Today I heard about someone accidentally pepper-spraying themselves because they didn’t anticipate the combination of an aerosol and wind. It reminded me of a similar experience from back in my college days....
It was Homecoming weekend of my junior year, and unseasonably warm for mid-October. I was one of those college kids who couldn’t possibly care less about our football team, but to be fair that would characterize almost everyone else on campus who didn’t actually play football. Homecoming didn’t mean a whole lot to me, and since I lived in an apartment complex tucked away in an older neighborhood about eight or nine blocks off campus, I was oblivious to what would prove to be historic partying taking place that Friday night. Warm weather on a big weekend, plus tons of people from out of town added up to some remarkably irresponsible, though not atypical, student behavior... at least not atypical for my school, which had a bit of a reputation and was about to double down on it. Long story short, the police were called in to chase the drunks off the streets and were none too pleased about having to do this. I didn’t see the local news the following morning, but apparently one frustrated officer called the student population “guests in our town” and allegedly said that if things got out of hand a second night in a row, “this time we’ll be ready.”
Well. As much of a cliché as it’s become now, “Fight for Your Right” by the Beastie Boys had been a big hit only a handful of years earlier, and there were still way too many people in my peer group that didn’t pick up on the irony of it. All some of these chuckleheads needed was a veiled threat to what they felt were their God-given partying rights before they would feel compelled to take a stand.
I still didn’t know anything about anything until later that Saturday afternoon. I called my friend Dean since we had plans to walk downtown to the buck-fifty second-run movie house that night, and he filled me in on everything that had gone on. I honestly didn’t think people would be stupid enough to push their luck into a second night of chaos, but wow, was I wrong. Our movie got out at about nine and we hurried back to campus to see if anything was starting up. All was quiet and calm until we were a block away. The streets bordering the section of campus that was predominantly student housing were lined with people eight deep, almost as if they were watching a parade. Dean and I got close enough to the edge to see what all the commotion was and saw police shoving some skinny guy’s face into the pavement while the audience either cheered them on or protested. Someone in a nearby dorm about three floors up had aimed their enormous speakers out the window to provide a soundtrack for the scene below. I remember thinking how “Welcome to the Jungle” was an appropriate choice and wondered if it had been intentional.
As we took in the scene, some shirtless dude came stumbling up the block carrying one of those ratty old chairs that only a college student would ever own. He looked at us wild-eyed and excitedly shouted something about the fire. Dean looked up the street and saw smoke rising. We decided the best thing for us to do was hightail it up to his dorm room before we got caught up in the middle of something we had no desire to be caught in the middle of. It was then we did the only stupid thing we did all night: Because the sidewalks were so packed and there was no clear path across the street, we just bolted straight across and dove back into the crowd on the campus side. It didn’t occur to us later that the police had probably cleared the street long ago and didn’t want any geniuses like us running across it.
We made it up to Dean’s dorm room. His roommates weren’t home and his room was on the opposite side of the building from all the action, so we went down to see some girls he knew who lived on the side with the better view. They were home watching the World Series and let us in. (Incidentally, the game they had on was the one in which Kirk Gibson hit his game-winning home run; the fact that I can remember this detail and couldn’t care less about the Dodgers should demonstrate how deeply imprinted this night is on my memory.) One of the girls in the room was an RA, so she was in full-on crisis mode. The dorm had been locked down from extra visitors about ten minutes after we made it back, and every member of campus security had been called out. With everything going on, people were coming and going in and out of the room the whole time. Someone even suggested ordering a pizza, just to see if we'd still get it free since there was no way it would arrive in less than thirty minutes.
At one point everyone was off running around or checking in with friends except for me (since I was now stranded in the dorm for the foreseeable future) and a girl named Jenna who lived there. We kept flipping channels between the game and the network news affiliates from the Cities, who had broken into regular programming (except for the World Series) to cover what was now being called a riot. We flipped between the different stations, kind of blown away to think that breaking news was happening at our school. Something outside caught Jenna’s attention and she called me over to the sliding glass door the led to their patio. We saw dozens of people running across campus in the opposite direction of the riot as if they were being pursued. Curious, we stepped outside to see what was going on.
Even though we couldn’t have been a hundred yards from the worst part of the riot, it didn’t take more than a few seconds before the tear gas reached us. It felt like my sinuses were dissolving and there was no way I could get it to stop. I tried blowing my nose into my hands, but that only made it worse. I was sure that awful sensation was just going to continue until it ate through bone and my eyeballs would reverse roll dangle back into this newly opened cavity in my head. By the time I figured out what was happening, Jenna had collapsed on the patio and was clawing at her eyes. I picked her up around the waist and we fell back inside through the door, which luckily we had left open.
If any of the tear gas made it into the room it hadn’t been enough to matter. It took us long enough to clear our heads that Dean and a few others had returned to the room before we could see straight. Jenna repeatedly told everyone what had happened, always ending the story with how I had pulled her back inside. Dean didn’t seem too happy about that -- I found out later he’d been trying to work up the courage to ask her out, and didn’t like that I’d been the one to help her instead of him.
The following morning I walked down to the grocery store to pick up a Sunday paper and saw a photo of a bonfire right in the middle of the street I ran across. The fire was primarily made of an upended dumpster and two couches. Off to the side was another picture, of two police officers escorting a handcuffed student who very obviously had a broken nose. In the weeks after that night, everyone traded stories about where they were and what they saw happen. Campus security became much more of a presence, especially on the weekends. Ridiculous handmade flyers started popping up around campus calling for revolution and supposedly demonstrating ways to brew homemade weaponry. One of the DJs from the student radio station organized a fund raiser to help out a student who’d had her car flipped over and destroyed. I did my part and bought one of the t-shirts he was selling.
To this day, whenever I hear someone mention pepper spray or tear gas my first thought goes back to everything that took place that night. And my second thought: No thanks. I’ve had my fill.
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