In 1355, two Latin-reading, French-speaking administrators-of-empire (students) decided that the local pub landlord (townie) wasn’t providing good quality beer and proceeded to assault him. The mayor of Oxford, England tried to arrest the students. This led the students to set fire to the non-university side of town. After which, a small war broke out between the students and the local townspeople. The great book of history, written by students, records that 60 pious learners were killed by townies while they sat reading their bibles. Some number of townies also died.
Why did this happen? The students told each other that the townies hated their god and learning and were jealous of what they had. After the fight the king paid for the students to go back to school with a gated community/quad for protection, and the townies went back to their smouldering town to bide their time.
Only fifteen months before August of 1990 I, too, had been an administrator-of-empire in training at a cloistered university ten miles away from Chapel Hill. And now, at this corner of Henderson Street and Franklin Street, I sat on the verge of greatness in my gold 1979 Plymouth Volaré. Hector’s was on my right and, of course, Joe Caparo was there. My long-time companion sat in the passenger seat, wearing hoop earrings and sporting an early prototype man-bag. At that moment, Joe was begging me to kill the student in front of us. It was a logical request. The ‘chad’ in question was experiencing his first innocent week of unsupervised drinking and j-walking in Chapel Hill. This was completely understood and forgiven, but what was not forgiven was that the light had changed to green and this particular ‘tchad’ was a slow walker. I honked my horn and felt a rage growing in the vein of my neck. I then put my foot on the brake of my trusted Volaré, put the transmission in neutral, and revved the engine, menacingly. Fifteen months before, I could have been him. I could very well have stopped into Hector’s for a suspicious kebab and downed a few underage draughts and then found myself slow walking across Franklin Street, oblivious to the upstanding, long-haired, working folk in their crumbling Chrysler who were about to run me over. “Why do you call me ‘Chadly’?”, I might have asked, “What have I done, my towntrodden friend, to deserve this chastisement? Why must you hate my learning and my profitable life choices?”
Behind the wheel of my 15 miles per gallon steed, I knew that one year of working for minimal wage hadn’t made me a townie. It wasn’t me, or who I had been. But, at that moment I had something like an out-of-body experience, and it seemed that I now wanted to run over the body that I had just left. For 635 years townspeople have been biding their time. “Move it, “chaz” I barely whispered.