Panty Intruder

I started my college career at the University of the Arts in center city Philadelphia.  I was psyched out of my mind to live in a sweet apartment in the middle of Philly.  At first, I really liked all three of my roommates, until one of them revealed herself to be a food-stealing mega-skank, but that's an entirely different story.  So there I was, living in a slightly dilapidated 10-story building, buying my own groceries, doing my own laundry, and learning how to politely decline offers from crack dealers.  Even though the elevators were frequently broken so doing laundry or buying groceries meant hauling loads up 6 flights in a scary rape stairwell, I was happy as a pig in shit.  Even though we could hear our neighbor having loud sex through the paper-thin walls on an almost daily basis, I was satisfied with my living arrangement.

In my first semester, I was so wildly optimistic about how I expected my college experience to turn out that I embraced all the weirdness wholeheartedly.  I don't know how I would have survived, otherwise.  I mean, there was the homeless man that snuck past the security guard and was caught wandering around on the third floor trying to look through the peep holes.  There was our friend from the 2nd floor who used to routinely get high and then come to our apartment to pass out on our futon, usually without pants.  The kid who got expelled when an RA found a trunk full of swords in his apartment...the time an RA broke up a party on another floor and found a kid passed out in the bathroom with a heroin needle in his arm...Ahh, college.

My favorite feature of my apartment building was, far and away, the basement.  The laundry room was in the basement, but more importantly, there was a door at the back of the laundry room that led to a panic room.  I know this was a panic room, because, clearly, someone inside it had panicked.  There was a bloody mattress leaning against the wall, a smashed toilet full of diarrhea stains, and dead cockroaches galore.  The pièce de résistance, however, was a typewriter that had been hurled with abandon into the bathtub.  This room seriously looked like it came from the set of Naked Lunch.  Bill Burroughs would have been right at home in this hovel:

Pine Street basement - circa October 2003

I don't know why this room existed, much less remained unlocked, but I used to explore it a little every time I did laundry.  Until they padlocked it, probably because a hooker finally got killed in there or something.

So, once the panic room wasn't available for my entertainment, I had no choice but to return to my apartment on the 7th floor to wait out the wash cycle.  One weekend, I was especially excited to do my laundry because I had just purchased a new pair of underwear that I couldn't wait to wear.  They were black and satiny, with lace trim, and while they were the boy shorts style and hardly sexy by normal standards, I was totally stoked about them.  I couldn't wait to wash them so I could put them on my body without getting crabs.  I tossed a load of darks in a machine, popped in a few quarters, and rode the elevator back to my apartment.

Twenty-five minutes later, I was back in the basement, carefully collecting my items from the washer.  I was getting high on the satisfying scent of laundry detergent and productivity, when I noticed that something was missing.  Where was my new black underwear?  I had a clear recollection of pulling the tag off the underwear and inserting it lovingly into the washer, but it was now nowhere to be found.  I searched in, around, behind the washer; I shook out all my clothes.  The underwear was gone.  Someone had opened up my washing machine and deliberately taken this one specific pair of underwear.  I wasn't sure if I should be pissed off, creeped out, or both.  I went with both, because I had a suspect in mind, and he was both creepy and very annoying.

There was a kid named James who lived a floor below me and was also in three of my classes.  During the first week of class, he made a big production of telling everyone he had Asperger's.  From then on, he proceeded to say overtly sexual, obnoxious things to all the girls in our classes.  If they got mad, he would be all, "I have Asperger's, I can't help it."  No, dude, if you had Asperger's, you would be totally confused by their anger and need someone to explain why your comments were inappropriate.  This guy was clearly just a very clever pervert.  One day, in 3-D design class, James spilled plaster all over his lap.  I had to rinse out a paintbrush, and found him at the sink, vigorously rubbing at the white splatter on his crotch.  As I approached, he turned to me and said, "Katie, look what you made me do in my pants."  If someone with half a personality said that to me, it would have been pretty funny, but James also had a weird monotone voice and no discernable personality beyond his penchant for sexual harassment.  I walked away in disgust.

That weekend, a pair of my underwear disappeared.  Coincidence?




Then I wrote a poem to express my feelings:

Panty Intruder

Obviously, there is a pervert in Pine Street dorm.
He's climbing in your washer
Snatching your panties up
Tryin' to steal them
So you better:
Hide your thongs,
Hide your briefs,
Hide your thongs,
Hide your briefs,
Hide your undies,
Cause they stealin' underwear out here.