EPISODE 2: Lamont, feeling woeful and dismayed

Fiction, by Joe Selmont

As I laid face down on one of the couches in the Student Union with my headphones blasting some Ray Charles at top volume (“Georgia, Georgia, no peace, no peace I find!”), I tenderly rubbed my temples in a counterclockwise motion. Holy cannoli, thought I, life just refuses to get better.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Lamont Harpe. I attend classes at UAA, I work at UAA, I live at UAA, and have done so for four years now. God willing, I’ll graduate by the end of this year with a degree in French lit. I guess I’ll pick up from where I left off last time, which was at the end of a strenuous day. This last Friday I moved back into the dorms after couch hopping all summer, and the short version of the story goes something like this: it sucked, a lot. But at least I was through the worst of it – or so I thought.

Lamont, bereft. (Illustration by Ted Kincaid)

The master of unpreparedness that I am, I knew I would have to spend the rest of the weekend racing around in a last ditch effort to throw together everything I needed for the upcoming semester. Plus I was working a booth for my job at Campus Kickoff, so getting anything done on Saturday was out of the question. In the end, Kickoff turned out awesome, so the delay was worth it. In fact, looking back, it was the only positive note in an otherwise catastrophic weekend. There was improv comedy by Horatio Sanz AND the new action flick The Avengers! Then some lucky sons of guns won Alaska Airline tickets. I would have killed for one of those, but, alas, I didn’t win. Nor did I have much in terms of money, making it impossible to purchase all the stuff I needed to survive the semester. And the list of “stuff I needed” was growing needlessly long as summer came to a close.



One such item on this needlessly long list was bedding. You must be wondering what sort of person doesn’t own bedding. Well, I sort of destroyed it all – pillows, blanket, even my sleeping bag – when I accidentally lit my tent on fire a couple weeks earlier. After helping me move into the dorms, my mom was generous enough to lend me the half-sized blanket her dogs usually sleep on, so I fell asleep cold and woke up smelling like a golden retriever. Moral of the story: build your tent upwind.

Thankfully at the Fred Meyer Night, which directly followed Kickoff, I got a super deal on a brand new bed set. Let me tell you, on Saturday night I slept like a baby swaddled in 3,000 thread count Egyptian cotton. Ah, what glorious sleep it was! Too glorious, actually, because I slept right through my alarm and right through the hustle and bustle of morning and didn’t wake up until late on Sunday afternoon. By the time I arose there was no way I could sort out my financial aid and, since I spent my last $20 on bedding, I couldn’t buy books from the Campus Bookstore, so I figured I might as well meet the new roommates. A reasonable, sensible, mature course of action in this situation, right? Wrong. Enter catastrophe number two of the weekend.

My first roommate encounter was with Brian. I walked in my pajama pants out into the common area only to find this tall, handsome dude crazily making out with a tall, beautiful woman. They were pretty into it. It was kind of disturbing, honestly. And, in my opinion, he was using way too much tongue – kind of like my mom’s golden retriever when she gets stoked to see people – but instead of instructing the guy on proper kissing technique, I cleared my throat a couple times then said, “Hey.”

Slowly apprehending my presence, the guy said, “Oh, uh, hey, man. You my roommate? I’m Brian.” Then glancing over to the woman on the couch next to him, he hurriedly added, “And this is Tifa. She’s my, um, friend.”

“Hi,” she said, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her sweater.

 “Hey,” I said. We all stared at the bare, white wall for a minute, avoiding eye contact, then I said, “I’m Lamont. I’ll let you get back to it. Later."

Barricading myself in my room and pulling Etta James up on my iPod, I turned her sweet voice as loud as it would go and sank into a dark humor (as Jane Austen would put it). If there was one thing I didn’t need, it was a reminder of my complete and utter singleness. Trust me, I was well aware of my pitiful relationship status. It’s not that I’m an unattractive, unfunny, or unintelligent man. As far as I know, I’m not un-anything. It’s really quite frustrating. I floundered in these thoughts and others for awhile, desperately grasping for a way to blame Brian and all others like him for my lack of game. Unfortunately, I couldn’t devise anything remotely resembling a sane case against Brian et al, so after a couple of soothing tunes I collected my wayward emotions and decided to go for a stroll. I yanked on some proper clothes, grabbed my headphones, and walked out the door, trying not to notice Brian and Tifa, who were right back at it.

Several albums and a couple circles around campus later, I found myself where you met me, lying on a couch facedown in the SU, grappling with oh so many woes, the sum of which equal my life. Poor + Single + French Literature = Lamont Harpe’s Woeful Existence. How could I even begin to reconcile my grand expectations with this lame reality? And then like a bullet I was hit by an extraneous but equally dismaying thought: classes start tomorrow, and I have no books, no supplies, and no food… but at least I have a blanket. 
 -----------
Did you miss Episode 1: 'Lamont Harpe crash-lands back in the Dorms'