I don’t know much about junior Doug Dellinger, and I never really knew him. I do know that every time I bring him up to someone that did, even in these weeks just after his tragic death, that person glows. And there is always laughter.
I remember driving around with Ben, his roommate, the week after Doug died. Ben is more a friend of a friend, but since his best friend was out of town, I was the one to cheer him up. There were deep, egg-yolk circles around his eyes, like shallow bruises. His hair was mussed, as it always is, for he is a scientist and takes his studies very seriously, but this was a different kind of muss – a stress, as if the hairs were trying to abandon the scalp. There was a stale tinge to his breath, and after a pale hug, I smelled that tinge. “I cried for a long time yesterday,” he said, our first words to each other, a rift in the thick air. “But then I just laughed. I couldn’t stop laughing. He just always made me laugh.”
With the mutual understanding that we had no idea what to do with one another, Ben and I drove and just kept driving, parking at whatever odd stop grabbed our eyes. We gulped large slushees from a convenience store. We went duckpin bowling – both total rookies – and danced down the aisles at our gutter balls. I got six strikes in a row. He finally got one, and we slapped hands. We pulled into the College Park Car Wash, bypassed the automated wash and did the manual one, water and foam dripping from our hair as we scrubbed and waxed and dried, and I remembered washing my family’s big, tan truck with my stepfather when I was young, and teasingly slapping him with my soapy cloth for making me do chores. This wasn’t a chore. For once, the dreary city of College Park – the one we’d always loathed for being hostile, dead, unfriendly – was open and alive. We were open and alive, smiling, as I imagine Doug was, every day, living, as Doug couldn’t, and thus was telling us to do. We rolled the windows down. The air was hot and humid, and it wet our faces.
Ben had many stories about Doug. Here’s the one I remember best. He scooped the ice cream in the South Campus Dining Hall. It is the best ice cream anywhere, they say. The fat content is too high for health standards, so it’s only sold at the college. He was too smart for the job, a sharp kinesiology major, but also too kind. Can you be too kind? In the food service? Yes, if it holds up the lines. His intimate conversations with nearly every customer lasted several minutes, and the line frequently snaked around the crowded dining hall all the way to the ketchup station, sometimes back to the salads. Ice cream and therapy for a couple of dollars is too good an offer to pass up these days, too rare.
Business couldn’t handle that, so Doug was moved to the grill. His good spirit couldn’t help him there, and neither could his eyes. He was colorblind – no difference between red and brown. He couldn’t tell when the meat for the quesadillas or burgers or cheese-steaks was done, so some think he developed an intricate system of timing. I like to think that when that failed him, he tapped someone on the shoulder and asked them to take a look. Gave them that smile.
I met him on at outing with friends to Franklin’s in Hyattsville. He was very tall, 6-feet-6-inches, I learned, and often mistaken for a basketball player, but his soft blue eyes made him unimposing. He tried every beer they had to offer and told the best jokes without trying. I don’t remember them, but I remember the entire table was absorbed. He tried one on the waitress, and she was absorbed, too, one more in our microcosm. We passed banter and beer for hours, a few serious talks in between, and Doug always leaned in for them and always looked you right in the eye. If he were a couch, he’d be the one I’d sink into after a hard day at work, a fight, a breakup, a death, and cry into and never leave.
I was forced to move out of my apartment early, before the end of the school year. I had nowhere to stay. Doug let me take his bed. I’d only spoken to him maybe twice before, but he said, “Don’t worry about it, I’ll find somewhere,” and made up his bed and grabbed a change of clothes. The room was disorganized, soda cans on end tables and an odd smell, as if there was food forgotten somewhere. A Maryland T-shirt draped over a chair. A bright yellow Curious George poster, with George peering through huge binoculars, was the only decoration on the wall. “Show me the monkey!” it said.
A few months later, he was driving home from a party. He’d offered to drive his friends home because they were drinking and he hadn’t had any alcohol. A large SUV sailed across the median and into his Ford Explorer. A man who lived next to the highway heard “a gigantic boom” while he was watching TV, he told the papers later, and ran out to help. Doors were jammed and windows in pieces, and try as he might, the man couldn’t pull Doug’s tall, crumpled body out. He was dead when he reached Howard County General Hospital. He was 20 years old. The man who hit him, Jeff Carr, grew up two miles away from him and sang next to him in their high school’s a cappella group, the Madrigals. A madrigal is a short love poem that is often turned into song. Carr was 22. He was treated for a few days and released and uncharged. School started two weeks later.
It is the ultimate paradox that the man who loves life the most gets the shortest one. The rest of us work too seriously, at least I do, heads down, always trying to find the bright side and never considering that maybe everything is bright, that maybe there is no silver lining because everything is gold. I imagine if you squeezed every ounce of joy out of my life, it would equal one day’s worth of joy in Doug Dellinger’s, and there is almost a guilt to it. I’ve got some catching up to do.
Raquel Christie is The Diamondback’s Opinion editor. She can be reached at opinion.dbk@gmail.com.
