Encina Riffini

In the coming months, though, she seemed to take the initiative with me, inviting me to little informal gatherings in her room with her other cadre of friends, including Alex Guldbeck, Jason Meyers, Kristin MacDougal, Miranda Ballou, and Mighty Dane Petersen. These people, with their refreshingly hedonistic "devil-may-care" attitude were all to have profound effect on me in the coming years.

Encina Riffini soon showed that her attitude about the human world was much like my own. She saw it as a resource to be exploited. There was an "us" that had to be defended to the end, and there was a "them" who were worthless and stupid, a great "other" unworthy of even minimal respect.

Occassionally Encina would join forces with me and some of my friends to wage war on "the other." For example, we founded an informal group we called the "crime co-op" that would go around Oberlin's campus stealing things from the other Co-operatives. Most of these things were food items necessary to prepare meals in Harkness. But occasionally we als stole kegs of beers from parties or useful equipment.

When Alex Guldbeck covered the walls of Harkness's kitchen with enormously funny drawings of people defecating, a great cry was raised by the forces of uptightness. Alex was widely demonized by people throughout the co-op. Even I was heard to say that I thought he was immature and probably had psychological problems. But Encina viewed him as one of "us," someone who must be defended to the end. And so we, his friends, all closed ranks around him. He became our hero and our cause. And through him we soon learned that immaturity was just a label that the society places on people who are original and creative.

Encina, Alex Guldbeck and Kristin MacDougal eventually came to constitute an indivisible social atom. They were known for their excesses and craziness, and for advocating nihilistic hedonism in others. When their group feel apart (caused in part by a relationship Alex entered into with a girl named Karina), much vitriolic energy was released. Encina spread much malicious gossip about Alex, and went one step further.

You see, as an avid diarist, I kept a journal with all the private details of everyones life meticulously recorded. I glued some xeroxes of this journal to the underside of one of the drawers in my room in the Spring of 1989 and it was discovered in the Spring of 1991 by a later occupant. The particular sheet that was discovered gave the details of how Karina lost her virginity to Alex. When Encina was shown this, she was in the height of her anti-Alex frenzy. Nothing could have been better to fuel her fire. And so she xeroxed numerous copies and tabled them in all of Oberlin's dining halls. The uproar that followed found Encina before the Oberlin College Judicial board. She was made to offer written apologies to all those mentioned in my journal.

When I discussed this with Alex some months later, he bore no resentment towards me. He told me he'd read about the characteristics of cult leaders, that they are wonderful and generous to members of the cult, while simultaneously separating them from their old friends and connections. This, according to Alex, was exactly what Encina had done to him, and what she continued to do to others.

And there were other stories. When one of Harkness' girls made the suggestion that some of Encina's male friends had been sexually inappropriate towards them, Encina retaliated with a vicious, threatening and signed note posted in the Harkness dining room. This resulted in Encina being permanently barred from Harkness, but she continued to come by covertly, where she was protected by an extensive network of friends.

My last semester in Oberlin (Spring 1989) was a difficult one, since I was then breaking up with my only true love (you know how that is). The only ray of sunshine in all of this was being Encina Riffini's lab partner in Organic Chemistry. We were the only ones in our lab class with blue, not white, lab coats. And we were also known to do things like inhale petroleum ether and then immediately take cigarette breaks. When we had to do one lab procedure in our professor's personal office, we did so to very loud classical music played from his stereo.

In early 1992, Encina Riffini and her then boyfriend, Jeff Brecko, left to live in the hedonist Meccah known as Seattle, Washington. Occasionally I heard tales from their life there. Violence and drunkeness in the streets. Getting busted for shoplifting. That sort of thing.

In Oberlin, Encina had been an accomplished shoplifter. She did it all the time, usually with the assistance of a specially altered overcoat. But in Seattle, they're on to the likes of Encina Riffini.

In the Fall of 1994, I got a call from Encina Riffini. Now she was living in Blacksburg, Virginia, only 100 miles away! I set out to visit her immediately.

She'd just had a nasty breakup with her boyfriend, Jeff. They'd been together four years and their relationship had been characterized by his getting drunk and her beating the hell out of him. At this point in the break up, Jeff was taking it kind of badly and was given to going to see her to try to reason with her. But she wanted none of that. When he pursued her into a batheroom, she stabbed him in the heart with a pair of scissors. Luckyilly, his sternum protected him from death. But medical attention was required.

Encina took a great deal of interest in the paintings I was doing at the time and decided rather suddenly that she and I could both be rich if she just promoted my paintings to the World. But this project foundered when her van stopped functioning somewhere in New Jersey. She settled down to be a white collar cog in The Machine, and I have heard little from her since. She does surf the web, though...