After all the college application and admission smoke cleared and I was bound for Rutgers, I was assigned to a dorm room in one of the older complexes, known as The Quad. It seemed this was a better alternative than the still older Ford Hall, except that Ford had already been renovated while renovation for The Quad remained a future project for the university.

Four individual buildings made up The Quad, and Hegeman Hall being the largest of the four and, L-shaped, made up one entire side of The Quad and part of another. The nearly half-century old classic red brick buildings surrounded a – I am sure – once lovely area, the actual Quadrangle, that, in its esthetic wisdom and budgetary constraints, the university saw fit to completely pave over in asphalt, as it had done with half the Rutgers College campus. If one was not actively living on a parking lot, one at least could get the rich vicarious experience of doing so, certainly a key part of the New Jersey ambiance, thanks to the all-pervasive black top that covered The Quad and stretched off in all directions from there.

Hegeman consisted of several sections, each with its own entry door from the Quadrangle, stairway connecting the two floors of rooms, shared bathroom, and communal telephone closet. I was assigned to a room in the third section, on the first floor and right in the corner of the “L” that was Hegeman Hall, facing out onto another asphalt-paved space between Hegeman and the much newer and high-rise Clothier Hall, that looked down on The Quad. This room was Hegeman 313.

Being a corner room and therefore larger than the typical Quad room, Hegeman 313 was a triple. Meaning there were three freshmen assigned to it. A decidedly bad idea, though that was unknown to me at the time of my naïve arrival on campus. As anyone who has ever shared a living space with two other people can attest, two of the residents will invariably band together in an alliance of convenience and gang up on the third – in this case, the third being me.

The room itself was fairly sparse. A bare concrete floor, painted a dark brown. Concrete walls, painted in the university’s pervasive dark green color, which we came to call Mason Gross Green, after the Rutgers president. Three metal frame beds with thin mattresses. Three steel desks. Some lights, closets, two windows – one looking out on Clothier and its asphalt quadrangle, the other looking toward the large, modern River Dorms across River Road, and of course, more asphalt.

My parents deposited me and my baggage in Hegeman 313 with all the hope and false expectations that parents the country, if not the world, over deposit their offspring as they make their fledgling flights into the world. And they had every reason to embrace this ethereal hope since they had not yet met my two roommates, whom we’ll call Neil and Phil, that being their names. Or I think it was.

Neil was a big, strapping sort of guy, not much brighter than the dark-brown concrete floors of Hegeman 313, and Phil was a classic spoiled rich kid from Western Essex County – Livingston or Short Hills, if memory serves – who seemed to think that college was mainly meant to be one big party. Neil and Phil, as different as they were from one another, were even more different from me, and so they immediately formed that alliance of convenience I previously mentioned, and I was squarely on the outside of it right from the first day.

Neil and Phil did in fact have some things in common. For one, they were both heavy cigarette smokers, and this was something that was allowed in the dormitories of the day. I, on the other hand, had been raised with the notion that if my parents ever caught me smoking I would be made to eat the cigarettes until I vomited, a less than attractive notion to me.

Neil and Phil also were kind of “cool” guys, or at least they shared traits of what might be considered cool guys, whereas I was your classic dork who, while probably smarter than the two of them put together, didn’t have even a faint clue of many of the things they knew about and had experienced. Not that I wasn’t curious and didn’t want to know about them, but it was terra incognita to me, and terra that Neil and Phil both jealously guarded while taking every opportunity to make sure I stayed off their ground and remained incognita.

There were some points of conflict that arose fairly early on in our triumvirate living experience. First, there were the gold pajamas. These were things I wore to bed at home, and my mother thought would be a good idea for me to wear to bed in my dorm room at school, too. For some reason I was willing to go along with this, probably for lack of any better idea on my part. But apparently this was not such a good idea after all, since Neil and Phil burst into laughter and began pointing in my direction in utter derision the first time they saw me wearing the gold pajamas as I prepared for bed.

College guys apparently were not expected to wear pajamas, much less gold pajamas supplied by their mothers. Underwear – tighty-whities being the prevailing style of the day – was considered the proper night attire of supposedly cool college guys. I wasn’t quite ready to abandon my gold pajamas, so the nightly humor and mocking went on until I finally decided the gold pajamas weren’t worth it, and I acquiesced to the accepted dress code for bed.

The gold-pajama stage was not yet over when another point of derision arose between Neil and Phil and me. It’s all a little fuzzy to me now, as it was at the time, but apparently – being a healthy 17-year-old boy – I must have had a wet dream and wound up masturbating in my sleep. Not to miss a thing where I was concerned, Neil and Phil caught the show in the dark shadows of Hegeman 313, probably Neil pointing it out to Phil, and it was more sly grins and leers and finger-pointing and laughter in the morning, me being the butt of all this mirth shared between my two roomies. It helped not a bit that I was caught in flagrante delicto, dick in hand in the dead of night, in those damned gold pajamas, no less. Oh, the humanity.

Being a freshman guy away at college for the first time carried with it certain time-honored sexual traditions, such as taping posters of a half-naked Raquel Welch in her cave woman persona in Planet of the Apes above one’s dorm-room bed, and somehow laying one’s hands on every copy of Playboy one could find, buy, borrow, or steal. And so it came to pass that, one otherwise nondescript late Hegeman 313 afternoon, with Neil and Phil out of the room, I awoke from a sound nap on my dorm-room bed to look up and see my father standing over me. And all I could think of were the several copies of Playboy spread open on my desk, and not to the articles necessarily, and old Raquel looking down on me from the other side of the bed from where my father stood.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I think I groggily intoned, or words to that effect.

It turned out that my Mom and Dad were coming back from a trip down the Shore and decided it would be a good idea to stop in and see me. A good idea to them, anyway, but a decidedly bad idea to me. The occasion provided my first clear opportunity to begin the proper training of my parents, and in a pique of annoyance and indignation (accentuated to draw attention away from the Playboys gracing my desk where I suppose my Dad expected to find text books open and in avid use) I insisted that, henceforth, no parental visits would be broached absent a prefatory phone call and request for permission to visit. Somewhat to my surprise, my parents accepted these terms, and that was my last surprise campus visit by them.

Even as Neil struggled with his school work and Phil was working his way well along toward flunking all his first-term courses, I remained a source of constant cohesion and derision for them. There were the white socks that I thought looked sharp paired with black slacks (in defense, I knew little at the time about Canada and its very different style sense). There was shaving dry in the room mirror. There was my sense of near-awe at Phil’s seeming sexual prowess as he prepared for dates and which he must have taken to be quaint, at best.

And there were the cigarettes. Both Neil and Phil smoked incessantly, and I saw them and inhaled their side-stream smoke on a daily basis, day in and day out, night in and night out. I finally decided there must be something to this habit of theirs and it was simply easier, I felt, to join them in it rather than fight against it. So I picked up a pack of cigarettes and some matches somewhere or other and started smoking myself.

It was mid-term time, and I was already way behind in the readings for most of my courses, and so I started pulling late nighters and all-nighters studying – “throating,” as serious studying was termed at the Rutgers of the day – for my mid-terms. Cigarettes and coffee played key roles in my efforts to stay awake and study, usually curled up in a plush chair in a lounge in one of the newer dorms, as other classmates engaged in marathon games of bridge like some version of driven shipmates on long sea crossings.

The cigarettes and coffee became so crucial to my studying regimen that I spent most of my time lighting up and puffing and downing paper cups of light, sweet, dorm-machine coffee into the wee-most hours of the night in an effort to stay awake, with little time or energy left for actual studying.

Fortunately, almost miraculously, I never became addicted to the cigarettes. One day I came back to Hegeman 313 after lunch at the University Commons, Neil and Phil both out of the room, and as I stood by the open window looking out toward the River Dorms and puffing on a cigarette, I looked down at it in my hand, said to myself, “This is really disgusting,” and put it out. And that was the end of my short-lived career as a cigarette smoker.

As the first term wore down to a close, Phil had succeeded in flunking every single one of his courses and he was invited to leave the university. Neil managed to make it through, as had I, and so it was just the two of us left in Hegeman 313. At that point I invited one of my friends, Dan Jass, into the room, and thus was able to shift the balance of power to my favor.

Dan was a psychology major from a well-to-do family in Scarsdale, New York, who had interesting theories on just about everything from what it means when we smile at strangers (a way of releasing hostility) to why we light up our cities at night (to block out the stars so we don’t have to face the enormity of the Universe). Dan claimed to have slept with the folk singer Judy Collins at one time, and he had an irritating way of always declaring himself the winner of just about any argument, followed by an even more irritating cackle of a laugh. There were times I suspected Dan of being deranged, a perfect counter-foil to Neil who clearly was deranged.

Dan and I began our journey into smoking pot together, and it was a fateful night when I came back to my open text book on a table at the University Library to find a hand-scribbled note that read simply, “Come back – this is it!” That was my queue to come back to the room, where our first taste was awaiting us. And like most first-time tokers, it took a while for us to feel the effect, and so we kept asking ourselves, “Do you feel it yet? Do you feel it yet?” as we went to get ice cream cones from the trucks out on College Avenue. And then my ice cream cone tried to punch me in the face. A paranoid toker from the start.

Dan and I decided it would be a good idea to take our bed frames and turn them on end and drap them with sheets or something, essentially Balkanizing Hegeman 313 into three separate enclaves. It gave us each a modicum of privacy, not to mention a little love nest in the event we could actually score a girl to come back to the dorm with us. To add to the psychedelically erotic effect, we strung flashing Christmas lights between the various make-shift partitions.

Neil did not take well to the Balkanization, and let it be known in no uncertain terms. One post-lunch afternoon I returned to the room, to be greeted a short while later by an enormously loud rendition of “Thou shalt not partition the Lord with prayer!” booming from a speaker aimed out of an upper-floor window in the neighboring Clothier Hall.

“Thou shalt NOT partition the Lord with prayer!”

Louder and louder, with more emphasis each time on the words “not” and “partition.” Or at least it sounded like “partition” to me, and it sounded like Neil’s booming voice saying it.

“Thou shalt NOT PARTITION the Lord with prayer!”

It was a little scary and it went on and on and on. I think until someone sent Campus Security to shut it down. I never did know for certain whether that was Neil or not, but it sure could have been even if it wasn’t actually. We never discussed it.

The college Housing Department meanwhile continued postponing its plans to renovate The Quad, and so our first year at Rutgers ended with Hegeman Hall still open and available. At that point I saw no reason to relocate to another dorm, and I had struck a deal with my good friend David Szonyi to come be roommates with me since Dan was moving on elsewhere. Neil also decided to stay in Hegeman 313, but David and I figured we would just live our normal lives and in short order that would drive Neil from the room in terror.

Well, that’s not exactly how things unfolded, and Neil simply lived his normal life and nearly drove David and I from the room. Even partitioning the room, with or without prayer, once more did not dissuade Neil from staying on, and so we went on with the one terrorizing the two.

Other events transpired in Hegeman 313, not the least of which was my successful bid to be Quadrangle Dorm President, my unsuccessful bid to be Residence Hall Association President, the passing of a night of drunken squalor on the concrete floor, and the ultimate and most memorable event of all, the passing of my unlamented virginity with Sheila Mangel (she was an artist, she didn’t look back, thank you Bob Dylan), on Saturday, May 24, 1969, at about 1 in the afternoon, at the end of sophomore year.

Throughout all this strum und drang, there hung the continual threat that the university finally would get around to renovating The Quad. And at last that day came, sometime in our junior year, and we were summarily ordered to abandon Hegeman Hall, to be banished to newer dormitories around the campus. And beyond. And therein lay the next struggle, when the Housing Office decided to split David and I up, to send us off to the University Heights Campus, a long and nauseating bus ride away in Piscataway. And in the zeitgeist of protest of the time, David and I decided we were having none of it. And so we hunkered down in Hegeman 313, refusing to budge until our demands were met. And thus began the saga of the Hegeman 2.

As workmen began to remove furniture and fittings from the dorm, reducing the bathroom to rubble as 50-year old marble was broken and ripped out, as dust and debris rose and settled around us, David and I held our ground. Orders from on high turned to threats, threats to pleas, pleas to heavy negotiations. I think the university officials felt both the frustration of a couple of college kids defying their orders and the fear that somehow they would be held liable if a slab of concrete fell on us, or we were poisoned in a cloud of lead-based Mason Gross Green paint being blasted off the walls.

Daily the building janitor would come by to harangue us, barking in a German-accented tirade all the reasons we couldn’t stay in the dorm, telling us we had to go, demanding that we stop making what in his mind clearly amounted to a huge nuisance of ourselves. And we would politely listen, and demur.

While protestors stormed and took control of Old Queens, the two-century-old university administration building, and put their feet up on the desk of the university President, the very Mason Gross himself, while bomb threats emptied classroom buildings on a daily basis and exams and courses and grades were all thrown out the anti-war protest window, the Hegeman 2 staged our own somewhat lower-profile, but no-less-frustrating to authority, protest in a corner room of the aging Hegeman Hall.

Almost daily one or the other of us was summoned to the college Dean’s office. The tactic became one of divide-and-conquer. They would offer one of us a chance to stay on the main campus with the other being shipped off to exile in Piscataway. They would try to sweeten the deal offering one or the other of us some special concession, hoping to break our solidarity and with it the impasse at which they found themselves. But being inured to the politics of co-option, David and I hung tough, and neither of us fell for these feckless tactics of administrators and deans unaccustomed to students who actually stood up for their rights, or what they perceived as their rights.

It remains unclear to me why the university did not simply send in the Campus Police to perp walk us and our belongings out of the room, but I think they felt they had enough protest to deal with without stirring up another upswell of student activism and one more cause celebre they would have to defend themselves against. And so days turned into weeks as David and I hung tough, wending our way through the broken marble and Mason Gross Green paint dust to make use of what remained of the facilities, and as troops of workmen did their noisy thing all around us. It felt a bit like the closing days of the Roman Empire, a feeling rendered all the more realistic by the slabs of broken marble in the remains of the second-floor bathroom.

Finally, realizing they could not beat us, the administration capitulated and agreed to offer both David and I accommodation in the newer River Dorms on the main College Avenue campus. They did not have a room for the two of us, but at least neither of us would be sent into Piscataway exile, and our basic demand had been met. So with some sadness and much maudlin sentimentality, we packed our things and, with assistance proffered by the Housing Office, left Hegeman 313, crossed River Road, and headed for our new quarters. I wound up on the fourth floor of Frelinghuysen Hall, David in similar accommodations elsewhere but nearby.

My new roommate – this being a two-person room, as all the newer dorms featured, the designers of student residence halls having learned the bitter lesson of three-person rooms – was a pleasant Latin fellow who went by the name B.R.

B.R., it seemed, was well named, since it turned out that B.R. stood for “Boy Roommate.”

B.R. seemed happy enough to have me as his new roomie, until the day he came back and found that the new roomie not only had partitioned the Lord, but had partitioned the room, with his upstanding bed frame and other accoutrement of the latest campus cool love nest partitioning trend.

“Uh, what’s with Fort Apache?” B.R. asked me, displaying admirable restraint, upon my initial post-partitioning return to the room. Clearly B.R. was not pleased with this new and unanticipated development.

I did my best to defend my partitioning, explaining how it gave us both more privacy. B.R. was unconvinced, and we set about exploring compromise positions that would leave us both satisfied and not feeling browbeat by the other or feeling like we were indeed living in Fort Apache. This in itself was a huge improvement over the on-going low-level guerilla warfare that was the normal mode while in Hegeman 313.

One evening during this recent post-move partitional period, I found myself sitting in a stall in the communal john near the beginning of the fourth-floor hallway when I heard a thunder of heavy feet stomping down the corridor. The steps seemed to stop about at my room, where I had left the door open. There came a moment of silence, followed by the now-familiar German-accented bellow of our old janitor friend.

“Oh, no! It’s the kid from Hegeman!”