The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue by Robert Klein

Author:Robert Klein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

Chapter Nine

Ducks in a Row

I chose to live in the fraternity house my junior year. Happily, Mrs. Alcott, the house mother, was more out of touch with reality than ever, and the boys living there were totally unrestrained. Thanks to several sensible upperclassmen, it was still possible to study there, but it could be difficult, and more and more guys headed to the library.

My roommate was Bob Matolka, one of eleven children, from Endicott, New York. He was an engineering student with excellent grades, who became the steward of the house, in charge of meals and snacks. Before coming to Alfred, the closest he had ever been to Jews was when he ate a kosher pickle from a jar in 1956 in Binghamton. Yet for all his bucolic upbringing, he proved incredibly sophisticated and wise, and he had the respect of one and all. He was a serious type, but the zany and nonsensical carried the day at the house, with wild practical jokes planned and executed nonstop. Bobby Chaikin continually rolled an automobile tire down the stairs from his room in the attic, which would smash open the door below with an explosive sound and pin the occupant to the wall. He liked the element of surprise, like four in the morning. Not surprisingly, he became a dentist.

At supper one night, the main-course platter came out of the kitchen, the lid was removed, and on a lovely decorative bed of lettuce sat the head of a dead cat that Steve Levine had purloined from the zoology lab. Mrs. Alcott, whose sight was not much better than her mind, had to be restrained from taking a portion. “Oh, I love hash,” she said as Levine swiped the platter away. At the end of the meal, she was still slightly perturbed that the main course had been removed before she could taste it. On another occasion, Mike Wiener put flour all over his naked body and hid himself in the large industrial-size freezer in the kitchen. Munchkin, the house scaredy-cat, was induced by some of the guys to open the freezer. Wiener fell out like a corpse, and Munchkin almost had a cardiac arrest.

Bessie Hurd, the elderly churchgoing local farm woman who cooked five nights a week for the brothers and had never met a Jew until she took the job, was unfazed by any of this. Naked boys popping out of freezers did not deter her from preparing her hearty farm fare, which was frequently delicious and featured outlandish peach and blueberry pies. The guys treated her like some eccentric aunt, but unlike the house mother, whom she disliked, her perspicacity was intact, and she was unlikely to mistake a cat’s head for hash. I did a fair imitation of Bessie, who was prone to saying “God bless you,” even to people who hadn’t sneezed. She meant well.

I had become the court jester of Kappa Nu, the house comic. I had developed somewhat of a repertoire, which included several accurate impersonations of faculty members.

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