www.gibberish.com/tales/101296.html
Another unverifiable campus story is that of the Rockefeller suite. I can't verify it, anyway, and it exists for me only in a kind of legendary way. It's said that there are these suites for freshmen which are quite luxurious by campus standards. Most freshmen share a room with one other person and use the hall bathroom; There are also reportedly quite a lot of rooms in Main Building that have their own bathrooms. I passed by what I think was one of these rooms recently when I was going to a friend's room in Main for a meeting. There was a chunk of empty wall space with no doors that looked too big for one room, and the fire-route maps posted at the end of the hall indicated a room that looked like a bathroom but had no door leading to the hall. The door to this abnormal room was open and someone was inside having a conversation. I tried to crane my neck around to see past the door to where an adjoining room would have had to be, but I couldn't get to a spot where I could see anything without being noticed by the room's occupants. I imagine these places as little idyllic islands, where two people can stay just a little more to themselves then they would if they had to use the communal coed bathroom. It would give kind of a magical quality to your freshman year, at least as long as you got along okay with your suite-mate. I think I can even see one of them, in Cushing, the nice old dorm out behind Noyes, known as the "quiet dorm" and populated by an unusual amount of seniors. As you approach the dorm's front door you can see what looks like a bathroom window on the second floor, where there shouldn't be one. Bathrooms are usually in the same spot on every floor, producing a regular column of lit, fan-mounted windows running up the side of the building even when all the room lights are out. Anyway the Rockefeller suite in Cushing is really the only one I can come close to believing in. My friend Ken's girlfriend Dakota says she was in it her freshman year. Her suite-mate, then, was Yumiko, who was in my painting class last year. Dakota, at least, stayed in Cushing, a beautiful dorm, and always got beautiful rooms. On Founder's Day the whole campus has a party - Matthew Vassar was a brewer so you can get free beer, lots of people essentially take that as a dare and do all kinds of drugs, campus looks the other way as always, there's bands and a carnival - and as things were winding down between the day's events and the fireworks and movie, I was hanging with Dakota and Ken in her room as she read these Tarot-like I Ching cards for Ken. I think it was then that she said she had been in the Rockefeller suite, but maybe Ken had told me earlier or something. As we walked over to Sunset Lake for fireworks, I was both glad for their company and bitter that I didn't have a nice girlfriend of my own. Watching the two of them watching the fireworks, Dakota leaning back against Ken who was sitting up, both of them under a blanket, their faces lined right up one to the other and Dak's face lighting from within when the colored bursts lit it from above - she said "wow" out loud once or twice like a little kid - it all reinforced the idea that she had come out of this magic place and been blessed somehow. After the fireworks we didn't go around the lake to watch the movie like the rest of the crowd but went to watch Shaft in the auditorium instead (Dakota mostly dozed through it). I thought of the story of the two dead girls from the room at the top of Main again as I was approaching the front entrance on a late night walk last night (yes, really last night). The story occurs to me at that spot because that's where I first heard it - freshman or sophomore year I was walking with some folks one time and someone wondered out loud about that top window, and someone told the story. Last night I walked toward Main and looked up at the window, and looked over at the spot where I thought the room with its own bathroom was on the second floor of the north wing, trying to see a light on in the bathroom. I gave up on that and walked through the front door into Main lobby, expecting to breeze on through College Center and back outside to more aimless sanity-walking, but just as I passed the door to the Main elevator, which I never use but some people swear by, it dinged and opened up as though someone had pressed the Up button. No one was standing there waiting for it, but it's possible that someone had pressed the button and then lost patience and just taken the stairs. I stopped and thought for a second, then I got into the elevator. I figured I never take the elevator, a little ride would be fun. Maybe I'd go up to the fifth floor and visit the ghosts. As soon as I stepped into the elevator - I swear to god this is true - the door closed right behind me and the elevator started going up. The interior of it was this weird spooky corrugated gold stuff - no, wait, that's the elevator at work down in the city. But this elevator was spooky too, and it just started moving on me. A week or so ago I watched the second half of this bad TV movie called "The Tower" on the Sci-Fi Channel, it had Paul Reiser in it and was all about this couple trapped in a computer-controlled office building that was trying to kill them and had a scene with an elevator that kept stopping at random and doing all sorts of scary things. So I thought some more about the ghost of the urge to tell tall tales, and wondered what floor I'd wind up on. The door opened and I instantly recognised the fifth floor. Some security guard had called the elevator up, which explains why it suddenly closed doors and took off. Actually being on the fifth floor doesn't call to mind the story of the two dead girls; The inside of that sealed-off stairway up to the room is now covered with joyful graffiti from all the people who've participated in the bell-ringing ceremony over the years. It's kind of depressing how the administration is perfectly willing to let students make a permanent physical mark on the campus as long as it's in a space where only students will see it, and only under special circumstances that are tied to a ritual that emphasizes students' belonging to the college. Everywhere else, they take down posters when you put them in the wrong place, they put in flowers everywhere when parents' weekend is coming up, and of course they paint out graffiti. They make it clear that this place doesn't belong to us. Last night I looked out the fifth floor's back window, that overlooks everything east of Main, the body of campus, out at the new pathway between the theater and the computer center that's lit all bright and has the low stairs and ramps that rollerbladers and skaters love (the signs say no skateboarding). I took the stairs back down, and on the second floor the Rose Parlor caught my eye through the doorway. I suddenly felt really happy it was there and decided to stop there for a minute. It's all done up in beautiful red carpet and all the old furniture has red upholstery. It's kind of fancy and beautiful as heck but still has a good comfortable feeling to it, because it gets a lot of use and is sort of beaten up in that way. They don't exactly require pearls and gloves like they used to - they just roll out a cart with hot water, tea bags, paper cups and cookies - but people go there and hang out. Last night I went in, sat down and looked at the dark out the window. I remembered a time, freshman year I think, when Marla and I were out bopping around campus some weekend night and we decided to check out a party in the Jade Parlor, which is near the Rose Parlor, and the party turned out to be visibly out of our league - a get-dressed-up thing, with a guard at the door - so we went to the Rose Parlor with our vending-machine snacks and sat down. A couple of girls in evening dresses came out of the party and sat on the bulbous old couch across from us to have a chat with each other. They were gorgeous and involved in some scandal and were looking at one another knowingly, and Marla and I were there in our sweats slouching around - I think I actually still sort of had a crush on Marla at the time,...
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