An ode this week to Bowman-Oates Hall and the big-talking, horn-blowing, glad-handing show-off that will be forever known to me as Bird Shit.
Bowman-Oates Hall was a four-story dormitory and where I lived my four undergrad years. It was perfect and pristine in exactly no way at all, perhaps aware that it was not long for this world. At one time it had been one of the more popular on-campus dorms, partly because it was squared away in the center of campus but also because it was coed, had its own cafeteria, and parking was a breeze (out back, in fact). I chose it for those reasons but also because it was across the street from the Communication Building, though “across the street” is a slightly misleading term; one end of the “street” had been sealed off decades before and it the narrow strip of broken blacktop served mostly as parking for Communication Building faculty and staff.
My first encounter with Bowman Hall was probably during one of the university’s “Meet and Greet” sessions held once each long semester – once in March, the other in October – to allow potential students the opportunity the chance to walk the campus, meet with instructors, and peek inside academic buildings and dormitories to see what this college thing was all about.
Whatever my first impressions of Bowman Hall were are long forgotten. My memory of this "Meet and Greet" Saturday is still fresh on my mind.
Everyone met at the coliseum by 8 AM and following the welcoming ceremonies we broke into groups of about 10 students to tour the campus with our guide. What made these tours interesting were the people – students, of course – culled to act as tour guides. My guide was most certainly a member of a fraternity and more than likely had partied the night before all the while forgetting of his commitment the following morning. He didn’t reek or slur his speech or anything immediately noticeable but he didn’t react kindly to sunlight or repeated questions.
For reasons I’ve never understood, but that still resonate clearly in my mind, my guide somehow misunderstood my name as “Greg” when we were introduced and not Martin or Marty or something along those lines (or even, as I’ve been to some, Mark). Then he thought my brother, who was tagging along with my parents and me, was the soon-to-be freshman and started asking about his major.
After the tour I dubbed the guide “Mark” – possibly in retaliation for not being able to retain my name. Mark did little more than waddle around the quadrangle and point out buildings and their contents though it was not as convincing a show as you’d expect because Mark relied heavily on reading verbatim from the signs out front the buildings.
However the real gem in our tour was the guy near the front of the crowd dressed in black. Black shirt. Black pants. Black bucks, and probably black socks but no one checked. Black hair; oily, swimming in a swamp of Wildroot or shoe polish or some other God-awful concoction. His face looked like a catcher’s mitt, wrinkled and tan. My mom said his dentures were slipping every time he smiled. He didn’t smile a lot because he talked excessively about his daughter. The girl was the smartest student to ever come out of the Montezuma school system, or so claimed the man in black. He proudly rattled off a list of her high school highlights: cheerleader, volleyball squad, wrote for the school newspaper, and was crowned Homecoming Queen, Prom Queen, and Miss Chi Chi (whatever the hell that was...) all in the same school year. I have no idea if that record has ever been beaten.
Listening to the father boast of past accomplishments wasn’t irritating enough. Her father seemingly knew that her name would be on the lips of every student within the first few weeks of her first school year. She was destined for popularity! Every time our guide mentioned something about a building – “this one houses the campus television station” or “this is the English building” – her father man would loudly announce some ridiculous claim like “you’re gonna see my baby on that television channel” or “my girl has a book of published poetry.” The girl, walking nearby as she balanced her family tree on the end of her nose, smirked and feigned interest in the tour.
Of course, the tour was thirty minutes and after ten minutes we were more than ready to jettison this man in black. And that’s about when some of us noticed the man’s shirt wasn’t really as black as the man thought.
Somewhere between the quadrangle and mall area, maybe somewhere around the Old Administration Building or Bowman Hall, the man in black walked underneath a bird. That’s when the bird let loose with its opinion on his daughter’s achievements. It was, as far as we could tell, a very large bird. Sadly, the man had neither seen nor heard the bird’s recent activity. Most everyone else in the tour did see what happened. And most everyone laughed.
It made for a memorable Saturday morning.
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Bird Shit Magnet
(unknown)
Debris
From the album Errata
1997
