Vomit Night

[troubled sleep]

“Liquid or chunky?”

 

Erin is our resident vomit expert. She had three cases of throw-up in her bathroom in the first week and a half alone. The night of the first football game had been a veritable flood of vomit in the 8th floor, high side bathroom.

 

I, however, have been lucky. And despite a predilection for leaving their hair everywhere and clogging the drains, my girls have been decent about keeping the bathroom clean...ish. So when I was greeted tonight by an angry message on my dry erase board proclaiming, “Vomit!! Vomit! There is vomit in the shower. OMG,” I knew it was time to bring in the big guns. So I called Erin.

 

“Liquid or chunky?” she repeats. She's standing her PJ's completely neutral, completely unfazed by the fact that I'm freaking out on her doorstep.

 

“Umm, sort of both? It's like...I don't know if it's quite umm..it's still kind of...you know...” I make vague motions in the air with my hands.

 

“Solid?” Erin offers mildly.

 

“Yeah! It's still kind of solid. I don't know if it's quite digested enough to be vomit, or if someone just tossed some food in the shower to screw with me.”

 

Erin nods. Sighs. Smiles. Slips into the matching pair of pink slippers placed next to the door and steps out into the hallway.

 

“Well, lets go take a look.”

 

We trot down her hall and around the bend, past the elevators and onto my side of the 8th floor. It's called 8 low, partially because it's on the lower side of the hill, but mostly because it has rooms 801-817, whilst Erin has 818-832. It took me almost a full semester to figure that out. We're an interesting floormate pair, Erin and I, as we're both very different. Even right now--she's dressed in a coordinated clouds-and-cows PJ ensemble with those cute slippers, and I'm rocking mismatched socks, old sweatpants and last year's RA t-shirt, a shapeless grey thing with, "Being a leader, being an RA" emblazoned on the back.

 

Erin is the mother of our staff. Despite being as many as three years younger than some of us, she manages to keep all 18 of us in line with her quiet, organized way. I've never seen her flummoxed or upset. Her favorite phrase is “Oh, Goodness!” and she can adapt it to fit any situation. She says just this as we walk into my bathroom.

 

“Oh, Goodness!” She draws back the middle curtain and looks down at the puddle of guck and hair and food blocking the drain. “Yep, that's vomit alright.”

 

We sit there and silently stare at it for a moment.

 

“Damn dining hall pasta salad, gets 'em every time.” I say after a moment, trying to lighten the mood by being silly, because that's what I do when I'm freaking out.

 

“Something with tomatoes, definitely,” Erin replies, nodding down at the squishy red food blobs. We both step away from the shower stall at the same time and let the curtain swing closed by unspoken mutual agreement.

 

“So, uh...what's the best way to go about cleaning this?”

 

“Well,” Erin says, calmly as though she were telling me about the weather, “You need cleaning supplies, that means going to Smith--”

 

“But I'm on call, I can't leave the building...”

 

“It's ok, I'll get them for you. Let me go get my shoes. You call Smith and tell them I'm coming.” She turns and walks calmly out of the bathroom and back to her own room. I leave at a run, taking the 8 flights of stairs three at a time to get down to the front desk and its list of telephone numbers.

 

Smith Hall is, for all intents and purposes, our sister hall. And not just any little sister, but the weird, freaky one who is always trying to one-up you, even though you're clearly way cooler. Salley hall is nearby, too, the voice of reason in our inter-hall squabbles, and between the three of us, we make up the Westside High-rises. Or, as I call them, the Westside Sisters.

 

As it's after hours, their front desk phone is answered by a nightstaffer. For those unacquainted with these strange, but mostly gentle beasts, nightstaffers work the front desks from 11pm until 7am, bolding holding the line against floods, drunken students, power outages, and weirdos wandering in whilst the rest of us slumber away. They're usually nice once you get to know them, but can be a little abrasive to us day-time dwellers – at least at first. It's all about knowing how to handle them.

 

“Smith Hall, what is it?” A tired, male voice asks when I dial Smith's number.

 

“Hello, Smith Hall! This is Mae, RA on call in Kellum and I'm sending you a visitor!”

 

He perks up immediately--Nightstaffers love it when you send them people to talk to. My friend Michael used to work Nightstaff and I used to sit up with him a lot—it gets awfully lonely sitting by yourself at the front desk, watching the hours tick by. Believe it or not, there's only so many times you can watch that one youtube video with the dancing cat before your brain starts to melt.

 

“What's up next door?” the nightstaffer asks, excited for news, gossip, or anything to lend excitement to his night.

 

“Some loser threw up in my shower, so I'm sending my floormate over to borrow your cleaning supplies. So be on the lookout for some Kellumites headed your way in the next few, ok?”

 

“Alright, I'll keep a weather eye out. Thanks, Kellum.”

 

“Anytime, have a good night, Smith Hall!”

 

Ever efficient, Erin is there and back again in a just a few minutes. She comes bearing clorox clean-up, 409 lysol wipes, and a plethora of gloves.

 

“Last time, I made my girls help me clean,” she says by way of explaining the twenty-odd plastic gloves she's now pressing into my hands.

 

“I don't know...it's kind of late.”

 

Erin looks at me with her unblinking, un-judging eyes. And nods.

 

“Well, it's about midnight.”

 

“I can handle it myself, I think.”

 

Erin just nods again.

 

“Okay. If you want help, let me know.”

 

After a further thanks and few more pleasantries, Erin departs for her own domain, leaving me quite alone in my big, empty hallway clutching at the clorox. Stealing myself, I walk back down to the bathroom, boldly throw open the curtain and...stop. I stare down at the mass of vomit. I could very easily clean this up, leave an admonishing note on my girls' doors and leave it at that. But, a small voice at the back of my head protests: it's not *your* mess—you're their RA, not their mommy and certainly not their maid. I glance back at the door. Then down at the clock on my phone. 12:18am. Setting the clorox and the gloves back down on the floor, I take a few deep breaths, square my shoulders, and walk-with-a-purpose out the door and down the hall.

 

Curling my hand into a fist, I knock loudly against the first door. No answer. I knock again.

 

“What?” A voice calls from the depths of the room.

 

“Hi, it's Mae—you're RA, can you open the door please?”

 

The door is opened by an amazon, and I stifle a gulp. Most of my residents are at least 5 foot 7, with tall, bronzed bodies and very long, beautiful hair. Me? I claim 5'4”, but I'm really more of a 5'3” and kind of...soft. And very pale. And frizzy.

 

“What?” the amazon—her name is Ruby, by the by—asks, an eyebrow raised at my sudden appearance at her door. Holding my hands in front of me so she can't see them shaking, I take in a long breath and begin to speak very quickly:

 

“Throw on a t-shirt or something, we're having a bathroom cleaning adventure!--someone threw up in the middle stall and no one's going to come clean until monday, so it's on us! And I for one don't want to shower in vomit! I've got cleaning supplies, I've got gloves, so I need you to get out here, sweetheart, and help me get people out of their rooms. The more we've got, the quicker it'll be. Come on, bathroom cleaning adventure!!!!” Without saying anything else, I move on to the next door before she can properly protest, repeat my speech, then move to the next door and the next, pulling people out of bed and away from computer screens. Soon I've got a veritable army of pajama-ed freshmen girls, all of whom are ridiculously pissed. Marshaling my troupes, I send half of them down to the other side of the hallway to get the rest up and bring the other half into the bathroom with me.

 

“OK! I brought gloves, here's some for you, and you and you,” I say, handing out the flimsy plastic gloves to my unwilling residents. “Here are some cleaning supplies, you take these, Bree and you take these, Zoe, now, umm—go!” The rest of the stragglers had shuffled in by this time, and all of them just stood there, clutching their gloves and staring at me. I'm hit with a sudden wave of Panic—what if they said no? I half expect them to be like, “no! Forget this, I do what I want, fool! I'm going back to sleep!” What if they didn't listen to me? What if—

It was then that my girls shrugged into action. Much to my surprise, people began to venture into the showers whilst others stayed out on the main floor, handing in lysol wipes or spraying 409 in before them.

 

“This is nothing!” shouts one of my residents—Rupa Chadha, a Kellum hall returner whose name I only remembered for the roster test because of its similarity to “Chupacabra”—as she went once more into the breach, “You should have seen it last year! Puke everywhere!! Puke on the walls! On the toilets! On the windows! On the--”

 

“I just can't believe someone would do this...I mean, seriously? Why wouldn't you just, like, throw up in the toilet??” Bree -- a Louisianan who claims to be first cousin to Brittney Spears -- says, wrinkling her nose as she hands another Lysol wipe to her counterpart wiping down the shower.

 

“I think I'm going to be sick!” Savannah, a tall blonde, says covering her mouth and turning away.

 

“Or they could at least aim for the trash can,” spritely Zoe calls back to Bree from her place inside the shower.

 

“Puke on the ceiling! Puke on the door! On the--” Rupa continues to shout to no one in particular.

 

“I am going to find whoever did this and I am going to mess her up!” Cami says, standing in her shower stall, gloved hands on hips.

 

“Yeah!” the rest of the girls chorus.

 

It was then that I realized that their anger wasn't at me for waking them up, but rather for this unnamed person who ruined their bathroom. I take heart in that—but also advised them that violence is not the answer.

 

In fifteen minutes, the bathroom was, well, if not sparkling clean, at least as clean as a community style bathroom gets in a freshman dorm. I scurry up on the lip between the shower and the floor, a six inch boost putting me about at eye level with most of my residents. “Thanks everybody for taking part in our bathroom cleaning adventure,” I say, much slower this time, “as nice as it's been to see everybody, I hope we never have to meet like this again,” this is greeted by a number of nods and a few cheers. After a few further parting words about how they should not let their hair clog the drain--this was part of the problem, too--and should not throw up in strange places, I let them go back to their lives.

 

Some residents stayed behind to chat for a few minutes, but in the end, it's just me, standing alone in the bathroom. I look down at the shower, now clean, and smile. I'm not much of a “tough guy,” I never have been. I'm terrified of hurting peoples' feelings and have trouble asking people for things. It's one of the things that always scared me most about becoming an RA. I was hired midway through the year, and managed to skate by with minimal conflict with my residents, but this year is already shaping up to be a very trying one. But nonetheless...in this moment, I feel pretty cool that I actually was assertive, that I got people to do something. I'm not a very good tough guy, but I'm working on it.

Edited October 18, 2009 by troubled sleep

[Peredhil]

*hugs tightly* I wish I could express how proud of you I am at this moment. Not only for doing the right thing over fear, but for writing this so well I felt I was there. You really capture the moment.