Rosebud, or: Things I Do for My Alma Mater

This past year after a particularly nasty storm my school admitted defeat and granted a snow day, which is huge for us because our Provost is from Montreal, so if he can manage to physically insert his smarmy ass into work, he thinks everyone else should be able to as well.  Of course we did like any college kids would: reverted back to our five-year-old states.  We played until it got dark, and then decided we were going to go sledding.  Now, my school is on the side of a small mountain, so that's basically as easy as finding someplace with a decent stretch of nothing hard, starting to run, and belly-flopping onto something flat.  I had a cafeteria tray that I smuggled out of the dining area a couple years back when they stopped using them to conserve wash-water; it is an excellent sled.  Four of us set off across the mountain to our favorite hill to sled down.

Now, the thing about our school is, it's a notorious party school.  Back in the '80s the city police department washed its hands of us, leaving the school to build its own official police force solely for the sake of keeping our drunk asses safe from ourselves and the townies.  These poor guys have the shitty job of wandering around campus all day and night, dealing with thankless, belligerent drunks.  So of course they do like anybody else would--take it out on the students.  Walking down the street with my beloved cafeteria tray (I had named it Rosebud), I heard "Hey! You! Get over here!"

I turned and saw the cop, and he was making hard for us.  He was bundled up tight and looked uncomfortable in his standard-issue boots; I assumed he had about four pairs of socks on in there.  I looked up at his face and my heart sank; it was the stupid bastard with the '80s gay cop mustache.  He was average height, thin, and had the face of someone whose stomach, heart and soul were malnourished and/or crushed.  He was known universally around campus as the most oppressive bit of university police force that ever put on a badge.  He once put a grad student in handcuffs because he claimed he was trespassing in school buildings at night, when grad students are always allowed into the buildings containing their labs and even have their own keys to get in.  And he was not happy to see us.  He came stomping towards us, and apparently we caused his mean streak to perk up so much he didn't even realize where he was walking, because--shwip-thud!--all the sudden we were looking at his bootsoles.  He painfully struggled back to his feet, and we noticed that death was now in his eyes.  Great.

"What're you doing?" he demanded.  We looked at each other pan-faced, as if he were speaking Swahili, not knowing what to say, and I was about to go with an honest answer when he pressed, "You weren't planning on going sledding were you?"  Now that I had a direction, I immediately shook my head.  "No, officer."  Which of course made him more angry.  "What's that?" he yelled, pointing straight at my beloved Rosebud.  I decided once again that honesty was the best policy.  "Oh, this?... It's a tray."  Which made him even angrier (in retrospect, I realize that nothing I said contributed to the rising anger, it was solely a function of time spent talking to ridiculous college kids.  Had I known this I would just have started swearing at him for all the good it did).

Apparently it's against school policy to allow sledding on campus, since some girl cracked her hip picking a bad trajectory and not having the common sense to jump off before she hit the streetlamp.  However, we didn't know this, and he wasn't about to enlighten us, so I had the distinct impression he was looking to arrest me for stealing a cafeteria tray.

"Why, in the middle of campus, at night, do you have a tray?!" he shouted.  I looked up to see where we were, and spotted the campus diner fifty feet in front of us.  "We're going to the Hawk's Nest," I doe-facedly lied.  "We're going to get a bunch of food, and bring it all back to the house with us.  That's what the tray is for."  His eyes just... bugged out.  I literally do not know how I stood motionless, as I swore for a second he was going to just snap and start clubbing me.  About five electrically-charged seconds took an eternity to pass, and then he just deflated a little, turned around and walked away.

I was a hero around campus that night for pushing the bastard one step closer to ending his meaningless existence, but more importantly, he'd have taken that ridiculous '80s gay cop mustache with him.