Word: roomful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...girl-and said hello. Betty said hello too, and she came over to talk to him, but before he could say anything she got a funny look on her face and said that the class was starting and she had to go sit on the other side of the room. That didn't bother Martin too much, although it seemed to him that everybody was sitting on the other side of the room. Then the class was over and Betty came to talk again, but she said she was in a hurry and by the way she would...
...soon as Betty left, Martin's head began to reel again. Everything became distorted; he fell down four times just walking back to his room. He thought he was going crazy, for now he was having one of his dreams in the daytime. He was an earthworm, burrowing through a telephone cord into the receiver: Betty was in the other part of the telephone, and he was getting closer and closer to the receiver there, and something was about to happen-but before it could, he would see pictures, wildly distorted, of his old biology book's photographs...
This kept happening as he sat in the chair, staring at the phone, ill that day and the next. His roommate got scared and told Martin that he was going to sleep in Dave's room "because you're blowing your goddamned mind, you freak," but Martin didn't even hear him. He was completely absorbed in his hallucinations, which kept getting more and more intense, more and more frantic. Something was going to happen very soon now, and Martin didn't want to miss it. Soon he had to grip the chair to keep from being thrown out, everything...
...kept in custody. "I was put in a bedroom with 16 other men," he said, "screaming and urinating all over the place. I stayed in the hall and told the black attendant spook stories..." He became more and more excited and finally was put in the "box," an empty room "with cement all over, small windows with bars and an iron door. I was told to take off all my clothes... it was cold. I was not allowed to have water. I was given one blanket. There was nothing to urinate in. I screamed all night..." He left after...
...students had to go through the gradual reconciliation this girl did. For some the return was swift and joyous. One boy said, "I walked up the steps to my room and pushed open the doors. All my roommates were there slapping me on the back and saying. 'Hey, man.' Right away. Before, the people I had known in high school were much realer to me than my college friends. But from then on, the characters in my dreams were the same people I saw walking around in the daytime...