Bobby Likes A Lot of Things

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Our dorm was next to the Kosher dining hall, aka "Sherman Hall" aka "Sherms." It is long, beige and flat, more contemporary synagogue architecture than college food court. Many a non-kosher hour was spent at Sherms, consuming bland fish or meat separated from bland potatoes or pastas, very separated from any sort of bland milk, cheese, or otherwise flavorful item, as if the actual restriction was salt against any other ground spice you could think of. 

The memory: 

Bobby, at lunch, piling a plate high with foods a goy didn't need or want to separate. His was the people who invented mayonaise and he was not likely to forget it. He would go back for seconds, thirds, whatever is the reverse of appetizers, savory desserts, ever in search of the perfect note to end on. There was a constant, obsessive attention to stirring and mixing. Raw peanut butter into the bland vanilla soft-serve frozen yogurt, with a hyperactive, elbow-driven compulsion. He created sauces like he was a manmade immersion blender, the off-switch permanently jammed into submission.

Inevitably, the clock would tick and the neurotic Jews around him would raise quiet, nebishy alarms (myself included) about leaving the food hall. Bobby's stalling procedure, perfected over many extended meals: The dining hall staff is dutifully cleaning up. The staff consists of muscular Hispanic men and developmentally disabled folk from the local town, working on a primarily Jewish campus, so they're not super eager to call out Bobby (who could pass for Jewish) for being "cheap."

The place is empty, as quiet as my bedroom on a Saturday night. As a diversion, Bobby has just embarked on a long discourse on America's cultural inheritance, the northeast corridor, slavery, and the American Dream. No hardworking, underemployed or mentally challenged waitstaff is going to stand in the way of his free meal. And thus, he bridges the gap between lunch and dinner, without having to pay for a second meal. It is not two for the price of one, but eight for the price of a single kosher salad bar. Still, I respected his joie-de-vivre and to this day his hand-churned peanut butter soft serve is unmatched. 

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That was my third memory of Bobby.

To be to heavy-handed, the memories reconstruct themselves. They're loosely centered around art, sex, and food, though the order would shift over the years. Bobby liked a lot of things, and he made you wonder why you didn't too. 

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Two years later, he and his girlfriend were living on my floor.