You So Crazy

Who Crazy? University Housing or the students it's supposed to shelter and protect? The answer: Crazy!

BY BRANDON HARTLEY

The UO dorms are bad, bad, bad places to live. Ask anyone who lives there. While some residents will tattle on you to the RA at the first clink of a bottle overheard through your closed door, others will argue with their multiple personalities all night long and threaten to kill you. Pop quiz: Which scenario is more likely to elicit a response from Housing authorities? This article was first published February 18, 1999.

Life in the dorms is a lot like a prison movie: the guards don't give a damn whether you live or die, and at any second you're apt to get shanked by one of your fellow inmates. Despite a hefty list of safety policies and a legion of Junior Officers on constant patrol, dorm residents still feel unsafe. This is probably because every year, countless resident grievances are ignored, and policies often go unenforced by University Housing authorities. PRIDE Hall advocates insist the University's dorms have become so unsafe that there's an actual need to establish a separate dorm for LGBT residents. Yet their proposals have been consistently overlooked by University officials. Personally, if I'm stuck in the dorms again next year, I'm buying a shotgun. Here's why:

To some living in a certain Walton Complex dorm (left unnamed to protect the innocent), "Shitfaced Phil" was considered a maniac. To others he was merely a novelty to be laughed at from a safe distance. To all of us he has since become a legend, but as for myself personally, I consider that St. Ides-sucking lunatic to have been a direct punishment from God himself for a wasted life spent eating breakfast cereal and ogling models in those Emporium pull-out ads.

Shitfaced Phil had been ousted from a nearby study hall for several noise violations, before being relocated next door to me on a night back in November. After settling in and relaxing for a few seconds, Phil immediately began drinking heavily and talking to himself. As the night wore on, his booming voice grew louder and louder, eventually filling the entire dorm with obnoxious chuckling and drunken digression. Before finally passing out hours later, he could be overheard shouting questionable epithets in the hallway and threatening the lives of several inanimate objects. According to other witnesses, the highlight of the evening came when he tried to kick down the door to my room, evidently mistaking it for his own.

In the weeks leading up to winter break, Phil proved himself to be quite the little psychopath. Two or three nights a week, he would conduct incredibly loud conversations with himself that would often last into the wee hours of the morning and beyond. These conversations were not always conducted in the privacy of his room. Phil could often be seen wandering around campus arguing with himself. To make matters worse, Phil fancied himself a guitarist. On many a weekend, after getting properly soused, he would snatch his electric guitar, hook it up to an amp the size of a dune buggy, and perform tuneless renditions of Tom Petty songs for the listening pleasure of the entire dorm.

At first I found Shitfaced Phil's behavior to be amusing. Prior to his arrival, life around my dorm had been about as exciting as being trapped in a time warp on a houseboat in Astoria. Never before had anyone tried to kick down my door in a drunken rampage-I felt somehow honored. During the early weeks of his stay in the dorm, I even defended him against a bum rap in an angry e-mail to M. David Bayless, Resident Director of the Walton Complex. What can I say, Phil really knew how lighten a place up.

But after a month or so of sleepless nights, the novelty eventually wore off. Living next to this nut had slowly become a nightmare, somewhat akin to sharing property lines with a never-ending Ecuadorian freak show. Phil happily began transforming my own comfortably narcoleptic and antisocial lifestyle into a living hell. No matter how far up I cranked up the volume on my TV, the sound of his voice could easily overpower Homer Simpson's.

Having been brainwashed, at age 13, by Al Pacino's "Scent of a Woman" rant against snitching, I stubbornly refused to complain to the dorm's RA about Phil's twisted behavior. But even if I had consulted the her, my input would have been unlikely to conjure up much action from the RA or Housing authorities. In the three months that Shitfaced Phil lived in the dorm, numerous residents contacted assorted UH authorities, only to have their complaints ignored. Adding insult to injury, Phil lived directly across the hall from the RA herself. Unfortunately, she was unwilling to go on the record to explain her remarkable ability to overlook Phil's continuous disregard of the Student Conduct Code.

Phil's stay in the dorm was laden with blatant outrages, yet UH authorities did almost nothing to control his behavior. For example, since his tirades could heard even on the third floor of the dorm, residents upstairs would usually turn up the volume on their stereos or televisions in an attempt to tune him out. When Student Patrol Officers made their nightly rounds, who was politely asked to quiet down? The poor kids upstairs, of course. Why? Probably because these apathetic Junior Officers had neither the desire, nor the appropriate weapons, to successfully intimidate a maniac with a case of Henry's flopping around in his gullet.

Slowly but surely, UH authorities began to realize their blunder in allowing Shitfaced Phil to live in the dorms for so long. Sometime during the first couple of weeks of winter term, he was finally placed on suspended eviction, which in layman's terms translates as "one more fuck-up and we're kickin' yer ass outta here." This warning of course did nothing to put a damper on his behavior. Instead, it got worse.

It was around 2:00am on the Friday leading up to MLK weekend, when Phil returned home from a night of bar hopping. I was sitting next door, struggling to finish a term paper, when he began discussing several highlights of his evening with his imaginary friend(s). As usual, he could be heard all the way upstairs, and someone on the third floor stuck his head out of a window, and told him in no uncertain terms to shut up. Not knowing where this sudden burst of criticism had emerged from, Phil assumed that I must have been the culprit. He immediately whipped himself into a frenzy and began pounding on the wall separating our two rooms, screaming about how he was going to, "fucking kill [me]."

I ignored his threats, put on a pair of headphones, readying a high-powered water gun and a golf club just in case he was in the mood to put his words into action. If things had come to blows, I'm sure Phil could have easily overpowered my Super Soaker, disemboweled me, and eaten my entrails. Fortunately, for my sake, he mistook me for a door. After a brief battle, the door stood victorious as Phil fled off into the night with a pair of bloody knuckles and an aching foot.

The next day Phil was notified that he had been evicted. Blaming complications due to the three-day weekend and a lack of sufficient evidence to warrant a quicker eviction, Bayless didn't bother recommending a 24-hour eviction to Michael Eyster, Director of University Housing. He instead gave Phil until the following Tuesday to move out. With nothing to lose, Phil announced loudly in the hallway that he was going to get even. Fearing for my own safety, I cast off my principles, scrawled a quick note to the RA, and fled. Despite my note claiming that Phil had threatened me physically, Bayless stuck with the Tuesday eviction date.

I spent the weekend at a friend's apartment. Over the following few days, reports trickled back to me, via word of mouth, about Phil's epic three-day battle with UH authorities. Witnesses claim that he spent the long weekend barging into other residents' rooms, and parading around in front of the open windows in cherub underwear with a 40 of St. Ides in hand. When Bayless arrived at his room to discuss his eviction, neighbors say Phil barricaded his door and refused to speak with him. In an attempt to keep Phil quiet over the weekend, authorities confiscated his guitar. Undaunted, he simply went out and purchased another one.

Bayless and Michael Eyster were unwilling to speak with me on the specifics of the chaos Phil created, but were more than happy to discuss UH policies. Both stated that their department strictly enforces evictions. If an evicted resident misses a 12:00 noon deadline for moving out and turning in the keys, Bayless claims, "I am at their door at 12:01 with a locksmith." Phil was supposed to have moved out of his room by an unspecified time on that Tuesday. However, when a janitor came to clean out his room on Wednesday at noon, Phil was still sitting in his room with his keys. After the janitor argued with him for a few minutes, Phil finally agreed to walk to the area desk and turn in his keys.

Shitfaced Phil had no business being allowed to live in the dorms for as long as he did. He was a dangerous guy with a head full of problems. Rather than deal with the trouble he caused in a professional manner, UH authorities instead opted to ignore his bizarre behavior and the complaints of their sane residents. At one point, a janitor had to do their job for them. They allowed a man who was a danger to both himself and others, a man who drove me personally out of my own home, to run amok for three months.

Both University Housing and the UO are quickly earning themselves a nasty reputation. Neither seem to be all that concerned about the safety of dorm residents. LGBT students have had their grievances ignored, and authorities refused to lift a finger when a drunken schizophrenic threatened to kill me. God knows what else the bastards have gotten away with. Left to their own devices, UH authorities won't do a damn thing to protect their residents, even if the problem is living directly across the hall from them. They'd much rather spend their time busting the stoners down the hall for burning incense.

Brandon Hartley, a junior majoring in English, didn't want to be Associate Editor for the Oregon Commentator anyway