Michael Zorek

Michael Zorek.

Every year on this date, May 24, I get lost in memories of graduating from college on it in 1981. I've written most of them down in various places (or at least I think I have because whenever I begin to it feels familiar). Here's one I don't think I've written about.
Around graduation, colleges take on a slightly apocalyptic air as seniors abandon the accumulated material objects they've gathered over four years and been unable to sell or give away and have no room to transport home, or desire to do so. My college in rural Ohio was strictly residential and I lived in a dorm that only seniors lived in—housing was determined by lottery and seniors got favorable numbers. 
I stayed an extra day after graduation because I had a long drive west to a place I'd never been to (Minneapolis) that I'd made the random decision to live in. I was far less conscious then of some things I'm not today, like that college campuses have things to do after the students leave and the housekeeping and maintenance people have work schedules to keep. It took asking and a little paperwork to stay that one extra day. I had a fever because of the enormous stress of the past few weeks weakening my resistance to illness, so much of what happened that week happend in a fog.
On my last night there I encountered two people in my otherwise empty dormitory. One was a junior I knew named Micheal Zorek. The other was a woman around seventeen who didn't go to the school but was the daughter of the English professor I'd had my first year. He was professorial in a good way. A kind and quiet intellectual who wrote poetry, wore a jacket and tie to class, would sometimes rub his face with a chalked hand, leading to a little mirth in the class, and gave me the first real writing style advice I ever got, which was to use more pedestrian language when I write. (Advice I didn't follow then and don't now, thanks to ego and pretension I'm unable to regulate.)

The daughter was pretty and seemed nice. She'd just gotten out of high school and would go to the college the next fall and graduate in 1985. I had no idea how she knew Michael Zorek or why he was on campus at the time. The two were scavenging for usable items, which enhanced the zombie movie vibe the dorm had. 
Michael Zorek made a bad first impression on many. A New Yorker, he was stout, hairy and brash, shouting out jokes in crowds, aggressively pursuing women, bound to major in drama. He did later become an actor and appeared in several movies and TV shows in the 1980s. Most of them were in the slobs versus snobs genre and he played crude young men. The most successful movie he was in was "The Woman in Red," in which he had a minor, nonspeaking part as a crude punk boyfriend of a main character's daughter. His career, like that of most, dried up and he last performed in 1994.
After living in Los Angeles for awhile, he moved back to New York, married a woman who worked in public relations and became a stay-at-home husband. He got some attention in the early aughts with a website showing pictures of his infant son with celebrities. It was called whoisthatwithjeremy.com and sounds silly now but that was the internet then for you.