Back in the heady days of my rather unfortunate youth, when I was but a mere student at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa (home of the infamous three-legged corn detassling races – don't ask), Laurel, Crank Boy and I whiled away the hours between classes with an array of exciting and enlightening diversions – reading the famous philosophers, debating matters of ontology and phenomenology, huffing huge amounts of fumes from the paint thinner we'd stolen from the theatre department. Our lives were undeniably simpler then – student loans covered our bills, the dormitory cafeterias kept us fed, and the bounty hunters hadn't really figured out where we lived yet. You could tease and torment the freshmen without ever really worrying about what the police might think; after all, those freshmen were smart enough not to talk, considering the Polaroids we always seemed to have of their parents tied to chairs, covered with bacon grease, and surrounded by unruly wolves.
But there was one chap, a truly annoying little jerkwad named Percy, whose countenance we couldn't shake no matter how hard we tried. Oh sure, he was alarmingly cute, there was no escaping that simple fact. The boychild was stunning of appearance, with the kind of syrupy good looks you'd equate with the cast of The Bold and the Beautiful. He would walk through a crowd and suddenly stupefied young ladies would drop their textbooks, emit tiny, paralyzed squeaks from their impressively slack jaws, and have spontaneous shrieking orgasms right there in the student union… and you'd look up, and there was Percy, stunningly oblivious, on his way to get a fookin ham'n'cheese from the Hardee's counter. And then, sandwich secured, he'd take a big bite as he tried to find us, his eyes frantically searching the student union as the three of us attempted to hide behind plants or inside garbage cans, as giant globs of disgusting cheese goo slid down his perfectly sculpted chin, causing entire tables of unsuspecting underclassmen women to suddenly swoon with wild, saucy delight and collapse to the floor in a sexual frenzy as he walked past.
"Christ Jesus on a motorized Popsicle stick rammed straight into His stigmata," Laurel would shout, "he's spotted us!" and we'd know without doubt that Percy was on his way directly toward us, and there was nothing we could do, nothing at all, for sprinting in our typically altered state of consciousness usually involved a fair amount of falling down, breaking noses, and losing blood, and by that point, we were really over that whole scene, so.
"Hey guys," Percy would say, an obnoxious yet thoroughly beautiful smile gracing his angelic lips, "wanna hang out?"
And my heart would fall, nay, plummet, deep into my ankles, for the second to last thing on Earth I wanted to do (the first being to spend even five seconds in the same room as an unclothed Joan Rivers) was hang out with Percy. It wasn't just the alarming way he managed to inappropriately quote the great poets – Yeats, Coleridge, Jermaine Jackson – whenever he was on the verge of flatulence. It wasn't just the way he managed to start every third sentence with the phrase "Hold on, let me empty my colostomy bag." It wasn't just the way he carried a small portable amplifier on his belt that played a continuous loop of Air Supply's Greatest Hits. No, it was mostly an indescribable creeping dread that seemed to surround him, presage his appearance, and trail after him like the toilet paper that constantly stuck to his fookin loafers. When Percy arrived, we always knew we were submerged in extremely deep vats of feces.
But there was one particular afternoon, back in the twilight of my tenure as one of the single most intoxicated students in UNI history, when we simply couldn't bear the thought of interacting with Percy, and decided drastic action was necessary. Laurel had made chocolate chip pot cookies that were so strong that the chocolate chips were actually fleeing in terror from the cookies, leaping from her backpack into the paths of the normals we went to school with, shouting "Save us, save us!" and disappearing down unsuspecting students' throats before she even had a chance to salvage the pot residue from their tiny chocolate hides. As we each took several large bites from one of these deadly cookies, we spotted Percy making his way to us from across the student union, the usual glob of cheese goo this time accompanied by an actual slab of ham that was stuck to his goatee.
"Holy Mother Mary doing naked roller boogie on my dining room table," Crank Boy muttered, "we have got to get the fuck out of here."
Fortunately for us, Crank Boy had a shall we say intimate familiarity with the system of steam tunnels that runs underneath the UNI campus. There was an entryway underneath a nearby potted frond, which we quickly tossed aside, stomped upon, and set on fire in our hasty attempt to access the steam tunnel entryway. Crank Boy threw open the lid, and we hastily descended into the murky underworld of the steam tunnels, even as Percy's plaintive wails of "Guuuuuuuuuys, wait for meeeeeeeeeeee!" became horribly audible.
We dropped to the tunnel floor and began a desperate lurch, with Crank Boy in the lead, taking us around corner after corner, down long deserted passageway after long deserted passageway, across unexplainable chasm of doom after unexplainable chasm of doom. The tunnel system was a revelation to me; I had no idea the very foundations of UNI contained a labyrinthine morass of steel walkways, rusted ladders, concrete walls and immense pipes and ducts that sprawled in every direction. But Crank Boy led with an unerring precision; it was as though he had been down here before… exploring, spelunking, hiding bodies.
Despite our best efforts, however, Percy was behind us.
"Didn't any of you bring concussion grenades?" Crank Boy shouted furiously, but sadly, we had all left our stockpile of small explosives back at the dorms. You just couldn't travel freely with that stuff anymore, now that campus security had actually hired Chuck Norris to be in charge.
"Guuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuys," Percy shouted, as he grew perilously closer.
We reached an impasse, a large steel door that was, for no apparent reason, closed and locked directly in our path.
"Somebody DO SOMETHING!" Laurel exclaimed, like a school girl in need of some shall we say special attention.
I turned to face Percy, resolute in my determination to put an end to this misery once and for all. Soon enough his dashing yet entirely vapid personage appeared at the other end of the long, narrow walkway we stood on, suspended above a large gurgling vat of unnatural green liquid that the university kept on hand for, uh, the science department.
"Hey, guys," Percy shouted with an amazingly dim grin on his otherwise entrancing face. "I'm so glad I caught up to you! I was thinking we could go back to my place and watch all those Webster episodes I have on tape, what do you say?"
It was in the heat of that stark, vivid, thoroughly unappetizing moment that history was forged, as I played the same prank upon Percy that I had played for years and years and years. The only difference this time was that we were playing this prank above a large vat of gurgling, unnatural green liquid… normally the gurgling, unnatural green liquid was something I was distilling to drink later, and not something that filled the space below a tiny, precarious walkway upon which we stood.
With a casualness that belied the inherent creeping horror I felt in his presence, I calmly remarked, "Heads or tails," and then flipped a single penny in the air, over the edge of the railing, and watched it sail toward the vat below.
As I predicted, Percy could no more watch a penny fly to its doom than he could avoid removing the bandages on his ass and scratching despite doctor's orders, and so it was on that fateful day lo those many years ago that we watched Percy leap from the safe haven of the walkway into midair above the vat of gurgling, unnatural green liquid, attempting to arrest the penny's fall and failing miserably. The penny and Percy both plummeted directly into the depths of the vat, and for a long, cool moment, Laurel, Crank Boy and I stood motionless, wondering if we had at long last eliminated this continual threat to our ability to chill.
A deep, incredible silence filled the air. Laurel shifted her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. Crank Boy lit a cigarette and marveled at how cool and refreshing the buzz was after all these years. I pulled out my copy of Kierkegaard's Fear and Loathing and scrawled frantic notes in the margins, calmly preparing for an epic final exam that was soon to dominate my life. And then-
-the thoroughly unexpected occurred. For just when we had dared to hope that Percy was gone from our lives forever, a writhing, spitting, gelatinous mass arose from the gurgling, unnatural green liquid. It was Percy all right – but his face and body had been horribly disfigured by exposure to the liquid. He now seemed to be a writhing morass of melting flesh and disgusting rivers of bile, his once charming and delightful features dissolved into a puddle of sickening green tributaries of filth and horror. He screamed the scream of a man who realizes his future has evaporated, and at the same time, realizes he didn't even catch that fookin penny, either.
"Oh boy," Laurel said in her typically understated fashion.
"May I heartily suggest," Crank Boy said quietly, "that we mosey our pathetic asses right the hell out of here?"
And so we left poor Percy behind. Little did we realize he would soon become our prime nemesis… the awful, awe-inspiring, truly wretched, criminally insane monstrosity known as