Part of the setup for the Blinn College Stories — the home base where all the rest of them happened. Two years in an all-male dorm in Brenham, Texas, remembered from a Google Maps window thirty-five years later, once the building itself turned out to be gone. Pinesol, one payphone, and Room 203.
So that's how I got to Brenham. The bigger question was where I'd actually be living for the next two years — and the answer was Memorial Hall.
I was thinking about the place again recently. I spent two years there, and I got curious what it looked like now, since I hadn't been back since I left in the spring of 1990. So, like most things these days, I went looking on Google Maps.
You can imagine my surprise when I discovered the whole block was gone.
Memorial Hall was simply erased from the Earth, as was the dorm next door. There wasn't even much left to suggest they had ever been there. Just an empty space where a small piece of my life used to be.
I remember sitting there staring at my screen thinking, well, what the hell is this?
A little research later, I discovered the dorms had finally met their end. They had become too expensive to maintain, and it was cheaper to build new ones somewhere else. That seemed like a perfectly reasonable explanation — but it also caused me to stop for a moment and think about what that place had meant to me.
For two years, Memorial Hall was my home.
So, before I forget any more of it, I thought I would simply write down how I remember it.
If you were to ask me today what Memorial Hall smelled like, I could tell you immediately. It smelled like Pinesol and bleach. Lots of both. I suppose it really did smell like a Carolina pine forest, if someone had mopped one. Whatever they were using, they weren't shy about it. Forty years later, I can still smell it if I think about it long enough.
The building itself was built in the early 1960s, sometime around the Cuban Missile Crisis and the beginning of the space race. By the time I arrived in 1988, it was already approaching thirty years old, and looked every bit of it.
Everything about it was institutional. The furniture in the main lobby looked like it had been purchased during the Cold War — heavy wooden pieces that could probably survive both a nuclear exchange and fifty college freshmen. Somewhere, I like to imagine it's still sitting in some government building, as indestructible as ever.
There were photographs hanging on the walls from previous generations of students who had passed through Memorial Hall. Looking through them was like watching time move slowly through East Texas. Hairstyles changed a bit, glasses changed a bit, but somehow Memorial Hall remained Memorial Hall.
There was a giant console television downstairs that wasn't particularly impressive, but was certainly large enough for football games and whatever else happened to be on in those days.
The entire building was covered in gray linoleum tile that had been waxed so many times over the decades that it had developed its own personality and sheen. Everything echoed off those floors. Every laugh, every slammed door, every footstep coming up the stairs announced itself to the entire dorm.
There was Mrs. Massy's apartment downstairs. We never actually went inside, so naturally we assumed it was something between Margaret Thatcher's residence and Buckingham Palace. Occasionally we'd catch a glimpse through the doorway of lace curtains and delicate lamps that seemed completely at odds with the rest of the institutional aesthetic of Memorial Hall.
Then there was the laundry room. I vaguely remember one of those vending machines that dispensed little boxes of laundry soap, and perhaps a soda machine nearby. I couldn't swear to that part, but I feel reasonably confident Dr Pepper was somehow involved.
There was only one payphone upstairs.
Imagine that for a moment if you're under forty years old. One phone. Fifty guys.
In 1988, a long-distance call from a Texas dorm to California was a small financial event. There were no cell phones, no dorm-room lines you'd want to run up, and definitely no free nationwide calling. You used the payphone in the hall, you fed it coins, and a rate clicked over every few minutes — evenings and weekends were cheaper, which is why the line was longest exactly when the missing-something feeling hit hardest.
A single shared payphone for fifty guys meant there was no such thing as a private call. Everyone heard your breakup, your good news, your two a.m. call home. It also meant you learned to keep a pocket of quarters and dimes like a small currency reserve, and to make every minute count. The whole architecture of staying in touch has been rebuilt so completely since then that it's genuinely hard to explain to anyone who grew up with a phone in their pocket.
There was no privacy whatsoever. If you were calling your girlfriend back home, everyone knew about it. If you were fighting with somebody, everyone knew about it. If you were calling California at midnight — not homesick so much as reaching for a place you weren’t sure was still yours — there was probably somebody waiting behind you wondering if you'd hurry things along because they needed to make their own long-distance call.
You stuffed your dimes and quarters into the machine and hoped you had enough change in your pocket to finish the conversation.
The voices would echo down those hallways for everyone to hear.
Then there was Room 203.
The second door on the left as you came upstairs and, as luck would have it, directly above Mrs. Massy's apartment. Lucky me.
This was my new home.
If you've ever seen Van Gogh's painting of his bedroom, it looked a little bit like that — if Van Gogh had painted it in East Texas at the end of the Cold War and had significantly less money.
Van Gogh painted The Bedroom in Arles in 1888 — exactly a century before the fall of 1988. He loved the picture enough to paint it three times, and described wanting it to express perfect rest and simplicity: plain walls, a plain bed, two chairs, a little table, a few things on the wall. He was broke, often alone, and a long way from where he'd started.
A narrow room with two beds, two wooden chairs, a table, and white walls, occupied by a kid a long way from anywhere he’d call home, is a closer match to that painting than I realized at eighteen — down to the exact hundred-year gap. Same furniture, same feeling, same distance from home. Just add a thirteen-inch television and a Nintendo.
The walls were painted an institutional sort of hospital white, layered with decades of paint from generations of students before us. You could feel the gouges and imperfections underneath with your fingertips and wonder how many stories had happened inside those walls before you arrived.
There were two twin beds with Sealy mattresses that were made right there in Brenham, Texas. Two wooden chairs. One large wooden table. Small closets for our worldly possessions. A chest of drawers for each of us with just enough room on top for a thirteen-inch television.
The mattresses weren't a random detail — Brenham really was a Sealy mattress town. The company traces back to the nearby town of Sealy, Texas, where a cotton-gin builder named Daniel Haynes began making cotton-stuffed mattresses in the 1880s; the brand took the town's name and grew into one of the largest mattress makers in the country.
So a Blinn student sleeping on a Sealy in Brenham in 1988 was, more or less, sleeping on the local product. In a German-Texas farm county where so much was made and grown right there, even the dorm bed was hometown.
Underneath some of the furniture were small bits of graffiti left behind by students from years gone by.
Garrett was here.
Or something equally profound.
There was a sink and medicine cabinet inside the room, which seemed oddly luxurious considering everything else. Looking back on it now, I think it was probably there because fifty college boys sharing one bathroom was already challenging enough.
The window looked out over the back parking lot, the bike rack, and the train tracks that ran just beyond campus. More than a few stories begin and end with those train tracks.
Parked below was Mrs. Massy's car, an older sedan that seemed so perfectly suited for her that I wasn't entirely convinced she hadn't come with the building sometime during the Johnson administration.
The room itself wasn't much bigger than it needed to be, but somehow it was enough.
That room would eventually become home to Nintendo marathons, long-distance phone calls back to California, late-night conversations about absolutely everything and absolutely nothing, endless packages of Top Ramen, tennis rackets leaning against the wall, music from California colliding with East Texas, and more stories than I can properly remember.
At eighteen years old, I didn't appreciate any of it.
I was mostly broke, a long way from anywhere I was sure of, and trying to figure out what in the world I was doing out there.
Today, I would give just about anything to walk through that door one more time.
The funny thing about places is that we assume they'll always be waiting for us. We think we'll go back someday and they'll still be there, exactly as we left them.
Sometimes they aren't.
Today, if you went looking for Room 203, you wouldn't find it. The walls are gone. The furniture is gone. The payphone is gone. Even the building itself is gone.
The hallway still echoes when someone slams the fire door downstairs. Mrs. Massy is wondering who's making all that noise above her apartment. Somebody is waiting in line for the payphone. Bon Jovi is playing too loudly down the hall. The Texas heat is finding its way through an open door propped up with a textbook, and some kid from a little mountain town in California is trying to figure out who he's going to become.
That's how I remember Memorial Hall.
And I suspect that's how I'll always remember it.