Full House

Last night my roommate for December (Eli, the Project 117 intern) moved in, and was soon treated to a bonus surprise: my friend Pierre was also crashing for the night. There’s always room for one more.

Eli will be sleeping on the futon underneath the loft bed. I normally sleep on the loft, but last night told Pierre to take it and I would take the pullout couch. This way, when Eli and I rose before him, he could keep sleeping.

After a brief chat, we began readying for bed, since it was late and we had kettles today. I went in the bathroom and when I emerged a few moments later I was greeted by the spectacle of Pierre trying to scale the loft.

Pierre is many things: generous, hilarious, level-headed, faithful, and one of my best friends in the world. One thing he is not: agile. Or graceful for that matter. Needless to say, Pierre would not be sleeping in the loft bed.

This sight harkened back a memory for me of when we were young and foolish and at Youth Councils. One night, Pierre, Cornejo and I were roaming the grounds of the Frank Davis Sunrise Resort with one other companion when we encountered a building whose roof was sufficiently low to the ground to invite mischief (It may have been the Frog, I don’t remember). We of course decided to climb on top, for no real reason other than the fact that we were teenage boys and we could. Three of us got up without significant difficulty, but Pierre was dangling. Try as we could, we could not pull him up. Before we could devise another plan, we were spotted by security.

We all hurried down before they drove over and tried to pretend nothing had happened. They gave us the obligatory “Don’t do that again or there will be trouble” lecture while we nodded gravely and silently waited for them to finish yapping so we could walk away with no repercussions. We kept our game faces on and were ready to escape without discussion, when Pierre (remember him? The guy who wasn’t even on the roof?) decided he needed to “talk his way out of this one.”

“We went up there to investigate because we heard there was some guy up there.”

Oh, boy. At this point the authorities rightly asked why it took four of us to “investigate” this “guy.”

“We heard he was really big.”



Thanks, Pierre.