common room that allowed Grover to cook indoors. When I first came to Morgenthau, I was invited to one of these dinners and got to know my neighbors. Through Grover, I learned the back-stories to my new friends, most of whom would open up only to Grover because he was one of the few people a Morgenthau resident could trust.

He met countless others who remembered him from the soup kitchen and were shocked to find that such a well-mannered man lived in such a horrible place like Morgenthau. But once the class of no tomorrow began their stay at the abandoned campus, they slowly felt no use for pity. There was an attitude that circulated among the residents that they were not entitled to any handouts or special treatment. They would not beg, they would not ask for mercy. In crossing the stone wall and the iron gates, they had accepted a fate that damned them to the university forever. This was to be the place that we were going to die, and to a certain degree we all knew it.

The Professor knew it most of all. He had accepted his fate long before the University closed and forced its students and faculty to find new jobs and schools. The Professor, more than anybody else, was capable of leaving the awful ruins of Morgenthau whenever he wanted, but the decision was his alone. The curse was his alone.

Roughly once a year, The Professor would walk off campus, ignoring the attempts by the addicts to scare him, and headed out into the Tri-Towns to meet with an old colleague of his. These meetings never went well, for The Professor insisted on paying for his half of dinner and refused his former colleague’s offers to give him shelter, a new job or some new clothes. One of these nights, the colleague dragged him across town to Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, where Grover happened to be working his shift. Because the residents did not believe in charity, Grover was surprised to see someone from the campus enter the soup kitchen, let alone a curmudgeon like The Professor. His gloomy disposition suddenly brightened upon seeing the old man, especially since Grover had become very close with him over the years. In fact, the only reason that The Professor had decided to go over to the soup kitchen was because he had developed a fancy for the soup that Grover brought back from the mission, and he didn’t see the harm in getting some more.

Grover’s sunny demeanor only lasted for about five seconds before Grover noticed that the man accompanying The Professor was the man who had ruined his life with one tiny sentence. Behind The Professor, wearing his trademark blue overcoat and his black, Irish tweed cap, walked in Dr. Roland Salisbury, who was on the board of regents at Morgenthau before the school closed. Compared to the disheveled horde that dined at Grover’s soup kitchen, Salisbury looked distinguished in dapper slacks and a bright red scarf with white tapers that looped around his neck. He took off his leather gloves as he entered and tried to coax The Professor forward so that he could see what a nice establishment the church was running.

Grover had frozen at his post at the sight of Salisbury. His customers began to get frustrated at his lapse in service and he was brought back to reality when an old man with a rugged beard slammed his fist on the steel countertop. Grover resumed his service and tried to think of what to say to The Professor or to his former advisor, who had kicked him out of med school, outed him to his parents and requested that the dean of students to remove him from campus as a matter of public safety.

For all Salisbury knew, Grover was dead. He was more concerned with his old friend, who he believed was suffering from a mental illness that had made him an incredibly stubborn hermit. The Professor was crazy, but he certainly wasn’t mentally ill. He had not enjoyed his annual meeting with Salisbury and he just wanted to go back to Morgenthau and have the same soup that he was being prodded to eat now.

The two men walked up to the counter where Grover was standing in his typical white apron and black mesh hairnet. Grover made it a point to always remain clean-shaven, a vanity shared by few other men at Morgenthau. He had always been thin and pale, and he figured that he probably looked similar to the student that Salisbury had once taught in college.

“One soup please,” asked Salisbury with a sense of righteousness.

“Stop it!” shot back The Professor, “You think I don’t know how to order my own food?” The Professor looked up at Grover and rolled his eyes while nodding towards Salisbury. “What’s good here Grover?” asked The Professor.

Salisbury had been looking around the room thinking about making a charitable donation to the kitchen in his attempt to be a hero to the downtrodden, and after he heard The Professor speak, he looked over at the man behind the counter, and stared for five seconds before his jaw began to sag with shock and a deep, invisible embarrassment.

“Grover?” asked Salisbury. Grover did not acknowledge his former advisor, he just continued pouring soup into the warm, freshly cleaned bowls that continually came back from the kitchen.

Salisbury persisted, “Grover Ellis?” he asked again. With his full name uttered, Grover shot a quick menacing stare at Salisbury. This man had ruined his life and now he was here to pretend that he gave a shit about homeless people, when it had only been so long before when he railroaded him out of town.

Grover took a big swath of soup from the simmering cauldron and splashed it wildly into a bowl in front of Salisbury. The soup ricocheted off the sweaty porcelain and splashed all over Salisbury’s Madison Avenue overcoat, scolding hands as he attempted to defend himself from a steamy mist of broccoli cheddar soup.

Salisbury, in a defensive move, lurched back where he collided with a mob of hungry street dwellers that had been held up while Salisbury and The Professor gallivanted through the kitchen. Salisbury, who moments ago acted like Mother Theresa in the presence of the poor, suddenly recoiled upon coming into physical contact with these hobos, and pushed them away, spurting out ill-advised comments such as “Get your filthy hands off me!”

Suddenly, an ill mood developed among the soup queue, as the kitchen’s rightful customers, already fed up with Salisbury’s high and mighty act, turned against him. As he attempted to walk back to The Professor and Grover, a number of men stepped in front of him and prevented his movement any further. Grover later said he didn’t know who started it, but somebody threw a piece of stale break that struck Salisbury flush in the temple and within moments, the well-to-do doctor was being bombarded with everything from bread, to bowls of soup and other nefarious items smuggled into the kitchen by the Tri-Towns’ finest homeless men and women.

Salisbury exited swiftly without saying a word to The Professor or Grover. The Professor, as he was known to do from time to time after tense moments, let out a raucous chuckle and slammed his fist on the counter while Grover cleanly pored him a new bowl of soup.

With no open seats left in the kitchen, The Professor stumbled around the mess hall for a few moments before tired legs forced him to take the first open seat. Across from the table sat a hopelessly sad woman who couldn’t muster a smile despite the ruckus at the expense of Dr. Salisbury. That was the night changed the lives of The Professor and everybody at Morgenthau. It was the night he met Kendra Keane.

Chapter XII: Grover Holds His Head High

All of the residents that lived on campus for more than five years had all been associated with the school back when Morgenthau was one of the most respected universities in the region. Winston had studied art history, The Professor was born and raised on the campus and Grover Ellis had been a sociology major. In fact, Grover had taken classes with The Professor, and the old man had taught him the most important lesson of his life.

Grover was a legacy. His grandfather and father were both Morgenthau alumni, and having achieved great success in their professional careers, they donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the school. The uninhabitable science building was named after Grover’s grandfather, who had started a successful medical practice in Grover’s hometown of New London, Connecticut. His father followed in his grandfather’s footsteps and joined the family practice after earning his degree from Morgenthau. Two generations of successful doctors had come from this college, and as an only child, Grover was expected to do the same.

But there was something about Grover that was never quite right. He knew it long before his parents knew it. He could never understand why certain things were expected of him. He had grown up in a very nice house, and had learned that he should always do as he was told. He was expected to get a job, so he started working at the family practice the day after his fourteenth birthday. He got his license the day he turned sixteen. He scored high on his SATs and was a permanent fixture on the honor roll. He didn’t have to do these things to get into Morgenthau—who only needed to see his last name to grant him acceptance—but he did anyway.

There were other things about life that never made a lot of sense to Grover. He ran with the overachievers in high school, and he kept participating in extracurricular activities when the rest of his friends were too busy hanging out with their girlfriends. His parents asked him who he was taking to homecoming, but Grover didn’t have a date, or for that matter, a girlfriend.

Grover didn’t like dances and he was already jealous of his friends and the amount of time that they spent making out with girls at the movies. He didn’t see having a girlfriend as a necessity, he thought of it more as a distraction. After he turned 17, things began to become clearer for Grover, and this sudden clarity had left him with terrified insecurity and increasingly crippling paranoia. He was becoming more aware of who he was, and more importantly, who he wanted to be with. He was not attracted to his friends’ bombshell girlfriends. Rather, he was attracted to his overachiever friends themselves. He tried desperately to deny it, but the more it became clear to him, the more he began to assume that everyone could see it, as if it were tattooed in bold-faced type on his forehead.

But nobody suspected anything out of the ordinary from Grover, who was a lanky, but not Lurchy teen that had a bright smile, a nice voice and pleasant demeanor. As Grover got increasingly paranoid, he started trying to overcompensate for the insecurities that he was experiencing. When his friends went out and chased girls, Grover chased along with them. If one of his buddies threw a party, Grover would put on his dancing shoes and have fun, being careful not to drink too much and let his guard down. He acted tough, he talked wise and he charmed the hell out of every girl that he met.

He graduated at the top of his senior class, accepted a big scholarship from Morgenthau and spent the entire summer before college pretending to be somebody that he was not. Two weeks before their respective universities would separate them, the overachievers headed out on a road trip to The Hamptons, where they had rented a beach house for their final week together. Armed with trust-fund bank accounts, realistic fake IDs and hefty allowances, they barnstormed through the yuppie paradise and invited dozens of club-hopping girls back to the beach house every night. His friends drove faster cars and wore trendier outfits, but in his weeklong, alcoholic haze, Grover was the life of the party.

Grover had always enjoyed being the wingman, distracting the ugly and annoying friends of the pretty girls long enough so that his friends could swoop in and steal them away. He was damn good at it. Over the course of their last year in high school, Grover had racked up more assists than John Stockton. Although he primarily did it just so that he could always be seen talking to a girl, his friends viewed it as selfless sacrifice. He had always taken one for the team, and they respected him greatly for it.

On the final night of the Hamptons road trip, Grover’s friends set out to reward their friend for his gallant service in getting them serviced. Each girl that they came up to was pushed onto Grover. He was not used to being pursued and he began to panic, fumbling his words, trying hard to be as quick on his feet and not let the cat out of the bag.

“Relax baby,” said one of these high-class party girls, “Take it easy, let’s get a little more comfortable.” Before Grover knew it, he was doing lines of blow with some of the most beautiful women in the world, and started getting very affectionate with a blond-haired bimbo in a slinky black dress. She kept rubbing his knee as they sat next to each other on the couch, and leaned into him, kissing his neck, tonguing his ear and whispering all kinds of filthy nonsense.

To his friends, that night was a celebration of their friendship. They had set out to make faithful, dependable Grover a man. To Grover, he felt like he was under attack. He had to perform and perform well. Any slight slip-ups might lead to rumors, to assumptions, to gossip and humiliation. As the blonde dragged Grover up from the couch over to his bedroom, his friends clapped and hollered in celebration. Although they assumed the bewildered expression on his face was a result of the beer or the coke, Grover was utterly terrified.

But Grover was always the overachiever. Faced with the possibility of being outed and exiled from his group of friends, he sucked it up and rose to the occasion, albeit drunk and clumsily. It didn’t matter anyway, he was never going to see that girl again, and her opinion was not as important as the conquest itself, at least as far as his friends were concerned. The night was just another performance in his long line of false representations. It was an afterthought. He didn’t think about it until years later.

Once Grover got to Morgenthau, he was a lot more comfortable with himself. His hallway was populated with art majors and actors who didn’t care who Grover was, so long as he was himself. He felt a lot freer, as if the giant weight he carried on his shoulders had been lifted. He was still coy, just not as paranoid. When he visited home, he never spoke of any of his friends at Morgenthau.

He had met a few men through classes and others at parties. He had gotten drunk once or twice and had kissed a few of them, but he remained steadfastly prude when it came to getting more physical than that. At the time, AIDS was still a very real fear, especially in gay communities in colleges across America. Grover knew that. He had to; he was pre-med.

Although he secretly wanted to be an adolescent psychologist, Grover was a quickly rising star in Morgenthau’s School of Medicine. Some of these accolades were based on the fact that his knowledge of anatomy and biology was legit, but for the most part, he was the rising star because his name was literally on the front of the science building. His life had all been scripted, and he was simply running through the scenes.

So, on the day that the prestigious internships were to be awarded to the top students in the program, Grover was not at all surprised to be called into his advisor’s office for what he assumed would be a congratulation and a brief orientation.

Grover, who was always sharply dressed in dress shirts and slacks, took a seat in front of Dr. Roland Salisbury, his academic advisor. He was always modest, but Grover couldn’t help but sport an anticipatory grin on his face, in preparation for the good news that was soon to be delivered. But when he looked at the face of his advisor, Grover saw a disconcerting frown radiating back from the man in the white lab coat. He was holding a blue folder with papers stapled together. He leaned back in his chair, patted the folder against his desk three times and took a few deep breaths. Grover’s grin vanished quickly.

“Grover…” said Dr. Salisbury, who never referred to any of his students by their first name, “I’m just going to come right out here and say it…” High-pressured fear pulsated through Grover. Had they found about the drama major that he’d hooked up with? Had someone accused him of plagiarizing a paper? Had his father been killed in a tragic accident?

“Grover,” said Salisbury grimly, “You’re HIV-positive.”

It was a death sentence. He felt like he had just been shot in the stomach. The bullet had blown a gaping hole in him, and all of his dreams and hopes began pouring out onto the floor and circling down the drain forever.

Before he could even usher out a contentious ‘How could that be possible,’ he immediately flashed back to the night in the Hamptons some three years earlier. Who knows how many coked-up party boys that blond girl at the party could have slept with. Who knows if she was shooting H backstage at rock concerts with drummers and roadies. He didn’t even know her name. He only slept with her so that his friends wouldn’t think he was gay. He had denied himself any pleasures with the men that he was truly attracted to for this very reason. He was going to die. To make matters worse, everyone would now know who he was, even if that girl had infected him that night in the Hamptons. People would know.

A routine physical had caught the virus. Grover could not practice medicine with it. He was out of a job. He was out of a major. He would be lucky to keep his scholarship and declare a new major. He would be lucky to survive at all.

Everything was crumbling around Grover. Word traveled fast. It was the beginning of his junior year when he learned of his diagnosis. He wanted to tell his parents himself, but a colleague of his father’s on the School of Medicine’s board had told his father. It was only a matter of time before people in New London heard about Grover. The gossip caused the family practice to lose a dozen patients. Grover’s hometown friends—who suddenly claimed to have known all along that he was gay—got tested, having slept with 10 times the amount of women that Grover had. They all came back negative. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, rumors began swirling about the impending doom of the college itself. Even if Grover stayed in school, he might not have a school to go to.

He had fortunately maintained his scholarship thanks to his good marks, but it would only last for one more semester. He would have to pay Morgenthau’s staggering tuition and room and board because his parents had revoked all of their financial support in shame. Grover could not afford the drug cocktails he would need to curb the virus. He was finding it hard enough to afford to stay in school.

As the semester wore on, Grover faded deeper and deeper into invisibility. He had a good deal of friends on campus, and a lot of them had reached out to show him their support. But Grover was so ashamed of his condition, and he became increasingly paranoid that everybody was talking about him behind his back. The more he closed himself off, the more friends he lost. In Grover’s head, he was walking around with a giant sign over his head, and a crippling weight on his shoulders.

He had transitioned to sociology after he was shut out by medical school and started taking a few classes taught by The Professor. With the number of academic programs being slashed by the college, a large group of students had packed into The Professor’s lecture hall. Grover understood why some people chose not to sit next to him. On one particular afternoon in The Professor’s lecture hall, a tall, young female student walked around the front of the class looking for an open seat. There was an open seat next to Grover, but she refused to sit in it.

“Miss Hardy, there’s a seat right there,” said The Professor pointing to the open seat. The girl knew who Grover was. She kept looking at the jam packed rows above him.

“Miss Hardy,” repeated The Professor sternly. “There are no other seats, please take that one.” The girl let out a disgusted sign and moved carefully around Grover, making sure not to touch him and holding her breath the entire time. As she sat, The Professor began his lecture, speaking in his bellowing, almost operatic voice.

Grover had finally found his winter jacket, which was buried under a pile of clothes in his room. It was still a little musty from being tucked away for several months, and as he reached in his pocket to pull out a pencil, he let out a big sneeze, which he caught ably with his right hand. Hearing the sneeze, the young Miss Hardy jumped up out of her chair, bumping into the student next to her and letting out a horrified yelp.

The Professor, who was already upset at the late start to the class took off his glasses and glared at the girl. “Miss Hardy, what the hell is your problem?”

“He just sneezed on me!” she yelled, “That queer’s got AIDS and he sneezed on me!” she yelled, wiping her hands on her shirt. With this, a hearty mumble started to emanate around the classroom.

Grover stiffened his upper lip, sat quietly in his chair, pulled a tissue from his bag and blew his nose. He quietly rebutted, “I didn’t sneeze on you Corinne.” Slowly, a few meathead jocks that surrounded Grover started to move away from him, picking up their books and sliding as far as they could away from his seat. One student got up and moved to exit the room.

“Excuse me, Mr. Ricks, where are you going?” asked The Professor.

“I need to go wash my hands,” said the meathead sitting directly behind Grover.

“No!” yelled The Professor. “Sit down!” His voice silenced the mumble among the students in the crowd. Mr. Ricks sat down, but Miss Hardy refused. “Miss Hardy!” he yelled at the girl who grumpily sat back down, but on the furthest edge of her seat.

The Professor wiped his brow with his forehand and looked out at the jam-packed crowd in his classroom. “You two make me sick,” said The Professor in a subdued and disappointed tone. “You have no idea… you have no fucking idea.” The Professor walked over to the front desks and stared at the sour-faced girl. “Miss Hardy, if you do not sit completely in that seat right there, I am going to ask you to leave this classroom and not come back.” With that, she slid fully into the seat. Grover, who was furious at this kind of attention being paid to him, sat in stoic silence.

“The real diseased people in this room are the those of you who have made your classmate an outcast!” said The Professor in a sweeping crescendo. “It is YOU who are dying inside, not him! If I so much as hear one more student in this class make the slightest wisecrack or a sophomoric joke you will fail for the semester and you will have to wait until next year to take it again...” The Professor paused with a sigh, “…If there is a next year.” He looked briefly at Grover who had let a single tear escape the ducts of his right eye.

Grover closed his eyes and hung his head. He could hear the girl next to him get up and leave the class. In Grover’s head, her singular footsteps sounded like a mass exodus fleeing Grover and his terrible affliction. Once she left, The Professor resumed his lecture and did not discuss the issue any further.

Upon the end of the class, The Professor instructed Grover to stay in his seat as the students departed the tense atmosphere of the lecture hall. The Professor stood over him, looking at the shattered young man who had sat quietly in the front row taking notes.

“Don’t you ever hang your head in front of me,” said The Professor sternly. “Don’t you ever hang your head.” With that, The Professor exited the class.

Seven years later, as he wept at the bedside of The Professor the morning after he had taken his own life, Grover found the courage to hold his head high. He was tougher than his disease. He was tougher than his grief. He was tougher than his fear. He hadn’t lasted this long because he was on a series of virus-impairing medications, he had lasted this long because he refused to hang his head. If he had, it wouldn’t be the virus that killed him; it would be The Professor.

Chapter XI: The Maniacs in the Basement

Tommy Burton and Deb Flanagan were good kids once. Now they’re maniacs. I don’t even think they’d recognize each other. It happened to a lot of people who ended up at Morgenthau. The lost souls that were beyond saving ended up either in the woods with the addicts, where they lost their fear and their faces or they ended up down in the basement of the Main Residence Hall sucking on chemicals and howling late into the night. They lived in complete filth, walked around naked during the summer and often froze to death in the winter. Even Nolan and The Watcher refused to go down into the basement to deal with the maniacs—they were that horrifying. Yet, while the rest of us paid our shares of the rent, the maniacs made our lives worse and paid nothing.

The addicts were shady, but the maniacs were downright dangerous. Both shadowy groups were insane, yes, but at least the addicts had method to their madness. The addicts stole from the thieves, violated the violators and tortured the tormenters. The maniacs, on the other hand, were the lowest of the lowlifes. They preyed on the weak, the vulnerable and the fearful. We feared the addicts, but if it were not for them, the maniacs would take over the entire campus.

Arguably, the two groups constantly waged a silent war against each other. The addicts relied on their dark, ninja-like personae while the maniacs were very visible and very, very audible. On my first night in the Main Residence Hall, when I lived in the freshman wing on the first floor, I could not catch a wink of sleep due to the relentless wailing of the maniacs in the basement. I banged on the floor and radiators and screamed back at them, but it only encouraged the maniacs to grow louder and in a greater chorus. They howled like coyotes at the moon. Their voices were sometimes filled with angst and bottled rage and at other times they let out deep, painful moans as their intoxicants began to eat their bodies from the inside out.

The maniacs had inherited the basement of the Main Residence Hall around the time that Alistair converted one of the water closets on the first floor into a somewhat useable latrine. Before that, most people just went down to the bowels—as they called the basement—and did what they had to do there. It was rare that any of the residents would attempt to clean the place up, and those attempts usually involved pouring out a bottle of bleach in the affected area, trying to cover up the foulness and wash it away down the basement’s flood drains.

There were closets full of disinfectants, cleaners, solvents and other hazardous liquids. Their attempt to clear the air of the awful stench actually created an even bigger mess, as the fumes from the chemicals drove out a number of residents, some of whom had begun to develop serious breathing problems.

When Alistair built his latrine, the basement’s usefulness—or lack thereof—became obsolete. Instead, it became a place where the junkies would go to get high and where some of the emancipated whores would come to turn tricks in exchange for drugs or rent money. Tommy and Deb met during the latter. One night, after realizing that they had been burned by a cheapskate dealer from the Tri-Towns, the two started looking around the basement for a hidden stash or a wayward joint. Instead, they found the closets full of old chemicals. Tommy, thinking back to the days in junior high when he occasionally huffed paint, encouraged Deb to huff some solvent with him. Within a matter of minutes, they lost their senses. Within a matter of weeks they lost their minds.

There was plenty of solvent to go around and as more residents watched their money disappear, more people started coming down to the basement to get stupid with Tommy and Deb.

The regular drugs did awful things to those who abused them, but huffing those chemicals took away the few things that made them human. With every brain cell lost, they morphed into maniacs. Their motor skills were replaced by those of a zombie, and their attitudes, social conduct and behavior became as polluted as the former latrine they called their home. The heroin and cocaine killed a lot of druggies, but their death was slow, painful, and for the most part, anticlimactic. In contrast, the chemicals seemed to kill the maniacs faster, more painfully and always with one last insane outburst, usually directed on the innocent squatters who lost sleep while the maniacs lost their souls.

While the addicts hid cloaked in their woods and secret hideouts, the maniacs lurched about campus like the living dead. They broke into rooms, stole food, and were known for violent—albeit non-sexual—attacks, usually provoked by something they imagined. They looked like harmless shambles of human beings, but they could be very dangerous. Nobody told me that, and unfortunately, nobody told that to Eva either.

After discovering Eva pregnant, bruised and shivering in the Gardens, several residents and I had taken it upon ourselves to protect Eva like we had failed to do for Kendra. Upon moving in, Eva got situated in the room Kendra had kept before she moved in with The Professor. The old dorm on sat on the second floor, down the hall from mine and across the hall from The Steve and Willie.

The Steve had not said a word to anybody since he had returned to the world of the living after his short stint with the addicts in the woods. The day that we moved Eva into Kendra’s old room, The Steve suddenly perked up in his bed and left his room for the first time in more than four months.

In the days that followed, he started hanging around Eva, usually asking her about the stuff she liked, like music, movies and the normal things that teenagers got involved in. In the beginning, a few of us were skeptical of The Steve’s motives, unsure if he was some kind of creepy older man who had developed a fancy for the very pretty 17 year old girl who had just moved in.

But after a week or so, I began to see a change in The Steve that I had never seen before. He had always lived under a dark cloud up until the time that Eva came to Morgenthau, but after that, his life was once again filled with purpose, and just as he had been determined to succeed in his previous life as a programmer, he was not going to let anything stop him from protecting Eva. Late at night, when Eva was asleep on Kendra’s old comfy couch, The Steve could be seen sitting by his door across the hall from her room, keeping guard. When The Steve got tired, Willie would relieve him of his duties and take another watch.

But of course, we couldn’t be with her every moment of every day. One night Willie was in town stealing cars for the tow truck company, The Steve was exhausted after helping Alistair build a fire pit outside the dorm to keep the snakes away and I was passed out after hoofing it all the way into the Tri-Towns to score some free soup from Grover, only to find the mission closed for—of all things—a religious holiday. We were all upstairs, but we needed sleep. The night watch was on break.

Eva was still getting to know the old building, which became treacherous to navigate in the pitch-black night. With nobody around, she got up after midnight and tried to find latrine that Alistair had built. She had always followed one of us down there and she forgot which set of stairs led her to the water closet.

In the darkness, she picked the wrong door, and accidentally entered an ugly, ugly place. She couldn’t see anything down in the basement except the eyes of the maniacs. She was stunned by the unexpected gust of chemical fumes that blew into her sinuses. They started moving towards her, raising a slow groan that built like the sound of an oncoming train whistle. She moved to back up, but her feet slipped on the staircase that permanently dripped with the runoff of water from the first floor.

She tried to scream, but the maniacs raised their howls so loud that it covered her screams. The sudden rabble woke us up, but that was nothing new. Admittedly, I opened my eyes, let out an annoyed groan and tried to go back to sleep. However, The Steve was the only one to realize that there was nobody keeping guard of Eva. He bolted out of bed and ran down the stairs, his traction-less shoes sliding on every wet step as he vaulted down to the basement.

Down in the bowels, Eva had become paralyzed with fear, having still not fully recovered from the incidents with Simeon. She couldn’t scream while she coughed up the harsh toxins that floated around the basement. The stinking, sweaty creatures made such an awful cacophony of noise and had completely surrounded her. She reached her arms up to try and reach for the handrail and suddenly felt herself being lifted up out of the darkness but a force so strong, it nearly ripped her shoulders out of their sockets.

After hearing The Steve’s manic rush for the stairs, several residents followed behind him, realizing that Eva might be in trouble. I made it down the stairs first, where I saw Eva, coughing up the fumes on the ground. Above her stood The Steve and two shadowy figures speaking to him in whispers barely audible above the coughs of Eva.

Apparently, The Steve had made friends with some of the addicts with whom he had so briefly enlisted himself. Upon seeing me walk down the stairs, they quickly turned their backs and ducked into a corridor, their footsteps vanishing into the night. The Steve and I met eyes, and exchanged a nod of understanding. He knew I had caught him talking with the addicts, and I knew that he would never offer me any more insight than that. The addicts were loyal to the Steve, for reasons only known to him.

Eva didn’t see the addicts, no one ever truly did. The first person she saw when she came to was The Steve. She thanked him dearly for saving her life. He felt so guilty accepting her thanks. He had failed her. What if those fiends had done something to her? What if she had lost the baby? Had he not been so ashamed of himself, he might have realized that she was falling in love with him.

Chapter X: Big Willie's Biggest Regret

Big Willie Odom had done a lot of bad things in his life. Despite what he told the judge, the jury, the parole board and his probation officer, he never truly regretted anything he did. The only things that he had the slightest regret for were the situations that landed him in prison, and even then, he only regretted that he hadn’t been smart enough to elude the police. When it came to the things that he was never caught for, Willie washed his hands of everything.

Willie grew up on the mean streets of Hempstead, New York, a rough Long Island neighborhood surrounded on all sides by affluence, decadence and expressways. While the Islanders were busy winning Stanley Cups in neighboring Uniondale, Willie was breaking into cars in the Nassau Coliseum parking lot, stealing the ones he could sell and looting the ones that he couldn’t.

He was in juvie before he was in high school, which he never finished because he got sent up to the majors, doing three in Ossining for stealing cars. Willie was a tough customer. At 6’5” and 300 lbs, he was not easily intimidated, and his toughness got him through those three years in prison. There were inmates twice his age that thought Willie would simply succumb to his elders, but the oversized youngster punched, kicked and downright dominated his way to respect. By the time he was released for good behavior—a citation given to him because nobody dared to come forward and accuse him of perpetrating a few savageries—he was the cellblock’s unquestioned leader at the ripe age of 20 years old.

But on the outside, Willie found things a lot tougher. There were few jobs to be found, and the only real talent that Willie could put on his resume was his aptitude for breaking into, hotwiring and stealing cars. He could steal Air Force One if he really tried. But being a 6’5” black man driving in any vehicle, let alone a tiny sports car, made him an easy target for racial profiling. After only being out of the pen for six months, he was incarcerated again in Attica, and did 10 more years. Unlike his All-Star performance in Ossining, he found that in Attica, he may have been one of the biggest inmates, but he was certainly not the toughest.

His muscles were no match for the cunning shank attacks perpetrated by shiftless gang minions. His size only made him a bigger target. Willie was stabbed four times while he was at Attica, the last of which left him in the infirmary for six months. He spent the final three years of his time in Attica looking over his shoulder everywhere he went. He trusted no one, had no friends and lived in a state of constant fear.

Transitioning from Attica to Morgenthau was remarkably smooth for Willie. For all he knew, some of the addicts who lived in the woods were the same gangbangers who had stabbed him while he was in prison. He had elected to live a life of seclusion at Morgenthau and chose not to get to know any of his fellow residents. Instead of joining the majority of the population in the Main Residence Hall, he had broken into the Fieldhouse and was living on a wrestling mat underneath the foldout bleachers. He had come to Morgenthau during the somewhat blissful period where Nolan wasn’t stingy about his residents paying the rent, before The Watcher started his campaign of pain and extortion.

One night, Willie got lost in the dark and realized that he was surrounded by the shadowy figures that lived in the woods. He had no idea what they wanted from him, but he immediately felt like he was back in the washroom at Attica, about to be ambushed by the gangs that he refused to join. The 37-year old giant ex-convict closed his eyes in fear as he felt the addicts descend upon him, but suddenly their demonic whispers were drowned out by a loud voice.

“Get away from him you fucking mongrels!” shouted The Professor, taking one of his late night smoking strolls. With that, Willie opened his eyes and saw the last streaking shadows of the addicts rush back into the woods as The Professor lit a match and appeared in front of him. Willie had seen this old man before, but always took him for another snooty white man who saw him as nothing more than another negro criminal.

The Professor walked up to Willie and took a long drag from his pipe and blew out a long, white plume. “Take my advice, son,” said The Professor, “Stay off these streets at night. Those creatures are god damn lunatics.” With that, the old man stumbled off into the darkness, unafraid of the addicts or any other monster, ghost or demon that inhabited the woods.

Willie spent that night and the next few days thinking about what had happened to him. In the past, Willie was a rock. His physical power was unquestionable and his mental fortitude was as guarded and solid as Fort Knox. Now, he was nothing more than a big baby who froze and shivered in the face of the unknown; more terrified than the 70 year old, feeble, crusty Professor who had every reason to be scared, yet feared nothing.

Slowly, Willie began to assert himself like he had before his time in Attica. He revered The Professor for the way the old man had handled the addicts. Like many of us, he kept trying to find ways to impress and please the old man. Willie began taking on various tasks at the campus, minor things like carrying the maniac druggies out of the foyer of the Main Residence Hall when they had escaped their frightening homes in the bowels. He helped Alistair with his many crazy projects, and he started making some extra cash by stealing cars and parking them in tow-away zones, getting a small cut from a man named Eddy who he had met on the inside in Ossining. When he could, he would run errands for The Professor, picking up various items and delivering messages to his lone contact in the outside world.

But more than any other service that Willie performed for the college, his most appreciated undertaking was his undertaking. Although the thought of burying the dead bodies of the expired druggies and maniacs made a lot of residents queasy, Willie never objected to accepting the role of gravedigger, and was always the first to volunteer for the job. The job never really got personal until Kendra was murdered in the spring after the great fieldhouse fire, and half a year before The Professor took his own life after that long and rainy autumn.

It had always made Willie jealous that a smart and pretty black woman like Kendra—who came to Morgenthau six months after Willie—had fallen the way she had for the aging, white Professor, even if she was about 10 years older than Willie. Willie had never finished high school and spent his college years in prison. Other than their skin tone, Willie and Kendra had little in common. Yet, he was still fascinated by her, and always went out of his way to smile and say hello whenever she passed him on the thoroughfares. To make matters worse, Willie had nothing but the fondest admiration for The Professor, especially in the aftermath of his run-in with the shadowy figures in the woods. Since then, Willie had been able to keep his emotions in check, always keeping his head in the game, and never allowing outside influences to distract him from his focus. He was a new man now, who did not allow things like jealousy to cloud his mind and weaken his resolve. But he was only a man.

Kendra’s presence had thrown the entire community into a loop. Things were never quite the same as they were before she came to Morgenthau six months after Willie; nor were they quite the same after she left this world. Kendra brought out something in everybody’s life. Most of the men just found her attractive, and went out of their way to please her, much like we did for The Professor. However, the subtle ass kissing with The Professor was more or less the reflection of our father/teacher respect for him. With Kendra, the men were always trying to get her to smile or laugh in the hope that if she left The Professor she might shack up with them next.

There was no better example of this than Willie. Over the course of two years that Kendra spent with us, Willie’s loyalties slowly began to shift from The Professor to his live-in companion. He started coming up with excuses when The Professor asked him to go into the Tri-Towns to fetch an item for him. Of course, if Kendra asked him the same question, he would drop everything and fetch whatever item she requested like a hyperactive dog chasing a Frisbee or a tennis ball.

Things changed around the time that The Watcher’s reign of terror began to grip the campus in fear. Anyone who claimed to not be intimidated by the brute was a liar, even someone as big and tough as Willie. The Watcher reminded Willie of the hired muscles at Attica; mindless sentinels sent out by weaker men to do their dirty work. The Watcher was as fearless as he was merciless. He was under strict orders, and he followed them to a T.

Kendra was not afraid of The Watcher, for she knew that he was only a minion of Nolan, the real monster at Morgenthau. For a long time, The Professor had been secretly paying the rent for he and Kendra, knowing that she was bound to say or do something that would land both of them in a great deal of trouble. Kendra could be slapped around a few times, but one savage blow to The Professor could kill the old man, and at that time, he was certainly not ready to die.

It was only a matter of time before Kendra found out about it and when she did, she was furious at The Professor. By then, Willie was no longer living in the Fieldhouse (Alistair had burned it down earlier that spring) and he had taken a residence in the slimy dorms, a floor below The Professor. As he listened to Kendra’s voice scolding The Professor through the paper-thin walls, a wide, shit-eating grin stretched across his scruffy, bearded face. Maybe this was the final straw, he fantasized to himself, maybe this time she’ll leave him for good.

A cold front blew into Morgenthau that evening, dumping a solid two inches of rain on the campus. The stormy weather reflected the suddenly stormy relationship between The Professor and his companion, who had bolted out of the building to chase Nolan and voice her fury about the illegal rents he was charging. The Professor—who still had a lingering hip injury from when I hit him with my mom’s car back in the Tri-Towns—came lumbering down the stairs asking if anyone had seen Kendra. Willie emerged from his room and told The Professor that she was looking for Nolan. The Professor shook his head with disgust, thought about things for a second, then looked up at Willie and asked him to come with him to find Kendra.

By this point, Willie’s lovesick head had been completely conquered by his lust for Kendra. He had fallen under the impression that he was so close to finally having her all to himself. He was certain that he was one of her favorite residents, and he could satisfy her needs better than the crusty, old, Professor. Going out there into the rain would not only be a pain in the ass, but it would only keep the old man and Kendra together. He couldn’t let that happen. Not after this long.

Willie complained about the weather and said that he didn’t want to go outside on such a dreary night. The Professor—who had gotten so used to Willie serving both he and Kendra so faithfully—turned a disgusted eye towards the tall black man standing in the doorway of his room. The Professor had seen a remarkable transformation in Willie, who was once so terrified of the addicts in the woods and was now as unshakeable as he was in Ossining. All of a sudden, he was too scared to get wet? He suspected this might have something to do with Willie’s feelings for Kendra, but time was wasting, and she was getting further and further away.

“If you’re not going to help me, you’re not going to help me,” said The Professor gruffly as he walked for the stairs, adding, “Not like I’ve ever helped you out, you ungrateful bastard...”

By morning, our world had changed forever. By morning, Kendra was dead, The Professor was half-dead, and Willie was safe and sound in his room, but feeling utterly helpless, as if he’d been shanked once again. Somebody had murdered Kendra, and Willie knew that if had he only gone out to help her, she would still be alive. He would have sacrificed himself for her; he could have held her attacker at bay long enough for her and The Professor to escape. He could probably have killed the attackers with all his pent-up sexual frustration and his love for Kendra. He could have done something, but he had selfishly done nothing.

When we brought The Professor back up to his room, the old man was barely conscious, but he had enough strength to open his eyes as the residents carried him past Willie’s room; enough strength to stare at Willie with a damning, hateful glare. He never forgave Willie. Willie never forgave himself. Although he was 6’5” and 300 lbs., that night, he cried himself to sleep.

Chapter IX: Papa Grasso Gets Rich

On the day before The Professor took his own life, Giovanni “Papa” Grasso sat in a modest meeting room in the Tri-Towns where a zoning committee was meeting to discuss the future of the property formerly known as Morgenthau University. I wasn’t there, but Grover was. He had heard Simeon mumbling about it on his cell phone and decided to take a walk over to town hall before he went over to moonlight at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow.

Papa Grasso was the size of both his sons put together, and his clout was just as big. It had been close to seven years since Papa and his late brother had bought the Morgenthau property and they had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the deal. With one vote, and with one handshake, they could recoup all their losses and turn a slick profit.

Of course, the profit that Papa Grasso would make would only be a profit in monetary figures. In reality, owning the property had been the largest disaster of his life; personally, spiritually and physically, not just financially. The seven year battle to transform the campus into a sprawling splatter of townhouses had left him with high blood pressure, a stomach ulcer, a son whose head was so fucked up that he didn’t go outside for fear of phantom drug addicts, as well as the loss of his co-investor and brother to the same stress-related ailments that would kill him if things didn’t change.

Papa Grasso had pulled many strings and lined many pockets. He had twice petitioned the zoning committee to re-classify the campus as a residential area and had been denied both times. The board was very clear; they would not allow Morgenthau to be demolished for yuppie townhouses. In order to get a new zoning board appointed, he donated tens of thousands to the opposing political party, sabotaged their candidates, financed a smear and intimidation campaign, and had some of his cronies rig polling places on election day.

The end result of Grasso’s scheme was a brand new government that swept the local elections the year before The Professor’s death. They had little experience, no real agenda, taskforces or five-step programs. The new government had been assembled for the sole purpose of re-zoning Morgenthau. The new government excused the zoning board, which furiously complained to the newspapers, but were ignored by a public more concerned with celebrity gossip. Crime in the Tri-Towns began to rise. The new government, already in over their heads and looking for a scapegoat, began to look to the old campus and its homeless hoards as the source of the big problem in town. The solution was simple, and it started with Giovanni “Papa” Grasso.

At 8:15 in the morning, the gabble fell and a motion came to the floor. It happened so quickly and so quietly that Grover thought he had entered the wrong conference room. Within a matter of seconds, the board proposed “The Reclassification of Community Board 7” approved it, and quickly went on to the next matter of business. A joyous Papa Grasso lurched up from his chair, shook a few hands next to him and left the room to go downtown and sign the papers with the developers that had remained unsigned for over five years.

Grover was hardly astonished or devastated to learn that the campus’ fate had been decided by corrupt, government officials. He had been at Morgenthau longer than anyone but The Professor, and he secretly believed that this date would have come sooner. Had The Grassos really cared about the property, they would have strung barbed wire along the gates. They could have hired personal security to maintain the property and they could have hired landscapers to maintain the overgrown jungles and the lavish gardens. Had they truly loved their alma mater, they would have allowed it to keep functioning as a university that churned out CEOs, State Senators, Pulitzer–winning photographers and professors of art and history. Instead, they had stabbed it in the stomach and watched it slowly bleed to death.

It would only be a matter of time before the college would be razed for the condos. They would have to tear down the Main Residence Hall, because there was no way to repair the damage that the squatters had done to the building. The library was gorgeous, but it was haunted, and it probably always would be. Weeds and neglect had suffocated the Gardens’ exotic plant life, not to mention the fact that there were several corpses buried without hermetically sealed coffins. Admin and Services were literally sewers, since Alistair had run his makeshift sewage lines into their basements. Had they truly cared about this place, they would have razed it to the ground when they bought it so that people like us couldn’t come and sully something so beautiful.

Grover couldn’t help thinking that if The Professor hadn’t sunken to such desperation following Kendra’s murder that perhaps he would have led the charge to save Morgenthau from the developers. He wouldn’t do it for us, because he was very vocal about his disgust for his fellow residents.

He would stand up because he had been standing up for seven years. He stood up when the school eliminated his program, when they closed down his school and when society shunned him for living a life of squalor and destitution. He stood up through freezing winters and brutally hot summers. He had stood face to face with Nolan and The Watcher. He remained standing even when they killed the only woman that he ever loved, although it devastated him to do so.

Depressed, bedridden, anemic and heartbroken, The Professor kept standing, even if he wasn’t quite sure what he was fighting for anymore. In the beginning, he was fighting to save his job, but he never really liked his job. The only thing in his life that had remained a constant was the University where he grew up, studied, lived and worked. He was not going to let a thief like Giovanni Grasso to get the best of him and take away the only place that he had ever called home.

Over his dead body.

A few days after The Professor’s death, Willie drove a stolen car back over to the University to find a parade of goldenrod colored construction vehicles lined up along the eastern wall of the campus. The sun was finally setting on Morgenthau University and there was nothing that any of us could possibly do about it.

Chapter VIII: Winston and His Ghosts Paint a Masterpiece

Winston Ipswitch lived alone in Morgenthau University’s abandoned library on a bed of clothes laid out on a frame of old encyclopedias. Next to The Professor and Grover, Winston had the longest tenure of any of the residents on campus. His accommodations at the library were always a subject of controversy and jealousy, mainly because he was the building’s only tenant and paid the same amount of rent as everyone else. He certainly did not see himself as the rightful owner of the building, and whenever he was accused of hogging the library all to himself, he invited any resentful individuals to come spend a night with him in the library. Anyone who took him up on the offer never went back again.

The bodies of our departed brothers and sisters may have been buried on the west side of campus in the forgotten splendor of The Gardens, but their spirits unquestionably lived in the library. According to Winston, who had majored in Art History at Morgenthau back in its heyday, there had always been some kind of spirit in building, even before the campus was abandoned and people started dying.

The library more adequately resembled a medieval castle than it did anything else. It had once been a lavish mansion on the outskirts of the city in the late nineteenth century. An artist’s colony developed around it, and some of those buildings were eventually incorporated into the Morgenthau Academy and later by the University of the same name.

So, when asked about the ghosts that haunted the library, Winston said that most of them had been around for a good hundred years.

“It’s just like any old house,” he told me one afternoon when I was helping him and Alistair board up a window that had cracked during a summer hailstorm. “The people who lived there before me still feel like they own the place. They’ve been dead a hundred years and they still feel like they own the place!” Winston’s favorite remark was always saved for when new people asked him about living with the ghosts.

“Doesn’t it bother you living with ghosts?” asked Eva the first time she met him.

“They annoy me less than you people do,” he said, always with a smirk.

Winston ended up living at Morgenthau after a modest career painting murals in New York City began to unravel due to a debilitating nerve disease that affected his ability to hold his brushes steadily. He refused to call it Parkinson’s, and usually said some other name when asked what his disease was called. When the condition was still in its earliest stages, Winston tried to ignore the disease and compensated for the jittering and shaking by painting with smaller brushes or even with his opposite hand. As a result, his work slowed to a crawl and he missed deadlines, fell behind in his work, and spent his advance before he finished the job and received the rest of his commission.

As a result, he was kicked out of the artists collective where he was living in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and decided to try to get a teaching fellowship at Morgenthau, only to travel back to his alma mater to find that it had been boarded up and closed down. While roaming the deserted thoroughfares on that November morning, he saw The Professor as he was walking back from the Admin building, the only descent place to take a shit in the entire complex before record snowfall collapsed its roof that winter.

The Professor told him to get lost if he knew what was good for him, but Winston lingered around the campus until night fell and the temperatures began to dip below freezing. Unlike years later when the campus was overrun with addicts and other squatters, the campus only had a handful of residents at the time. The quadrangle had yet to become a jungle of weeds and overrun by snakes, the Fieldhouse was still standing, but locked. The Main Residence Hall was open, but the stench drove Winston away immediately.

The only building that Winston found unlocked was the Library, which The Professor had been looting whenever he began to lose his mind with boredom. A solid, stone building, the library was a quick stroll from the dorms, connected to the quadrangle by a two story arch that led to thick oak doors, adorned with a series of wood carvings. Inside the doors, a reception desk sat at the foot of a double staircase that led up to the nonfiction sections. By sidestepping the reference desk and the stairs, a Morgenthau student would then walk into a well-lit, high ceiling chamber that housed fiction, microfilm, computer stations, typewriter stations and dozens of comfy couches and chairs for reading and studying. The upstairs nonfiction section served as a mezzanine that looked down on the grand room of the library.

By the time Winston came back to the library, he found very little of the building he remembered from his days studying about the Impressionist movement. The lobby was cluttered with debris, dirt and random trash. The grand room of the library swirled with a perpetual fog of dust and smoke. Several bookcases had toppled over like dominoes, their contents were scattered across the ground like leaves beneath a tall tree in autumn. The couches, ones so comfy that Winston remembered falling asleep while cramming for a bio final, had been ripped to shreds or had their cushions stolen by the campus’ first few residents looking for decent bedding.

It broke Winston’s heart to see his college in the shape that it was in. He had no idea what happened to this place that he had called home. This time of year, a place like the Library would be filled to capacity with students prepping for midterms and thesis projects. Instead, the life had been sucked out of this once lively place. It felt like he was living in a cemetery long before he ever encountered the ghosts.

He rarely spoke about his spectral landlords, but when he did, he would criticize them for being so repetitive. Things like tapping his shoulder when he was walking through a dark room were terrifying at first, but after a while he had come to expect it from them, the same way he stopped getting fooled by his uncle who always told him his shoes were untied before flicking his nose. Every now and then he would talk about the ghostly figures that spent eternity re-arranging the scattered books back into their proper Dewey-Decimal order. If pressed, he would talk about the sounds of footsteps in the dark, or the squeaky wheels of the book cart as it rolled along the mezzanine, or the old typewriter that would start up in the middle of the night and type exactly 2,000 words. They bothered Winston, but as he always said, they didn’t bother him half as much as we did.

Winston got through the first few weeks in the library without sleeping at all. He took a few naps during the day when the spirits were on break. The library’s old, solid structure allowed for the heat to be held throughout the winter and for a cool, cellar-like feeling to maintain throughout the summer. Even as the other residents braved the elements in the dorms, no one who had spent five minutes in the library would dare of trading their hypothermia for a warm night with the ghosts.

As a result, Winston tried his best to work through the night painting. His hand had gotten progressively worse when he was not painting, but there was something about working in the dark in the middle of a ghostly study group that had found a way to calm his nerves. His canvases, old tarps from the basement stretched around the frames of the empty bookcases, were painted with a variety of old paint buckets he had found in the utility closets of the academic buildings. Most of his paint was white, but there were a few buckets of Morgenthau’s school colors, red and black, and the occasional light blue or cream.

He painted by candlelight, in a setting that looked more like a séance than an artist’s studio. When he held his palette in his good hand, his bad hand trembled as it dipped his brush into the paint. But Winston had learned to absorb the energies of the spirits around him. As he moved the brush towards the canvas, his wild jerks swirled into a high-speed, controlled vibration. He went from being as erratic as a weed whacker to being as precise as a tattoo needle in a matter of seconds. Occasionally, he could let loose the reigns and his uncontrolled strokes turned into stylized etchings, using his cursed hand’s spasms as a unique approach to his work.

In a past life, Winston had painted portraits, landscapes and murals. In the darkness with the ghosts of the library, he had harnessed his true talents, and the result was dark, primal, furious artistry that still maintained delicate form and intricate arrangements.

The prime example of Winston’s distinctive artistic style was the 10-foot by 6-foot portrait of Kendra that he painted in the days following her death. The piece a cathartic expression as much as it was a lesson in self-torture. In a fit of anger, Winston tore a nearly completed painting off his makeshift easel and covered the tarp with black paint, using up every drop, scraping out the final streaks with his own bare hands and filling in every white space on the cloth. He began screaming at the ghosts in the library to leave him alone so that he could concentrate. He threw books in their directions and spit whiskey through his candles, forming fireballs so bright and crisp that he swore he could see demonic faces in them. He challenged the specters to give him all that they had.

He told me a few months later that the experience was the scariest night of his life. Before then, he had kept an impersonal relationship with the ghosts, but after that night he had crossed the line into their world, and they were about as tired of him as he was tired of them.

The completed painting hung up in the mezzanine, in front of the library’s cathedral-like stained glass windows from the time he finished it until the day we wrapped The Professor’s body in the canvas and buried him. I was amazed that Winston was willing to part with the canvas. He had painted a dead-on perfect portrait of Kendra’s face and shoulders in clean strokes of white and off-white paint. The rest of the painting was a series of erratic strokes that pictured—among other things—the scene of her murder; the dark, menacing forest where she was found; the evil, guiltless fiends who had committed this act; and, according to Winston, the ghosts that tortured his psyche while his bad hand unconsciously composed his finest masterwork. It could have been in any art museum in the world, but instead it’s buried with the corpse of our departed friend and teacher.

I visited Winston one afternoon not too long after The Professor’s death and talked to him as he sketched out a new painting on a brand new canvas. The day suddenly turned into night and I began to realize that we were not alone in the room.

“I think I should leave,” I told Winston. “I don’t want to get really freaked out by your roommates,” I told him.

Winston continued painting and spoke in his typical monotone, “If it makes you feel any better, they’ve been here for about an hour already,” said the painter. I gulped. “Just keep looking at the painting,” he said calmly.

It was hard not to look around the room where I imagined that a dozen apparitions were standing in audience, watching Winston sketch out his next masterpiece.

“What do they want?” I asked, sheepishly.

“Well,” he said with a long, exhaling sigh, “They’re probably not very happy that you’re here, but then again, there is little that makes them happy.”

“What should I do?” I asked.

“Just keep focusing on the painting,” he repeated. “If you want to leave, you don’t have to make a big scene about it, you can just get up and leave. They’re not going to try to scare you if you act like you’re not afraid and that you don’t want to be bothered.”

“But you’re not afraid of them, and they still bother you,” I countered.

“Well, the big secret about me, kid, is that I’ve kind of become dependent on them. And they’ve kind of become dependent on me. It’s funny how life works like that sometimes. My parents were the same way. Fucking hated each other. But once they were separated for more than a few days they’d start crying uncontrollably. My mom only outlived my dad by two weeks. Fact of the matter is, they steady my hand, and I keep people afraid of them.”

“What happens if we’re no longer afraid of them?” I asked.

Winston turned around from his painting, with his eyes subtly glancing over my shoulder. “Well,” said the painter, “if you’re truly not afraid of them, turn around and see for yourself.” And with that, he picked up his palette and began laying down some smooth black lines and giving off the distinct impression that our conversation was over.

I slowly got my feet, clenched my fists, gathered a head of courage and turned around to find the dark room empty. No sounds of footsteps, no apparitions, nothing. I began thinking that perhaps it was all a point that Winston was making. Did the ghosts really exist or had Winston simply perpetuated the myth so long that people believed it? Were those footsteps really ghosts or just the sounds of an old, rickety building, or perhaps the unwelcome intrusion of one of the addicts from the woods? Had Winston invented this myth so that he could maintain the library’s cozy comforts all for himself? He was crazy enough to do it.

On my way out the door I thought Winston tapped me on the shoulder to tell me I’d forgotten something. I turned back and saw nobody standing there. I screamed like a girl and ran like hell.