Tales from the Lost Semester - Volume 4

The Nevada House

It is said that every junkie needs their fix. Alcoholics may find themselves bellied up at some seedy bar where the number of remaining teeth in a female barfly’s mouth outnumbers the musical selections in the jukebox. The insatiable appetite of the sex fiend might lead them to grope unsuspecting women on a crowded subway. The gambling addict can often be seen on Fridays cashing in his paycheck at the riverboat casino cashiering booth so that he can lose that month’s rent money rolling them bones. The denizen of a crack house might whore themselves to a deviant john in hopes of scoring that next trip to outer space. And back in early 1993, you may have seen the tenants of the MPB house’s Room 23 and their friends trudging out of Champaign, into Urbana, from campus’s western limits to its eastern edge, in the hopes of securing the goods needed for that evening’s Buy a Bag-Smoke a Bag (BABSAB) session – a journey that took them all the way to the Nevada House.

Ah, Nevada House – they put the “supply” in “Supply and Demand Economics”. When you’re a 19-year-old reefer addict, it is crucial that you know exactly where your next bag is coming from and that it’s available whenever you need it. Such was the case with Nevada House – given that there were multiple gentlemen residing there who could take care of whatever you needed, whenever you needed it, it was a haven for the likes of me and my wacked-out friends. OK, I’m exaggerating here – we were by no means the shaking, blue-lipped, bug-eyed junkie freaks you’re likely picturing in your mind right now – we were (and still are) all normal guys who happened to partake in the pleasures of herb (quite a bit, I might add) and maybe one or two other things that weren’t available “over the counter”. It’s all about experimenting with what God gave us, man.

Our two main hosts at Nevada House – let’s call them Stems and Seeds – were also from the MPB house, yet they were a bit older than the rest of us and had become “Out of Housers” during their Junior year, which earned them the scorn of several more “upstanding” members of our house who believed that moving out and not showing up to chapter meetings was the fraternity life equivalent of kicking a pregnant woman in the belly. But I digress. Stems and Seeds were good guys – to the best of my knowledge they were both enrolled in a full slate of classes, just like real students. Yet instead of delivering pizzas, working at the bookstore, or even holding down the most uber-cool of all jobs – bartending – they earned their disposable income through less “desirable” (and I don’t doubt more profitable) means. And when they decided to move out of the house prior to my arrival on campus, they obviously did not choose a location based on its proximity to MPB, leaving their rather large client base with quite a haul if they ever hoped to score. When you look at a map of campus, you’ll note that it’s in the shape of a rectangle, with the larger distance stretching from north to south. Thankfully this was not the route to Nevada House – instead it was a straight shot east from the MPB house, which sat on the western edge of campus. Not that it was a hop, skip and a jump to clear its width – this is a school with 35,000 students overall, and you need a lot of space to fit in all those aspiring engineers and accountants. I keep telling myself it could have been worse – they could have lived in the upper northeast corner, away from all of our class buildings, which would have added significant time to our commute. Of course, we would have made the commute regardless, but that’s beside the point.

Keep in mind that we are in the days before cell phones and email were used on a widespread basis – “hooking up” required quite a bit of effort and some impeccable timing. Seeing as none of us had a car on campus, you can imagine that there was a lot of planning that went into organizing our trips to Nevada House. Instead of utilizing our brainpower to solve problems in our classes, we instead focused our efforts on devising a complex Just-in-Time inventory system whereby we painstakingly analyzed the amount of pot left in each bag, how many people had bought in to the existing bag, how stoned we felt like getting (usually very much so), how many people wanted in on future purchases, and how soon we would want to get stoned again (usually very soon). We took all of these factors into serious consideration when determining when we would place the call to Stems and/or Seeds, how much money we needed to collect from everyone (to this day, my mom wonders how a poor college student ever had money to buy pot – what can I say, my parents are hip), who would be making the trek to Nevada House and when we anticipated the next session could start. It was a logistical nightmare – we could have invented the fucking Internet and had a campus built in our honor had we focused this much energy on something worthwhile, but damn if that pot didn’t make the music sound better and the food taste better – no regrets here!

All in all, we were good about splitting the scoring responsibilities – I myself made more than my fair share of trips to Nevada House. Actually entering Nevada House wasn’t as much of a culture shock as one might suspect – it was not a filthy den of inequity (save for maybe the requisite dishes piling up in the kitchen sink, and possibly Stems’ bedroom), but a rather well kept living space by college male standards. There were several good parties thrown there, and people of all types hung out on a consistent basis. But being a second semester freshman and given that Stems and Seeds were a few years older, I really never had a chance to get to know or hang out with any of the other guys they lived with – in fact, there’s no way I could pick any of them out of a lineup if my life depended on it. So while I did spend a bit of time over there in regular social situations (one of which will be a future subject of these writings), my main purpose for venturing into Urbana, aside from those rare instances when I attended my classes, was for purposes of obtaining the fuel for my mind-altering experimentation.

Nevada House was not only the hub of my supply chain – it is also the location that bore witness to my one and only experience with narcotics of any kind. One day after class (because who studies after class?), I popped into Nevada House, likely in the hopes of securing some green, and found Stems hanging out on the couch packing a glass bowl. “Hey J, have a seat and check this out” – it’s worth noting that Stems was a very cool, friendly guy, regardless of whether or not you happened to be patronizing his little entrepreneurship at that particular moment. He even stayed cool with me after I asked him flat out if I could get an eighth off of him right in front of a girl he liked that had no idea he dealt or was even involved in any of that shit (smooth move #127 of many on my part that semester), and I trusted that he wouldn’t ask me to try anything he didn’t think I could handle. So of course I plopped myself right down on the couch, ready to sample whatever pine tree/skunk/potpourri-smelling, $120-per-quarter (a lot back then), one-hit-shit he had come across (hey, I’m open-minded and willing to try new things – that’s a good trait, right?). Instead, as I sit down, Stems hands me a glass pipe containing a black, gooey substance I had never seen before.

“What is this stuff?” I ask. “Hash oil?”

“No, it’s opium!”

Wow – to quote J. Peterman: “Opium. Shanghai Sally. Yam Yam.” Up until this point, I had only read about opium; specifically how the British started a war over it in order to keep the Chinese people addicted to it because it was netting them a ton of cash. But here it was right in front of me, ready for my consumption. This was a narcotic, a physically addictive substance that had claimed millions of souls throughout history, sitting in my impressionable hands. So, being the stupid 19-year-old that I was, my natural response was, “sure, what the hell.”

What the hell, indeed. If memory serves me correctly (and given the circumstances, this is questionable), I only took one, maybe two hits. Before I could say “chasing the dragon”, my entire body had melted into the couch – I felt as though only my eyes and brain remained, hovering above the muck, if only because I could still watch Columbo on TV, and can clearly remember the phrase, “wow, I’m fucked up” floating through my mind over and over again. I’m not sure how long I stayed sitting there, but after a while Stems went to the kitchen and brought us out a couple of Cokes (no, not coke – never have, never will). I must have really responded the combo sugar-caffeine rush because shortly after drinking it, I became alert enough to realize that I was slouched deep into the Nevada House couch, darkness was approaching, I was hungry, very high, and had a long fucking walk to get back home. So I scooped myself up off the couch, thanked Stems wholeheartedly for guaranteeing that I would get no studying done that evening, and set out for the long journey home with a pleasant disposition and a clear understanding of how Samuel Taylor Coleridge got his inspiration to write his opium-induced poem Kubla Khan. I recall the walk home to be one of my favorites ever from the Nevada House – not the first, certainly not the last, but definitely the most serene. I never came across opium after that, and even if I had I likely would have passed on trying it again, but I will say this: I understand why those millions of souls throughout history kept coming back for more.

As you can probably guess, Nevada House played a central role in our pursuit of good times all throughout the Lost Semester – to this day it was the best reason I had for venturing into Urbana outside of attending my graduation. If it were closer to where I lived I might be a little chubbier and a bit softer in the head, so as you can see it was all for the best.

Until next time…