One day, I will have children who will ask me “What was college like?”, and if I choose to answer honestly I will reply “For young men, college is mostly about destroying things, refining procrastinating technique and bullshitting skills, but mostly it?s drinking cheap beer and peeing on things while at the same time trying not to get caught or hurt in the process”. Then I will tell them about my impressions of Del Playa ( mainly that the street smells like a urinal), of returning home to the dorms to find that all of the sit down toilets had been pissed all over along with the toilet paper, and how my apartment mates and I speculated about how urine made its way into and all over my apartment’s communal washing machine and dryer.
Here are a collection of stories, all that share a central, common theme, that I remember about my life as a student at UCSB:.
The D.A.
College parties often provide a good environment in which to observe the dynamic relationship between the police officers and students, who tend not to get along very well. In Isla Vista, UC Santa Barbara’s own college town, these two groups play a high-stakes game of “tag”, called “open container-tag” that illustrate the struggle between having a good time and being busted for having too much fun.
The game is played like this: Cops are “it” and partygoers are “not it”. 1.Partygoers can not be tagged if they are on home base, in this case defined as the property on which a party is held where cops have no jurisdiction. 2.Partygoers are also safe if they are not visibly drunk (i.e. acting like a jackass) or are not carrying an open container with an alcoholic beverage. When carrying a cup, it must be held upside down to avoid provocation..
The cops can tag partygoers if both conditions 1. and 2. are not met. If the partygoer is under 21, they face the possibility of a huge pain in the ass. If the partygoer is 21 and has an open beverage on public property, they can be tagged with a fine or citation.
As the streets of I.V. get packed with partygoers on any given night, cops can be easily evaded in the crowd, but if the partygoer has had too much to drink and their motor skills are impaired, this can result in hilarious, shame-filled stories that can and should be used to blackmail your friends and acquaintances in the future. Nicknames such as “Drunk Steve” are earned in this way, but that?s guy by himself deserves a post dedicated solely to how he became the ?Drunk Steve? out of all of the other Steves with whom we were acquainted with. For now, I?ll just sum him up by saying that whenever I saw him, he was with beer in hand and there was a good chance that someone was going to get tackled?
In the last quarter of our freshman year, we were well acquainted with open container-tag, and none of our immediate friends were ever caught. We were out one night, partying with our D.A. “Gheelberto”, when he was giving us some advice on drinking under the radar in the dorms. Gheelberto was a cool D.A. who often dispensed knowledge of this vein, and had helped us to stay out of trouble during our first semester, when we were inexperienced and careless.
Gheelberto left the house party that we were at to go meet up with some “hot chicks from another dorm”, and we left about five minutes later, only to see our D.A. getting written up for breaking the open container law. In his drunken state, he had been careless, and not-so-smoothly tried tossing the contents of his red plastic cup into a bush, right in front of the cops. This was an important reminder that cops often show up at the most inconvenient of times, and that there is no “time out”, nor are there ?do overs? in the ever-running game of “open container-tag”.
Unwitting Accomplice
Like many other UCSB students, one of my friends has always distrusted and disliked law enforcement officers, even before college. We had moved into I.V. but occasionally went onto campus to drink and hang out. On our way back from an event on campus and after having imbibed our fill of Red Dog(40 bucks a keg), we were passing the San Rafael dorms when we spotted a police truck. They had most likely come because some students were being too loud on a Friday night or because their D.A. ratted them out for drinking on campus (one of the D.A.s in San Raf was a dick!), so my friend decided to let his feelings about their actions be known.
“Let me know if they’re coming” he slurred, as he pissed all over the door, side window, and handle of the truck. Realizing it would be pointless to say “they’re only doing their jobs”, I instead resigned my protests to watch him, and was unable to hold back a flood of hysterical laughter. I guess I kind of wanted him to do it.
Hmmmm….Salty
The food at the school cafeterias was almost always bad, but one friend found a way to make it even worse. This friend’s roommate was a dick, so one day while the roommate left the table the friend took his roommate?s soup under the table and pissed in it. The roommate returned and took a few sips before noticing, first, that everyone could not contain their laughter and, second, that his soup’s flavor had changed. I had some really immature friends back then, and even though this story makes me laugh I also feel kind of bad for his roommate. And then I remember that he was a dick, and then I laugh some more.
The Angry Exhibitionist
Another friend, who we’ll call “Topher”, shared my tradition of peeing on D.P. 6645, my “The Real World” experience of living with psychotic roommates during my sophmore year. We did this many, many times, after a long night out and about in I.V.. Anyways, Topher had been raised in an area where cops were almost considered as trusted members of the community. It only took one night to transform to get Topher to start hating the police on the same level as Public Enemy and the NWA.
One morning, after a wild night out with Topher and the gang, I went out with a friend for breakfast burritos (these seriously kicked ass after a night of hard drinking!) and we had a conversation much like this:
“Did you hear that Topher got a ticket?”
“What for? Was it a B.U.I. (biking under the influence)?”
“No, he was coming home from D.P., and stopped to pee in the bushes. That’s all I know right now.”
So when Topher came over to the apartment we inquired about the incident:
“You got busted for peeing in the bushes?”
“I (expletive deleted) hate cops so much! (expletive deleted) the police!”
“How did it happen?”
“You know that open lot in the 6700 block of D.P.? I was taking a pee over in the bushes and those cops jumped out and busted me! (expletive deleted) pigs!”
“What do you mean they ‘jumped out’?”
“They were hiding in the bushes, waiting for someone to pee there and they caught me.”
“Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah. Heh, that really sucks… how much was it (the ticket)?”
“It’s 200 bucks, and if I get caught 2 more times I have to become registered as a sex offender! Can you believe that?”
?That?s?.. Awesome! Hahahahahahahahaha!?
(look of hurt on Topher?s face) ?(expletive deleted) you guys!?
Oh, how much ammunition did this provide for future jokes, taunting, and the final word in our arguments and conversations? I don’t know, but it never got old and I still look for the opportunity to drag this gem out every once in a while. Because, really, that?s what friends are for.
What’s that on our couch?
One of our friends acquired an almost legendary status on campus. One night he went to a party and fell asleep on a couch in an apartment that he had never been before. He was woken up by a girl who was a resident of the apartment who didn’t know who he was. The girl clearly saw that he had passed out and wet his pants along with their couch, and quite understandably she told him to get the (expletive deleted) out. He made a hastily made a weak apology and walked out of the apartment and into the mythology of I.V..
And what happened to the couch? I don?t know for certain, but like most other ?too funky for even college students to keep on using? couches, it was likely dragged into the middle of the street, set on fire, and then jumped over by a group of drunk college students led by Drunken Steve.
Don’t come around here no more
On Sabado Tarde, we regularly held parties with multiple kegs. At one of these parties the boyfriend of one of our friends, who we didn’t like to begin with, was manning the tap. Word got back to us that he had pissed into one of the cups and passed it off to a guest as a beer. My roommate got so angry that he was going to feed the punk a knuckle sandwich, but he got away just in the nick of time. He was later given warning that his presence would not be tolerated at any of our parties ever again. What did she see in this guy? I?ll never know.
A Night Raid
I was driving my Legend through I.V., on my way with a friend to jiu-jitsu lessons in downtown Santa Barbara, when I spotted a group of punks who had rigged a garden hose to spray passing cars. I kept my Legend in top condition and had just washed and waxed it, so I stopped my car and told them not to spray my car. Luckily the window was up, and although we both wanted to get out of the car and confront these losers, we decided to get to class on time instead.
That weekend, we were out drinking and discussing this over a few beers. Somehow, it was decided that we would get revenge that night. At two in the evening, we returned to the house, first rigging some black cats with a slow fuse next to a window (burning cigarette). Then it was decided that we would get payback a la Hammurabi’s code, except substituting urine for water. He would piss all over the front door, and I would get the glass one. We were fully loaded from the beer, and the blast of the foamy stream against the glass door produced a loud, sustained snare, unmistakable in the quiet night. We got everything- the handles, lock, crevices?
I’m not especially proud of this incident, but it never fails to bring a smile to my face. Is this what college was really all about? No, but it does make for more exciting stories than what you learned in O Chem and Statistics. Do you still remember anything from those classes, really?
The Bed-wetting Roommate
My sophomore year in college I lived in the #8 apartment at 6645 Del Playa Street. I moved in with a couple of friends before really getting to know each other. The apartment mates who I didn’t know turned out to be awesome people who helped me to fight the dreaded Axis of Evil, 3 of us against 3 of them- but that?s a whole different subject..
I lived in the same room with “Argonaut”, who seemed cool at first. One of the first signs that Argonaut was strange was his policy on toilet paper. We all took turns buying TP, but Argonaut insisted on stealing TP from the university which was obvious because he took the huge industrial sized (1 ft in diameter) rolls of 100 grit toilet (sand)paper on his rotation. It only got worse after that.
One morning I woke up smelling urine in the room. Argonaut was gone, but clearly visible on his sheets was a huge wet stain, clearly the source of the stink. When he returned I confronted him, saying that his sheets were stinking up the room, but he denied it, as if I were making things up. Confounded, I enlisted the help of my other roommates, and it was only when the members of the Axis asked him to change his sheets that he complied.
His next move shocked us all. Instead of washing his sheets like a normal person, he left them to soak in the bathroom sink. This was much the same as pissing in the sink to me, but as long as I didn’t have to sleep next to the soiled sheets I let the point slide. From this point, Argonaut became known as “Bed-wetter”
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