Unspooled

When I was in college, I was addicted to collecting free or swiped items for my dorm room, which featured ashtrays and shot glasses pilfered from the college town bars in Charlottesville and Winston Salem, when we followed our Tar Heels to football games on crisp fall days, road trips that are a blur of crashing on couches and wandering brick pathways, scanning Ivy-covered quads to see if the Cavaliers or Demon Deacons had cuter boys than those in Chapel Hill.

As I stuffed a low ball glass from Third Edition in Georgetown into my purse and we posed for photos as if we were the cast from St. Elmo’s fire, I likely thought my thievery would demonstrate my willingness to take risks to my cute dude accomplices. Being adventurous and fun-loving seemed to be more important qualities than being an intellectual seeker of knowledge.

A boy who was clearly trying impress me, once showed up at my dorm room door with the Miller Light neon sign I’d admired the night before at Trolls, the basement bar with the sticky suction cup floor. Sadly for him, the sign lit up my room, but I never gave him the chance to light up my life.

One evening as I walked across campus with my friends Ty and Randy after our first session in the basement computer lab, we noticed the open window on the second floor of the iconic domed Wilson library. It was late and no one else was around because the dot-matrix printer had taken so long to spit out my essay on Apartheid for my South African History class. I decided computers were stupid and I’d stick with my IBM Selectric typewriter with its white-out ribbon.

Renovations on the 1920s library began just before we started our freshman year. It was one of the prettiest buildings on campus – at least from the outside - but we weren’t allowed in. For all the money we were spending on tuition, I mean I’d worked all summer selling  ties and boxer shorts in the men’s department at Ivey’s, all to shell $429 hard-earned dollars to cover my tuition that semester. Should they really be able to keep us out of a building WE were paying for?

Site of the Séance

The thing about scaffolding is that it begs to be climbed. And the thing about second floor windows that are open is that they beg to be climbed through.

We decided that the next night, we would host a séance in the scaffold-covered ancient library. Maybe bring back the ghosts of Thomas Wolfe or President Polk.

Reverent in the mission of our hastily formed secret society, the next evening Ty carried a bucket of bones from Time Out like it was myrrh from a king. Those greasy bones were indeed a poor, drunk man’s gold. Just 50¢ for an extra-large popcorn-sized tub of chicken bones hugged by tiny pieces of meat that didn’t make it onto a biscuit. Time Out was the place to be at 2am after the bars closed and tipsy college kids needed something to soak up the alcohol. Nothing did the trick like a chicken biscuit. But if you didn’t have a couple of bucks and were lucky enough to be in line at just the right time, a bucket of bones was the crack peddled by Billy Ray, the old guy working the fryer who handed them over with gusto, always a smile on his face as he laughed at the beer-soaked antics of his regulars and rapped his favorite song.

My name is Billy Ray and I’m here to say, I’m gonna fry you some chicken.

I work at Time Out and I’m here to shout that it’s finger lickin’.

Now, I was a new vegetarian, having given up meat for lent my freshman year after reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. Surprisingly, giving up meat was a lot easier than giving up chocolate for lent.

In Sophomore year while visiting my roommate, Krissy’s family in Annandale, Ty and Randy asked us “What’s for lunch?” one afternoon as if we were their private chefs. Well screw that!  We made the guys canned dog food sandwiches, giggling as they ate them. But I nearly gagged at the thought and extended my vegetarianism for decades. That wasn’t so easy to do in the mid 1980s while living in the land of BBQ, sausage rolls and hamburger casseroles at a time when a “gardenburger” was nothing but an oxymoron. I found myself eating a lot of house salads with jaw-breaking croutons.

Ty passed the bucket of bones up to Randy, who was first up the scaffold tower. Lennis passed up the Ouija board and I climbed up with my backpack filled with candles and picnic blanket and eight of us slipped through the 18” opening. Cobwebs and dust-covered the empty mahogany shelves and card catalogues, and our voices echoed off the stone columns and marble floors. Mary Kay, who was most likely to become an MTV VJ, passed around a joint as I lit the candles in a circle and Randy pulled wine coolers and beers from his satchel. Our séance devolved into laughter before we were able to conjure any spirits. At some point in the gale of guffaws, Randy pointed at the huge empty spool and said “That would make a great bar!”

“We could totally put our Beta max on it,” I said to my roommate, and I began to covet deeply the huge pine spool.  And as good friends do, mine began their plan to make it mine. We stuffed our bottles, bones and candle nubs into backpacks and opened the window as wide as it could go.

As we rolled the huge copper wire spool out the second-floor window of Wilson Library, we felt like Robin Hood, taking from the rich to make a table and a bar for the poor. The cable reel landed on the brick sidewalk with a thud and Randy prevented it from rolling down the hill in the shadows, making sure the echoes of the fall didn’t attract campus police. When we were in the clear, the rest of us shimmied down the stone sides, hanging from the window sill before dropping between the boxwood bushes below.

We rolled the giant spool down the brick covered walkway, past the bell tower, past Kenan Stadium, through the woods and up the steep hill to Morrison dorm just as a campus police office pulled up to the entrance. “What do you kids think you’re doing?” he called out. But we rolled the spool faster into the lobby as Mary Kay pushed the elevator button ten times in a second. “Hey!” he was following behind us, “Where did you get that?” And the elevator door closed before he could get to us.

We laughed all the way up, stopping at the 7^th, 8^th and 9^th floors to throw the officer off the scent before rolling the spool into the 10^th floor lobby, through the door of our suite then into room 1045 where it soon became the home to our television and Betamax player, which, when Blockbuster opened that spring, made our room the place to be to watch Cheech & Chong, The Karate Kid and Sixteen Candles. The lower shelf was filled with Everclear, Bacardi and Jagermeister, as often were we.

Decades later, when I finally went back to the campus and ventured into the venerable library, filled with rare books and Southern historical collections, I walked over to the window from which, once upon a time, a wooden spool descended and remembered the girl with the misdirected attentions and the oft misunderstood intentions, all the couldas, the wouldas, and the shouldas, and I know I’d do it all again. Because the memories speak volumes and those volumes could fill a library.

As shared at Story Salon on July 16, 2025 when the theme was "Oops I Did it Again."