The Go Big Red Fan

 

The Go Big Red Fan was John Wesley Fenrick's, and when
ventilating his System it throbbed and crept along the floor with a
rhythmic chunka-chunka-chunk. Fenrick was a Business major and a
senior. From the talk of my wingmates I gathered that he was smart,
yet crazy, which helped. The description weird was also used, but
admiringly. His roomie, Ephraim Klein of New Jersey, was in
Philosophy. Worse, he was found to be smart and weird and crazy,
intolerably so on all these counts and several others besides.
As for the Fan, it was old and square, with a heavy rounded
design suitable for the Tulsa duplex window that had been its station
before John Wesley Fenrick had brought It out to the Big U with
him. Running up one sky-blue side was a Go Big Red bumper
sticker. When Fenrick ran his System—that is, bludgeoned the rest
of the wing with a record or tape—he used the Fan to blow air over
the back of the component rack to prevent the electronics from
melting down. Fenrick was tall and spindly, with a turkey-like head
and neck, and all of us in the east corridor of the south wing of the
seventh floor of E Tower knew him for three things: his seventies
rock-'n'-roll souvenir collection, his trove of preposterous electrical
appliances, and his laugh—a screaming hysterical cackle that would
ricochet down the long shiny cinderbiock corridor whenever
something grotesque flashed across the 45-Inch screen of his Video
System or he did something especially humiliating to Ephraim Klein.
Klein was a subdued, intellectual type. He reacted to his
victories with a contented smirk, and this quietness gave some
residents of EO7S East the impression that Fenrick, a roomie-buster
with many a notch on his keychain, had already cornered the young
sage. In fact, Klein beat Fenrick at a rate of perhaps sixty percent, or
whenever he could reduce the conflict to a rational discussion. He
felt that he should be capable of better against a power-punker
Business major, but he was not taking into account the animal
shrewdness that enabled Fenrick to land lucrative oil-company
internships to pay for the modernization of his System.
Inveterate and cynical audio nuts, common at the Big U, would
walk into their room and freeze solid, such was Fenrick's System, its
skyscraping rack of obscure black slabs with no lights, knobs or
switches, the 600-watt Black Hole Hyperspace Energy Nexus Field
Amp that sat alone like the Kaaba, the shielded coaxial cables
thrown out across the room to the six speaker stacks that made it
look like an enormous sonic slime mold in spawn. Klein himself
knew a few things about stereos, having a system that could
reproduce Bach about as well as the American Megaversity
Chamber Orchestra, and it galled him.
To begin with there was the music. That was bad enough, but
Klein had associated with musical Mau Maus since junior high, and
could inure himself to it in the same way that he kept himself from
jumping up and shouting back at television commercials. It was the
Go Big Red Fan that really got to him. "Okay, okay, let's just accept
as a given that your music is worth playing. Now, even assuming
that, why spend six thousand dollars on a perfect system with no
extraneous noises in it, and then, then, cool it with a noisy fan that
couldn't fetch six bucks at a fire sale?" Still, Fenrick would ignore
him. "I mean, you amaze me sometimes. You can't think at all, can
you? I mean, you're not even a sentient being, if you look at it
strictly."
When Klein said something like this (I heard the above one
night when going down to the bathroom), Fenrick would look up at
him from his Business textbook, peering over the wall of bright, sto
record-store displays he had erected along the room's centerline;
because his glasses had slipped down his long thin nose, he would
wrinkle it, forcing the lenses toward the desired altitude,
involuntarily baring his canine teeth in the process and causing the
stiff spiky hair atop his head to shift around as though inhabited by a
band of panicked rats.
"You don't understand real meaning," he'd say. "You don't
have a monopsony on meaning. I don't get meaning from books. My
meaning means what it means to me." He would say this, or
something equally twisted, and watch Klein for a reaction. After he
had done it a few times, though, Klein figured out that his roomie
was merely trying to get him all bent out of shape—to freak his
brain, as it were— and so he would drop it, denying Fenrick the
chance to shriek his vicious laugh and tell the wing that he had
scored again.
Klein was also annoyed by the fact that Fenrick, smoking loads
of parsley-spiked dope while playing his bad music, would forget to
keep an eye on the Go Big Red Fan. Klein, sitting with his back to
the stereo, wads of foam packed in his ears, would abruptly feel the
Fan chunk into the back of his chair, and as he spazzed out in
hysterical surprise it would sit there maliciously grinding away and
transmitting chunka-chunka-chunks into his pelvis like muffled
laughs.
If it was not clear which of them had air rights, they would wage
sonic wars.
They both got out of class at 3:30. Each would spend twenty
minutes dashing through the labyrinthine ways of the Monoplex,
pounding fruitlessly on elevator buttons and bounding up steps three
at a time, palpitating at the thought of having to listen to his
roommate's music until at least midnight. Often as not, one would
explode from the elevator on EO7S, veer around to the corridor, and
with disgust feel the other's tunes pulsing victoriously through the
floor. Sometimes, though, they would arrive simultaneously and
power up their Systems together. The first time they tried this, about
halfway through September, the room's circuit breaker shut down.
They sat in darkness and silence for above half an hour, each
knowing that if he left his stereo to turn the power back on, the other
would have his going full blast by the time he returned. This impasse
was concluded by a simultaneous two-tower fire drill that kept both
out of the room for three hours.
Subsequently John Wesley Fenrick ran a fifty-foot tn-lead
extension cord down the hallway and into the Social Lounge, and
plugged his System into that. This meant that he could now shut
down Klein's stereo simply by turning on his burger-maker, donut-
maker, blow-dryer and bun-warmer simultaneously, shutting off the
room's circuit breaker. But Klein was only three feet from the
extension cord and thus could easily shut Fenrick down with a tug.
So these tactics were not resorted to; the duelists preferred, against
all reason, to wait each other out.
Klein used organ music, usually lush garbled Romantic
masterpieces or what he called Atomic Bach. Fenrick had the edge in
system power, but most of that year's music was not as dense as,
say, Heavy Metal had been in its prime, and so this difference was
usually erased by the thinness of his ammunition. This did not mean,
however, that we had any trouble hearing him.
The Systems would trade salvos as the volume controls were
brought up as high as they could go, the screaming-guitars-from-Hell
power chords on one side matched by the subterranean grease-gun
blasts of the 32-foot reed stops on the other. As both recordings piled
into the thick of things, the combatants would turn to their long thin
frequency equalizers and shove all channels up to full blast like Mr.
Spock beaming a live antimatter bomb into Deep Space. Finally the
filters would be thrown off and the loudness switches on, and the
speakers would distort and crackle with strain as huge wattages
pulsed through their magnet coils. Sometimes Klein would use
Bach's "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor," and at the end of each
phrase the bass line would plunge back down home to that old low
C, and Klein's sub-woofers would pick up the temblor of the 64-foot
pipes and magnify it until he could watch the naked speaker cones
thrash away at in the air. This particular note happened to be the
natural resonating frequency of the main hallways, which were cut
into 64-foot, 3-inch halves by the fire doors (Klein and I measured
one while drunk), and therefore the resonant frequency of every
other hail in every other wing of all the towers of the Plex, and so at
these moments everything in the world would vibrate at sixteen
cycles per second; beds would tremble, large objects would float off
the edges of tables, and tables and chairs themselves would buzz
around the rooms of their own volition. The occasional wandering
bat who might be in the hall would take off in random flight, his
sensors jammed by the noise, beating his wings against the standing
waves in the corridor in an effort to escape.
The Resident Assistant, or RA, was a reclusive Social Work
major who, intuitively knowing she was never going to get a job,
spent her time locked in her little room testing perfumes and
watching MTV under a set of headphones. She could not possibly
help.
That made it my responsibility. I lived on EO7S that year as
faculty-in-residence. I had just obtained my Ph.D. from Ohio State in
an interdisciplinary field called Remote Sensing, and was a brand-
shiny-new associate professor at the Big U.
Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school,
we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and
academic at the right times and we had neither Kleins nor Fenricks.
Boston University, where I did my Master's, had pulled through its
crisis when I got there; most students had no time for sonic war, and
the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State
was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where
noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than
tweedy black bachelors. I just did not know what to make of Klein
and Fenrick; I did not handle them well at all. As a matter of fact,
most of my time at the Big U was spent observing and talking, and
very little doing, and I may bear some of the blame.
This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened
and suggest why. It is a work of the imagination in that by writing it
I hope to purge the Big U from my system, and with it all my
bitterness and contempt. I may have fooled around with a few facts.
But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could
have, and I knew enough of the major actors to learn about what I
didn't witness, and so there is not so much art in this as to make it
irrelevant. What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can
happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few
years ahead of the rest.