Dave is Jerk -- Still

"Dave is jerk" the seething international student cut into my dorm-room door in 1981. His anger burns there still, 30 years later.

As always with his work, the note is beautifully centered and well rendered. This is notable since he'd undoubtedly been in a rush, lest he be seen defacing Azusa Pacific University property. Shy Agus P. Johannes Jusran of Jakarta would never even have dreamed of committing such an act, had he not been so angry.

I was a great fan of a spaceship he sketched in a matter of seconds one day in my room. He called it “The Searcher.” It was a wonder, a work of art. He liked it, too, but was too humble to go waving it about the whole of Second East. I watched as he took a couple of tacks from my bulletin board and stuck it to the inside wall of the hallway closet just outside my door. “It’s up high, where no one will find it,” he whispered. “Only you and I will know it’s there.”

Of course I told everyone.

Dave is jerk. Unfortunately, the unintended effect of his accusation was to draw smiles from readers, since he'd left out the article "a." What's more, he'd identified himself – my lone friend speaking English as a second language -- as the vandal.

We found "a" scratched into the door a day later, off to the side. It must've killed the artist in Jo to destroy the symmetry of his piece. But then he'd always been one to try to get a thing right.




"X" MARKS THE SPOT: When his anger later cooled, the artist attempted to cross his outburst out. Thirty years later, though, it remains.