SharpNose's Journal: I Drove a Girl Crazy

Frustrated as I was by Elvira, I did on occasion set my sights elsewhere while I was in college. Sometimes, sights were actually set on me, but as you'll see, that wasn't necessarily good.

Desperate as I was, I was often looking for ways to draw attention to myself based on all these special abilities that I had. When I lived in the dorms, I would often drag my bass and a boom box that I could run the bass through to the little circle of wooden benches at the corner of the block my dorm was on and play along with songs. This probably mostly had the effect of making me an object of scorn, however, one girl did actually come up and talk to me. She was a smallish, mousy-looking girl named Cathy, and she typically wore fairly dumpy shirts with jeans and a denim jacket. Her oval wireframe glasses were tinted, making it difficult to see her eyes. She looked stoner-y, but in fact, she was the type of person we generally referred to as Jesus Freaks.

Every campus has them. Kids who are away from home for the first time will often glom onto anything that makes them feel good. If the indulgence of choice is food, well, that's where the phrase "the Freshman Ten" comes from - the ten pounds you put on by Christmas. If it's alcohol, you tend to not remember your weekends and your laundry throughput is more than most people's. However, campus Christian groups *really* put hooks into people, and Cathy was one just so hooked, it turned out.

I did get her number and we'd talk every once in a while, but one time there was going to be an ice cream social in the basement of C dorm, so I invited her. She was in G dorm, the mega-dorm immediately to the north, and I met her at the stairwell door that faced C dorm and walked her down.

Her behavior at the ice cream social was a bit odd. She seemed distracted and out of it. At one point, she appeared to be holding her ears, even though aside from people having lively conversation there wasn't anything louder than a boombox with Billy Joel playing.

After the social, Cathy just sort of vanished, and I couldn't figure out what happened to her.

Some weeks later, I got a letter in my campus mailbox from Cathy. She was at her folks' in upstate New York, and in the letter she described what happened.

Apparently she had gone to see a professor about a test score and whatever occured in that meeting was troubling enough for the professor to call the Dean of Women Students' office. Cathy was called into the office, and again, whatever happened *there*, she was taken away in an ambulance, to a psychiatric hospital. From which she escaped. And was caught again. And was sent home.

More ice cream?