Mr. Sunshine

Continuing the story of my academically unremarkable college career...

I sank further into depression my junior year of college. I moved off campus, living in a shitty duplex with previous RA Gary, my old school friend Jim, and a strange man named George, who was a janitorial supervisor at the college. George had some congenital condition, or combination of conditions, that made him look a bit like a chimpanzee with an oversized head. He wore Coke bottle glasses and was always going to the dentist because his teeth were rotting out of his head. George had absolutely no memory for names. I lived with him for eight months and he never stopped calling me “Boss.” He kept an arsenal of these informal appellations at the ready – Chief, Buddy, Pal, Guy, etc. – so that he was always ready to greet a roommate or co-worker. We used to joke about George being a serial killer, and he capitalized on this notion, often threatening to boil someone “in a vat of acid.” We found another place to live.

A clay sculpture I made of George in his favorite chair.

Gary was an uptight business major who once wrote an angry letter to the college newspaper protesting suggested nudity in a campus theatrical production, and while Jim was a good guy, he wasn’t exactly a barrel of monkeys. My old floormates Wade and Eric had signed up to be RAs for the year, and Chris had agreed to be Eric’s suitemate, so I was stuck living with Mr. Sternly Worded Letter and Cameron from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off.

That was the year that I made my first foray into politics. As with most of my endeavors, this was not so much a deliberate, well-thought-out endeavor as it was a half-assed, mostly facetious effort, driven by a last-minute whim. A guy named Peter something-or-other was running unopposed for senate president. He was currently serving as the treasurer, and everybody seemed to assume he was a shoo-in for the top job.

“This will not stand!” I hollered to the three other staffers who were still lolling about the offices of the college newspaper at 10pm on the night before the election. “This is America! You can’t have candidates for high office running unopposed!”

I decided that I would start a write-in campaign. I might not win, but at least I’d make Peter whatever-his-name-was work for his victory.

This was in 1990, before digital photography and sophisticated desktop publishing, so a fellow newspaper staffer and I used the office copy machine to make a hundred campaign posters with inane slogans like “The name you can trust” scrawled next to a grainy, virtually unrecognizable 500% magnification of my driver’s license photo. We ran all over campus, plastering these things on every wall next to every poster of Peter whosit.

Further diminishing my chances in this contest was the fact that I had at this point pretty much reached the apex of my assholishness. The student body was about 4,000 people, and as of the morning of the election maybe 8% had any idea who I was. Of those, probably half thought I was the biggest asshole on campus and would have voted against me if the other candidate had been Muammar Qaddafi. And of those few people who actually knew and liked me, probably 95% would have been terrified to have me in a position of authority. The odds of me winning this election, even if I had started campaigning weeks earlier, were virtually nil.

You’d be surprised how hard it is to pull off a definitive second place finish in a two man race under these circumstances. As if being virtually unknown, not well liked among the segment of the electorate who knew me, and not having my name on the ballot weren’t handicap enough, the current senate president went around tearing down my makeshift posters the morning of the election.

It was a rule, you see, that any signs put up on campus had to be approved by the senate. The president could tell they were unapproved because they didn’t bear the student senate seal. Of course, the student senate seal was kept in an unlocked desk about twenty feet from my campaign headquarters, and if I had known that she was going to be such a humorless bitch about my pathetic little campaign, I’d have gone to the trouble of forging senate approval. But like I said, I hadn’t really thought this through.

Undaunted, I got up well before noon that day and skipped two classes to campaign hard. I called everyone I knew to urge them to vote for me. Because I was clearly unfit for the office, my only hope for getting votes was to convince people that I had no chance of winning.

“It’s just for fun,” I’d say. “There’s no way I’m going to win. My name’s not even on the ballot. You have to write me in. I’ll be lucky to get 5% of the vote.”

I have to admit that it was a little demoralizing to realize just how frightened my friends were of the prospect of me holding political office. I had to basically guarantee them that the odds of me winning were statistically insignificant, and even then I could rarely get a firm commitment. The problem, I think, is a characteristic that very few people possess, which I call anti-charisma.

I had gotten to be such an insensitive jerk that it was difficult for people to fathom that I was as big of a jerk as I seemed. They assumed that there was something that they were missing; that deep down I must be alright because nobody could get away with being that much of an asshole all the time. The truth, of course, was that I really was that much of an asshole, and I could get away with it precisely because people didn’t realize that the asshole scale went that high. The lack of imagination of ordinary people is a prime enabler of assholishness.

My friends saw how I got away with being an asshole and were therefore skeptical of their fellow voters’ ability to appraise my assholishness. So even the people who might have voted for me out of pity tended to vote against me on principle, in case they were the only ones standing between me and political power.

With a lot of hard work and assurances that I wouldn’t take the job even if I were elected, which I wouldn’t be, I swear to God, I managed a pitiful second place finish, garnering around 4% of the vote – thanks mostly to historically low voter turnout. I think that was when I realized I probably wasn’t cut out for politics.

Things improved a bit my senior year. My dorm friends Eric, Wade, and Chris, having finished their RA duties, moved back in with me and Jim. After moving out of George’s duplex, we had moved into an older colonial style house not far from downtown. Gary got married and moved out. For the most part, I hung out with Wade and Chris. Eric and Jim were usually too busy with their schoolwork or jobs to play two-liter baseball or watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 with us. Eric, in particular, was not someone to waste time on such frivolities. Frankly, we were all a little frightened of Eric. To say that Eric was “tightly wound” doesn’t even begin to describe it. I once made the mistake of letting Eric drive me to campus when he was late for class. I don’t claim to be a particularly conservative driver, but I literally feared for my life that day. We lived a little more than three miles from campus, down a busy, urban road with a speed limit of 40 miles per hour. Somehow, swerving wildly around cars that seemed to be standing still, we made it in just under three minutes. It was like the freaking French Connection. I couldn’t imagine what Eric thought he was going to miss in the first five minutes of Fluid Dynamics that was risking both of our lives for.

Eric is the only person I ever knew who ate apples with salt. It was like he was looking for ways to increase his chance of having a heart attack. I remember one incident where a number of us were hanging out and talking in the living room while Eric tore up and down the stairs, trying to finish up some project while getting ready to go out with his girlfriend for the evening. It was exhausting just watching him, and we were relieved when he finally ran out the door, got in his Escort GT, and peeled out of the driveway. There was a moment of silence, and then I remarked, “I counted six.”

The others present looked at me quizzically, trying to figure out what I was talking about.

After another moment, I clarified, “Six different places that Eric was in at once.”

The room erupted in laughter. You couldn’t make jokes like that when Eric was around.

Jim was another story. Jim also took his schoolwork very seriously, but he wasn’t constantly redlining, like Eric. In fact, part of Jim’s problem was that he always seemed to be running at about half-speed. He was a smart guy, but he was slow and meticulous. As a result, he always seemed to be a bit overwhelmed. Wade, Chris and I took it upon ourselves to inject some fun into his life. Or at least to amuse ourselves at his expense. One time we wrapped his car’s hubcaps in aluminum foil. Another time, when he was trying to sleep, we crawled onto the roof and held in front of his window a large charcoal drawing (facetiously entitled “Mr. Sunshine”) that I had done in art class. I scratched on Jim’s screen until he came to the window, looked out, and saw this:

“Mr. Sunshine”

The best joke we ever played on Jim, however, involved a tub of water, a tape recorder, and a couple dozen plastic SCUBA divers. We had seen this bag of deep sea divers for $0.99 at the grocery store – and we had decided to enlist them in Operation Treasure Cove. We filled a plastic tub halfway with water, started up a tape recorder, and then spent a good twenty minutes splashing around in the water and calling to each other in horrendous British accents about Spanish galleons and sunken doubloons. We left the frogmen in the tub, rewound the tape to the beginning, and put both under Jim’s bed. We had left half an hour of silence at the beginning of the tape, and hit play as soon as Jim got home. It was late, and he went right to bed – only to be awoken a few minutes later by the sounds of splashing water and calls of “Jacques! I’ve found the treasure!”