THE FXBG ADVANCE SUNDAY 9/13/26 MIDDAY READ
By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
This is a cautionary tale set in Newport News, home of Christopher Newport University—a reminder for an age group that gets most of its news from Tik Tok or Instagram that Big Brother is watching—now more than ever, though not always in the form you might expect.
By day, I am a mild-mannered claims adjuster, and one thing I’ve learned on the job is that there are cameras everywhere, so you would be foolish to lie to the police or your insurance carrier. George Costanza once noted, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”—unless of course there is clear video footage that proves it’s a lie no matter what you might believe.
Another thing I’ve learned on the job is that the great world does in fact spin in only six degrees of separation even if they can’t always be connected to Kevin Bacon. In this cautionary tale, the degrees of separation in Newport News are far fewer than six—and instead of surveillance cameras, sometimes what you have to watch out for is word of mouth, and who happens to know whom.
Here’s where the story begins:
My daughter recently moved into her dorm at Christopher Newport—a sentence I’m still unable to write without my seasonal allergies kicking in. She and her roommate are connected to their neighbors, also two young women, by a shared bathroom.
One night shortly after they moved in, my daughter and her roommate heard a male voice coming through the bathroom door—definitely a concern at 1 in the morning. My daughter has an older brother who graduated from CNU, however, and so she understands that bathrooms sometimes function differently in college dorms than they do in the real world.
Hearing the male voice in the shared bathroom would have been a minor anecdote, a small annoyance, soon to be forgotten, until the spoken word turned to retching that was at a volume much higher than that of the ear buds that my daughter and her roommate quickly plugged in. The retching continued for an impressive length of time.
Once it died down, my intrepid daughter went into the bathroom to inspect the carnage, and discovered that the visitor’s aim hadn’t been what might be called true. She knocked on her suite mates’ door, saw they had an inebriated male visitor wearing a CNU football t-shirt, and suggested the girls next door might want to think about having the guy clean up the bathroom. Or, if his wasted appearance was any indication, maybe the suite mates would prefer to address the matter themselves before anyone had to use the bathroom later that morning.
The vomitter appeared incapable of raising his eyelids, let alone a brush to scrub a toilet.
The key element in this cautionary tale is the CNU football t-shirt. It’s quite possible that the male student in this story doesn’t play football at CNU and was merely a fan of the team. While it may be possible, it is unlikely since this was only the second day that most athletes were on campus, and those shirts aren’t available in the campus bookstore.
What is more likely is that a first-year football player couldn’t handle his drink or weed, and yawned in technicolor all over my daughter’s shared bathroom which only a few hours earlier had smelled of apples, or so I’ve been told.
I have since learned that there is a medical term associated with this type of regurgitation if it is related to excessive marijuana smoking, and that word is “scromitting” which was reason enough to write this column.
The suite mates cleaned up the bathroom, so all was well with the world, but not necessarily with the football player, who had failed to realize is that he’d puked all over the bathroom of the sister of CNU football royalty: My son B., the recent grad and first-team punter in the New Jersey Athletic Conference when CNU won the NJAC for the first time in school history three years ago.
I feel certain that the only ex-punter who would have more clout in the CNU football locker room than B. would be former NFL punter Pat McAfee only because McAfee is an ESPN personality who football players can watch on their phones.
Of course, as a former college football player, my son did not find the freshman player’s vomitorious actions as distasteful as I did, and also he would never intervene on his sister’s behalf in recognition that doing so could lead to more problems for her. Plus, he wouldn’t want his sister to ever know how much he actually likes her.
As such, the offending player skated because of the football locker room code. Or thought he’d skated, because there’s another level to his failure to handle his drink or smoke, and that is that we own a house in Newport News where my son lives with—wait for it—a CNU football coach.
We would of course never consider waiving the coach’s rent for a month just so he could exact some sort of revenge on the kid who befouled our daughter’s bathroom, but it certainly is fun to contemplate. My wife and I have even spent time over cocktails designing inventive ways to punish the transgression, but—just to be clear once again—we would never even consider actually doing such a thing, mostly because our son and daughter made us promise we wouldn’t.
So kids, as you make your way onto college or high school campuses this fall and think that hiding a vape in the thumb opening of your baseball glove is smart (as one high school kid did on a team I help coach), or that total strangers would love to hear you puke up your guts at 1 in the morning, remember that even if there aren’t cameras there are coaches everywhere.
And as the great philosopher Woodsy Owl so famously said back in the day: Give a hoot, don’t pollute… especially not all over my daughter’s shared bathroom.
