While Stanford students have been trying their best to avoid sickness this week, Hoover Tower hasn’t been so lucky. Last Tuesday, it lilted to a half-limp; like a squeezed-out bottle of toothpaste, our proud, phallic monument fell.
And that’s exactly what made Maurice Pillup, freshman, so furious. Pillup — the kind of kid to plant sweet potatoes outside his dorm, to arrange Ikea furniture in his free time — snuck into the tower at night, stuffing it with Viagra pills, filled to the third floor.
Afterwards, with an Adderall shot injected directly into his collarbone, he danced til dawn, nude and dripping with sweat.
I spoke with Pillup from his campus jail cell; he was arrested on charges of vandalism, littering and unregistered revelry.
“I first met the flu in middle school; back then, though, it went by influenza,” Pillup recalled, speaking from behind a glass partition.
“But we didn’t go to the same high school, and I never imagined we’d meet up again in college.”
When campus officials raided Pillup’s dorm with an arrest warrant in hand, they found he’d been stockpiling mattresses; ten of them, stacked to the ceiling. Pillup’s lone comment on the matter was that he’d been trying to “Princess-and-the-pea’’ his long-lost lover. Under the 8th mattress, police discovered a small Tupperware container of Vitamin C powder and cocaine.
On Pillup’s nightstand was a thumb-drive with Hoover Tower nudes; compromising, to say the least. Diary entries on his laptop went further, describing — in detail — torrid polyamorous fantasies of HooTow/Flu/Pillup threesomes. Police read as far as they could before the raw, untamed sexuality of a haiku pontificating on the viscosity of Pillup’s runny nose forced their top criminal psychologist to throw down the computer, hands shaking.
Pillup, now awaiting trial, refuses to acknowledge the potential jail time he faces, instead insisting that “you don’t need a conjugal visit to catch the flu.”
“Unless they’re sick, they’re not enough,” he said, staring at me, unblinking, from within his cell. “Now cough for me, baby.”
At that point I was escorted out by the warden, the sounds of intense panting and intermittent sniffles following me all the way out into the daylight.
