But the elevator goes straight to Hell!

I spent Christmas 1998 with a huge welt on my forehead.

One of my roommates that year got mad at me and threw a Nintendo game — Ikari Warriors to be exact — at me.

Scary Gary was pretty well known on campus. He was easily recognizable, wearing a black hunting vest (the kind with all the pockets for ammo and knives and whatnot) over his worn out leather coat, he would run everywhere he went. One time I saw him trip, fall and roll all the way down a hill. It was horrifying, sad and hilarious. Kind of like watching a clown car lose control after slipping on a banana peel and crash into a pie stand.

Gary was a year older than me and the year I lived with him was his second year in that room. He was very attached to that room, so much so that he lived there for at least three more years afterward.

It didn’t take long for us to realize that Gary was, well, unique.

Of course, there was move-in day, when he screamed at me for stealing his bed.

You see, I moved in first and took the bed furthest away from the door and bathroom. Also, it had a brand-new mattress. It seems that was the bed Gary had the year before and he wanted it again. I’d known this guy for all of two minutes and he was already screaming at me.

Then there was the second day in the room, after we’d gotten all unpacked and I had my computer set up. We were all hanging out in the common room with a few girls from down the hall when Gary started looking up the nastiest porn he could find and insisting we look at it. After that night, I password protected the computer.

From then on, Gary would look his porn up on the computers in the lab, printing stacks of pictures out at a time. He’d come home from the library every night with a stack of paper in his hands and walk right by us into his bedroom without saying a word. Gary only owned one belt, one of the old Boy Scout belts with the shiny, metal buckle. It made a tremendous racket whenever he was taking it on or off. So as he marched by us to his room, you’d hear the door slam and then the sound of metal on metal as he unbuckled his belt.

The belt buckle served as an alarm, of sorts. He didn’t spend a whole lot of time with the rest of us out in the common room. If he was home, he’d be in his bedroom watching TV or doing Lord knows what else. On the first night we were there, Gary was in his bedroom and the rest of us were out talking about our classes. Suddenly, his bedroom door flew open and there he stood in a t-shirt and tighty-whities, bouncing excitedly like a small child who can’t wait to tell the latest knock-knock joke. He didn’t even get two words out before we shouted him down, telling him never to come out of that room again without pants on. From then on, the sound of his metal belt buckle was our warning that he was about to emerge.

Typically, it went something like this:

Roommate 1: Did you see the trailer for the new James Bond movie? It looks pretty sweet.

*clink, clank* Bedroom door flies open

Gary: This new James Bond movie is a ripoff of blah blah blah. Besides, they should have put insert obscure actress name here in it instead. She’s much hotter. She’s got naked pictures on the Internet.

Bedroom door slams behind Gary *clink clank*

Just as quickly as he’d emerge to say something, he’d disappear back into his bedroom and you’d hear the belt buckle again. It’s like he couldn’t stand to wear pants for more than a few seconds at a time.

About halfway through the year, Gary developed a crush on our neighbor.

Hillary was on the crew team, the kind of tough, no-nonsense girl that was intimidating to a lot of guys. She was a punk, which is how we met in the first place. She liked to hang out in our room and watch Wrestling with us and after a while, Gary started creeping out of his room (with pants on) whenever she was around. We knew it was on the night Hillary asked if any of us wanted to walk down to the cafeteria with her for an ice cream sundae and all us declined except for Gary.

Of course, Hillary decided that she didn’t want ice cream anymore. Instead, she decided to stay and flirt with Gary. Eventually, the conversation somehow turned to sex and bondage.

Gary: I’m not into that whole whips and chains shit.

Hillary: Bondage can be anything, Gary. Haven’t you ever held someone down during sex? That counts as bondage.

Gary: Nope. My love boat has never left dry dock.

It was honestly one of the funniest things I ever heard the kid say, but sadly, Hillary started dating some other guy and Gary was heading back to the computer lab.

While funny things were rare, Gary said his share of frightening things. As a matter of fact, there was a time at the beginning of the year when we were all kind of scared of him.

It all started when we noticed that he would spend hours drawing assault rifles that he saw in Soldier of Fortune magazine in his sketch book.

He liked to talk about guns and bombs and what he would do if he had them. It was frightening, to be sure, but you have to remember that this was before Virginia Tech, hell, it was even before Columbine. We hadn’t yet seen what people with the rhetoric Gary was spewing were capable of if pushed over the edge.

It was the week before his birthday and he was going on and on about what he hoped to get from his parents. He said he had a rifle for hunting deer at home and was hoping for a high-powered scope to top it off with.

“If I had that scope, I could sit on top of Hill Hall and pick people off coming out of Goddard,” he said.

For those unfamiliar with the EMU campus, Hill is a dorm tower on the back of campus and Goddard was an honors dorm on the front of campus. It also housed the student newspaper.

“Gary, my office is in Goddard,” I said.

“I know,” he replied, grinning.

That night, while he was at work, we ransacked his room.

When we found no guns, knives or anything else to indicate that he was actually motivated to act on his nonsense, we decided we should try to befriend him. Maybe, we thought, if we treated him like we treated each other, he wouldn’t kill us all in his sleep.

It worked, and he started to come out of his shell a little bit. That Thanksgiving he brought his Nintendo back from home for us all to play and even bought a game for each of us from FuncoLand’s Web site. My game, as you might have guessed, was Ikari Warriors. I played it a handful of times and then put it on the shelf after I remembered how freaking hard it was to beat. I guess this hurt Gary’s feelings, because he pegged me right in the forehead with the cartridge.

Gary was still strange, but he was more social second semester.

I felt for the guy, I still kind of do, because he probably has Asberger’s Syndrome but everybody just thought he was weird. That’s why, when he asked me to help with his final project for broadcast media class, I agreed.

Gary was a communications major, which I always found funny because he seemed so incapable of even the most basic, normal human interactions.

Everybody at the newspaper knew him because every semester he’d apply to be a columnist. His application, of course, was denied because his submissions were usually nothing more than rambling, hateful, thousand-word piles of grammar fail. Instead, he’d write letter after letter to the editor. Some got into the paper, most didn’t. I remember one particularly hilariously inappropriate letter where he went on for 1,200 words about why Hillary Clinton wasn’t fit to be a Senator. At the time, I believe, she was just starting to consider running for Moynihan’s seat in New York.

In any case, Gary went on and on spewing his hatred (much of which was regurgitated from Rush Limbaugh, I’m sure) for Hillary Clinton. The point that sealed his argument, he thought, was that no woman could excel as an authority because Captain Kathryn Janeway was an awful commander. Voyager sucked, Babylon 5 was awesome, therefore Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be a Senator.

We had to look up Voyager and Babylon 5 to realize what the hell he was talking about, but once we did, we spent the next 20 minutes laughing.

But I digress.

Gary’s final project for his broadcast class was to do a two-minute, on-camera interview. I don’t know who he’d asked before me, but he told me he’d bombed out with each and every one. Personally, I believe it would have been a far more interesting interview if he was the subject. Creepy? Yes. Frightening? Sure. Fascinating? Absolutely.

Nobody, it seemed, wanted to help him out. He was upset, I could see that he was scared. Without an interview subject, he said, he would fail the class.

So off I went to class with Gary. He wouldn’t tell me what he was going to ask me beforehand, but assured me the questions would be related to my work at the student newspaper.

The first minute of the interview went smooth. Gary asked about what I did at the paper and ultimately, why his columns were never selected to run in the paper.

Then, just as it seemed to be going along swimmingly, Gary seemed to run out of questions. He sputtered, flipped through his note cards a few times, then looked up at me.

“You’ve got some friends in a band?” he asked.

“Yes, I’ve got friends in a few bands,” I replied.

“The band I’m thinking of, it’s called PT’s Revenge. Can you tell me what the name means?” he asked.

“Well, the band is named after a friend of ours, whose nickname is Porno Tim,” I said flatly.

I waited for a follow-up question, but it never came. A huge smile spread across Gary’s face as he scanned the audience, hoping to spot someone who thought me uttering the word “porno” was as funny he did. You could have heard a pin drop in there.

There were no more questions after that, Gary just sat there smiling for what felt like hours. Really, it was more like 15 seconds. There we sat, sweating under the lights, straining like Atlas under the most uncomfortable silence I have ever felt.

Finally, as the professor signaled that Gary had just a few seconds left, Gary jumped up in his seat and looked straight into the camera.

“This has been I can’t remember what he called the segment with Gary T. blah blah blah. Remember, the stairway may go to heaven, but the elevator goes straight to Hell.”

Then, with a grin a game show host would be proud of, he gave a double-thumbs up, holding it until the professor said “and we’re out.”

A few days later we moved out of the dorm and our adventures with Gary were over. I saw him a few times around campus after that. Once, I saw him try to tackle a football player who he’d accused of stealing a burrito from Taco Bell — Gary took his job as a cashier there very seriously.

I know I was — and still can be — kind of jerk sometimes. I know I didn’t always treat people with the respect they deserved. I just hope that, in some small way, Gary wasn’t one of those people.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know he was a crazy bastard, but he’s had a rough go of it and I surely never wanted to make things worse for him. Also, I never wanted to end up on a list like the one Buscemi had at the end of Billy Madison.

I often wonder what happened to him. Did he ever graduate? Did he ever get a job? Did any girl ever let him see her naked, you know, for free?

I’ll probably never know, unless I see him on the news some day.

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