I spent the night at a friend’s dorm room nook in Warren Towers last semester. In the morning, I woke to pasty sunshine, a staccato stomp ringing in my ears like the resounding soundtrack to a bad dream. But as I shook uneasy sleep from my eyes and sat up to lean against the glossy cinderblock wall, I noticed the sound wasn’t stopping. Instead it was getting louder, a most demanding crescendo of clatter, and I was getting scared. I got up to investigate.
Howard Stern, a Warren veteran, wasn’t just being dramatic when he referred to it in his memoir as “The Zoo.” As I peeked into the hallway, crawling toward me was a group of three or four strung-out girls, swathed in hassled-looking black polyester dresses that crept out of unzipped North Face parkas. They looked battered, hungry, pallid, like a few errant hyenas, separated from the pack, stricken and tired. Their stilettos — out of place within the cement-and-steel corridors of Warren, anachronisms in the morning light of some wild Allston evening past — tore across the linoleum with no great conviction. They just bounded forward, with a succession of coerced clacks, desperate for natural selection to give them one more chance.
Picking a metaphor for Warren is difficult. It’s so many things — how can I choose? Like Staten Island, it’s the kind of place where people have a certain accent, which defines them instantly, as if the head-to-toe BU French terry attire and perpetual reference to “the other night at Chi Phi” wouldn’t. Like all the B-line stops west of Blandford Street on a Saturday night, it’s the kind of place where everyone within a five-foot radius of you is drunk after 10 p.m. It’s like a Facebook profile with way too many applications added. It’s like prom nigh. It’s like Amsterdam.
But it’s not so much the environment of Warren that interests me. It’s the people, the attitudes. Warren girls have this marked aggressiveness — always hungry lionesses on the prowl for something or other, whether they be guys at MIT frats, Panda Bowls at the GSU or new jeans at the Jasmine Sola closing sale. They meander around campus, eyes half-closed and blase, bored in their prowess, bearing their teeth at the prospect of some cute upperclassman man.
Warren boys handle overstocked dining hall trays with the effortless ease of waiters at mid-priced, family-oriented chain restaurants, balancing entire dinners plus three plastic cups of Gatorade on one hand. The other hand is purposely left free for high fiving, texting or cookie grabbing. If Warren girls are lionesses, Warren men are all the things lionesses hunt. Or maybe antelope — always running somewhere, but never really going anywhere.
What drives the Warren way of life? How is it possible that such a distinct cultural gap can exist between Danielsen and Warren and Warren and West? It has to be more than a matter of distance and space. When I spent that evening at Warren, I felt no more like a stock university freshman and no less like a wayward Danielsen bohemian when I woke up than I did when I walked in. Clearly, the Warren traits are acquired, not inherent. Perhaps it’s the continual exposure to the wildness of the place that causes the mutation — like how Mowgli was raised by wolves and thought he was one in The Jungle Book. There must be something in the water of those dim, industrial bathrooms.
Maybe I’m just jealous. Danielsen isn’t exactly the conventional college dorm experience. The contrast between 512 Beacon and 700 Commonwealth is salient — it’s like comparing Bates to NYU. But maybe because of the sleepy nature of Danielsen, we Outsiders are extra-perceptive to the otherness of Central. Maybe that’s all we members of the perimeter do — sit on benches at 2 a.m. and watch them crawl out of the woodwork, exchanging numbers and Google-mapping 24-hour pizza delivery on their iPhones — because we feel we’ve been shortchanged. If Warren is a zoo, are the rest of us envious tourists? Lab coat-wearing scientists? Jealous?
I don’t feel jealous — but I do feel intrigued, in an anthropological kind of way. But perhaps the different dorm cultures can’t be compared. What kind of anthropologist am I, evaluating cultures without considering the big picture? Every building has its own conviction — whether it’s where the best parties are, where the closest dining hall is or where the quietest hallway is. The students in Warren have big shoes to fill, all 20,000 million of them striving to become American icons. Maybe it’s not a zoo at all, but rather just another college archetype striving to avoid the insatiable hunger of cultural natural selection.
Lauren Rodrigue, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at [email protected].