For two academic years at the University of Michigan I lived in East Quad. I remember on the application for a dorm that I got to rank my preference of Central Campus, North Campus, and The Hill. Though I was an engineering student I had no interest in living with other engineering students far away on North Campus. My sister had lived on “The Hill” the previous year and it felt to me a little less “central” to the activity of the college. So I boldly stated my preference for “Central Campus” and noted on the application “anything but East Quad.”
Well, they put me in East Quad. I imagine a sadistic administrator laughing away at making that choice for me. West Quad and South Quad seemed like fun places. In reality they were about the same level of lacking amenities that East Quad had, but they had less weirdos. East Quad was well-known to be strange. The cause of their strangeness was a residential learning program — a college within a college — where students studied languages and arts (I think, not language arts) and welcomely received only pass/fail grades. Though the term wasn’t used at the time, I’m sure at some point they must have thought grades were invented by the patriarchy.
In the first week living at East Quad I found the communist newspaper in the lobby. This isn’t like “oh I don’t like Democrats so I’m going to call them communists.” No, it was straight up communist. The paper referred to our country variously as Amerikkka and the United $tates of America. I really wonder if this paper was brought in by the local commie club, or indeed promoted by the University.
Well, East Quad always reminded me of Catcher in the Rye. The similarity, I suppose, was in its era of construction. The place was built, I found out, to house people during (or just after) World War II. If I remember Salinger, he had some scene with the roommate shaving. Well, in the East Quad dorms there were slots in the wall to discard safety razors. By the time I lived there (2000-2002) there must have been tens of thousands of rusty razor blades in those walls, but modern folks were using 5-bladed razors that surely wouldn’t fit through the slots.
Living in East Quad was a challenge to put it lightly. The location of my room seemed to have been designed to maximize the incoming noise from the trash truck. At what felt like 5 AM to me, I’d suddenly hear a beep … beep … BEEP … BEEP BEEP … CRASH! waking me up. Sometimes I was already up though, thanks to the frequent prankster(s) who pulled the fire alarm in the middle of the night whenever a midterm or a final exam seemed to be approaching. No less than a dozen times I stood outside in the cold Michigan winter night wearing pajamas and a coat, and wondering … WHY DO I HAVE TO LIVE IN EAST QUAD! In addition to the noises, there were the smells. Or, one smell in particular. There were two elevators in East Quad. One was a freight elevator that we didn’t use much. Then there was a main elevator. And someone urinated in that elevator. Maybe it started with a drunk student coming home late one night. And so it was cleaned. But then it happened again, and again, and again. There were signs in the elevator. “Don’t urinate in here. Don’t vomit in here.” But it was to no avail. It was even shut down for a time, though I don’t think they ever found the pee-petrator. While I certainly did not participate in the discusting-ness, I must admit that I found the situation comical. But that is my natural tendency, to replace the tragical with comical.
I later found out the Unabomber had lived in East Quad when he was a student at Michigan. How’s that for notoriety. Apparently he lived in 3rd Prescott. I know the first year I lived in 4th Hayden. The second year I lived on the 3rd floor and I don’t remember the hall, but I don’t believe it was in Kaczyinski’s old hall.
I occasionally have flashbacks of the one time, shortly after I moved in, that I walked the entirety of East Quad; all the halls on all the floors. I see vividly door after door passing by me as I move swiftly through the corridors.
I remember some of the people. My friend Louie, of course, who lived down the hall and once played “Who Let the Dogs Out?” on repeat and full volume for a good hour to terrorize the hall advisor while we were at lunch. We came back to him fuming outside of Louie’s door. And I remember J. Fishbach, a brilliant math student I worked with on one particular difficult assignment in our honors course. I remember Frank, the first person I ever met who was openly gay.
Then there was the Halfway Inn. In the basement of East Quad there was a place open late, where for far-too-high cost you could get a grilled cheese sandwich if you missed the dinner time in the dinning hall. This was the first time I had ever heard of muenster cheese.
There were lots of new experiences for me in East Quad. It was the first time I had lived away from home. It was a strange place, almost terrifying at times, but it was home. I even opted to stay there a second year, something I could never had imagined when I first moved in.