The Fire Sale
My freshman roommates at 1731 Silliman College showed no interest whatsoever in studying. The living room was a party room as far as they were concerned and drinking was the main item on the party menu. I moved all of my work over to the double across the quad and spent hours there, sometimes overnight. I’d come back and try to avoid the raucous goings-on in the living room.
Late one Saturday night in April, walking into the Silliman quadrangle after working at the Dramat, I smelled smoke. Someone was burning trash, I thought. The smell was particularly strong in our entryway and really strong in our living room. It turned out that the roommates had set a fire in the fireplace and, being sufficiently drunk, were breaking up the furniture and throwing pieces into the fire as well. Then they had put Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” on the record player and turned the volume up to the maximum. They certainly had a roaring fire going. When the Yale campus police arrived, the lot of them were hauled off to whatever place the Yale police had for stowing drunken undergraduates.
Justice was swift at Yale. All four of them were instantly expelled. The next day when I was in what was left of the living room, the four of them appeared and started calling their fathers. These drunken bullies were crying to their dads, snuffling about how, individually, it wasn’t their fault, it was somebody else’s fault. The dads weren’t buying it. One roommate’s dad was especially irate; as the roommate said afterwards, his father shouted over the phone, “Not a dime, not one cent, get a job!”
Thus it was that this roommate’s MGA was for sale. It was a true fire sale. I called my father who sent me $1,500, and on April 24 I paid one expelled roommate $1,430 for his sweet little British sports car.