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…

News and Notes - July 19, 2005

• Cuba Gooding Jr., meet Jamie Foxx. We all remember Mr. Gooding Jr. for his deranged Oscar acceptance speech after he won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Jerry Maguire, and then for his subsequent descent into obscurity as he starred in such “films” as Rat Race, Snow Dogs and Boat Trip, undoubtedly cashing in on his instant celebrity in the process. Now, Mr. Foxx, who was excellent as blind crooner Ray Charles in Ray, is starring in the summer’s hottest new action hit Stealth about a bunch of people who fly really fucking awesome fighter plans. Believe me, I know people who will likely get a hard-on during this movie because of the sheer kick-assedness of the planes involved (note that I said “know”, not “associate with”). Soon after this movie tanks and appears on Blockbuster Video’s shelves inside of 2 months, Mr. Foxx will star in Miami Vice, the latest in the seemingly never-ending series of movies based on old TV shows that really weren’t that good in the first place (Bewitched, The Honeymooners, Dukes of Hazard). Welcome back to obscurity, Jamie – we’ve saved you a lovely seat by the fire.

• Yes, you read right – I think that Dukes of Hazard might be one of the stupidest shows to ever grace our fair airwaves. Seriously, I’d rather watch the six existing episodes of The Ropers than suffer through the trials of two inbred scofflaws that spend way too much time vying for the attention of their cousin. I have always wondered what the fascination was with this show, save for the car, which still wasn’t as cool as Starsky and Hutch’s car. And given that the movie version features Johnny Knoxville (he should really just stick to jackassing), Sean William “I Channel Stiffler into Every Role I Play” Scott, Jessica “Can You Say Overexposed?” Simpson, and Burt “I Don’t Need to See the Script – Just Cut Me a Check” Reynolds, I now have reinstated my hatred for the entire concept with renewed vigor. Only Willie Nelson’s involvement keeps me on this side of the brink of insanity – thank you, Redheaded Stranger!

• My friend from college Marty Casey is a contestant on the latest in the never-ending string of new reality show concepts, CBS’s Rock Star: INXS. The premise is simple: 15 aspiring rock stars audition for you, the viewing public, to replace autoerotic asphyxiation victim Michael Hutchence as the front man of INXS. Hosts David Navarro (who calls Marty "Holmes" in one episode - priceless) and Brooke Burke tantalize these hopefuls with the prospect of playing giant stadiums with hundreds of thousands of screaming fans as video footage of INXS concerts play in the background (however, I suspect that this footage is circa 1989, so I’m not quite sure just how tantalized anyone should really be at this prospect). One of the existing members of INXS, complete with the requisite bad hair, lame sunglasses and perma-tan one would expect from an aging rocker, says that playing with INXS is “the most fun you can have with your pants on!” (The camera then cut to my friend Marty as he let out a belly-laugh at this horrendous joke – don’t sell your soul to Aussie rock and roll, my friend!). In reality, the best possible thing for Marty would be to finish second because a) he would get maximum exposure, while b) not having to actually front a bunch of has-beens. Good luck, Marty! Readers, please go to cbs.com and vote for Marty early and often – after all, that’s the Chicago way!

• My other new summertime TV addiction will no doubt be ABC’s Brat Camp – a show about troubled teens who get duped by their parents into attending a two month camp whose sole purpose is to whip their punk asses into shape. Maybe it’s their living conditions (outdoors in Oregon in November, eating nothing but pintos, rice and oats), perhaps it’s the vague descriptions they assign to each teen (i.e. “Angry Punk”; “Compulsive Liar”, “Self-Destructive Drug User”; “Tried to Stab Twin”), or it might be the back-to-nature names adopted by the granola camp counselors (i.e. “Little Big Bear”; “Mountain Wind”; “Mother Raven”; “Glacier”), but whatever it is, I’m hooked. Now, Michelle points out that I shouldn’t laugh at these rapscallions and their problems – she notes that this could happen to any parent, including us approximately 13-15 years from now. I, of course, counter with the argument that if our kids have gotten that out of control, it means that I likely had my entire frontal lobe removed 10 years prior. We agree to disagree sometimes.

• (Note: the following blurb was written last week – more to come after Bush announces his nominee) Hey, remember the last few times I’ve babbled about the Supreme Court’s latest blunders, pointing out that Sandra Day O’Connor is often the only voice of reason? Well wouldn’t you know it, she’s decided to step down! And during the George W. Bush Administration, no less! So that means with Rehnquist likely to step down, W gets not one, but two Supreme Court nominees, one of which may be Alberto “The Geneva Convention Sure is Quaint” Gonzalez! Of course, he may not get the nod because many Republicans feel that he’s too soft on abortion and other controversial issues. At this point, if you saw me and decided to bash my skull in with a piano leg, I probably wouldn’t be that upset about it.

• After receiving my 3,297th credit card solicitation of July that said all I had to do was sign my name and I’d get a $15k credit line, I thought to myself, “why would some poor, unsuspecting corporation voluntarily give me $15,000 without having any real assurance that I’d every pay it back?” Don’t these people realize that I would likely spend this money on video games and hashish? I thought these companies to be complete fools. Then some information from the Motley Fool came to my attention:

o Total consumer credit card debt: $1.7 trillion
o Average credit card debt per American: $8500
o Total finance charges paid by Americans in 2001: $50 billion

Fifty billion dollars??? We paid $50 billion just to sit on an outstanding balance and buy shit we really couldn’t afford??? Now, I don’t claim to be innocent here – I’ve had my share of debt at one point or another (knock on wood – it’s gone). But seriously, with these kinds of numbers, you’d be an idiot not to offer people ridiculous amounts of cash they can’t ever possibly pay back. You want a new flat screen DLP TV? Charge it! How about a vacation to Bali? Charge it! Running low on cash at the riverboat casino? Charge it! Can’t make rent? Charge it! Just pay us crazy amounts of money to keep charging it and we’re all good! Apparently it’s the American way. Now, excuse me while I go peruse Visa’s websites for job openings.

Until next time...

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…

Tales from Beyond the Lost Semester - Volume 1

As my nine readers probably know by now, Tales from the Lost Semester has quickly become a runaway smash hit within the blog community. Thousands of emails pour into newsandnotes@hotmail.com on a daily basis from crazed fans begging to be placed on the distribution list (sign up now!) of this fabulous blog, while several book publishers have entered into a bidding war for the rights to these hilarious, true-to-life tales of bad grades and good bud, certain that they have the makings of the next classic American novel.

Were any of this actually true, I might be sitting pretty right now with a fat commission check for my next three books, invitations to sit on numerous panels discussing the horrors of fraternity hazing and the medicinal benefits of marijuana, and the adoration of doting fans from sea to shining sea. However, this being reality, we all know that this isn’t the case. I know of perhaps five people who regularly comment on this site, leading me to believe that my readership lies somewhere south of the nine I constantly brag about. To date, I have received two emails asking to be put on the distribution list. And while my pipe dream is to someday author a book about these experiences, I feel that my current portfolio couldn’t get me past the reception desk at any reputable publisher. As I like to say, “Woe is me.” The truth is, I don’t need to waste time whining about all this crap – there are stories to be told and laughs to be had! That being said, over this past glorious holiday weekend during which America turned 229, loyal reader Mary voiced the following concern regarding Tales from the Lost Semester, specifically Volume 3:

“While your story about Hell Week was good, I was extremely disappointed that you didn’t fold in your initial encounter with your dorky roommate.”

Despite my best efforts to convince her that I had a very specific agenda for the Tales – that they were to represent the best stories from the actual Lost Semester – Mary’s point was that there was so much else out there that needed to be told. Whether for contextual purposes, or merely to provide cheap laughs, stories like this Roommate Summit deserved to be put down in writing and preserved as a guideline to future generations of when you should consider an emergency roommate switch. It is with this in mind that I introduce my new series: Tales from Beyond the Lost Semester.

OK, I realize that I’ve got several balls in the air, and that I may be biting off way more than I can chew here. My primary goal is to get through the 20+ volumes of Tales from the Lost Semester that I had mapped out in my head before committing myself to any additional efforts. However, to Mary’s point there are just some stories outside the confines of the Lost Semester that should, no, MUST be told. Whether they lead up to the Lost Semester or serve as a byproduct of it, there is some value in each in every one – mainly the fact that getting them off my chest helps me along with the healing process. Therefore, allow me to kick off this new sub-series with the often-told, never tedious story of…

Big Tim

As told in Volume 3 of Tales from the Lost Semester, despite my best efforts to sabotage my future and my social life, I was able to gain attendance into a great school (Illinois), as well as secure housing at a dorm that would be able to provide me with a normal social life (Hopkins Hall). During the summer of ’92, as I flagged traffic and shoveled asphalt on my way to unimagined riches, I received about 476 pieces of correspondence from the U of I regarding the upcoming semester. One of these bits of information was a letter that contained the name and home address of the individual who was to be my roommate – Tim Barker (not his real last name). Tim hailed from south suburban Chicagoland, an area I knew little to nothing about given my west suburban upbringing, my dad’s company’s tendency to bid jobs in the city and north/west/northwest suburbs, and my perceived lack of necessity to ever visit the intersection of LaGrange Rd and 143rd Street. However, I thought myself to be quite open-minded and tried my best to mentally prepare myself for any number of possibilities – how different from me can this guy really be, I wondered. This is a question that would not remain unanswered for long.

Once I got Tim’s name in the mail, I thought it would be logical to look him up, call him, see what kind of hand I’d been dealt and figure out who would bring what to create the ultimate dorm room experience. Much to my pleasant surprise, I received a phone call one July evening from none other than Tim Barker himself! “Great,” I thought, “let’s get this shit figured out.” We started the conversation by exchanging general pleasantries, finding out what each other’s majors would be (his was Engineering), determining what our musical tastes were (his were ghastly – mostly Bon Jovi, Styx and other crap of the like), and hashing out who would bring what to campus (I volunteered my boom box stereo, and Tim said he had a TV for us, albeit a bit worn down by his own admission, but a TV nonetheless).

After settling most of what we needed to settle, we kept talking in the hopes of finding out exactly what we were both getting in a roommate. The important thing you must know about Tim is that the sound of his voice is very…I don’t know…‘strange’ might be the best word. It’s nearly impossible to describe in writing, but imagine if you will the sound of someone whispering, but at normal volume with a deep underlying voice and perpetual out-of-breath undertones (seriously, if you’ve heard me do the impersonation before, you know exactly what I’m talking about – if not, ask me the next time you see me and I’ll lay it on you). At any rate, it is like no voice I have ever heard prior or since – bonechilling to say the least.

As we began to delve further into what made us click, I slowly began to realize that Tim was not someone I would have been very likely to hang out with had we attended the same school: He didn’t play sports (except for badminton), we liked completely different types of music (I mean, I like Styx’s “Blue Collar Man”, but anything past that is a stretch), he liked to work in really lame jokes and laugh at his own work in the progress (I laugh at my own jokes too, but hey, I’m funny) – we just didn’t seem to be clicking. At one point, we had the following exchange:

Tim: Do you like to play cards?

J: Well, to tell you the truth, the only card games I’ve ever played are drinking games.

Tim: Oh, well, I’ve never had a beer in my life.

My immediate reaction was, “Oh shit, major red flag – a roommate that does not party.” After hyperventilating for a couple of minutes, I soon snapped back to reality and convinced myself that there were indeed people in this world, normal people, who didn’t have their first experience with alcohol in a suburban park when they were 13 years old. That being said, I tried as hard as I possibly could to keep an open mind, to find some common ground, to really give this guy a chance. And that’s when the shit hit the fan.

Tim: Hey Jason, can I ask you a question?

J: (growing nervous) Uh, sure…

Tim: Do you like to hang mobiles from ceiling?

J: (after approximately 14 seconds of silence) E...e...excuse me?

Tim: Do you like to hang mobiles from ceiling?

At this point, I could practically hear his devilish smile through the phone, as if he were chomping at the bit prior to revealing the grandest of punchlines known to mankind. Stunned beyond the point of reason, I meekly offer my response:

J: Um, no…but if you want to bring yours down, that’s cool…

Tim: Well (the sound of his smile was louder than a Bon Jovi encore at this point), that might be a problem for me because…I’m six-foot-six.

And there it was. Not only was I moving away from home for the first time ever to go live with a non-drinking Engineering student with poor taste in music and a horrific sense of humor – he also had 13 fucking inches on me. So much for backasswards luck, eh J?

From that point the call quickly wrapped up, mainly because I had to get off the phone before I either started to laugh hysterically or sob uncontrollably. Needless to say, Tim and I had zero more conversations until our historic first meeting when my dad dropped me off at school in late-August (of course, Dad was as cordial as can be when meeting Tim, and on his way out he seemed to have this grin on his face that said, “boy, you’re in for some fun!”). Given that we spent the entire Pre-Lost Semester together, you can bet your ass that I have a few more tales to share regarding the phenomenon that is, was and always shall be…Big Tim.

Until next time…

Tales from the Lost Semester - Volume 3

The Most Fun You’ll Never Want to Have Again

Everyone who has ever left the comforts of home to accept the Herculean challenge of making that first move out on their own understands what a frightening proposition this can be. For example, my brother Greg moved out of my dad and stepmom’s house when he was 19 (among other reasons, over a dispute as to whether he had the authority to hang Christmas lights in his room) – he didn’t go away to college, he moved to the South Side of Chicago, two blocks away from County lockup, which is much scarier of a situation than that of my own. For you see, I led what many would call a charmed life in my 18th year – assistant captain of the hockey team, good group of friends, steady supply of booze and pot, and admission into the great University of Illinois. Granted I initially chose Illinois not for the quality of its business program, but rather because of the three schools to which I applied and was accepted (U of I, Wisconsin, Michigan State), it was the cheapest. Way to plan for the future, big guy!

At any rate, as has happened to me so many times in my charmed life, I fell ass-backwards into a great situation. There was just one problem – Illinois was a BIG place, and I didn’t know much of anything about it. The only time I had seen campus was during my freshman orientation weekend – yes, you read that correctly, I made what was at the time the biggest decision of my young life sight unseen, with no testimonials as to what life was like in Champaign-Urbana. To make matters even more hilarious, I decided to apply to live in a dorm that as it turns out is the housing equivalent of committing social suicide due to its horrendous location on campus – only through intervention of my high school Physics teacher did I learn that the “Six Pack” of dorms was the place where all the “cool” kids lived, so I logically switched gears and requested housing in the Six Pack, because as everyone knows, high school Physics teachers know all there is to know about being cool. Young, dumb and full of…vigor – that was J in ’92.

Backasswards luck being my forte, the Six Pack did indeed turn out to be the place to be. And being the outgoing, supercool guy I am, I soon made plenty of friends on my dorm floor – many fine young men who had the same affinity for inebriation, game shows and skipping class that I had. We got busted drinking, inflicted damage to the floor lounge, wrote on my roommate after he passed out when he decided to play the Century Club (100 shots of beer in 100 minutes) the first time he ever drank, played Nintendo, smoked joints, set off fire alarms and had a blast doing it all. However, even though the 4th floor Hopkins Hall crew and I had a great time together, within hours of arriving on campus we all began to feel the inevitable pull of the omnipresent force that hangs over the University of Illinois: The Greek System.

When you arrive on the U of I campus as a freshmen male, as long as you demonstrate some semblance of social skills and you are not hideously ugly, you have a good shot and receiving offers to join any number of fraternities. If you do decide to take the plunge and join the Greek System, it is critical that you are aware that joining certain houses could hurl you into the downward spiral of a four year sausage fest – being that fraternities outnumbered sororities almost 2-to-1, if you had any math skills whatsoever (as I proved I did with my solid first semester C in Calculus) you’d figure out that there were some dudes who were being left out in the cold when social function time came around. Given that we’ve established how little I knew about Illinois when I arrived as a freshman, there was an obvious danger of me falling into this trap and being placed in a situation from which there was no escape – a situation that would be fatal to my chances of “scoring” with members of the fairer sex, something that, while I know I had raw ability in, I still seemed to lack the true, polished prowess to accomplish with regularity. This is where it’s good to have a friend who figured it out before you, someone whose head was in the right place and wanted the same good things for you. And that’s where Dirk comes in.

Approximately 24 hours after arriving on campus, I received a call from Dirk – he and I had known each other for quite some time through the wonderful institution that is Elmhurst YMCA Hockey. We played together through grade school, junior high and finally high school, where Dirk was a year ahead of me. Upon graduating, Dirk headed down to Champaign and hooked up with what would become my fraternity – for purposes of this series, they will be know as the MPB house (not the real initials, but whatever). So Dirk calls me and invites me to the MPB house to meet some of the dudes, have beers, whatever. The first plus in the whole situation was that the house was about a 4 minute walk from my dorm – nothing like pure convenience for a lazy college freshman. The second plus? The minute I walked into Dirk’s room, he handed me a beer and began the process of introducing me around. After meeting some cool gents, I ended up in Room 8 where I would at once meet the group that would become the key players in my college experience: Ox, Big O, Sadahara, Mayo, CS, Reggie Taco, Silky – they were all there and ready to welcome me with open arms (I later learned that this is what’s called being “rushed” by a fraternity, an appropriate term given some of the persistent behavior I observed from other houses). Upon walking into Room 8 and hanging out with this motley crew, I had an epiphany – my search for a fraternity was over before it had even started. 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.

But I’m not here to regale (i.e. bore) you with the details of my pledge semester – that’s a set of stories for another blog series. All you need to know is that it involved a lot of cleaning, a lot of push ups, a lot of drinking, a lot of smoking and not much class work. However, now you know how I happened upon my fraternity – I didn’t have to endure the full onslaught of the Rush process, I didn’t have to jump through hoops or work to get a bid to join up. I was just in from the start, which was nice considering that I had plenty of other things to occupy my mind at that time. For purposes of this story, the end of pledgeship leads us to the beginning – the “Alpha”, if you will – of the Lost Semester: the madness that is know simply as “Hell Week”, the details of which we were sworn to secrecy over – but who gives a shit about that, right? You want to know the sordid, creepy details, right? You want to marvel at the stupid shit I was willing to put myself through, right? Right, indeed.

During pledge semester, Hell Week was the event that dare not speak its name – I think the active members were terrified of driving off its potential members, lest they lose the new influx of housing and membership payments that were so desperately needed. Oh, that and the loss of all that brotherhood. Sure, we pledges all knew that hazing, while “officially” banned, was alive and well within the walls of the MPB house, but I don’t think any of us had a clue as to just how deep it went. At any rate, Hell Week really didn’t come up as a topic of conversation until the last line up of pledge semester. At this time, we were given detailed instructions of what to bring, what to wear, when to show up, etc. We were also given the tasks of developing “skits” for presentation during the week – the sole purpose of these skits was to dig up dirt on actives and rip them to shreds, and in turn, these scorned actives would implore the Sergeant at Arms to come down on us even harder. Ah, brotherhood!

Throughout the circles of the MPB house, Hell Week was constantly described as “the most fun you’ll never want to have again” – I don’t know about the fun part, but they flat out nailed the never again thing. The group I was to go through Hell Week with showed up a week before classes started in January – some houses held their Hell Week during the first week of class, but MPB was too smart for that as they knew that meant we had a chance to eat, sleep, shit and/or shower without their permission. The first few hours of my Hell Week Experience (beginning at noon on a Wednesday) were spent blindfolded and sitting Indian-style in our basement as classical music blared from oversized speakers and the occasional random individual walked through banging pots and pans as loudly as they could. Nothing says “eternal bond of friendship and brotherhood” like fucking with a bunch of blindfolded fools. After we were sufficiently rattled, the 15 of us who were submitting ourselves to this shit (among them CS, Pops and Mayo) were lined up and given the ground rules, which I now will share with you in the hopes that you begin to understand why I’m such a freak:

• The clothes you are wearing are the clothes you will wear all week – white T-shirt, jeans, gym shoes, white sailor cap (patience – explanation to follow…)
• No sleeping, unless we say you can
• No eating, unless we say you can
• No showering…period
• Sailor hat etiquette: In the basement, you wear it inside out, floppy style. On the first floor, you keep it in your back pocket (don’t want any nosy neighbors peering in wondering why a bunch of filthy zombies are wearing sailor hats). On the second and third floors, you wear them the conventional way. Fucked up shit.
• When you hear the extremely fucking loud siren, you get your ass to the basement and line up.
• When in the basement, you must walk backwards while bending down to grab your ankles (ah, homoeroticism!)
• When in the basement, line up in order of GPA (since we didn’t have our report cards, no fewer than 6 of us lied about our grades, giving us what appeared to be better positioning).
• Everyone sleeps and eats in the chapter room, which was about the size of your average living room. Imagine having 15 unshowered dudes in the same room, eating, sleeping, farting – it gave me great insight into Third World living, I can assure you.

Ah, brotherhood!

So now that the ground rules are set, what are we going to do to occupy our time? Well, the majority of our time was spent doing special fix-it project around the house, performing extreme cleaning to undo what had been done when all the actives trashed the house prior to leaving for the semester, shoveling snow and other odd jobs. Other times, we would be lined up, yelled at, and forced to perform acts of (no, not beastiality) rote memorization and recitation. Yes, you heard right – a vast majority of our time during Hell Week was used for the purposes of committing useless, meaningless phrases, poems and songs to memory and having the Sergeant come up with new and creative ways for us to recite them. Please don’t ask me to repeat them (they’re really lame) or how I actually still remember any of them, for I haven’t a clue. However, when you take 15 sleep-deprived 18 and 19-year-olds and ask them to recite these ridiculously obscure phrases, with each and every screw up leading to push ups, sit ups, wall sits, or some other form of physical exertion, the result is a maddening experiment in just how far you can push someone before they a) pass out, b) shit themselves, or c) fly off the handle. In addition to these fun times, we also were thrust into scavenger hunts, performing our skits and other mindless time-wasting, brotherhood building activities.

Now, had my state of mind been remotely lucid, I probably would have wondered why I was putting myself through this shit and thought about getting the hell out – my father-in-law pledged a fraternity his freshman year in college (back in the late ‘50s no less, when the REALLY fucked with you), and upon assignment of his first humiliating task (which I believe was to strip, get a drink of water in the basement, walk on all fours up to the third floor, and spit the water on a fire, and repeat until it went out), he performed one pass, picked up his shit and got the hell out of there. However, I had a lot invested at this point, my good friends were going through the same shit, and I was too tired, smelly and hungry to walk out into the cold by myself – in essence I was trapped. As a window to my madness, I’ll tell you that during the week, we were required to keep a journal describing our Hell Week experiences – being a mindless lackey I diligently kept my journal, pouring out the deepest, darkest thoughts that were rambling through my head at the time. A few years after graduation, I found the journal, read it, became extremely disturbed by what I read, and tore it to pieces – as a result, I am sad to report that I will not be able to provide you with verbatim quotes of what was running through my head, but rest assured – I was mentally broken down.

As we got deeper and deeper into the throngs of Hell Week, we were assigned more tasks, given more things to memorize, and fucked with more times than I care to admit. Later in the stages of the game, our Sergeant announced that one of the neophytes had to volunteer to serve as “Fuckface” for the remainder of the ordeal. For the most part, none of us had a fucking clue what this meant – however, having friends on the inside helped yours truly, as Sadahara had pulled me aside earlier in the week and told me, “J, I’m not messing with you here – when they ask for volunteers to be Fuckface, do yourself a favor and volunteer!” Given the fact that we developed a good friendship (despite the oh-so-awkward active-pledge dynamic), I put my trust in what he had to say, and when the call was made for volunteers to be Fuckface, I was the only one to step forward…

Man, was I ever glad I did. Turns out that being Fuckface meant that you no longer had to listen to anything that the Sergeant said. You didn’t have to line up or clean the house. You got to eat, sleep, shower, and shit whenever you felt like it. You could come in during line ups and ridicule whoever you wanted, and they couldn’t do a damn thing about it. There was just one problem – I was so frazzled, so warped by the whole experience that I actually felt guilty over my new title! I felt like I was letting everyone else down by being Fuckface. I was an absolute fucking mess, man. Sure, I showered (it felt GREAT). And yes, I ate a ton that afternoon. And of course I took a nice, fat nap. But I still wasn’t right in the head over letting down my “brothers”. Maybe that’s why I thought that if I were to strip down to nothing but my skivvies and ride a bike through the basement, this act of hilarity would generate goodwill and a few laughs among my peers – my God, did I just type that or think it? Yes, it’s true, I could not escape the peer pressure inflicted on me the by the numerous actives that convinced me this would be the most hilarious and meaningful thing I could do. Looking back, if they would have convinced me that squatting in the basement and taking a dump in our Sergeant’s bowl of rice were the way to get laughs, I probably would have done it. And yes, it’s a wonder I can even look at myself in the mirror any more. Needless to say, my fellow mates were all so frazzled at that point that they were paralyzed with the inability to laugh. Either that or it just wasn’t that funny.

They say all good things come to an end, and MPB Hell Week was no exception. The bullshit described above spanned from Wednesday afternoon until Sunday evening, which was the night of our one final all night brotherhood building session. This exercise in camaraderie and friendship involved, among other things, flooding our weight room, kneeling for hours on a concrete floor, reciting a phrase about how great the MPB house was about 600 times, getting warm and cold water dumped on you, and participating in fun events like Alka Seltzer races (two Hell Week participants kneeled in front of each other, filled their mouths with water, put a tablet of Alka Seltzer in there and “competed” to see who could go the longest without spitting – needless to say, I spit mine out immediately because, well, the concept was retarded). After going through these motions the entire night, we were furloughed for a few hours and required to come back for one more day of “initiation”, which was really nothing more than a day of even more homoeroticism (i.e. wearing a toga and blindfold), sitting in our community showers (as they ran, of course), listening to horrible music played at full blast (i.e. Madonna’s Like a Prayer was played about 4,000 times) and learning obscure fraternity secrets. On a completely unrelated, totally coincidental note, I now own nothing with my fraternity letters on it and severed all ties with my fraternal organization (save for my remaining friends). Odd how these things work out, isn’t it?

The final tally: Six days, five nights, eight meals, seven total hours of sleep, hundreds of push-ups, thousands of recitations, several laughs, and one mentally broken down freshman. After it was all over, I went out with Dirk and Mayo for what turned out to be the best fucking cheeseburger ever, came home and ordered a pizza, got stoned and celebrated my first night ever in Room 23 with a solid 14 hours of shut-eye.

I hope the nine of you realize that I am risking life and limb by sharing my Hell Week escapades – there are probably several nimrods out there from the MPB house who would blow their fucking stack if they heard that someone was giving away deep, dark fraternity secrets. To those people I say: Piss off. It was 13 years ago, the house is dead so there’s no one to tip off, and looking back, we went through some of the lamest, gayest shit just to prove we could be friends with everyone who had gone through it before us, which of course made it essential that everyone else after them go through it as well. What a crock of shit. The good thing is that there is a very excellent chance that anyone who would be offended by the release of these secrets will never, ever come across this blog – I want readers, but not that badly…

All that being said, I regret nothing – even though Hell Week traumatized me for the remainder of the Lost Semester, this experience is one I would never give back, one I’ll always remember, and remains the most fun I’ll never want to have again.

Until next time…