My junior year of college was a pivotal time for me in many ways that I wasn't fully cognizant of at the time. It was a time of letting experience flow over me as I coped with unacknowledged loss and loneliness in the wake of my father's death and as so many of my closest friends were abroad for the year. Perhaps the most striking experience within a very full year of living was that of having Miss Kay for my roommate. She was from the south originally, the only daughter in a southern doctor's family, and she happened to become my roommate because my father had passed away and after much wrangling with my mother over my planned time in Rome for junior year, it was ultimately decided that I should stay at school rather than travel abroad. (Mom: "Sweety, you should just go to Rome with your friends. Your sisters travelled and you should travel too. " Me: "Are you sure, because I keep sensing you don't really want me to go." Mom: "Far from it. Go, experience life. It's what your father would have wanted. Don't worry about the money at a time when I am obviously very concerned about our finances. And, no reason to worry about me and your baby sister all alone in this house with all the others grown and gone, and you off to Italy. None of that is oyur concern, as consuming as it is. Go. You should go.")
So, I did not go to Rome, although most of my friends were there or elsewhere in Europe - my support system floating someplace far off. The loss of my father, who was a great deal like me and who was perhaps a much greater influence and balance in my life than I had realized, was suppressed I suppose while I took on whatever came next at full speed. I let the housing office at school know I would need a dorm room after all, and they did their best to accommodate me. I needed a no smoking room. This was the 1980s when students were given preferences over the 'freedoms' that has arisen in the 1970s and into the 80s to smoke in designated areas on high school campuses. Colleges, like much of the rest of the adult world - were places where people had generally been free to smoke wherever they wanted - but my college, St. Mary's in bucolic Moraga, California, nestled quietly into the hills to the east of Berkeley - had reserved many dorm rooms for non-smokers only (while our professors and other students were free to smoke away in class). The non-smoking designation assumed, one presumes that the ventilation of 19th and early 20th century construction was up to the task of isolating smoke exhaled in one tiny room from the next. And this was California during a time of excess, so besides the vapor of tar and nicotine, one was also subject at any time to a contact high from the pervasive cloud of marijuana smoke enveloping all living areas unimpeded by the obligatory towels stuffed into doorway floors. My allergy and sensitivity was to nicotine not cannabis, thank the good Lord.
I mention all of this because Miss Kay was my assigned roommate in our non-smoking room in a designated non-smoking suite of rooms, a double and a single on our side of a shared bathroom and another double and single on the other side. Directly across the hall from our suite mates was the dorm room occupied by the largest marijuana supplier on this side of campus (and perhaps this portion of the east bay), and his buttoned down business major roommates. Odd combinations arose when one put oneself out to the vagaries of the room and roommate lottery. And I should point out that I do not ascribe a surname to Miss Kay not so much to protect her identity (any statutes of limitation would long since have expired), but because she was in many ways ethereal, not so much of this world as of space, and once we tacked on the "Miss" to her shortened first name, she became like Cher and Madonna and Kesha - someone to whom a surname was unnecessary and who was utterly recognizable as Miss Kay alone.
This delicate southern belle entered our dorm room shortly after I had moved my things in. She was wearing a pair of Ray Ban wayfarer sunglasses, had a bright smile, dimples, and one of those epic extra long cigarettes dangling from her lips that had the longest stream of still attached ash at the end I had ever seen. It was as if she had taken the drag of all drags before entering the room and the ash clung to the body of the cigarette like a fossil unaware of its own extinction. "Hi Hon! I'm Kay." She effused in a scratchy, throaty voice reminiscent of the 1930s actress Tallulah Bankhead, arms outstretched to roll me into her embrace. As she hugged me some of that ash finally detached and affixed itself to my pastel SMC hoodie, leaving a small grey scar at the shoulder that would remain for the rest of the year. Miss Kay was about my height, although she was wearing heels with her pedal pusher jeans and her oversized white tee shirt emblazoned with a picture of her favorite band, the B-52s. They are also southern.
It was my friend Bug who dubbed her "Miss Kay", after the main character in a television mini-series from the late 1970s about a woman born into slavery who lived over 100 years to finally see Jim Crow eradicated - The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman. Bug, a towering young man of Robin Williamsesque energy and wit, entered a room much like a pinball machine himself, with lights flashing and bells going off everywhere, and he felt Miss Kay defied age and time. Indeed, she defied a great many principles of physics in our time together as roommates. Bug was part of Kay's entourage, an extended band of merry pranksters, 80s partiers and very free spirits. Indeed, as much of a rollercoaster ride as it was to live with her, she brought many people together and I think the most enduring impact she had upon me was that she brought Bug into my life. But, Miss Kay was a force of nature, not anything like anyone I had ever shared a room with before - including all of my sisters.
I mentioned to her gently as she unpacked on that first day (she had more sequined evening gowns than seemed reasonable for a student at a San Francisco Bay area college campus) that we were in a non-smoking suite, and that I had a particular sensitivity to cigarette smoke that has caused an embarrassing episode the previous spring requiring the calling of paramedics to provide CPR (the embarrassing part was that the paramedics whooshed right by unconscious me on the floor of my next door neighbor's room and instead offered mouth to mouth to the much hotter girl in the bed of that dorm room who was sleeping off a drunk after chain-smoking and cannon balling all evening while I typed her term paper - while our floor's androgynous oddball resident had come to my aid and had her mouth upon mine as I awoke in horror despite the reality she did not actually know CPR).
"Oh, hon, I don't smoke. Maybe one or two here and there, socially, to be polite. But, don't you worry, I don't smoke." She advised as she then plopped down onto her bed, rolled over onto her back, set an ashtray on her stomach and pulled one of her Virginia Slims 100s out of the carton in her nightstand. "And could you close the curtains, it's a little bright in here."
Miss Kay was a nocturnal creature by nature. She rarely rose before noon, creating great complications in her academic schedule, and by mid afternoon she was generally a flurry of activity making plans for and dressing up for the evening ahead, ice tinkling in her tumbler of vodka tonic as she dropped dresses on the top of her bed to assess while she teased up her hair into a power bouffant.
She had lovely, sparkling blue eyes full of mischief that were visible 2-3 minutes out of the day before she put on the shades. Often I would come back from class and our room would be full of people and smoke, new wave music blaring from her boom box (or my stereo, which was community property), the sound of tops being popped on cans of Coors Light or Jack Daniels or Smirnoff being poured into glasses, the lights dimmed and the room only illuminated during those momentary forays into the refrigerator for more supplies.
Sometimes I was a little overwhelmed. I had a very good time in college, but I also worked very hard. I graduated with honors in a Great Books based Liberal Arts program that also required four years of laboratory science (ancient to modern) and four years of classical mathematics. Miss Kay referred to me and my friends from our academic program (one of whom occupied the single room next to our double and had the great misfortune of sharing a foyer with us) as The Integrals, not so much because that was the name of our major as because it announced us to the normal hordes of humanity already populating the party room. I wheezed my way through the early weeks and months with Miss Kay, and I adapted as best I could to our regimen, which was most notable for its unpredictability. Miss Kay was prone to benders and could disappear for days at a time, re-appearing just as suddenly with no explanation. I might come home of an evening to find this or that gentleman rolling about in her extra long twin bed with Miss Kay, both of them three sheets to the wind and passed out very quickly post coitus, or sometimes one imagines, snoring while still astride. And there was that unfortunate incident that led to our suitemate having to discard her retainer, which sat in a case in our shared medicine cabinet next to the case that held Miss Kay's diaphragm. Not that I was without sin, as our poor suitemate could attest, as she suffered quite a shock and emitted a blood curdling scream one night when my gentleman friend stuck his arm in her window by mistake on one of those nights when he thought it would be cute to reach in and grab me by the arm while I slept to let me know he was on his way over. With Miss Kay it was more about the constancy of variety.
Bug sometimes would come sit on my bed with me as I tried to read a book while a party began to build around me in the room, and he'd cover us both with this crocheted blanket that he called "Our Mesh", our protective buffer and private place amidst the madness of any given evening. This from Bug, who himself had hollowed out the attic space on the wide ledge off his single room at the top of De La Salle Hall, and converted it into a speakeasy that he called The Prohibition Pub, where he would host small delightful hooch parties of an evening. He just understood that Miss Kay was sexanddrugsandrockandroll 24/7, and sometimes you needed the shelter of the mesh. Indeed.
And, ironic as it was in this situation, there was that tendency, when in Rome... I remember vividly coming back from my chemistry lab class on a Thursday morning. It was a three hour lab with Brother Brendan, a stern silver-haired misogynistic septuagenarian in a cassock. I had been up preparing for an essay exam the night before and Miss Kay had arrived back to our room about nine with her usual band of bon vivants, all in brightly colored 1960s dresses, hair teased up (even some of the men), massive earrings dangling and bouncing against their necks and shoulders. They laughed and talked, turned up the music, the booze flowed freely, the room was heavy with smoke, and they took turns snorting lines off this massive mirror that Miss Kay kept tucked under her bed most of the day (perhaps so we could never prove whether or not she could see her reflection). I had to be up by 7, and when the party was not slowing down by midnight (although the music was turned down after the fiftieth or sixtieth time our next door neighbors, Andy and Kevin, pounded on the wall and shouted expletives at us as they tried to sleep in their bunk beds along that wall), Miss Kay offered me one of her 'black beauties', small capsules she kept in a plastic Halloween jack o lantern on the bookshelf. She said it would help me be more alert for my exam in the morning. "In fact," she advised, pouring a second little black pill into my hand, "Take two, Hon. You're a big girl." I did as I was told, washing it down with some warm Coors Light. I think the party ended some time after 3 a.m., although by then I was wide awake. By about 9:30, half an hour into my chemistry lab and exam, I began to experience the sensation known as "speed bugs" a crawling within one's skin and a bugging of one's eyes. As I struggled to write out all of the many thoughts that were in my head in the essay exam and watched my hand fly over the paper, a metamorphosis began to occur, and it was not a pleasant one. For the first time in my life I understood clearly the lyrics to that song Johnny Cash made famous - "Sunday Morning Coming Down".
I struggled back to our dorm room at about noon, once my Chemistry lab let out. I felt like a dried up tread mark left behind by an earth mover when the ground was still muddy. My mouth felt like the inside of an old sock. I was a little put out with Miss Kay and her suggestion of not one but two of her little beauties. I burst through our door to find the curtains drawn, the room enveloped in shadow and Miss Kay on her back in her bed, her sunglasses on, that ashtray resting just below her breasts. She absently flicked some ash onto the carpet and pointed at me as I came into the room. It was noon, she had just awakened and it was time for the soap opera All My Children on TV. "Hon," she called out through the grinding gravel of a chain smoking 80 year old Alabama alcoholic's voice, "Flip on the tube for me. It's time for All Ma Kids."
She lived an enchanted life in many ways that year. Her party circuit was legendary, epic, and seemingly unending. For someone I can't recall actually seeing emerge from her bed in the afternoon, she was off at some point, and fluttered about making that loud clanging intimate conversation of the deeply intoxicated, highball glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, her head bouncing back in uproarious laughter. She was infectious (and not just her laughter). She endeared herself to you. She was unforgettable. She attended our college Christmas Ball dressed as a tree, her hair teased up like Marge Simpson's and painted bright green, filled with little miniature lights, and when she emerged up onto the stage at that party with Bug, he in bright red hair and dressed as a candy cane, and he plugged her in so she could burst forth with glistening light, the weight of that hair and those lights and whatever else was mingled with it to make it stand three feet tall and stiff as a board, overwhelmed her and she toppled over backward as gracefully as the Griswold's tree in the "Christmas Vacation" movie, showing her world to all those below as her pouffed out taffeta gown went horizontal.
I took a break from Miss Kay just after the Christmas Ball, heading to New York to study art and architecture (and pubs and bars) for the extended January term. It was so pleasant to share a room at the historic Barbizon Hotel on the upper east side with my much quieter friend, Julie. We had a marvelous time, learned a great deal about Impressionist art and gothic architecture and only had to hold each other's heads out of the toilet one time during our entire six week sojourn. When I returned to Moraga, a day earlier than Miss Kay for the spring term, I walked into our dark, musty room, redolent of stale beer, cigarette ash and bong water, and walked toward my side of the room to throw open both the windows and the curtains only to find my twin bed had been replaced with a standing tiki bar. She had even moved her "emergency mini fridge" out of its place in her corner of the room and plugged it in under the bar. I set my bags down and opened the window anyway, trying to breathe in fresh air. There was a bright blue bean bag chair next to the bar, it was an overstuffed cast off that had served as a guest room of sorts for my friend Patty, who lived off campus and often needed a place to crash. I was trying to figure out where Miss Kay could have taken the bed, how she got it out of the room, when Bug dropped by. To this day I don't know for sure if my memory of Kay's voice is really her voice or if it's Bug doing his impression of her, but he strode, in, looked at me, at the bar and then at the bean bag. "Hon," he said, all gravelly and southern like Miss Kay, "it's all about your priorities." Then he dropped into the bean bag chair, reached over to retrieve the crocheted blanket off the floor and patted the small space next to him, "Now come join me under the mesh."
I never saw Miss Kay again after my senior year, as she dropped out of school, hung around for a while, allegedly checked in and out of rehab a few times. Married, divorced. Who knows what else after that. She is vivid in my memory though. I tried to locate her almost six months ago, when Bug died, suddenly, ripping through the space/time continuum an upsetting the center of gravity for so many of us. We wanted Miss Kay to be there, to say goodbye to Bug with all of the rest of us. But Miss Kay could not be found. She was ephemeral, it would appear, in her timelessness. Were it not for a few snapshots I still have of her, one in particular in which she is smiling broadly with Bug in a drug store on a day when the clerk mistook her for Kate Pierson of her beloved B-52s, I might wonder if she really existed at all or if she was some wild amalgam of all the excess and inexplicable allure of that period.
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