It was a wonderful, miserable proposition. On those weekends where I was displaced from my home, my mother graciously offered to allow me to return to the home of my youth. My husband moved into his father's house and I stayed with the children during the week, but nearly every weekend he would come and stay with the kids at our house, so that they would have the stability of being in their own home, around the things that made them feel the calmest. Only when it was finally cold and lifeless on the floor, did we decide we needed to have an exit plan. My husband and I had let our marriage die a slow, insidious death. We made love, we made children, and we made a huge, gigantic mess of our lives.įifteen tumultuous years after I bode a fond farewell to the four walls of my childhood bedroom, I found myself back home once again. I married the boyfriend, we moved from small apartment to a feral cat ridden street just outside of Detroit. The story goes like many young love affairs do. "I know what I'm doing!"īut - and I know you'll be surprised by this – it turns out, I did not. "For God's sake, people!" I countered confidently, tossing my New Kids on the Block scrapbook into a half-filled moving box. "Is this really want you want to do?" questioned my mother, as she watched me untack my Van Gogh framed art and my Sarah McLachlan poster from my walls. "Are you sure this is a good idea?" my friends whispered as they helped me lug a hand-me-down sofa up two flights of stairs. One day, I lay dreaming in a twin bed in my mother's basement, the next I was playing big girl pretend in a one-bedroom apartment in a boxy building complex. 56).I moved out of parents house and in with my boyfriend at the ripe old age of 19. Pelicans & Chihuahuas and Other Urban Legends. Some tellings of the legend end with the sodomizer dead at the hands of his victim and his victim-turned-killer now serving a life term in Leavenworth. The GI is often said to “beat the crap” out of his tentmate upon discovering what he’s been up to. Whereas the college version generally ends with the discovery of the perfidy, revenge is almost always exacted on the perpetrator in the military version, either by the soldier acting on his own or with the help of his buddies. (Both tellings involve predators who drug their victims with alcohol.) The story has spread widely in the United States over the last twenty years or so, generally set in military barracks or campus dormitories. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, and it was included in Gershon Legman’s Rationale of the Dirty Joke. While searching through the items his roommate had left behind this student discovered a beaker of ether and a rag in a large zip-loc bag.Īs Brunvand notes, this legend has been mentioned in print as far back as 1886, in Richard F. He returned to his dorm room to discover that his roommate had hastily moved out and had dropped out of school. The sluggishness was due to heavy drug use. The doctor seemed puzzled because he explained that the cause of the student’s pains was due to being sodomized on a regular basis. After the exam the doctor asked the student if he was gay. This went on for a week or two before he sought medical attention at Cowell. Apparently his roommate had been using ether on him to knock him out while he, um, had his way with him.Ī guy in the dorms would wake up in the morning feeling sluggish and experiencing abdominal pains. It was discovered that he had a high level of ether in his bloodstream.
A guy went to the doctor because of pain in his rectum. A few summers ago, a friend of mine at work told me a story that supposedly happened at the school he went to.