When I was 17 I came to Cal. My parents wouldn’t allow me to room with my best friend Ellen, owing to some escapades mentioned in Autodidacts (August 19). I selected the dormitory building closest to the campus and the Telegraph Avenue action: Spens-Black.

I was assigned room 312. That was near the corner of the building closest to the Ave, and it was only three floors above the sidewalk shrubbery, which lack of height took the luster away from my roommate’s suicide threats.

We were randomly selected for each other. Her name was Michelle and she was from West Virginia. I don’t remember any phrases of intelligence issuing from her. She was into guys and then her boyfriend and sex and decadence. She had long shiny brown hair I would have killed for, big floppy boobs that looked good in clothes, apparently far more life experience than I. Michelle liked to be naked in our room, and when she was agitated (which is the only way I remember her), she’d bounce on her narrow bed, shake her index finger at me, repeat “The thing is … The thing is …” without ever completing the sentence, and offer to jump out her window. The sliding glass only opened about six inches wide, so I could never figure out how she was going to get out or how she’d arrange the short fall in such a way as to end her life.

It was the first time I’d ever shared a bedroom. I didn’t mind having her in there with me, but I needed my own space. We each had our own bed, desk, and closet. The closet was wide, with sliding doors, and the left half of it had a built-in drawer unit on the floor. I emptied the right side of hanging items. Into it I moved my desk. I could no longer close that side of the closet (the end of the desk protruded), but I didn’t care about that. I could climb into the closet and use the drawer unit as a seat. All of me and most of my desk was then in its own room, separate from Michelle when she was present and from her aura when she was not.

It was in that closet that I played all the freshman games of stress-reducing solitaire (with a real deck of cards, kids…no computers!). It was in there that I listened to my KLH FM radio and cried when King and Kennedy were killed.

My parents still weren’t ready for me to take an apartment when that first year was done. I next moved into a co-ed coop on northside. And it must have been another several years before I knew enough to understand that old roommate Michelle had surely been post-partum when she arrived at Cal. Little girls don’t come with boobs and bellies like hers.