The Res

 

After vacating the Haileybury School of Mines, I was next schooled at Cambrian College in Sudbury. Same course, Mining Engineering Technology, just different school. Should I have changed schools? Yes. Should I have found a different path to pursue? Even then that should have been obvious to me, but I was still oblivious to that. Even in regards to all things Engineering. My neighbour, George Miller, had worked in labour and supervision in the Timmins mining industry his whole life, and George had tried to give me some sage career advice that summer, but George was too cryptic in his delivery; George should not have just said, “Get the ring, David,” referring to the iron ring all engineers wear on their right pinky, George ought to have been bolder in his advice, telling me that the industry (largely engineers in management) does not respect technologists, only engineers, and that my career advancement would be severely limited because of it. Of course, no school that teaches technology courses would ever enlighten their students with that tidbit of wisdom, would they? That said, I was too full of myself back then to heed George’s advice, brushing it aside, as though I knew my choice of career better than a man in his 50s who’d already spent his life in it.
Essentials packed again, we arrived in Sudbury, found the college residence, found my room (1B10), and dropped my stuff off. That took a while. The residence entrance was on the 3^rd floor, my room on the 1^st. You’d think that my having worked underground and used to a three-dimensional world, that I’d have been able to figure out that the 1^st floor was not the ground entrance, that should have been a piece of cake, but it took a few tries before it sunk in. My parents took me to lunch, and were on their way back home in the early afternoon. I was less devastated this time than the last. There was more excitement this time. Bigger school, more people, more to do.
My stuff arranged, I crashed out in the common room, no more than five feet from my room, and flipped channels. I found football, and left it there. I didn’t actually want to watch anything, I wanted to get on with meeting new friends, but I needed something to fill the time with something, was too excited to concentrate on a book, and I didn’t want to appear too introverted or closed off. I kept glancing through the common room windows at the halls for activity, and shortly, Evan Macdonald was seen, and having just seen me, came in to introduce himself. I said, “Hey, I’m Dave,” and he answered with “Hey,” and whatever else he said. Evan spoke in such a thick Cape Breton accent that it took me about a month before I could really decipher what he said, and by then I’d already begun to pick up bits and pieces of his accent, too (so said my friends when I returned home for Thanksgiving). But within about a half hour, I’d begun to pick out most of what I thought he said, or enough to figure out what I thought he said, anyway. We began with easy words. Evan had beer, so we started with that one. I had beer too. We were best friends. We settled in, introduced bits about ourselves. Evan was in Audio Visual, a drummer, a soundman for his band out East. He wanted to learn more about the electronic end of music.

More people arrive, people from Timmins, Cochrane, North Bay, people from the North and people from the South. And there were girls, the Res being co-op. Everywhere I looked there were girls. And one in particular who caught my eye, a girl from Elliot Lake. Enter Debbie Wursluk. Polish ancestry, my height, good figure, a blonde mullet Mohawk that rivaled Robert Smith’s for height. We begin to mix in the common room, in the halls, chatting each other up in doorways.
Then we had our residence induction from our floor deans. Each floor had a male and female dean. Our male dean looked like he stepped out of Platinum Blonde. Our female dean looked like Patty Smythe from Scandal. Rules were laid out involving guests and such, the usual fire drill. Then we were told that there was a meet and greet at Cortina Café later. No one knew where Cortina Café was. They didn’t tell us. But I knew where Cortina Pizzeria was, my parents had just treated me to lunch there. And Cortina Pizzeria was only about a half mile away, just up Regent Street, the same Regent the Res was, on so I assumed that was what they were talking about. So, I said, I knew where Cortina’s was. Word spread, and that’s where first floor Res went. As a group, everyone, B section, G section, Y section. We filed in, and Cortina’s, seeing all those greenbacks roll in, set up an enormous table down the centre of the restaurant. We dominated the restaurant. We wondered where our deans were, as they weren’t in Cortina’s when we arrived. We shrugged, and settled in, Evan to one side of me, Debbie to the other, the three of us already fast friends. We ordered drinks, then more while we waited a while for our deans to arrive. They did not. It was suggested by Evan that maybe we were in the wrong place. I countered with, “well, this is the only Cortina’s I know about, and we’re here now. If there’s another, I’m not going to go traipsing all over town to find it.” We ordered, we ate, we drank some more, paid our bills, and once we got back to the Res, we piled into cabs for the nearest Beer Store.
By the time the deans returned from the actual Cortina Café, downtown and quite some distance away, we were back with our now much depleted cases, the party in full swing.
“Where the fuck were you,” they asked me.
“At Cortina’s, “I said, “just down the road,” pointing up Regent Street through the windowless hall (my 3D senses fully aware by now where everything was in relation to one another), “Where were you?”
They explained where the “real” Cortina Café was. I shrugged. “Oh,” I said before taking a pull on my beer, not really caring. I may have been a little tipsy by then.
The night progressed, the party surged from hall to rooms, to the common room, spilling out to other floors to meet newer new people.
Debbie and I found ourselves alone in Evan’s room, close, her on his bed, me on a chair facing her, the chair abut the bed, our legs resting alongside one another, touching. She was surveying me with what I believe now was smoldering sensuality. I was responding like I never had before. Breath deeper, a bull urge rising up. Looking back, I think Evan concocted a reason to leave us alone, figuring out rather quickly and easily what I was too daft to see for myself.
We are taking each other in, feeling each other out, chatting about everything and nothing at that moment. Deb was in Audio Visual, as well. Loved music, loved movies, chatted endlessly (I was entranced with her voice, her laugh), but also hung on my every word when I did speak.
After a pause, she asked me, “Have you ever wanted to go to bed, but weren’t sure you wanted to go to bed?” She said. My heart lurched, skipped a beat.
I was pretty naïve then, and I’d just come from a largely all male college, so such conversations were pretty much unheard of, so I was not entirely sure what she was getting at. Was she tired? Did she want to take me to bed? I was really beginning to like this girl, even after so short an acquaintance, so I was really hoping for the later, and was really hoping that she would decide to do just that. But I was a gentleman, raised to respect women and their choices. And we were drunk, so I really didn’t want my first time to be a drunken tumble, soon to be regretted by her in the morning. Regretted by me were she to reject me on that count.
“Yeah,” was all I could think of to say, hoping that she’d read manly worldliness into so short a response.
I did not turn out how I’d hoped.
I think she decided that she was too drunk to continue, and that I was too drunk to continue. And maybe she didn’t really want to mess things up with me, either. Her mind made up, she slinked and hopped from the bed, she whisked past, but not without grazing her fingertips along my pant leg as she passed.
Good night, she said, and laid a kiss on my cheek. She must have heard my breath catch in my throat, because she smiled more broadly than she had already. “Loved meeting you. It was a good night.”
It was.