College Life

My Smoke's Waltz

by Ray Hedrick, SUNY Cortland, November 29, 2007

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The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
--Marcel Proust

If Prometheus gave us fire, then I’d like to thank him.

I can still envision the smoke that billowed into my window that morning. She grabbed me by the wrists. Her breath was paralyzing, but I held on for dear life. Whirling around me, she moved frenetically. I lost a sense of where I was. Such waltzing was not easy.

“It’s a shame, Michael” I said while fatuously looking away from my younger brother with my chin high in the air.

“What is?” He was noticeably annoyed.

Sitting up in my chair I said, “I just wanted to give you my old iPod.”

“I’ll take it…” he started. “Wait. Why is it a shame?”

“It’s a shame that it’s the older version. I’m willing to guess that you don’t even want this one.”

Little bro stood up as if to walk away. He’d had enough.

With one last pause, he turned and faced me. A look of hope flickered upon his face. He had enough patience for one more question. “Is it broken or something?”

A grin enshrouded my face, from forehead to chin. “Well, the wheel sticks a little. It’s usable, I guess. But there’s no way you would want to have this old thing, right?”

Michael’s 6’1”, 235 pound frame left the room; his head shaking.

He could walk away from me; it didn’t matter. I was doing him a favor. That very morning, while doing one of many inventories for college, I had found that old iPod. He didn’t realize that it was perfect for testing him. He almost failed. He was younger than me and didn’t understand what I was doing for him.

But now, I had to make sure that I had all of my personal properties; I wanted to count my accouterments. It was almost time to head back to Cortland.

. . .

It was the first week of school, and my roommates and I were watching the blazing bright light from our drafty living-room window. We didn’t know what the building was, but we knew that it wouldn’t last against the fire that was slowly consuming it. Dark, dark smoke penetrated the brick walls. The building must have been a couple miles away, but we could see the fire clearly.

“There are a lot of fires in Cortland, aren’t there?” my roommate Justin said.

. . .

Months into my senior year at Cortland, I was still in awe of my prized possessions. I often lounged in my bedroom staring at my alluring American Fat-Stratocaster guitar perched next to my Mesa Boogie tube amplifier. Their looks were paralyzing. My snowboard hung ceremoniously from the wall, displaying its $500 bindings. It was breathtaking. My entire DVD collection stood alphabetically and upright on a fine pine shelf next to my massive collection of creaseless books. (These were my books for show; I had others for reading.) Sometimes I even exaggerated to my friends about the cost of my valuables. I was an English major; I knew much about hyperbole.

Before I went to bed on April 10th, 2006, I called my girlfriend and wished her goodnight. I set the alarm on my brand new RAZR cell-phone, although I didn’t have to be up particularly early. I usually wake-up at around 8AM anyway; I have some sort of mental clock.

A faint, almost inarticulate purr played contrapuntal to the sound of my series of newly-awakened yawns. I glanced at my new-fangled alarm clock but didn’t catch the time. I got up and staggered drowsily into the kitchen for my early morning cup of coffee. The ill-defined buzz was still lurking about. It didn’t take long for me to identify the sound as some sort of emergency alarm. It was low-pitched enough for me to brush it off as coming from the building perpendicular from us. Still, I needed a second opinion.

It was always an arduous task to wake up any of my housemates, especially Eddie. This morning, though, all it took was a simple knock on the door. He climbed down from his self-concocted bunk bed with his eyes seemingly shut.

“What’s up, dude?” he mumbled. “It’s like really early in the morning, bro.”

“I know, man, but I keep hearing this sound. I think it’s our fire alarm” I proclaimed.

His eyes opened, “Don’t worry about it. Go back to sleep. It’s probably just some fuckin’ idiot who doesn’t know how to cook.”

Without another word, Eddie escalated back into his make-shift bed. I didn’t know who would be cooking this early, but I really didn’t know what time it was either. Maybe it was bacon grease. Eddie was right, I decided. I blamed the annoying sound on a culinary disaster and headed back to bed.

As soon as I got back to my room, she looked me right in the eye. The contents of the room faded. Her long black hair consumed me. I felt trapped. She was ubiquitous.

At that very moment, the alarm in our building kicked-on. Smoke was still in my room but she let me go. I snapped out of my daze and immediately dashed toward Eddie’s room, pounding on Pat’s and Justin’s doors en route.

Eddie thought I was being overly frantic when I told him about the smoke billowing into my room erratically, forcing me into a paralytic stupor. After he fixed himself a tall glass of pulp-free Tropicana, he agreed to come outside with the rest of us. I grabbed my bag so I could do some work outside while we waited for what I thought was going to be fifteen minutes or so.

From the outside, the building looked strong: the commanding red bricks stayed bright against the dark pockets of black smoke; the windows remained clear enough to see that we had left our bathroom door open; the black-shingled roof seemed to be winning the fiery battle. We joked about the situation at first. However, the horseplay lessened after each hour crawled by. When it was suggested that we call our parents, the reality started to set in. Like cattle, well-dressed police officers and dusty firefighters herded us to the YMCA across the street where we would be able to “hang-out” until everything was “taken care of.” I envisioned high-powered blasts of H2O entering the orifices on my electronic devices.

My girlfriend ran downtown from campus, skipping her first class of the semester. She was genuinely worried about me, as I could see the nervousness in her ocean-blue eyes. I assured her that everything was going to be fine, that we would be watching a movie in my living room later that night. Deep down I knew that wasn’t the case, as I could still smell the wretched mix of ash and hot tar. Then, a short, bald-headed man (who must have been a passer-by) yelled from the street:

“Half of the building just fell. The entire structure of the brick Clocktower Building was wooden… who knew!”

I gasped for a breath of air. The crowd of stunned residents rushed outside the Y to see the spectacle. I didn’t know what to think. At that point, I was searching for something, but I didn’t know what it was or where I would find it. At that point, I realized that my apartment had detached itself from the building; our bathroom door was now riding a wave of bricks towards my ’99 Civic. At that point, I heard another ambiguous ringing sound but didn’t recognize what it was. At that point, I identified the sound and then answered the cell-phone that was stashed away in the pocket of my book bag. It was right after that point that I recognized my brother’s deep voice. He needed to know that I was alive and well.

The phone call lasted only a couple of minutes, but it was that moment crossed with the company of my girlfriend and the surreal scene across the street that made me realize there are more important things in life than high-end snowboard-bindings. Later that day, my parents drove almost five hours one-way to get my brother and meet me in Cortland. They wanted to make sure my housemates and I were safe.

At Applebee’s that night, my brother offered to give me my old iPod back. I grinned.

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