The other day in the bathroom, my eye fell upon a solitary pubic hair in the urinal. And I thought of Dale Taylor.
Dale Taylor lived a few doors down from me in the dorms my freshman year. He was from Binger, OK, home of Johnny Bench. He was tall and thin, and other than having unruly brown hair was almost completely nondescript looking. He smiled a lot, but there was a bit too much eagerness in his smile for it to really be endearing.
He was the first person I knew who was completely obsessed with Star Wars. At that place and time, Oklahoma in the early 90s, being obsessed with pop culture from your youth was odd. We hadn’t reached the point where every male in his 30s was basically an overgrown adolescent with early-stage Type 2 diabetes.
So his level of obsession with Star Wars was distinctive. And it was an obsession. He’d fire up the VCR and watch Star Wars (which kids today now call “Episode IV”) every Monday. Empire every Tuesday. Jedi every Wednesday. Repeat on Thursday, Friday, Saturday. On Sunday, so he didn’t mess up his schedule, he’d watch some other movie. Goonies, Robocop, The Last Starfighter, maybe. He did this every week, without exception, the entire time I knew him.
He had dozens of action figures and one of those towers to hold them all, with levers that you could move the figures around and recreate that dramatic lightsaber duel between Obi-Wan and Vader on the first Death Star. He also had an original remote control R2-D2 which, if it’s still working, could now fetch hundreds of dollars on ebay.
By itself this wasn’t a huge deal. This was the dorm for the smart kids. Every hall had That One Guy, someone obsessed with anime, or goth metal, or tornadoes, or Multi-User Dungeons.
But Dale had two other strikes against him. The first was that he smelled bad. Thee second was his girlfriend. This girlfriend, whom I met once, was very nice. She was also plain, overweight, not particularly smart or interesting, and she didn’t strike me as totally stable mentally. I’m sure from her standpoint, Dale was probably the best thing to come out of Binger, despite the Star Wars thing. She had hit the jackpot and she was going to hang onto him.
She had stayed behind in Binger and was going to community college with the hopes of getting into nursing. So she would sometimes call to check in on Dale. Dale had no answering machine, so if nobody was there to answer, she’d let it ring until he came back. And if he didn’t come back for an hour or two, she’d just let it ring for an hour or two.
The cinder block walls didn’t do a particularly good job of filtering out sound, so his phone ringing for a few hours at a stretch a few times a week didn’t endear Dale to the other people on the hall. Fortunately, we were on the top floor. The walls ended a few inches above the ceiling tiles and there was room to climb over into your next door neighbor’s room.
So Kevin, the guy who lived next door, would do everyone the service of climbing over into Dale’s room, picking up the phone, yelling, “He’s not here! He’ll call you when he gets home!” and then hanging up and leaving the phone off the hook.
Now, I know what you’re thinking now: “What does any of this have to do with pubes?” Please be patient, I’m getting to it.
It’s annoying having a guy who smells bad, whose girlfriend was effectively a neurotic stalker, and whose obsession with Star Wars was on the verge of ruining the franchise for everyone. But other than the phone calls, his annoyances were pretty well confined to his room.
For his roommate, there was no escape. His roommate was a guy named Richard. Richard described himself as “evil”; sometimes he lived up to his own billing. He had his own girlfriend situation, which had him driving back-and-forth from Tulsa every weekend to see her. But he still had Dale to deal with during the week.
Richard was complaining about Dale to Kevin’s roommate Mark, who was by this point pretty sick of listening toVader announce that he was Luke’s father twice a week. They decided to see if they could get Dale to move out.
Kevin and Richard were taking a couple of the same classes and one morning, Kevin needed to borrow a book from Richard. Kevin checked the door, found that it was unlocked, and walked in as Dale was laying on his bed masturbating.
Apparently the idea that Dale might be caught in the act hadn’t occurred to him, because he was on top of the covers. He quickly rolled over onto his back and shrieked, “What are you doing?!”
Kevin decided to borrow the book some other time.
About a week later, at a different time of the day, Kevin walked in on him a second time. Same roll-over, same shriek of “What are you doing?!”
A few weeks after that, making sure to knock this time, Kevin walked in on Dale in the act yet again.
After the fourth time Kevin walked in on him, in tribute to his Star Wars obsession, he earned the nickname “Hand Solo”. Although to my knowledge nobody called him that to his face.
The fifth and final time, Kevin had knocked twice, loudly. He had jingled the doorknob a couple of times. He had slowly opened the door, and still he interrupted Dale. Apparently such was Dale’s focused dedication to the act that nothing short of actually walking into the room could distract him.
Each time was the same quick roll, the same shriek of “What are you doing?!”
It later came out that his roommate Richard had been intentionally leaving to door unlocked. Richard thought the whole thing was hilarious. The last time was a complete setup. He knew Kevin needed to borrow something that morning, so when he left, he had locked and then immediately unlocked the door, so it would sound to Dale like it was locked.
Then he waited downstairs to see Kevin’s reaction when he came downstairs. Kevin came to the bottom of the stairs with an angry, disgusted face, held up five fingers to Richard, shook his head and walked out.
I think Richard stopped leaving the door unlocked when he decided the whole thing was traumatizing Kevin more than Dale.
Now you’re now probably thinking, “Okay, so that certainly involved the public area, but actual pubic hair didn’t make an appearance.” I promse we’re almost there.
This plan to have Kevin repeatedly walk in on Dale was certainly entertaining (unless you were Kevin), and the nickname had been good for a few laughs. But Dale wasn’t any closer to moving out.
So Richard and Mark decided to escalate.
I mentioned Dale smelled bad. Their next move combined emotional abuse and scientific inquiry. Mark climbed over the wall into Dale’s room and hid his prized remote control R2-D2 in his underwear drawer. And not buried underneath the underwear, right on top of his underwear.
All Richard would have to do would be to open his drawer and he would see his beloved astromech droid right there. The question, for the sake of science, was, how long would it take for him to open his underwear drawer?
When Dale came back from class, he went into full-on freak out mode. I don’t recall that Dale ever swore, but that day he got really close.
Richard was all sympathy, saying he was sorry, that he might have left the door unlocked. Dale immediately suspected Richard had something to do with it. Probably because Richard was being sympathetic, and sympathy coming from Richard was pretty much guaranteed to draw suspicion.
But Richard held firm against any accusations, saying, “I did not touch your R2-D2”. Which was true, although he did know exactly where it was. And since Dale couldn’t actually pin anything on Richard, all he could do was fume and make outraged comments to nobody in particular.
This went on for three days.
Then his R2 unit* reappeared on Dale’s shelf and the matter was never discussed again.
The final straw was when Richard and Mark rearranged all of Dale’s action figures to be acting out scenes that were not from the movies. For instance, when you moved the levers, instead of Obi-Wan and Vader having a lightsaber fight, Obi-Wan was using his lightsaber for something obscenely homoerotic.
Dale could tolerate many things, like a psychotic girlfriend or his own odor. But blasphemy against Star Wars crossed a line with him. He was gone a week later.
But he left a surprise for Richard on his way out. As Richard was cleaning up and trying to remove the smell of Dale from his now-solo dorm room, he found pubic hairs everywhere. Under Dale’s bed, on his matress, on his shelves, in his drawers. Richard even found a few in his refrigerator.
He imagined Dale as some kind of pubic hair Johnny Appleseed, reaching into his pants, grabbing handfuls of pubes, and casting them liberally about the dorm room.
When Richard was recounting this, someone noted that a better nickname for him than “Hand Solo” would be “Pube-bacca”.
Personally, I wish two different people had these two nicknames, and in some drawer I had a picture of Hand Solo and Pube-bacca together.
I still saw Dale from time to time. He got into metal working and made himself a Boba Fett costume which was truly impressive. He later made a Robocop costume and would hire himself out for things like the grand opening of a new Blockbuster Video.
Last I heard he’s living in Oklahoma City and loving life. Whatever trauma that led to his moving out, it didn’t seem to have had any long-term effects. And it seems that culture has finally caught up with him. Fanatical interest in Star Wars can now be passed off as just a personal eccentricity.
Live long and prosper, Dale!
* “Hiding his R2 unit” sounds like a euphemism, doesn’t it? “Ted and Phil got a hotel room for the sci-fi convention, in case they met someone who wanted to play ‘hide the R2 unit’.”
