UMOC

When I entered the University of Mississippi, I was everything co-eds didn’t want to look at. Nothing about me was attractive or symmetrical. I was the proverbial ninety-eight pound weakling. Skeleton skinny, I could hide behind a fence post. I had narrow shoulders, a sunken chest, a giraffe neck, and arms as long as an orangutan’s.

But more than anything else, it was my face that caused females to flee. My roommate, who professed to be the campus Lothario, never tired of telling other students that one look at me made little children squall and cling to their mother’s dresses. Back then, several weeks before Halloween, Ole Miss held what was called the Ugliest Man On Campus contest. Large glass jars with slotted tops were placed all over campus beneath pictures of the contestants. Students voted by dropping coins in the jars, and the money was donated to charity. Despite my extreme ugliness, I was able to coax one homely co-ed, a girl named Jane (known on campus as “Plain Jane”), out of her dormitory for an occasional date. One night, I was bemoaning the fact that so many students teased me about my ugliness. I expected her female nurturing nature to kick in, and hoped she would comfort me; instead, she made me feel worse.

---

“You should enter the Ugliest Man On Campus contest,” she suggested. “I can fix you up so that you will be even uglier” — definitely not a nurturing thing to say. Unaware of her comment’s cruelty, she continued, “I’ll use a combination of sulfur, coconut oil, and old-fashioned hair grease to make your long hair stand up in devil horns. And you know how you frighten me by rolling your eyelids backward so that the lashes don’t show? You can do that, and I’ll even paint your two front teeth so that they look like fangs, and you can frown like a Halloween pumpkin. You’ll be a shoo-in.” Obviously, the idea of making ugly the ugliest thrilled her, but I had no choice but to agree, since I didn’t want to risk running off the only girl on campus who would go out with me. Thinking Mama would get a good laugh out of my picture, I sent her a copy. Even though she had long ago accepted the fact that I had a face only a mother could love, she was furious. She tore the picture in shreds and mailed it back to me, along with a note stating that I should be ashamed to enter such a scandalous contest. When I received the letter, all I could think was … please, Lord, don’t let me win; if I do, she’ll never speak to me again. Long before the voting period was over, my jars were completely full. Plain Jane was right: When the money was counted, I won by a landslide. For months on end, Mama wouldn’t speak to me, and even worse, from that day forward, everyone on campus called me “UMOC.”