By Robert Celaschi ’80

We needed a break, Greg and I.

A break from our cramped Tercero dorm room. A break from dining commons food. Most of all, a break from pranks.

K Building, our home that freshman fall of 1975, seemed to be an Experimental College prank lab.

My roommate and I started out as willing participants. The day Greg and I moved into Room 206, the sophomores and juniors demonstrated how to lock someone in his room from the outside simply by wedging pennies between the door and the frame. Once we forced our door back open, we rushed off to try the trick on someone else.

The rotary-dial phone on our wall was vulnerable to a little trick called “green-wiring.” The technical details aren’t important. What matters is that a green-wired phone would not stop ringing even with the receiver off the hook, no matter how hard Greg hit it or cursed at it. We inflicted that prank once or twice too.

But when the rest of the dorm moved rapidly on to upper-division pranks, Greg and I discovered that our interest did not run that deep. That only made us prime targets.

Too often I had to explain that no, sir, I did not sign that form requesting that your religious group visit me. Too often we had to frantically stuff towels under our penny-locked door to blunt fire-extinguisher attacks. When we seriously considered hauling our bikes up to the second floor instead of leaving them unguarded outside, we knew it was time to get away.

We headed to my parents’ house in the Bay Area for a weekend of home cooking, television and other luxuries.

That weekend Room 206 disappeared.

I don’t mean the contents of the room disappeared; I mean the room itself ceased to exist. A person could wander the second floor of K Building all afternoon and conclude that it had never contained a Room 206.

We know a person could do that because Greg’s father did it. He called my parents’ house on Saturday night to describe his wanderings and his conclusion.

Greg and I were baffled. One, we hadn’t given anyone my parents’ phone number. And two, Greg’s parents lived in Hawaii. As for that nonsense about no Room 206, would he please explain in more detail?

Greg jammed the receiver to his ear and nodded blankly. Business trip . . . uh-huh . . . San Francisco . . . rental car . . . surprise visit to Davis . . . uh-huh . . . room not there.

Greg shook his head.

“Our room is right opposite the stairwell.”

No it isn’t, said Greg’s father. His voice implied that this would be a good time for Greg to come clean about where he was really living.

I put my parents on the phone. Unlike Greg’s dad, they had seen our room. They insisted it existed.

Oh yeah? Then why did everyone in K Building say Greg and Bob didn’t live there? And why did the kids give Greg’s dad this phone number?

The five of us met in Walnut Creek for a confused dinner. The parents agreed that the only thing to do was drive up in the morning and straighten this out. Greg and I agreed that this was the last thing we wanted them to do.

The parents won. They had the cars.

Late Sunday morning, K Building seemed calm. Greg and I knew this was a bad sign. Things were never calm in K Building. Too many people were awake, looking far too nonchalant.

We walked up the stairs to the second-floor landing, looked straight across the hallway and saw . . . a blank blue wall. What the ...?!

We stared. We cautiously tapped the wall. Solid. Smooth. No sign of a door. Greg and I looked at each other. We DID live in K-206. We knew we did. Didn’t we? 

But wait. The wall was not completely smooth. In the dim light you could see a faint ripple in the plaster that—hey, why was the hall light so dim, anyhow? Ah, so that we wouldn’t notice the rough texture outlining exactly where our door should be.

Laughter exploded from the crowd that had slowly gathered behind us. And our parents laughed right along with them.

The minute Greg and I had left for the weekend, we now learned, our dorm neighbors had jimmied the door, taken it off its hinges and filled the opening with a sheet of plywood. Then they had plastered it over, flush with the frame, and painted everything to match the rest of the hallway. The finishing touch was the strip of vinyl baseboard glued to the bottom.

And they’d rummaged through our desks to find the phone number in case anything went wrong.

Our parents went home, rather proud that their sons deserved such attention from their inventive young friends. But Greg and I, sitting in the plaster dust after we’d chipped our way back into our burglarized room, had a different conclusion: major bummer, man.

For our sophomore year, Greg and I rented an apartment. And slowly the bad feeling began to fade. The door thing was kind of funny, really. In fact, it became almost a badge of honor. When co-workers would tell crazy stories of college days gone by, I would sit back and listen with a knowing smile. “Pretty good,” I would finally say, “but did I ever tell you about the time my dorm room completely disappeared?”