Happy Inappropriate Card Day

Continuing the story of my unremarkable college career...

I continued to do occasional temporary jobs after being sued for stealing an old woman’s boots, albeit with a renewed sense of caution. The absolute best temporary work was ushering at on-campus events. The college had a regular staff of ushers, but occasionally they would host an event that required more ushers than they had on staff. Being an usher also granted you free admission. One day my floormates and I got to see the Harlem Globetrotters perform.

One of the biggest events of the year at Calvin was when we played nearby Hope College in basketball. Calvin and Hope are the official colleges of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) and Reformed Church in America (RCA), respectively. Both denominations are offshoots of the Netherlands Reformed Church, a fact that you wouldn’t think has much to do with basketball. The salient fact here is that the Dutch are, as a nation, the tallest people on earth. This fact explains in part why Hope and Calvin have historically been basketball powerhouses.

So when the Calvin/Hope game approached, and the events manager called the job service for additional ushers, I once again reserved a spot for myself. This turned out to be a momentous decision in my life.

I was assigned to take tickets at one of the main doors, along with a pretty, blond freshman named Julia. Julia and I traded quotes from the Saturday Night Live 15^th anniversary special that had aired a few months earlier (“That boulder is too large. I could lift a smaller one.”), and by the end of the night I was smitten. I asked Julia what she was doing after the game. “Going home,” she replied curtly.

Fortunately, I wasn’t about to let a little thing like being brutally shot down deter me. I stopped by Julia’s dorm room several times over the next couple of weeks and eventually got up the courage to ask her out again. She said yes. Our first date ended up being a few days before Valentine’s Day, which put me in an awkward position. I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for Valentine’s Day when you’ve only gone on a single date with a girl. I didn’t want to scare her away by buying her roses, but I didn’t want her to think I was a cheap, callous bastard either. I ended up skipping Valentine’s Day, but then, a few weeks later, slipping a “Happy Birthday, Grandson” card under her door. Inside the card I wrote, “Happy Inappropriate Card Day!” We continued to celebrate Inappropriate Card Day every year for the duration of our marriage.

Julia found my quirkiness endearing, but the girls she lived with did not. Her suitemate in particular, a girl named Laura, despised me. Laura was a humorless, ax-faced harpy who had the good fortune to attend high school during the 1980s, when a girl could distract people from her face by applying a 3/8” sheet of makeup and teasing her hair to roughly eighty times its natural volume. By 1990, big hair and clown makeup was on its way out, but Laura hadn’t gotten the memo. I once asked her how much taller she was after she did her hair. She didn’t think it was funny.

The upshot of this is that a few months after we had started dating, Julia’s roommate and suitemate convinced her that I was no good for her, and she broke up with me. I was devastated. A few weeks after that, she went home to California for the summer. Fortunately for me, that summer afforded many opportunities for distraction. Eric, having finished his RA duties, moved in with us, and both Chris and Wade lived nearby. We discovered a park with a Frisbee golf course about a quarter mile from our house, which became our primary source of entertainment. House rules required that we use a lightweight ten inch Frisbee, which put us at a disadvantage compared to other players, but we played so often that by the end of the summer we were routinely scoring twenty throws under par. We spent more time playing Frisbee golf that summer than any other single activity besides sleeping.

Wade and I also started lifting weights that year. I had grown a few inches since high school, but I was still almost frighteningly skinny. As a sophomore, I was six foot two and a hundred and forty pounds. You could have used me to illustrate the location of all the organs of the human body – other than muscles, that is. We worked out religiously and over the next year I put on close to 20 pounds. I was still skinny, but I looked and felt healthier, which made me more confident and less self-conscious.

That was also the summer that Wade decided we should buy a house. Wade was a business major and a born wheeler-and-dealer. He had recently bought a used Porsche 944 with money that he had made selling baseball cards. He had come to the conclusion that paying rent was for suckers and that he was going to be on the other side of the sucker equation from now on. He selected me and another friend of his, Brent, to be his partners in this venture. The idea was that we would buy an inexpensive house and move into it, along with our other roommates, charging them enough in rent to cover our house payments. Brent and I didn’t really add any value to this partnership; Wade could just as well have bought a house on his own. I guess he was just more comfortable sharing the risk with a couple of friends.

You’re probably wondering how a kid with less than a hundred dollars to his name managed to buy a house. Well, buying a house in 1992 was easier than you would think, especially in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And especially if you didn’t mind bending the rules a bit.

We found a nice older house near downtown whose second story had been converted to a separate apartment. Three female friends of ours were still living in the other side of George’s duplex, and it wasn’t difficult to convince them to agree to move into the upstairs apartment. We got the rest of our roommates – Jim, Eric and Chris – to agree to move with us into the main house. We made a lowball offer on the house, which was accepted. Having qualified for an FHA loan, we then had to come up with $1500 in cash. This is the part that’s a little shady: we asked for first month’s rent and a security deposit from all of our prospective tenants, and then used that money as our down payment. Technically you’re not allowed to spend a tenant’s security deposit, and as a rule of thumb you’re supposed to own the building before you make them pay rent on it. Fortunately, Wade had the foresight to select as business partners those in our group who were likely to point this out, and to select as tenants the responsible ones with more important things to worry about. Technically, the three owners were supposed to be paying “rent” as well, and that money would go into our business account to pay for repairs, improvements, etc., but I was constantly behind on my obligations. Despite this, this first experiment in landlording went so well that, three months into it, we decided to buy another house.

To be continued…