I met Kird on my first day of college classes. I don't know why he decided to be friends with me. I didn't ask him to, but we just hung out together a lot. I guess it was because we found we both had an intense interest in pop and rock music, especially the New Music that was becoming en vogue at the time.
Kird had grown up in Alamogordo, NM, which is about a two-hour drive from Artesia. His father was in the Air Force. Prior to coming to Eastern New Mexico University, Kird's father was stationed in Germany. It was at the high school there in which Kird started becoming involved in acting. He decided to major in Theatre when he went to college.
Before I really got to know him, someone said that Kird wanted to grow up to be Michael Jackson. He was trying to be a rock star and entertain people. I'll admit, he was very energetic and could be entertaining, but in college, he had no means of actually attaining this goal.
Kird was a rather hedonistic character. It seemed like he was always in pursuit of whatever would give him pleasure. More often than not, these pursuits involved other female students. In this day and age, he would likely be kicked out of school for that behavior.
Kird could also be extremely overbearing at times. I enjoyed being around him, but if there were other people around, Kird had a tendency to steal the spotlight. He could easily turn into one of those "look at me" people before I had a chance to let my presence be known. He was 100 times worse than my brother Loyd.
So I don't know how it happened, but he became College Roommate #5 during the Spring 1984 semester. My world was turned upside down that term. Kird would stay up until 3am. He would play music, talk on the phone, watch TV, go out to who knows where and bring people to the room. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, we had a class together at the Theatre at 9am. I could almost never get him to wake up and go to class.
Strangely enough, this was the semester I came close to getting a 4.0 average on my classes, so he was not a deterrant to my ability to study.
Also that semester, Kird was supposed to come with me to Artesia for one of the weekends I had planned to go home. We were going to leave after my last class at 1:00pm. However, he was nowhere to be found. I looked all over the campus and a couple of other places he frequented. After a couple of hours, I figured he didn't want me to find him and went home by myself. I kept calling the dorm room that weekend, but he never picked up. When I came back and asked him about it, he said, "I never said I was going to go."
It turned out that he had met some girl that day and decided to spend the weekend hanging around with her (although he never admitted this was the reason). That summer, he and that girl got an apartment together.
The next semester, Kird was no longer attending classes. I guess his father got tired of the bad grades he was making and stopped sending him money to go to school on. He was working in the food services department at ENMU. He was hoping to earn enough money to come back to school the next semester. But I don't know how he was planning to do that, because the first thing he did was buy a $500 bass guitar. He wanted to become a musician and planned to practice with the bass every day and get as good as Sting, whom he greatly admired. He brought the guitar over to the theatre and he was in absolute awe of it. I don't know what happened, but a couple of weeks later, he didn't have that bass anymore.
Even though he wasn't attending classes, Kird got cast in the Theatre department's production of "Charley's Aunt." During that production, he met this freshman girl who was also cast. They really hit it off. The only problem was that he was still living with that other girl. I didn't realize Kird had hooked up with the new student until later.
One night, during rehearsal, the girl he was living with showed up at the theatre. She yelled at him about a lot of stuff and said he owed her money. She then left. Kird went back into the rehearsal. I asked one of the actors what was going on. All he would say is, "Kird and his girlfriend are having problems." I suddenly felt like I was forced into the shroud of secrecy that surrounded me all throughout junior high and high school. I wanted to scream out, "I CAN SEE THAT, YOU MORON! KIRD IS MY FRIEND! WE WERE ROOMMATES LAST SEMESTER! IF YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON, WHY CAN'T YOU JUST GIVE ME A STRAIGHT ANSWER? IT'S NOT LIKE I'M GOING TO RUIN ANYONE'S REPUTATION!"
And I guess that was the problem. I felt like Kird was leaving me out of his life. The old girlfriend left and the new girlfriend moved in. However, she never told her family that she had left the dorm to live with Kird until they came up one weekend. I don't know if meeting the parents was an explosive event, but pretty soon after that, he had moved to Albuquerque. I thought he was gone forever.
I was wrong. A few weeks later, he returned trying to get back with that girl. By this time, she had hooked up with another student, who had recently gotten out of prison. Kird stalked them to the boyfriend's apartment. He was worried that he was going to do something that would send him back to jail. However, nothing happened. While he was in town, Kird had nowhere to stay, so he wound up sleeping on the floor of my dorm room between the beds of my roommate and me.
That night, I got a phone call at 1am. It was one of the administrators. He said he had received a complaint about Kird. Apparently the girl gave him my name as a possible contact. He asked me if I knew where Kird was. I said, "He's right here. Hang on." I gave Kird the phone. Kird did a lot of denying on his end of the conversation. Apparently, the girl accused him of harassing and threatening her. A couple of days later, Kird went back to Albuquerque.
He started doing poetry readings there. He actually had a following. I did go to visit him a couple of times in Albuquerque before I graduated from college, but I never saw him do the poetry stuff.
Kird did a lot more stuff after I graduated from college. His life went in directions I never imagined. I'll get to that in tomorrow's post.
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