Franklin Pierce University, Rindge, N.H

We new arrivals live in three massive concrete, four story blockhouses. Our rooms are plain and square like the cells of Benedictine Monks, the gloomy whitewashed corridors linking them echo with every footfall and as you walk along them you get glimpses, through open doors, of the mass of humanity stuck together here. However seemingly depressing our building seems though, it is also alive. I read somewhere that those giant jellyfish that wash up along the shore, the Portuguese Men of War, are a collection of a myriad of smaller organisms and that is very much like our dormitory block. The mere presence of so many souls in such close confines makes it almost a living, breathing thing rather than a building.

Outside the buildings dozens sit on rigid benches in a concrete yard, drunk, high or bored, seeking respite from piling papers and impending exams. I sit, the collar of my heavy pea-coat pulled up high, and watch them with my one black eye from rugby. It is always the same characters, I realised early on, that lounge there, smoking cigarettes late into the night and looking up blearily as strangers walk by on their way to upper-class housing. Many of them are my friends.

There is the rugby team, of which I am one, sitting often in a small huddle as if we havn’t quite got used to not being in a scrum. Cool Ethan, a 6.6 stick insect of a man talks to Gay Chris, who wears a hat that was once some sort of furry animal, possibly road-kill. Tavis looks on with his new drunken-rampage induced Mohawk as little Mark slips in and out of the conversation with his one bloodshot eye, returning from womanizing in the girls dorm. Occasionally little Carlo bumps into us, his nickname now Borat, his head filled with crazy dreams of professional wrestling after college. We sincerely hope that the little chap is not crushed to death on the rugby pitch.

There is Bogey Dave, who looks like a native American with his long black hair and dark complexion, smoking on his ever-present cigarette and surrounded by his gang of giggling stoners. One wears a T-shirt with “Cigarettes for $5” scrawled across the front in pen and another smiles with glassed eyes.

There is Ben Moss in his suit jacket and bright orange baseball hat, watching Cameron and another try to chug a pint of milk within an hour and laughing when they fail and vomit. Next to Moss is little Lauren, or drunk-ass, with her huge fringe and huge eyes, “like a racoon’s” she says. She moves like a bumper car at the fete, bouncing from conversation to conversation as Asian Mike with his ever-present grin tunes up his guitar and sings a song about me fighting dragons.

There are many more, that fall into one clique or another. Roid-raging Jocks on the baseball time, geeks in trench coats with fake swords, my mate big Mark who talks like Eeyore and rides a bike with no brakes round and round the litter bins. L. and her friend, both in pink slippers who are suposingly easy, a Venezuelan who’s name I never remember and who speaks to me in Spanish, Kevin in is pea-coat and watch-cap.
This is how I will remember where I now live. Like most dorms, it might be a ugly, hulking building but inside it lives a group of villainous, lovely and wild people, kids learning lessons of love and life, becoming adults through trial and error as I look on, remembering when I was one of them.