On the first day of school, freshman Gill Stillman was walking into the Memorial Union when he noticed a girl trailing not far behind him.
“It was 1:30pm, so I wanted to get Strada before the line got too long,” Stillman said. “But then I saw this girl walking behind me and thought to myself, ‘Hey, let’s start this year off on a good foot, Gill. Why don’t you hold that door open for her?’”
The girl was a lot further away than Stillman thought — she was by the food trucks when he first noticed her — but by the time he had decided to leave she was already too close, Stillman said. At this point, she gave him a quick smile and walked through the door.
“Boy, did that give me the shivers,” Stillman said, who comes from a small town. “I just froze there for a second, and was like, ‘Holy cow. Did I just seduce somebody? Did I just hold the door open for a girl and then have her smile at me like I was James freaking Bond?’”
Stillman said he ended up holding the door open for three more hours, “practicing his swagger.” But when he tried to leave, he was trapped.
“I think my problem was that my game got too good,” Stillman said, shaking his head and chuckling to himself. “Some guy actually called me his homie. I was like, ‘Word!’ It was so dope. Haha, dope. That’s another word I picked up.”
“My other problem was that I kept on making eye contact with people,” Stillman said. “I’d be shutting the door but then I’d lock eyes with somebody crossing the street. And then it was like, ‘Can I really just shut the door on a potential homie? And the answer in every case was absolutely not — not the first week of freaking freshman year. Go Badgers. On Wisconsin.”
Around midnight, Stillman started hallucinating. By this time, he had gone 11 hours without food or water. Stillman said he must have hallucinated himself going back home to Lakeshore and passed out, because when morning came he was still at the door.
“I woke up and Tunnel Bob was staring at me,” Stillman said. “Boy does he have a presence. He is a lot taller than I imagined. I don’t know how long we stared at each other. At some point I may have let out of whimper of fear, because then he clapped me on the back and called me a homie.”
Stillman stuck out his chest and pounded it.
“It’s not every day you become homies with Tunnel Bob,” Stillman said.
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Tunnel Bob told Stillman that as a reward for passing his staring competition, he would stand in line at Peets to get him coffee and a donut. Four hours later, Tunnel Bob came back, true to his word.
“No, he wasn’t dillydallying or anything,” Stillman said. “The line for Peets was really just that long. And Tunnel Bob didn’t want to order it online.”
The coffee and donut nourished Stillman so much that he decided he would continue holding the door open as long as he could. Eventually, after a full week, his reign as door-holder came to an end, Stillman said.
“It was 1:30 — exactly 168 hours after I had started holding the door open — and the exact same girl who I had first opened the door for came walking up,” Stillman said “I must’ve been in pretty rough shape, though, because when she saw me her face blanched and she called the police. They asked me to step away from the door but at that point my joints had all frozen up, so I couldn’t.”
“When they tased me, I pooped myself.”
Stillman said it turned out the girl called the police on him for stalking, but once he told the police his story they just shook their heads in disgust and walked away. Then one of them came back and said the next time they caught him holding a door open, they’d arrest him.
“Was I hurt that I was accused of stalking and then publicly ridiculed by officers of the law?” Stillman said. “Deeply. But that’s just part of the college experience. You’re only a freshman once, right? And I’ve grown. I am a different man than I was before I held open that door. I learned I’ve got game. I learned the word ‘dope.’ I became homies with Tunnel Bob. This is the kind of stuff you don’t learn in a classroom. This is what college is all about.”
