Tales from the Lost Semester - Volume 5

Caps

Before I kick off volume 5, let’s recap some of the highlights from the first four volumes of the Tales, shall we?

• “Don’t set your class schedule when stoned.”

• “For starters, we were the three bona fide stoners in our pledge class – the guys who would attend a line up at midnight and hang around afterwards so we could pull tubes with our already-initiated friends.”

• “Do you prefer a bowl, a hitter, the Aquapipe, or the purple ‘Clown Boy’ bong?”

• “I’m guessing the fact that there was a bowl, bong and joint simultaneously circulating around the room played a factor in my decision – just a hunch”

• “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.”

• “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”

• “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.”

Up until this point, I have tried to paint a picture of what my life was like in that fateful spring of 1993 – how I got to U of I and the MPB house, where I lived, who I associate with, how I cheated in class – important contextual information, no doubt. However, after re-reading the tales I’ve told in volumes 1 through 4, I came to the scary realization that I come across as nothing more than a lazy, mentally unstable druggie, with an insatiable appetite for any illicit substance that can help me melt away reality – and this is even before bringing up any of my experiences with hallucinogens! Yes, I admit, I was heavily into mind expansion, especially of the marijuana variety – however, this was not my only interest during my Lost Semester. Being the deep, complex young man that I was at age 19, there were definitely other things that piqued my interest, motivated me, and made me tick. I refer, of course, to alcohol.

Ah, alcohol – the most socially acceptable of all drugs! Get drunk, be stupid, vomit, get into fights, commit date rape, wrap your car around a flagpole – it’s all part of the great rite of passage! (Note: the first three are me; the last three most certainly are not). Because my nine readers know exactly where I stand on the whole pot vs. alcohol debate and the direct correlation that exists between the level of social/legal acceptability and the level of overall harm inflicted on self and others in each case, I won’t bore you with my politics on this subject. What I will say is that while not my preferred drug of choice during the Lost Semester, alcohol certainly played a prominent role. First and foremost, the entire social scene on campus revolved heavily around where the alcohol was being served – bars, house parties, apartment parties, fraternity after-hours – if the booze was flowing, the party was hopping. Therefore, if you weren’t hip to the booze, you just weren’t hip. Secondly, there were those times when Stems and Seeds gave us the unfortunate news that the well was dry so come back another day (hopefully we found this out via phone so as to save us the trek across campus, but I digress). So as you can see, as a 19-year-old male in desperate need of social interaction and inebriation, alcohol served a critical role in successfully fulfilling both sides of this equation.

However, I’m not giving you the whole picture, am I? While I cite the Social Interaction component of the equation as a crucial reason to fall off of a wagon I was never on to begin with, I must be honest here – as a college freshman, I was quite intimidated by the prospect of the whole social scene, especially the prospect of being in packed bars with an ability to enter yet not personally purchase alcohol. Number one, I detest large crowds, where bumping, pushing and other forms of physical displacement that I can’t stand were commonplace, causing my blood pressure to rise in the process. Add alcohol into the mix and one wrong look can easily hurl some sloped-fore-headed Neanderthal into a violent rage (doubly annoying when you consider that his frat “brothers” were ready to back up his pissed-off ass). Now I am not a big person – I like to think I can handle myself in a sticky situation, but realistically, if any shit were to go down I’d like end up on the business end of an ass whooping. Number two, as I’ve mentioned before, while I know that I had skills somewhere deep down inside of me that would help me score some needed interaction with the opposite sex, the fact that I had been a near-daily pot user since April 1992 had caused me to crawl back inside of my shell a bit, leaving me with dangerously-low levels of the self-confidence that was crucial in wooing the ladies (being a freshman only added to the misery – call it the Cherry-on-Top Syndrome). The third, and possibly most crucial factor to consider, was Caps.

Without harping on the subject too much (as I know at least one of my nine readers hates my inside stories/jokes), Caps was probably the most important thing you could learn at the MPB house. Now I will say that MPB had a reputation on campus as big drinkers – part of the reason I suspect this to be true is Caps. Simply, Caps is a drinking game whose sole purpose is to use some otherwise-useless skills to force your opponent to drink. A brief outline of the rules:

• The game is played with two teams of two, each seated 7 ½ feet apart (all of our rooms at the MPB house seemed to be tailor made for this activity)
• You are to be seated facing sideways so that if you extended your throwing hand, you would be pointing directly at the opponent across from you.
• In between you and your partner were two plastic beer cups, filled half-way with water (sitting “balls behind the line” was the general rule).
• The object of the game is to toss beer bottle caps into the cups sitting in between your opponents across the way. Every time your team landed 5 caps, the other team members each had to finish half of their beer.
• Games were played to 20 and, like ping pong, you had to win by two. Therefore, by the end of each regular game (which lasted approximately 10-20 minutes depending on skill level), you were through 2 beers.
• You puke, you lose (unless of course you vomit on your partner – then the fun can continue).

I will tell you that as far as drinking games go, this may be the most anti-social one I’ve ever played. You have four dudes sitting in a room, usually with music blaring, refusing to socialize with anyone not involved in that particular game, throwing bottle caps and rushing to finish beers so that the game could continue. The drunker people got, the more anti-social (and generally bitter) they would become as they a) tried to concentrate extra-hard on hitting their shots, and b) swore profusely as each subsequent throw become more off target than the last. A typical “let’s play before we go out” session typically was played in Best-of-7 format, meaning the losing squad had 8 beers in them before heading out to the bar, or passing out, whichever came first. So as one can clearly see, I could be as anti-social as I wanted, get shit-faced, and not feel that weird about it. Life was good.

Capping (the verb form of the noun Caps) was not just a fun way to get wasted in the MPB house – it was a religion, a way of life. Like any fraternity, we had elected officials (President; VP; Secretary; Sergeant at Arms) and appointed officials (Pledge Trainer; Kitchen Manager). Yet we also had an appointed office titled “Caps Chairman” – this lucky person would be responsible for scheduling tournaments, ranking players/room combos in the house, and the like. Caps Tournaments were a big deal around our parts – we had multiple games running in our cavernous basement, the décor of which resembled an inmate’s room at a sanitarium – stark, white, and sterile – which created an even playing field for all involved. There were even those brave souls who would dedicate an entire evening for purposes of playing a game to 100 – if you do the math, that’s 10 beers in one game, and even the biggest drinkers would be rendered blotto and likely piss themselves after one of these epic battles.

For the most part however, Caps was a casual affair, something to be done prior to actually going out and socializing with people you didn’t live with. On any given evening you could find one or two guys roaming the halls, poking their heads into each room and posing the simple question: “Cappin’?” During the Lost Semester, more often than not that guy was Goof. Goof was a last-semester senior with great grades and a job in his back pocket – therefore his schedule was rife with opportunities for heavy drinking with no fear of repercussion. Goof was the kind of guy who really could rub people he didn’t know the wrong way – he was very boisterous, crass, and in-your-face. During my pledge semester, many of my good friends told me that Goof was a dick and liked to fuck with pledges and hated freshmen and all that good stuff – that feedback made sense to me seeing as Goof served as Sergeant for many of these guys and busted their balls on a daily basis. However, early on in my pledge semester, Goof was assigned as my big brother for the week, and he took me out, got me blitzed, and then took me to his girlfriend’s apartment and demanded that she make us food. Needless to say I liked him right away. I realized that under the obnoxious attitude that people saw, Goof was just a good dude who liked to party.

This is why it came to no surprise to me that one fine Monday evening, just as CS and I aborted our efforts to salvage any usable resin from the utensils in our paraphernalia cabinet, Goof poked his head into Room 23:

“Cappin’?”

CS was having none of it, but seeing as I had designs on getting some sort of fucked up that night, I popped right up. “Sure, why not?” (Has anyone noticed a common theme about me yet?). Goof had his roommate ready to play, so I set out to find a partner in crime. I finally was able to coerce Reggie Taco to jump onboard and our foursome was set. I gave Goof $5, with which he secured my standard 12-pack of Keystone Light. It was then off to Goof’s room (18) for a couple of nice games of Caps.

As established before, I wasn’t what you would call completely lucid when setting my class schedule for the Lost Semester – along with my five Friday discussion sections, it seemed that every day I had a class that began at 9:00 or earlier. As subsequent semesters rolled around I became much savvier about picking and choosing my class times, but we’re talking about 19-year-old J here – there was nothing savvy about me in those days, so I was left to be a victim of my own foolishness. That being said, I am confident that I had one of my patented 8:30/9:00 classes to attend that Tuesday morning, so when we settled in to play at about 9:30 I told myself that I’d only play two, maybe three games, and call it a night. As they say, famous last words. After the first two games, which Reggie and I no doubt lost, I saw that it was getting late (call it 10:00) started to collect my remaining beers and thank everyone for the competition.

“Where the fuck are you going?” Goof demanded.

“Uh, I have class early tomorrow – I, um, only wanted to play a few games.”

“Sit your ass down, you’re not done yet!”

“Uh, OK.”

Spineless and at a loss for words – my equivalent of Flounder’s “fat, drunk and stupid” in Animal House. So, being the dutiful sponge that I was, I plopped right back down and prepared for the next game. It must be noted here that there were guys in the house who were downright fanatical about honing their Caps skills – there were a handful of guys who jockeyed hard to be in the Top 5 of the rankings because it served as a status symbol in their otherwise empty lives. I was certainly not one of these people. In fact, I’ll take it a step further and say that save for some streaky out-of-my-ass play, I was downright terrible. I can recall one tournament in my four years in college where my teammate and I advanced past the first round. Something to keep in mind is that there were no fewer than four tournaments a semester with at least 20-25 teams per tournament – a poor track record to say the least. On this particular Monday evening, I can honestly say that I played as true to my form as is humanly possible. I couldn’t hit the wide side of a barn, let alone two 8-oz plastic cups. And given that Goof was one of those fanatical players, we were getting destroyed with a quickness that led to extreme drunkenness in a very short period of time. Thank God for Reggie Taco – he at least kept us in each game and made the evening somewhat interesting. But with my dead weight on his back, we had no hope.

It should come to no surprise to anyone that by 11:45 we had played seven games, which resulted in the completion of my 12-pack of Key Light plus another beer – a baker’s dozen in a little over two hours. Therefore, I was about as piss drunk as I’ve ever been on a weeknight before or since. Finally, after losing the series 6-1 (I think I had one of those out-of-my ass games at one point), I stood up, wobbled quite a bit, and staggered out of Room 18 to make the approximately 35 yard walk down the hall to my room. After a five minute pit stop at the urinal, I arrived at Room 23 and crashed through the door, yearning only for my cubby hole in which I could merrily pass out. CS and Miser both took one look at me and started to laugh their asses off. “Fmyruck yoooo gzyaz,” I mumbled as I dove headfirst into my bed, almost cracking my forehead open on the loft in the process. Somehow I was coherent enough to remember that I had to set my alarm for class the next day. So I tested it out to make sure it was loud and that it was set. Then I tested it again. Then I decided I better test it again. And again. And one more time for good measure. Last time, one more test, OK we’re good. I finally drifted off to my drunken dreamland as CS and Miser continued to mock me (deservedly so), without caring the least bit whether that alarm would actually go off the next day.

So as you can see, not only did I have my insatiable appetite for outlawed substances – I was also hip to alcohol’s socially-acceptable scene, and as anyone can clearly see this did wonders for my social life during the Lost Semester. Let this be a lesson to all you kids out there – remember to broaden your horizons and try lots of different things. You’ll sleep better in the end.

Until next time…