Loyola University New Orleans
The little things about
Loyola University New Orleans are what make the school, the best spots to play
hooky, the nicknames people give to its seedy smokeholes, the people that frequent those places, and the people who wouldn't be caught dead in them. It isn't really about its
Jesuit background, its ratio of males to females, or its fantastic business programs. I'll leave that for the other LOYNO noders. This is a compendium of the more interesting bits of our school.
Father Bernard Knoth
Old Bernie is the president of our beloved university and is perhaps the only person who can do it and still be deemed cool in the eyes of his students. He roams around campus often, speaking with the students whether he knows them or not. He offers you
cigarettes outside, or, when you have an appointment with him in his office,
alcohol. Remember: the Jesuits don't take vows of...anything. Father Knoth drives an
Audi, and if you're pretty enough, will offer you rides in it. He is often
long-winded and ignorant at times, but we forgive him because he's Bernie Knoth.
The Residence Halls
The Res Halls are called that for a reason. It is not legal for
minors to consume alcohol in
dorms, but it is somehow okay to do it in a res hall, as long as the booze is behind the closed doors of the individual's room. I don't know the specifics of the legality, and perhaps the whole thing is just kept on the hush somehow. Either way, I'm not complaining. A few other schools get away with this, too.
Tulane University, mere yards away, and
Jerry Springer's alma mater, used to be one of them...but perhaps that was reason enough to crack down. Nevertheless, there are four residence halls on Loyola's campus:
Buddig Hall:
This is the freshman girl and Honors building. It is the tallest, boasting 12 fantastic stories, and is aptly referred to by most of its residents as the "Virgin Islands," "Princess Palace" or even the "Pussy Palace." There is so much estrogen floating around the bottom 11 floors of this place (The top floor is coed Honors, so they're doing their own thing...studying for organic chemistry, having sex on top of their lab notebooks, etc.) that residents of the Pussy Palace often find it difficult to make friends outside of their floor, much less their building. The RAs of this building are often the most emphatic about their jobs. Floor programs happen nearly every week, attempting to draw the girls of the floor closer together. Open doors are encouraged, and so is running around in only a bra and panties...less, if you can manage it. If you're looking for a good old fashioned pillow-fight-turned-kissfest, this is probably the place to go. These girls drink mostly indoors (as a floor, of course) and, as a result, get terribly excited when boys come over. Their floor shirts feature sayings like, "Grrrl Power," "Bow Down," or random lyrics from Shania Twain songs.
Biever Hall:
This was originally the freshman boy building, but as the girls of Loyola decided that they wanted to decrease their chances of becoming lesbian (Not that there's anything wrong with that), they decided to steal a couple of floors of the boys' domain. This hall is representative of every 7th grader's dream of the college experience: drunken vomiting, loud sex, gossip, loud music, bitch fights, and of course drunken loud gossip bitch sex. Along with all the hedonism comes exorbitant amounts of floor fines, fees, and most endearing, fire drills. Residents of the Biev keep pants, shirts, hoodies, and shoes by their beds at all times because they expect the fire alarm, most assuredly pulled by drunken hoodlums, to go off at any minute. Common decency does not play a role in fire drills; whether it is 2 in the afternoon, or 2 in the morning, you WILL be evacuated. If you're in the shower, throw on the robe and suck up the embarassment, because you'll be pushed out, too. Just as there is a sprinkling of upper classmen in Buddig, there are some in Biever (I'm one) who help the RAs generally maintain their sanity by taking on some of the reprimanding. The Biever girl is commonly called the Biever ho, and many do not mind living up to the term. Our shirts say "Biever Chix from 5 and 6: We Like It On Top." Case in point.
New Res:
New Res is (surprise) the latest built of the four. It doesn't have a name yet, so Residential Life, the clever buggers, refers to it as New Res or New Hall. We're just waiting for someone to donate a ridiculous amount of money to Loyola and New Res will suddenly become 3Com Hall or Bausch & Lomb Hall. This place contains upperclassmen only, save for the lucky two or three freshmen that somehow finagled their way into a suite. Unlike Biever and Buddig, New Hall has coed floors...by room, of course. God forbid girls should room with guys. The monks would fall out of their leather ergonomic special-ordered desk chairs. So, being a freshman-free zone, New Res is fairly quiet. There are chairs in the lobby, but they are seldom used. The Desk Assistants often complain of being lonely when they are on duty in New Res and cry. New Res has its fair share of booze and sex, but these are the people who have learned to keep their mouths shut about it. Until recently, that is. There has been an outbreak of Loud-ass New Res Hoes. These girls and guys are the pivotal cogs in the gossip machine of Loyola. Because of them, the school is often referred to as Loyola High. New Res also contains a few apartments, complete with their own kitchen and bathroom, and best of all, single rooms. We don't know who lives in them, as they are damn near impossible to get. New Res does not have floor shirts. There is no unity.
Cabra Hall:
Cabra Hall, sometimes lovingly referred to by its residents as Club Cab, or the Cabraray Projects, is on the other campus, the Broadway campus, which is a few blocks further uptown. Our Broadway campus is mainly the Law School and the fine arts department. Those who couldn't get back into Biever or Buddig, didn't have enough merit points (made up of GPA, Res Life delinquencies, number of semesters on campus, etc.) to get into New Res, or simply got shit on by biased Res Life members get booted to Club Cab. Cabra is for slaves. No, really. The land it sits on used to be a plantation and Cabra used to be the slave quarters. The massuh's house, now known as Greenville Hall, is right next door. For those who are spoiled by main campus living, the downgrade to Cabra is devastating. The beds are end to end, as there isn't enough room to put them side by side. The rooms are about the size of your standard walk-in closet. They are colored with motel room hues: mauves, teals, seafoam greens. Interestingly enough, though, the people who get kicked to the Cab are generally the people who do well there. Cabra RAs don't care about anything. Cabra has coed floors. Cabra has 24-hour visitation. Cabra can get away with anything, because the residents are often too stoned or too drunk to do anything destructive in the first place. Floor shirts? Ha.
Smoker's Alley
Smoker's Alley is the stretch of sidewalk connecting the Danna Center (our
student center) to Bobet Hall. On and around this length is the preferred hangout of Loyola's
fraternities and their sister
sorostitutes. Not all of them, mind you, but the stereotypical
Animal House types. If you want to get high right before class, this would be the place to do it, as your smoke will just blend in with everyone else's cigarette smoke and no one will know. If you're late to class and think that this shortcut to Bobet would be best,
think again. You will find it hard to dodge all the
Greek letters and everybody else who thought the same as you. Go around, and avoid the judgmental stares. Your
ego and your
lungs will thank you.
Iggy and Cancer Court
Cancer Court is the courtyard outside the Orleans Room, our dining hall. It's your standard enclosed
green room with big potted plants, waffle
patio furniture with umbrellas stuck to them, etc. The plants are yellowed with cigarette smoke, but no one that goes there seems to mind.
Iggy the Squirrel started showing up last semester, and is seen less and less frequently. At first everyone thought he was trapped in there, but we soon realized that he's in there by choice, feeding off people's dropped food. He somehow shimmies his way up a tree, over on a branch and does some kind of
death drop onto one of the umbrellas. We used to feed him, but the Loyola gestapo put a stop to that and I haven't seen Iggy at all since the semester started. We used to have
YHWY the kitty, too. But campus security decided that the
warm-fuzzies were increasing to unwanted levels.
Cliques
For as much boasting Loyola does about
diversity and
bridging of gaps, the cliques are ridiculous. LASO, the Loyola Asian Student Organization, a group in which I tried my damndest to participate, but couldn't because it felt like some sort of
co-ed fraternity, has a corner of the
library lobby. At any one time, there are at least 5 Asians there. The Asian population at Loyola is so small that they do not have the opportunity to divide even further. But they would if they could. We're like that. The
Latins have the steps between the business school and the library. This clique is perhaps the most obnoxious because not only do they have a common tongue, it's foreign, too. A horrible sense of
self-consciousness washes over me when I walk by those steps. God help me if they start laughing when I pass. I'm liable to cut myself when I get back to the Biev. The BSU, Loyola's
Black Student Union, have the BSU office. This is the place to catch up on all the juicy
gossip that goes on at Loyola High. Who's dating whom, who caught who in the laundry room, who's got which
STD. Nothing and no one is spared in the BSU office. There are several other places around campus that have been adopted by specific groups: the athlete couches in the Danna Center, the SigEp benches in front of the library, the PhiPsi's have about a third of Smoker's Alley.
The Uptown Masturbator
This guy hangs around campus asking people to give him
a little sumthin sumthin before class. He's been caught in the library bathrooms, behind the business school, in random hallways in the evening. He has no
shame. He's been reported many times by several different people. I worked with one guy in the library last year when he came down in a panic because he was asked to give a strange man, with his erect
member protruding from his pants, a
hug. So why isn't this guy caught? No one really has an answer for that, except that the social-justice-everyone-deserves-a-second-chance
Jesuit ideals kick in when it comes to things like this. This is probably the same reason that when the Biever
Pyromaniac was caught last year, he only had to switch residence halls.
The Marquette Ghost
Marquette Hall makes up the facade of Loyola. It is what people ooh and ahh at when they ride by on New Orleans' famous
streetcar. It is sometimes lit from the ground at night, giving it a
spooky look. There are four floors of Marquette that the elevators can take you to. There is a fifth floor, but one must walk up to it from the fourth floor. Early in Loyola's history, it was a room to store
cadavers. Students would hoist the bodies from the front of the building, from the ground, up to the fifth floor using a pulley system and pull it in through a large window. This human dissection class no longer exists and Dr. Ben Wren now teaches his
Zen class there. There are stories told by various people that they've experienced
supernatural things in Marquette. The drama department is stationed on the third floor, and several people have reported unexplained door slams, unnatural sounds, random temperature changes in certain areas of the floor. No one is really afraid of the Marquette
ghost (or ghosts), but it does deter many people from playing
hide and seek in Marquette late at night.
The Noders
Technically there are five Loyola noders at the moment:
me,
sauth,
Caitiff,
Janus D Malk, and
HesperiaNyx. Some of us are more active than others. We all keep see each other every day for the most part and of course, take
some of the same classes. Sauth, and Caitiff work in the math lab and I work in the same room, on the other side of the invisible wall, in the Academic Resource Center. I get in trouble for hanging out on the other side of the tracks. The math lab seems to be the happenin' spot for the noders (sad, yes), mostly because at least one is there all the time.
Other Loyolas
There are four Loyolas in the United States:
Loyola University New Orleans:
6363 St. Charles Ave.
New Orleans, Louisiana 70118
www.loyno.edu
Loyola University Chicago:
6525 N. Sheridan Rd.
Chicago, Illinois 60626
www.luc.edu
Loyola Marymount University:
One LMU Dr.
Los Angeles, California 90045
www.lmu.edu
Loyola College in Maryland:
4501 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, Maryland 21210
www.loyola.edu