In the fall of 1981, my brother, mother, and father went to New Zealand for my father's sabbatical. My younger sister was going to school at UC Davis. I was a junior at UC Berkeley.
I lived in the Norton hall dorms. With the exception of living with my grandparents, working for graduate students during the summer in high school, and summer forestry camp, this was my first time living away from home.
I continued where I left off in forestry camp. Every day I would get beer from a different country to start with and then drink cheap beer after I got a buzz from the first couple of beers. I stayed up late every night drinking and playing hearts. It quickly reached the point where I was missing classes and exams.
The catalyst for my full blown mania was the rape of one of the women living in the dorms. The residence hall assistants (RAs) asked several people if they'd be willing to change rooms with her roommates since we were on a floor directly across from an RA. Without consulting my roommates, I committed us to making the room exchange. Needless to say, my roommates were not happy. At that point I really didn't care.
I felt a very strong urge to make things right (as much as possible) for everyone in the dorm. It was at this point that I started to spend all of my money making things better. The Oakland A's were in the playoffs that year and I started collecting requests from people who wanted to go. I paid for the tickets with my own money.
I decided the dorm needed a library where people could go and check out course text books. I went to the university bookstore, got a large cart and proceeded to get one of every text book they had. I explained to the bookstore employees that our dorm was creating a text book library. I asked them to put a hold on the books until I could get some help from other students in the dorm to carry the books back to the dorm. I went to other stores near the bookstore and purchased anything that I thought might be useful for the dorm (i.e. pretty much anything).
Things came to a head on the day when the A's were scheduled to play their first game of the playoffs. I had been up several nights in a row. My dorm room and my thinking were becoming increasingly chaotic. My sister was supposed to come and go to the A's game with me and the other people from the dorms. It was getting closer to game time and the people I'd gotten tickets for were getting antsy. I had a difficult time trying to find the tickets because I couldn't remember where I'd put them. Eventually I found them.
In the meantime, one of the students in the dorm had called the campus police because they thought I was trying to rip people off. The cops hauled me away to the student health center. I was seen by a psychiatrist and put in a padded cell for awhile. After that they let me out and I proceeded to escape. Like an idiot, I returned to my dorm room. Once again the cops were called (the RA ratted on me) and they took me to the student health center again. This was the first step of my descent into hell. I never did get to see the game nor was I reimbursed for the tickets.
Here's the current version of Norton Hall's web page.