The thing that Bill wasn’t prepared for was that each dorm at Union was known to have a select group of people in it. For example, Joe Gilliam Tower held all of the jocks. The other groups may not have had a whole dorm assigned to them but they could have a wing, or a floor, at the dorm. The “Brain Trust,” for example, was the group of nerds who lived on the first floor of “Breckinridge Hall.” These were the really smart guys who knew that they were going places in this world as soon as they left Union. Unfortunately, because they were so smart and their competitions were based on their GPAs, there was always a lot in fighting between them. Their leaders were the roommate duo of David Hunter and John Pelham and these two guys could not stop arguing with each other, mainly over trivial things. They acted more like a married couple than best friends. Somehow, the dorm director had decided that Bill should live in “Breckinridge Hall” on the floor where the outcasts lived. There were a wide variety in this warren of unusual people, so much so that Bill would privately refer to them as the “Fraternity of the Pitiful!”
Rich Taylor was the first person to greet Bill as he moved his things into the dorm. Bill had already spent the summer before college living with his peers at Camp Van Dorn, so he wasn’t too nervous about moving in with a bunch of strangers and he only brought the necessities with him to the dorm, which led Rich to comment on how few things Bill had brought with him and how easy it would be to move in. Rich Taylor was two years older than Bill and the best that could be said of him was that he was quirky. His first two years in working towards his undergraduate degree had been spent at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), but it was a bad fit because the strict discipline there disagreed with his free spirit lifestyle. For example, Rich was always losing important things and would often admonish himself by saying “I spend half of my days looking for my keys.” A psychologist may say that his propensity to lose things was a sign of rebellion of the strict military at VMI and of his parents domineering personalities. He left the military school after two years, transferred to Union in his junior year, and was hired as a resident assistant because he was mature for his age and had an outgoing personality. Rich was going to be a, ESL (English as Second Language) teacher and had been to Colombia in South America to volunteer to teach English during the previous summer. To the incoming students loading their things into the freshman dorm, Rich seemed seemed to be worldly. And yet, to prove that he was just like the other students, Rich would say the oddest things. For example, he was fond of quoting Mr. Rogers and old black and white movies that were rerun on the afternoon movies on television. When he had a few beers, he amused himself by burping and farting as loudly as possible. Needless to say, Rich wasn’t dating anyone but told the “Fraternity of the Pitiful” that if they ever got a chance to move to Colombia then they should do so because “the South American girls love white boys.”
Bill’s roommate for his freshman years was Don Buell, a proud working class boy whose father owned Buell Trucking Company in Knoxville. With a crackling wit and a boisterous personality, and whose brother taught part time in the English department, Buell could have easily become a big man on campus. What gained him entry into the “Fraternity of the Pitiful” was the fact that he had scars over half of his body from when he threw gasoline on the barbecue to get a fire started. A flame shot up through the stream of gas and exploded in the glass container that Buell was holding. Knowing that he should stop, drop, and roll to extinguish the flames, Buell's mistake was that he did this procedure on the carpeting, which is made of plastic. The carpet melted, stuck to his skin, and his body remained ravaged by the plastic that melted onto his skin. He should have died. Only through extensive physical therapy did Buell pull through and go on to lead a fairly normal life. In fact, when he had his shirt on, the only scars that you could see were on his neck so he could pass for being normal. However, when he came back from the shower, the grotesque scars could be seen everywhere on his body. He rarely talked about it but when he did, Buell’s eyes would tear up with the knowledge that he had caused his own deformity doing something stupid and would spend the rest of his life paying for a momentary lapse in judgement.
Buell was a good roommate but Bill’s suite-mates, with whom he had to share a bathroom, were not such a good match. Tom Jackson was one of the suite-mates. He was a “Gung Ho” marine who kept his hair cropped short and who looked like he had just stepped out of a recruiting poster. He paid his tuition with an ROTC scholarship so his post college career had already been assigned to him. Aside from his studies, Jackson’s past time was working on a newsletter which he sent to local businesses in the hopes that they would pay a subscription fee. It didn’t work but at least he tried to do something to distinguish himself. Jackson went on to graduate, served his time with the Marines, and was honorably discharged. He happily retired to Tampa Bay where he and the other jarheads whom were in his retirement community spent their days at the local dive bar.
Jackson’s room mate, and Bill’s other suite-mate, was Bobby Rhett and the two could not have been more different. While Jackson was uptight, driven, opinionated, and angry all of the time, Bobby was laid back and nothing seemed to bother him. For some reason there were a lot of Puerto Ricans at Union University and Bobby had become pretty good at mimicking their accent. He would yell across the cafeteria, "I want your sister!" It didn’t make any sense, and it was offensive, but Bobby was so good at the accent and his imitations were so perfect that his friends laughed anyway. The Puerto Ricans, who take the idea of family seriously, did not laugh. Bobby always took his joke too far and was on the lam for saying that he wanted to have sex with the sisters of some of the athletes in Joe Gilliam Tower. He earned his membership in the “Fraternity of the Pitiful” by barely leaving his dorm room because he was afraid of getting beat up by the jocks and Puerto Ricans who didn’t appreciate his weird sense of humor. Bobby dropped out after a semester and no one heard from him again.
Just down the hall was the room which held Simon Buckner and A.J. Smith. Simon was the true oddity of the “Fraternity of the Pitiful.” Tall and lanky, lacking in personal hygiene, and speaking with a high voice that always broke in mid-sentence, Simon dreamed of becoming a sportscaster. It was an impossibility for him because, although he loved sports, he had no background in athletics and a demeanor which no fan would find charming or masculine. When his friends kidded him about having an unusual name, Simon would just smile and say “my parents gave me that name for my birthday so I had to keep it.” It was his one good joke and he used it often. Simon never cracked open a book and spent most of his days sleeping or watching television, and he dropped out of Union after the first semester of his sophomore year. His roommate for his first year was A.J. Smith, a redneck from Monroe, Ohio. He liked to play his country music as loudly as possible and he could hold his liquor better than anyone that Bill had ever known. Further, A.J. was as big as a mountain and could physically challenge anyone at Union. He was a good man to have on your side and A.J. and Bill became close friends by spending a lot of evenings at the university center bar talking about girls and life, but mostly about girls.
Jim Stuart was the quiet and shy intellect. He played soccer in high school, tried boxing in college, but also enjoyed his beer. That last bit is important because it explains his friendship with David Porter, or Ports, who was a true alcoholic. Ports was almost always drunk and if he wasn't drunk then he was planning on how he could get drunk. He counted out his money in terms of how many six packs that he could buy. All of this drinking led to Ports leaving Union and returning to Knoxville to join an Alcoholic Anomynous group.
Ed Pickett was in the company of Ports because they both liked to drink.The difference was that Pickett was a mean drunk. Once, while in the park and waiting for a concert to begin, Pickett hit his girlfriend a couple of times on the back when she was play wrestling with him. If a guy does something like that them he could not be Bill’s friend. Also, while in a drunken stupor, Pickett stole a record player from the library and planned to sell it to get money to drink. Pickett was convicted of shooting a police officer and was sentenced to 49 years behind bars for attempted murder.
Rounding out the Fraternity of the Pitiful were Preston Brooks, Richard Ewell, and William Pendleton. Preston was a dwarf who didn’t have a room mate. He was studying to be a librarian, and whose past times included reading Tarot cards for his friends. Preston’s dorm room had to have some accommodations made so that he could do the daily grooming like using the sink, for example. Then came Richard Ewell and William Pendleton, the former was an anal retentive book worm and the latter a drunken druggie. They didn’t know each other before they enrolled at Union and were such an unlikely pair that they began to hate each other. Within a month both Ewell and Pendleton had requested a new room mate and they moved off of the wing.
It was a diverse group of teenage boys. However, no matter which group we were in, no matter how smart or slow, the subject that came up most was girls. Their testosterone levels were at their peek and they stank of hormones. Some guys played sports to relieve the tension, others buried themselves in their studies, still others drank to excess. It was late adolescence at its peek and they were all flush with adrenaline and frustration. Really, what a stupid time of life to throw young people together. It is a system designed for failure. They didn’t know who they were yet, had not grown up, and brains still developing. They thought that they were ready but they were not ready. The thoughts that occupied their brains the most were about sex; that fact didn’t change whether they were a cheerleader, athlete, or in the Fraternity of the Pitiful
To escape the Fraternity of the Pitiful, Bill spent a lot of time at the library. Convinced that he had ADD but was undiagnosed, he had to find ways to compensate for his limited attention span. For example, Bill sat in the middle of the big room in the library. The cacophony of all of the different voices meant that Bill could not focus on one conversation because they all drowned each other out. Also, by sitting where everyone could see him, he would shame himself if he fell asleep handy Sitting in the wide open, where everyone could see me, forced Bill to concentrate, and he put on big headphones to telegraph to everyone around him that he was not to be disturbed. This was when he learned to love classical music and jazz.
Dorm life was clearly not for Bill. All of the unusual personalities, and the confines of living in a small room with a complete stranger, did not work out well for him. After one year he decided to leave Union and go back to Knoxville where he attended community college. It was a fresh start so he decided not to drink and not go to any parties. The friends that he made were clearly not healthy people and it was time to get serious and leave behind the social experiment that was the Fraternity of the Pitiful. After a chaotic year, Bill felt a need to get some normalcy in his life, so he decided to go back to Camp Van Dorn for a second summer. It provided a respite for him; a place to retreat to in the summer months between the Union University experiment and before retreating to community college. Bill needed to spend some time trying to figure out who he was and where he was going and Camp Van Dorn provided a place to relax and regroup
