CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Daniel Beason is only 21, but he has lived the past four years in a freshman dorm at UNC Charlotte and that's enough to scar a guy for life.

At the moment, he's standing on a box in Moore Hall, swinging his arms as he delivers a seemingly absurd list of rules to some of the 100 men who'll share the fifth floor with him this year.

Beason is a resident adviser in this madhouse, an upper classman who is part friend, part counselor and part cop.

"No dangling from the balconies, even if you have three people holding your arms," he says, without cracking a smile.

"No playing sports in the hallways, even if you invented the sport."

No throwing couches out the windows. No walking on the ledges. No pulling fire alarms for fun, or paying someone to pull the alarms for fun.

"If you are naked and running through the hall screaming, I am going to assume you're drunk and write it up, even if that's just something you like to do for fun," he says.

The freshmen laugh nervously but take Beason seriously, even after he has a late arrival, Nick from Room 503, stand on a table and dance like a pirate for the group.

Yes, crazy things happen in Moore Hall, but the craziest thing of all is that Beason loves it here, even on days when the jokes are on him.

"Every man has to make his mark," he says. "This is mine."

Last year, Beason was named Moore Hall's resident adviser of the year.

A student in a gorilla suit showed up on the day freshmen checked into dorms this school year.

"We don't know who it was," says Michael Denton, assistant director for new student and leadership programs. "It was just a student who needed to run around in a gorilla suit apparently."

Whatever the reason, it suggests a busy year ahead for the university's 93 resident advisers. There are 4,500 students living on campus and half are freshmen spending their first year away from home.

Moore Hall is all freshmen, 500 men and women, so large-scale foolishness is inevitable, much of it innocent, but some of it dangerous.

One group of last year's freshmen ended up appearing before a campus judicial officer, after they got caught using a two-story lobby in Moore Hall for a trampoline: They had a pile of mattresses on the lobby floor and were leaping onto it from an interior balcony.

It was also last year that some male students got into trouble after shutting off the water to a floor of women in Moore Hall.

"We figured it out the next morning ... after an entire floor of women went to their sessions without showers," says Nicole Kelly, assistant dean of students for new student programs.

"I think there is an expectation that, when you live in the residence hall, there have to be practical jokes. ... They have to keep coming up with stuff no one is expecting. ... Most of the time, they are innocent, but as administrators we are concerned about safety."

Surprisingly, resident advisers don't discourage innocent pranks, assuming teens focused on harmless jokes are focused away from drugs and alcohol. It's indicative that the students are bonding into a community, since good pranks call for planning and coordination.

One of the best was pulled off in the 1998-99 school year, when a group of freshmen got up at 2 a.m. and spent four hours covering the common areas of their floor in Moore Hall with dried black-eyed peas.

"It was a major undertaking," recalls UNCC graduate James Davis, who was their resident adviser. "I woke up and found every square inch of the floor was covered. It was the funniest thing. I'd guess there were millions of black-eyed peas.

"They knew they had to clean it up, of course. But no rules were broken and nobody got hurt. It was just a lot of energy put into a simple activity that wouldn't result in anything but laughter."

Why black-eyed peas?

"I have no clue, other than they were cheap and they were sold at the convenience store on campus."

Daniel Beason asked for this job his sophomore year, mostly because he didn't have the money to pay his way through school. Born the younger of two boys, he was raised on the modest income of a mechanic and a teacher's assistant in Raeford, N.C., 2 hours east of Charlotte.

Paul and Barbara Beason made it clear their boys were expected to attend college, but it was just as clear that the family couldn't afford it. The couple pledged to give each boy $1,000 for tuition, and challenged them to come up with the rest.

Barbara Beason assumed sheer economics would force Daniel, who graduated third in a class of 300, to attend a community college close to home.

But Daniel held out for a miracle.