conversations from a college graduation

My cousin (let’s call him Gonzalo) got his B.A. in philosophy last weekend from the University of Colorado in Boulder. Assuming, of course, that he passed that last final...

“Man, existentialism, that threw me for a loop,” Gonzalo says. “I mean, our other classes we learned if A then B or C, or how to defeat different arguments.”

“You mean like logic?” I ask.

“No, not that. I almost failed logic.” He sighs. “But for existentialism we had to read like novels and shit. Like The Stranger and Camus and man it was hard. They don’t believe in anything.”

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Gonzalo has three roommates. One of them used to have a pet snake…

“I really wanted a dog,” the roommate who used to be an amateur stuntman before giving it up to study architecture and tai chi and the best way to cook marijuana so that he could inhale vapors rather than actually smoke, explains over post-ceremony celebratory drinks, “but we couldn’t have one in the apartment.”

“So you got a snake?”

“Yeah, Lucy. A python.” He looks wistfully into the ice remaining in his glass. “She died of constipation.”

“How do you know that?”

“I got a snake book after that. I think I should have taken her to the snake vet.”

“But how do you know it was constipation that killed her?”

“Oh, you know.”

“How?”

He smiles. “When we’d feed her a mouse, you would see this bubble where she ate it. It would move down her. But that last time, the bubble just sat there at the end, and then she wouldn’t eat anything, and then she turned different colors and just died.”

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Gonzalo’s apartment had a small problem with doors…

“What’s the deal with your doors?” my other cousin, let’s call him F, asks Gonzalo one night as we wait for the restaurant to clear us a table. F, although 10+ years past his own college experience, is braving three nights on the sofa in Gonzalo’s living room.

“What deal?” Gonzalo asks.

“So picture this,” F says. “It’s 3 AM and after a night out, I have to pee really bad. I get up and start pushing on the door. But it just won’t open. I push and push but it’s stuck on the carpet or something. It’s like the door doesn’t fit the frame.”

“Oh,” Gonzalo nods. “That’s because it’s my closet door.”

We all stare at him. “What happened to the other door?” F asks.

“You don’t want to know.”

“All the doors got destroyed,” one of Gonzalo’s friends who doesn’t actually live in the apartment chimes in.

Gonzalo nods. “Yeah, at one point we had no doors.”

“What happened?”

Apparently one by one they were damaged, Gonzalo and his friends tell us, interrupting each other in turns with the details: one roommate punched through the first door. Another seems to have hurled himself through another door. I’m confused. We’re all confused. But what is clear is that at one point they had no doors for the entrances to any of the rooms and then they reallocated from the closets, hence the poor fit.

“So tell me this,” F says. “Do you guys ever lock that front door?”

Gonzalo shakes his head. “We’re lucky that thing has a handle.”

The original handle fell off, he says, as if that’s some kind of explanation. And until one of the roommates finally got around to going to Home Depot to replace it, “We just used a paper towel.”


*****************************
Hygiene seems to be a problem in Gonzalo’s apartment. The carpets, in particular, are crunchy with the crumbs of old food, and some kind of indeterminate crust….

“Do you guys ever vacuum?”

“Sometimes we let the neighbor’s dog come in and she licks the carpet,” Gonzalo says. “She loves it. Just lick, lick, lick. She eats anything.”

*****************************
And then there was the sewage backup…

“Do you mean the first sewage backup, or the second?” Gonzalo asks.

“There were two?”

“Oh yeah. It was disgusting. There was a layer a couple of inches deep over everything. Shit was coming out of the shower and everywhere, even.”

“Did they replace the carpets?”

“No just the pads.” He smiles. “Plus steam cleaning.”

He takes another sip of his mojito without noting the irony: it took a sewage backup to actually get the carpets clean.