Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Southern Michigan University was different from a lot of the other universities in the state–like Michigan State or U of M–in that it was closer to a 50-50 mix of ideologies in students rather than the 85-15 or 90-10 in favor of the left that you tended to see elsewhere. I’ve heard plenty of theories about why that is, but honestly I think that since the place is cheaper it tends to attract a lot of farmer’s kids and such.

At times the roiling conflict between the two groups breaks out into open antagonism. The best example I can think of was in the mid-2000s, around the time of the 2004 election, when acrimonious feelings were felt on both sides with no outlet because the lefties and the righties ran with different social groups that were active at different times of the day. As a result their antagonism took the only rout available to it: chalk.

Student groups had long used chalk to scribble advertisements for events and such, but when the discussion turned to politics it became bitter. At first the chalkings only supported candidates of choice, but it was a short road from there to insulting candidates of differing persuasions, insulting candidates of differing persuasions with bad swears, insulting candidates of differing persuasionswith claims of simian ancestry, and insulting candidates of differing persuasions with crude sexual references. Vandalism was the next logical step.

SMU sutdents formed anti-chalking brigates to seek out and alter, chalk over, or wash away rival messages. In the resulting melee, local stores ran out of the preferred pink and blue colors, reducing the rivals to using nigh-invisible yellow and green chalk or pinching flimsy white chalk from classrooms. I remember sitting idly looking out the window in a particularly boring class and seeing, in the space of ten minutes, a chalking deployed, vandalized, washed away, and replaced.

In the end, the Chalk-A-Lot War was decided in favor of nobody: the administration began enforcing a long-ignored prohibition on chalkings and had maintenence wash them away as soon as they were chalked.

Gambling was, at least in theory, illegal in Hopewell. But that had never stopped anyone, and the HPD as well as the SMU DPS had looked the other way for years, especially when the Fighting Grizzlies were on a hot streak. That hadn’t happened since the team had been the Potawatomi; some said the teams had been cursed when they gave Chief Kawgushkanic his walking papers and replaced him with Smitty the Grizzly.

But there was plenty of betting to be had regardless. Anna “Dayton” Gillespie saw to that.

Ostensibly a junior instructor at Southern Michigan University, Dayton taught a single one-credit remedial computer science course every other semester. But her true and abiding passion was social engineering expressed through the medium of gambling.

One of her cousins ran The Wigwam Bar & Grill downtown, and Dayton ran a betting parlor and a few slot machines in a back room. The slot machines only took and accepted bar tokens to skirt local ordinances, but the real attraction was the odds board where Dayton offered all sorts of esoteric bets. On a typical day, for example, there might be 1:300 odds that the SMU provost would get a parking ticket, or 1:20 odds that a key defensive player in the Fighting Grizzlies line would be caught in a tryst with a female escort. Bets were cheap, and many of the events so outlandish that many took the opportunity to bet against them.

That’s when Dayton went to work, using her extensive local connections and programming skills to try and bring those devastatingly unlikely events about. For the a football player to be caught in a compromising position, it was usually enough to alert a SMU Times reporter when the team went out for “hot wings” at Madame Bovary’s “restaurant.”

For more difficult tasks like the provost’s parking ticket, Dayton would spread rumors and lean on carefully selected individuals. Perhaps a major donor’s favored program was rumored to be facing cancellation, prompting an emergency visit that would require double parking. Perhaps there was a rumor that the provost’s daughter, a junior in Phi Qoppa Mu, was in the drunk tank and facing a 30-day sentence (everybody knew that the parking in front of the Hopewell jail was police-only). Or it might be as simple as altering the programming in the DPS’s absurdly unprotected computer system.

In any event, Dayton won most of her bets. And the thrill of the social engineering behind each victory vastly outweighed the small monetary gain.