April Foolishness

Ah, UCSB: We partied at Del Playa, Sabado Tarde, Picasso, Anacapa, State Street, and too many other places to name. Long Island Iced Tea night, 5 gallons of hurricaine punch, a hundred jello shots, a fully stocked bar, runs to Trader Joes for cheap booze, riding Bills Bus and drinking from the Trolley on the way downtown, the 5 keg birthday bashes with the Sierra Nevada and Rolling Rock keg hidden in the back room. These were the telltale signs of epic nights and countless birthdays, of finishing your finals, of graduating, of any given weekend, or of a week where no one had any tests. Barbecues next to the beach in the rain, mud football (I wonder if we played with Jack Johnson, es posible, no?), and watching TV off of the scratched 5 inch screen and my VCR with no rewind. This was the time where quarters were more valuable than any other form of currency, when everything was shut down for the night in the dorms, when we bought 2 Wildbreads from Woodstocks instead of 1 large pizza to make those meager dollars and coins from under the couch cushions stretch. Ramen saved our asses on several occasions, and we learned to make chowmein and other variations on this versatile staple by frying the noodles. We staved off scurvy with lemon drops and lime and tequila shots. Adaptability was a way of life rather than an occasionally useful personality trait. Ah, “back in the day when I was young I’m not a kid anymore…”.
Which brings me to the focus of this post: Having fun at the expense of our friends. There are many reasons why it is not a good idea to have any group of young men living together in close proximity for too long. The sink piles up with undone dishes providing a better growth medium for fungus and bacteria than an auger/blood medium, the trash becomes a giant game of Jenga, and the endless battle against Entropy is only fought when parents or prospective dates are brought home. Even the neat members of the group succumb to living as slobs, because it is just not fair that they should pick up after the other pigs in the house! The pigs are more than happy to let the pad degrade into a biohazardous dump because they resent being called pigs, are generally lazy, and find a sort of joy in watching the neat freaks suffer while trying to fight their Vietnam.
Eventually there comes a breaking point. Sometimes harsh words are exchanged and people storm out. Impromptu wrestling matches break out on the deeply stained, chunk-style (chunks being chips, pizza toppings, toe nails, and other various detritus), carpet that reeks of gallons of Red Dog beer. Conspiracies are formed and alliances shift around like dominos being washed (Domino Muthafucka!). And agression slowly builds, ever mounting higher and higher. Reasons? We don’t need no stinkin’ reasons! And so begins the cycle of vendetta.
The best plans are either the epic ones that take a lot of planning, or the flashes of inspiration that only hours of Warcraft/Starcraft/Counterstrike/Pirated Cable TV can bring. Enter my part-time job. One Christmas, I worked with my sister and her boyfriend doing a job with no general fitting description other than “miscellaneous”. One of the charges of the job was packing gift baskets, and sending them off to people like Jerry Falwell and other people with horrifyingly bad taste in Chrismas presents. They buy this crap for aquaintances and people that you don’t necessarily like but still have to give a token of recognition due to social pressures with money culled from the collection plates. Do they even try to justify their sacreligious spending of the Lord’s money on frivolous baskets of decorated candy, or do they laugh frequently and heartily at all of the suckers? Anyhow, at the end of the season, we had two huge bags of styrafoam peanuts left over. I didn’t know what I was going to do with these environmentally unfriendly curls of white death, but I knew that I needed them for something.
And then the perfect opportunity came: Chris’ 21st birthday. Me and Brian painstakingly developed a plan to make sure that everything was in place. The door was locked during the party to keep out the roaming stranger kleptos and so I told Steve, who shared the room with Chris, that I needed something out of his room. Leaving him to tend the keg (the kleptos love to steal keg taps! we give them free beer, and they steal the hardware that allows everyone to get the beer out of the keg? go figure!) sneaked into their room with the foam and dumped it on the ground, covering up scattered cairns of textbooks, soiled laundry, nuggets of mystery, and computer parts. Next, we set up the box fan, creating a feathery blizzard. It was Art in motion, truly satisfying work.

Rebecca took pictures of our triumph, and we turned off the lights, locked the door, and got back to the festivities. Steve walked into his room and discovered the chaos soon afterwards. He was really pissed off but he also found humor in the situation, punching us with a big smile on his face. Chris, who arrived right after Steve, did not share the same sentiments. He was in a bad mood, and we didn’t understand why. This was obviously some well deserved birthday hazing, and all in good fun, so we were relentless in making fun of him. This just added to his anger, instead of grudging laughter as we had expected.

No smile on this face. The girls were the first ones to spot that something was wrong, and the rest of us went on partying. However, we were forced by the girls to appologize and it was not accepted. This sucked: we just wanted to shock and annoy Chris and Steve, not to drive Chris into a rage on the night of his birthday. There was nothing to do but to give the man his space. We couldn’t get into our rooms because Steve had locked our door which didn’t have a key (payback of roughly the same magnitude as our joke), but this would not be a problem. We saw Chris come into the kitchen, grab the 5 gallon bottle of water, and then heard a resounding “BOOM!” as the hollow framed door buckled. The bastard had kicked down our door like Cochese, and was pouring water all over our matresses. He tossed the spent bottle to the floor, saying “O.K., now I forgive you.”. Now although this was the equivalent of getting back at at someone by punching them in the face for talking smack, there was nothing to do but laugh in this situation. It was funny after all, it really was.

That night, I slept on the soggy slab of plywood that had held my bed off the floor. I slept pretty well, but woke up sore with a hangover, still laughing from the previous night’s events.
For the remainder of our time in college, Chris remained bitter about the incident. It was “not funny”. I think that he had always secretly thought that the incident was funny, but just didn’t want to admit it out of pride. Then again, maybe not.
All of shit that we gave one another was given out of the desire to humiliate and to entertain, but also to share our own brand of love. Only good friends can be so cruel to eachother, and still be good friends after so long. These are among my fondest memories of college.