I think I’ve already written up most of the anecdotes from my third year at Penn State that are worth relating, so about all that remains to be told is how Mike Carr and I became estranged.

As you may or may not recall, Mike was one of the first people I met at Penn State, as he lived on the same floor as I did in Pinchot Hall that first year. We became friendly right away as we both liked theater, including musicals, and I didn’t hold his Catholicism against him nor he my atheism against me.

Even after I moved to Mifflin Hall, we kept in contact, usually going out for pizza and a movie every month or so. He had stayed in Pinchot Hall and was now rooming with a friend of his from back home from Pittsburgh.

We had made plans—the three of us—to get an apartment off campus for Mike’s and my fourth year.

During spring term Mike and I made plans to go see the movie The Boys in the Band which was playing at the new Cinema I. 

After the movie, we were going to discuss plans for the apartment the following school year.

But when Mike showed up, he wasn’t alone. Someone from his dorm had tagged along. We went to the movie and then the three of us came back to my room, and the other guy didn’t know how to take a hint that Mike and I wanted to talk in private. He briefly left to go to the rest room, and Mike apologized. He said he had mentioned that he was going to see the movie and the guy had jumped at the chance to go along, and Mike, being Mike, didn’t know how to say no.

So we made no plans that night.

The next day I called Mike to see if we could discuss things over the phone, and right away Mike asked how I was doing academically. I was taken by surprise and mumbled that I wasn’t doing any better than usual.

Mike was not amused. His temper flared up like I had never heard it flare before. He said he wasn’t going to subject his buddy to my flakey behavior and run the risk of my flunking out and leaving the two of them high and dry and having to bear the cost of an apartment themselves, so he was backing out of the apartment agreement. And then he hung up.

He didn’t merely back out of the agreement, he cut me off completely. I didn’t hear from him again, and I didn’t call him back.

What’s a bit ironic is that when I look at the transcript, I didn’t fail any courses that term. I got two C’s, in the Percussion course (the one where the instructor kept asking if I had broken my arm) and Geology, a B in the Poetry Workshop (and I still don’t know why I took that course) and an A in Elements of Calculus and Analytical Geometry (so I wasn’t a total washout in math after all).

I was probably more angry than hurt by Mike’s surprising behavior, as I was counting on getting out of the dorms.

In my recollection of this incident, I thought it had taken place about the middle of spring term, which would have left me several weeks to round up a couple guys to go searching for an apartment, but when I looked up when The Boys in the Band was playing, it turns out the movie didn’t get to State College until May 20th, so we probably saw it on the 23rd and the phone conversation was probably on the 24th.

Which means that Mike left me less than a week to scramble to find a couple of new roommates and go searching for an apartment before going home for the summer.