brain, as it were-- and so he would drop it, denying Fenrick the chance to
shriek his vicious laugh and tell the wing that he had scored again.
Klein was also annoyed by the fact that Fenrick, smoking loads of
parsley-spiked dope while playing his bad music, would forget to keep an eye
on the Go Big Red Fan. Klein, sitting with his back to the stereo, wads of
foam packed in his ears, would abruptly feel the Fan chunk into the back of
his chair, and as he spazzed out in hysterical surprise it would sit there
maliciously grinding away and transmitting chunka-chunka-chunks into his
pelvis like muffled laughs.
If it was not clear which of them had air rights, they would wage sonic wars.
They both got out of class at 3:30. Each would spend twenty minutes dashing
through the labyrinthine ways of the Monoplex, pounding fruitlessly on
elevator buttons and bounding up steps three at a time, palpitating at the
thought of having to listen to his roommate's music until at least midnight.
Often as not, one would explode from the elevator on EO7S, veer around to the
corridor, and with disgust feel the other's tunes pulsing victoriously through
the floor. Sometimes, though, they would arrive simultaneously and power up
their Systems together. The first time they tried this, about halfway through
September, the room's circuit breaker shut down. They sat in darkness and
silence for above half an hour, each knowing that if he left his stereo to
turn the power back on, the other would have his going full blast by the time
he returned. This impasse was concluded by a simultaneous two-tower fire drill
that kept both out of the room for three hours.
Subsequently John Wesley Fenrick ran a fifty-foot tin-lead extension cord
down the hallway and into the Social Lounge, and plugged his System into
that. This meant that he could now shut down Klein's stereo simply by turning
on his burger-maker, donut-maker, blow-dryer and bun-warmer simultaneously,
shutting off the room's circuit breaker. But Klein was only three feet from
the extension cord and thus could easily shut Fenrick down with a tug. So
these tactics were not resorted to; the duelists preferred, against all
reason, to wait each other out.
Klein used organ music, usually lush garbled Romantic masterpieces or what he
called Atomic Bach. Fenrick had the edge in system power, but most of that
year's music was not as dense as, say, Heavy Metal had been in its prime, and
so this difference was usually erased by the thinness of his ammunition. This
did not mean, however, that we had any trouble hearing him.
The Systems would trade salvos as the volume controls were brought up as high
as they could go, the screaming-guitars-from-Hell power chords on one side
matched by the subterranean grease-gun blasts of the 32-foot reed stops on
the other. As both recordings piled into the thick of things, the combatants
would turn to their long thin frequency equalizers and shove all channels up
to full blast like Mr. Spock beaming a live antimatter bomb into Deep Space.
Finally the filters would be thrown off and the loudness switches on, and the
speakers would distort and crackle with strain as huge wattages pulsed through
