05-15-00
In the summer after my freshman year of college, I turned 19. My friend Sarah and I decided that we needed to experience a bar firsthand. The bar of our choice, The Fieldhouse. Now, being sweet and naive and completely unaware that the place sucked ass and was for all intents and purposes a gigantic meatmarket for losers who grooved to bad, BAD music, we went in, found seats and prepared for the "bar scene."
About 10 seconds later, this really creepy Asian man came over and started talking to us. At first, we just nodded and smiled and tried to politely ignore him, but after a couple of minutes we decided to go dance to get away from him. He followed us to the dance floor and delighted in telling us we were good dancers. We escaped his clutches again and thought we were free of him, when he somehow managed to track us down, and offered to buy us drinks. Since the scene wasn't really that great and this guy was driving us buggy, we decided to go home to Cedar Rapids.
Three months later, I was watching the news to find out about some sort of shooting on campus. It was November 1, 1991, and Gang Lu, a Chinese graduate student in the physics department here at the University of Iowa, shot and killed a fellow student, three faculty members, and a university associate vice-president, before killing himself. He also shot and left a woman paralyzed from the neck down. The horror of this situation rocked the campus, the midwest, and the nation. But the most interesting part for me came several days later when I read in the paper that this man frequently hung out at the Fieldhouse. The pictures of him in the paper and on the tv were familiar in a creepy way, but I couldn't figure out why. Until I read that information, and I realized that he was the man who had pestered me and Sarah out of the Fieldhouse that day.
I swore I would never set foot in the Fieldhouse again, and I kept that promise until Saturday night. I went there, I danced with friends, and I experienced all that the bar had to offer. And you know what? That place still sucks, and it had less to do with mass murderers and more to do with the lame music and watered-down drinks. Oh, and the decor. Wow.
