My New Best Mate

So about 1:30 last night I hear someone knocking, then banging on my door. Upstairs, having been sound asleep for a few hours, I wait to make sure I am not still dreaming. More banging, then I hear what seems to be the door opening. "Security?" I think, my heart slow to catch up to the adrenaline that just shot through my body. I am living in campus housing, so security has come in unannounced a few times to check a silent alarm, to replace batteries in smoke detectors, etc. But then the lights go on, the stair lights—which are on a motion detector. Oh, shit.

I head down stairs as quickly as I can, not even thinking about what I might encounter. There, standing, in my living room, wobbling a bit, looking as scared as I was, to be sure, is a drunk, 5' 6"", 150 pound, college kid with short dark hair and dark eyes. He sees me and keeps repeating, “Sorry, mate, wrong house. Sorry, mate, wrong house. Sorry, mate, . . . .”  “It’s okay, mate,” I say and I shake his hand. Why, I don’t know, but there I am at 1:30 in the morning trying to show this intruder the door as politely as I can. His eyes are glazed, he’s swaying, and he reeks of liquor. When I open the door to let him out, I can hear that my neighbors a few doors to the south are hosting a party. I walk him out onto the sidewalk and point him in that direction. “Down there,” I say.

Back inside, I double check that I lock the door, and go back upstairs to my room. Two minutes later I hear him pounding at my neighbor’s door, my neighbour to the north. He’s gone the wrong way. Only now, he’s pissed. He’s kicking the door, and yelling. “Open the f’ing door, mate. C’mon Jimmy G, it’s me. Open the f’ing door. Damn it, Jimmy, open the bloody door.” My neighbors name is Pat, by the way.

I opened my upstairs window and yell down to him, “James doesn’t live there. You are at the wrong house. Go the other way.” He’s clearly not getting any of it. Like he did at mine, he tries the door handle but finds, unlike at mine, that he can’t open it. He continues pounding and kicking the door. I can hear Pat’s voice yelling back at him through the door. Luckily, Pat’s door has a window in it, so I know he can tell what is going on and that he isn’t going to open it. I go back to bed.

Four minutes later, and my new mate apparently finds the party he was looking for because I can hear him with two or three others out in the street on the cellphone ordering pizza—as loudly as you can when you are drunk and hungry and in college and it’s a Monday and you are 18.

About three hours later I fell back asleep. This morning I checked with security and found that I might not have been setting the dead bolt correctly on my door. I also put campus police on speed dial. Lesson learned and one new drunk mate gained.

It wasn’t raining last night, but it was a perfect night.