On August 8, 2001, Georgetown cashed a check that my father had signed for $15,861.13. On August 25, my mother walked into New South. Barely 30 seconds later, she screamed: “If you think that I’m going to pay $40,000 for you to live in this goddamn shithole, you’re fucking nuts.”
Ahhh, yes, New South. Also known as Dirty South, the Dirty, New Sizz and the Sizzito. My mother was right – it was a shithole. A shithole that I desperately wanted to live in. I even handwrote a three-page letter to the Housing Office explaining to them that they’d be ruining my life if they forced me to live in an awful place called Village C. (If I remember correctly, the letter even quoted Sartre at some point . who does that?)
Yet four years later I’m convinced that writing that letter was the best idea I’ve ever had.
At Georgetown, I’ve had more fun than some people do in a lifetime, and quite a bit of that fun came from the days when we still had to hide our booze from the RA. In fact, every time I sat down to write this reflection, I thought of a story from the Sizz, so I decided to stop my attempts at being clever and just share the most important lessons I learned in the Dirty:
Seth Cohen isn’t the only cool kid from the O.C.
I’m from the O.C. Yup, that’s right: Orange County. Orange County . New York. The O-Co (as we called it long before Ryan entered the Cohen household) straddles the border of the blue-collar suburbs and the middle of nowhere.
When I first met people in the Sizzito, they naturally asked where I was from. When people asked where a little town called ontgomery was, I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to make friends, but everyone else at Georgetown seemed to have a perfect New England pedigree; I just had Yaffa blocks and bed sheets from Target. The kid down the hall wore Ralph Lauren corduroys with lobsters embroidered on them – I was going to need something to be friends with this guy. When he asked me where Montgomery was, I quickly answered, “Uuuuh, it’s in Rockland County,” substituting the name of a slightly-nicer, but almost equally obscure, suburb for my own.
As soon as I said it, I realized what a dumb mistake I had made. Now I was cornered – if I told the truth, I’d be “the guy who lies about where he’s from,” forever doomed to spend weekends with “the girl who lies about her boyfriend from home.” So I perpetuated my little fib, until a friend from high school came and spilled the beans.
Surprisingly enough, no one cared, though they still make fun of me for it to this day. I never bought a pair of Nantucket reds, and my friends still like me . must be the pair of yellow shorts that I broke down and bought sophomore year.
Your true friends are the ones you spit on.
Once I spit water all over friends who were trying to take care of me. Then I kissed my roommate’s girlfriend. Another time I almost cried because I was drunk in front of our chaplain-in-residence. Then there was the time that we had a pool party at my house and my friends thought it would be a good idea to go skinny-dipping. And only NS4 kids would think that the best way to introduce my 16-year-old sister to college life would be to feed her shots of 151.
I’ve been through a lot with my New South friends and they’ve been through a lot with me, but NS4 has somehow stuck together as a core for the last four years. The majority of my best friends are still the people who saw me leaving the shower in nothing but a towel every morning, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up at a lot of New South weddings in the next few years (they’ll be like the NS4 reunion golf parties we have now, only we’ll be dressed up, and hopefully they’ll be less incestual).
Republicans aren’t all dumb . but they’re still wrong.
On Sept. 20, 2001, George Bush addressed a joint session of Congress in response to 9/11. By the end of the speech, my liberal biases made me want to vomit. Within 30 seconds of W’s final “If you don’t do as I say you’re with the terrorists,” two girls came running down the hall cheering and waving the Stars and Stripes – no, really. I thought they were out of their minds. Three thousand people had just died and they’re cheering as George Bush announces his plan to take over the world? The thought of having to see those two girls every day for the rest of the year disgusted me.
Those two girls became two very good friends; they may even have the distinction of being my first Republican friends. Though I preached the need for racial, ethnic and sexual tolerance ad nauseum, I quite simply couldn’t deal with people who disagreed. Once I started listening, I learned that Republicans, as a group, are in fact not categorically stupid. They do, however, have some really brainless ideas about Social Security.
Do it for the story.
All of us graduating have some good stories to tell – it wouldn’t be college without the things that seemed like a good idea at the time. I have loads of them, and so many came from New South. We were furious when the hostess at Denny’s wouldn’t let us make reservations, we dressed up as the Publisher’s Clearing House Prize Patrol for Halloween, we went to a club in Miami where the doorman was wearing a sequin jumpsuit and believed him when he told us that we wouldn’t see “anyone sketchy” in his club. These four years have taken me a lot of places – including a Tuesday-night trip to a diner in northern New Jersey at 1 a.m. because I reaaaalllly wanted cheesecake. I always did it for the story, but I didn’t do anything alone; whether I was at Beaujolais night freshman year or hiking the mountains of Peru as a senior, every one of my favorite memories ties back to New South.
Like a lot of things, Dirty South was the kind of place that was amazing, you just had to look past the dirt and grime – or, at least, the gnats nested in the showers. It bred the kind of things that freshman years are made of: sketchy RAs, endless drama between roomies and 4 a.m. pizza in the lounge with that kid from down the hall that you never really knew that well. It’s the kind of place where friendships are born over watching reruns of “Family Ties” and straight-shooting 151 (for the record, that was an awful idea). It’s the place where I became comfortable with myself and met the friends that will be there for life.
New South – we liked it dirty.
Michael Balz is a senior in the School of Foreign Service. He is a former senior GUIDE editor, associate editor, contributing editor, member of the editorial board and co-chair of THE HOYA’s 85th anniversary gala.
