I was Trying to Avoid a Squirrel

I thought I would write about Larry O’Donnell, my roommate during my first freshman year in college (that’s not his real name). I went to a college that required us to live on campus for the first year (unless you’re a local and your family lives in town).

So, Larry O’Donnell was a local, but he decided to live on campus, to get the full college experience. And he already had a reputation. He wanted to be an extreme skier (I went to college near a ski town. Yes, I live in Miami, but I am a good skiier. I’m full of interesting contradictions. Just ask my wife).

So Larry’s ambition was to earn a living by skiing of cliff tops, and down glaciers, and make money by filming it and making movies and distributing the movies to various outlets for other crazy people. This was before Jackass, which basically raised the bar so high for making money from this kind of behavior that you can only make a living from it by – strange as it sounds – by being a complete jackass.

But this was before the success of Jackass, so even though Larry was only half jackass, he was, I think, well on his way to achieving his dream of being an extreme skier. Or of being something extreme. His niche was to only halfway succeed, so he might have paved a new path for people in this industry.

I say he was already well on his way because, on the first day I moved in, he mentioned that he had tried to jump the highway on his skis, and eventually succeeded, but on the first try, he missed. Being normal (in comparison), I naturally didn’t believe him. He was well prepared for people not believing him, and he happened to have a tape of the attempt, which he popped into the machine. Sure enough, there he was on the top of a hill which overlooked the highway.

He skied down the hill (in a tuck, no less), went of a rickety ramp that had probably taken three minutes to build, and flew most of the way over the highway. He landed on the furthest lane, bounced, and, fortunately, had enough momentum to go hurling off the other side into the hill below, barely avoiding the oncoming Mac truck. The camera man, a fellow “extreme skier,” who I would meet a few months later, was laughing so hard it was difficult to watch Larry tumbling down the far hill without getting motion sickness. But he eventually came to a stop.

At this point, Larry stopped the tape to point out that “that really hurt.” I nodded in agreement as he started up the tape again, to show the second try, in which he got all the way over the highway and landed successfully. He explained that the angle of the ramp on the first try was to steep, which had blunted his momentum. He also wondered out loud why people never seemed as interested in the successful jump as the failed attempt. I answered by asking if I would watch the failed attempt again.

Then, there was his habit of climbing in through the window instead of using the front door. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that our dorm room was on the fourth floor. So, on the day’s he didn’t have books with him, or something else to prevent a good climb, he would take the window. He got pretty good at climbing, until one day, when he was trying to open the window wide enough to slip in, and he lost his balance, and fell backwards to the ground. That would simply be another “don’t be a jackass” story, except that there were a few staff offices on the second floor below.

The Director of the dorm looked out her window just in time to see Larry float past her window with, as she later described it (and at first I thought she was just embellishing the story, but now that I reflect on it, knowing Larry, it was true) an expression like “hey, have you seen my keys?” She poked her head out the window to follow his descent, and watched as he bounced off the bike rack below, and lay on the ground, moaning.

In the aftermath of these types of failed attempts at extreme sports, I would rush up to him to see if he was okay. The conversation usually went something like this:

“Are you okay? Can you wiggle your toes?” I would ask, rushing to him.

“That really hurt, man.”

“I should think so.”

“Do you think these chicks staring at us want to talk to me?”

Larry had some trouble with “chicks,” because of his extreme nature. The first and only woman I ever saw him successfully pick up was a girl at the skating rink. She was standing on the other side of the glass, talking to a friend, when he came hurling towards her (apparently he had never been on ice skates until then, although he informed me “the principles of physics are the same as being on a skate board.”) and slammed into the wall, and smacked his head into the glass hard enough that the girl let out a squeak of fear.

She rushed onto the ice, coming to his side. He was so stunned by the impact that his normal extreme fear of women didn’t surface, and instead of stuttering and making rude comments, he actually seemed charming in a “owe, that hurts, could you hold me?” kind of way. But any relationship based on one party being only half conscious is doomed to failure. I was there when he called her, and he had a weird look on his face when he hung up.

“How did it go?”

“She said if I called her again, she would call the campus police.”

Larry spent a lot of time attracting – and then repelling – women who were fascinated by his… Larryness.

For example, the party we went to where he knocked himself out by accidentally bashing his head into the ceiling. It was a hip-hop house party. He started dancing, and got into a trance, into the zone that only Larry can get into.

Everyone stopped dancing and formed a circle around him. They were fascinated by his wild gyrations. He was bouncing up and down. He moved his hips in wide circles. His shoulders did painful looking jerking motions. It was quite amazing, especially since his eyes were closed and he kept coming really close to the coffee table but never actually stepped on it. A couple brave women tried to dance with him, but he ran into the back of one, sending her flying, and hit the other in the shoulder (she ducked out before it became her face).

But he didn’t notice. He was Larry, the music was good, and he was in the zone. Then, he started jumping to the rhythm of the song. Swing left, swing right, and jump. Then again, then again, each time jumping higher. The crowd was cheering each jump, although I doubt he heard us. Then, he jumped high enough that he hit his head on the ceiling. The ceiling was concrete. He bashed into it so hard, that he was unconscious before he hit the floor. There he was, just lying unconscious.

The crowd stopped cheering. Some people laughed. We all looked at each other. He hadn’t made any friends, because as soon as we entered the party he had made a b-line for the living room (which was serving as the dance floor) and started dancing. So the crowd just stepped over him, and everyone went back to dancing. I prodded him, slightly worried but not THAT worried because, after all, it was Larry. He woke up, put his hand to his head, and walked off. I saw him the next morning playing speed chess (badly) on the computer. “The nurse said I probably got a concussion last night. Man, what a party.” I had to put up with his alarm going off every three hours because he had read somewhere that you aren’t supposed to sleep for too long when you have a concussion.

“Why don’t you go to the doctor?”

“The emergency room nurses know me pretty well. I don’t want to bother the doctor with minor stuff.”

Then there was the time he was on his bike, and grabbed onto the back of a car that went onto the highway, with him hold onto it (like a jackass). Or when he built a home made bungee chord, and hung it from a large tree in the courtyard. The tree branch broke on the second try, and he smacked right into the ground.

“I should have chosen a stronger branch,” he explained to me.

But he also was an aspiring engineer. He built a contraption that was hooked up to three car batteries, and asked me if I wanted to watch him vaporize a steel wire. I told him no, but he took that as a yes, put on a heavy smock and protective goggles (he didn’t offer me any), and pressed the two cables together. The wire was vaporized, but it also blew out the window. “That will make it easier to climb through.” He said, lamely.

He built a hydraulic system for his bed. It would automatically raise to the ceiling, so it would be out of the way when not in use. The second woman I ever saw (briefly) show interest in him sat on the bed.

“I heard that you do wild things on here,” she said. But Larry, being Larry, didn’t get the double entendre.

“Yeah, check it out,” he said, and rushed to the other side of the room to throw the lever. The bed shot up to the ceiling, with the poor woman, shrieking, stuck on the bed for the launch towards the ceiling. Fortunately for her, he had built it with about ten inches between the bed and the ceiling. By lying flat, she was able to avoid being squished.

But Larry had hit the lever with such enthusiasm that the bed kept pumping up, falling a few feet, pumping up, falling, all the while the woman screaming “stop it, let me off here. Stop this thing.” Finally, Larry grabbed a lead pipe (I’m not sure why he had a led pipe laying around, but he did) and used it to hammer away at the hose, which caused it to loose hydraulic pressure. The bed fell to the floor.

The woman sprang from the bed, straightened her dress, and ran out the room.

After that first freshman year, I saw him a few times. Last I heard, he was a recluse in the mountains, making iron sculptures. He makes more money, I heard, by charging people to watch him do the sculptures than from selling the sculptures themselves.

Well, that goes to show you, there is always someone interesting. And everyone’s got a niche in life.