He was put to the test one desperate day when, in the dining-room, he wheeled around a corner, tray in hand, only to confront The Most Beautiful Woman in Radcliffe (this is what everyone calls her--her family name has long since been discarded). The shock of being within three feet of The Most Beautiful Woman in Radcliffe was too much for my roommate, and his tray came clattering down, gracefully allowing the day's lunch to take up residence on his penny-loafers.
Thou Shalt Never Lose Thine Cool. With a resolve that Evil Knievel would admire, my roommate ran to our table, grabbed another tray, and threw it down at his feet. Not content with this, he took two trays--full of food, mind you--out of the arms of passers-by, and happily let them drop on the now newly-decorated floor.
The Most Beautiful Woman in Radcliffe looked confused, smiled weakly and passed on. I pulled my roommate aside. 'Don't you see," he panted, "I had to show her that I wasn't just another clumsy clod, that I dropped the tray on purpose." This story is told with a note of caution: readers should not attempt to emulate my roommate, as there are not that many trays of food in each dining-room, and there are fewer Most Beautiful Women in Radcliffe.
The most dangerous intersection in Cambridge is not the Harvard Sq. vortex, but the corners of Mt. Auburn and Boylston Sts., where I have suffered through my most humiliating moments. It is there that a decaying drunk collapsed on me as he wheeled out of the Rix drugstore, sending us both crashing to the pavement. As I stood him up, he swooped down again, once again taking me with him. I finally propped him up against the wall--he may be there, still.
At that intersection, I romantically dallied with a girlfriend in the small park outside of Grendel's. The magic of that summer moment was somewhat dimmed, however, when we spied a businessman urinating in the bushes not five feet away.
Finally, my memories of that street-corner are certainly colored by the time when, enroute to a party with a case of beer (bottles, of course), I tripped on the curb and shattered 288 ounces of Budweiser all over Mt. Auburn Street. Unlike my roommate, I did not immediately purchase another case and repeat the motion.
One of my few friends on the football team, actually, was a guy named Barry. Junior year, he thought that he'd fulfill his patriotic duty by giving blood, for the Red Cross. So Barry plodded over to Memorial Hall, filled out his forms, sat in line, and assumed the old horizontal position for 20 minutes, as he lost a pint of blood. When he got up to leave, one of those octogenarian ladies who were born solely to serve at blood-drive centers came over to escort him to the congratulatory cookies-and-soda table.
Barry started to walk over, and Barry--this huge Neanderthalish supreme physical speciman of a man--can you guess what Barry did, on the walk over, minus that pint of blood? No, that's not what happened. What did happen was that he leaned too hard on the arm of the little old lady, who promptly collapsed under his weight. They had to pick her up and bring some real nurse over to take care of her and that's the truth.