January is a cold month in western Connecticut. Especially when you’re living in a crumbling dormitory during the oil crisis at a school that apparently didn’t fund-raise well. I froze my grapes off. Mornings were brutal. As I scurried down the echoey hall toward a breakfast of powdered eggs and a chilly slice of toast, I felt as if my body had emptied of blood. I never felt comfortable until I was standing in the shower; then just when I’d begin to thaw out, I’d get pushed out into the drafty lavatory. Nights were worse. Two of the windowpanes in my room were broken, and the little warmth that managed to clank out of my radiator was sucked into the night and disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Fortunately, I met Billy-Fu Sodani. He was the son of a Pakistani oil minister whose wealth was estimated in the quarter-billion-dollar range. He was also the biggest drug dealer on campus. Billy-Fu didn’t deal for the money, but for the risk involved. Like those people who parachute just because it scares the turds out of them. Adventure being discomfort in retrospect and all that. His real name was Fuad, but he always wore a cowboy hat and he’d gotten this nickname.

A few nights a week Billy-Fu and I would stuff our beds and sneak out of the dorms. We’d scamper across campus, darting between every bush. A quick dash up the side of the mountain, and we were ready to get high. Even at that point, though, things weren’t exactly what Billy-Fu called “copacetic.” Besides freezing our fingers off trying to light the bowl, there was the possibility of being ambushed by a swarm of teachers. The school encouraged this as part of its “administrative pervasion.”

Kids were getting bounced from school three and four at a time. One guy actually went gray and then bald in the three days between his getting busted for dealing a few lids and facing the Disciplinary Committee for sentencing. Everyone thought he had a bad case of cancer or something. After he got booted, he went home to his doctor and they figured out that when his room was raided his heart must’ve actually stopped for a split second, long enough for all the hair on his body to wither.

Smoking dope or drinking were the easiest ways to get the boot, but even lighting a candle in your room could get you twelve hours labor because matches were contraband. Tension gripped the dorms like the ice outside. Knocking unannounced freaked people out. Bongs spilt on bedspreads, lit cigarettes were flung out windows, those already on probation hung from their fingertips from third-floor ledges, those on double-pro dropped from third-floor ledges, random drugs were gobbled down, and so on. The standard procedure was to knock and say “cool” simultaneously. Only teachers knocked without “cooling.”