Darn.

My junior year in college I lived off-campus in a house with three other guys, Adam, Tobbe, and Chavez. It was a great house in a fantastic, if really far away from campus, area. Syracuse has this enormous neighborhood to the northeast of the campus that's made up of nice little streets stacked with nice little houses in a style I think architectural types would call New England. Very few civilians had the guts or gusto to live in this off-campus neighborhood near a school that partied as hard as Syracuse typically did, and so almost every house on every block was rented out to students.

One interesting thing I noticed about this neighborhood was that as you walked down its streets, the imagery could sometimes be a little jarring. Picture this nice little Norman Rockwell community peppered with the accoutrements of hard-partying college students. An empty keg here, dozens of crushed plastic cups there, a blow-up sex doll waving from a window, tie-died sheets covering other windows.

There were none of the little external signs that people who owned and loved their houses resided in this neighborhood. None of those little touches of which homeowners seems so enamored. No flamingos or other lawn ornaments. Paint jobs were flaked and peeling. Flowers were alien to this landscape. Lawns were unkempt, if they existed at all. Ours consisted mostly of beer-soaked dirt.

The law of the range governed this neighborhood, what law there was anyway. For instance, if you didn't want to risk a head-on collision in a four-way intersection where the stop signs had been removed by drunken students the night before, well then this was a neighborhood into which you simply did not drive. Still another example of the kind of lawlessness we were used to would be the rock-toss game. What you would do is head outside in the middle of a still, silent winter night when all the world was deep in the throes of a booze-induced slumber, grab a rock, and throw it as high and as far as you could (the only rule was that the rock had to land at least one street over... for anonymity purposes of course). The winner would be he whose rock toss resulted in the funniest "impact" sound effect (extra points were awarded for obvious glass landings). It was all very unsettling in a way. These were images that didn't really seem to go together. Old-world suburban sprawl mixed with keg-party chic. Sometimes walking through the off-campus neighborhoods felt like walking through my hometown as it would appear in a nightmare. Familiar, but disturbing somehow.

Our house was a very roomy three level puke-green job on Ackerman. The four of us rented the top two floors (which included five bedrooms and an attic) and three girls rented the bottom floor. The main level of our place had this great patio/porch thing where we would sit, get drunk, and watch the world go by.

Somewhere around the middle of our first semester in the house, I decided to bring my drumset to school and set it up in the house. Adam and Chavez were both guitar players and, even though they sucked and I had just learned to play the drums that previous summer, we all thought it would be fun to set up our instruments and jam every now and then.

We set everything up right away, in the extra bedroom, which was on the second level, directly above the bedroom of one of the girls downstairs. Now, these girls were classic alterna-chicks. Very nice, very cool, but a little, well, off I guess. They lived the hippie lifestyle and exhibited all the classic signs of 90's disaffectation. One even had a rat for a pet. We liked them and they liked us, though I'm sure they thought we were sell-out frat boys and said so behind our backs. That's OK. I thought they were alterna-chicks and often said so behind their backs, even as recently as in this very paragraph.

But I liked them enough to have the courtesy to go down and ask before I started to bang away on a drumset less than five feet above one of their heads. So I did. They thought it was great, "bang away" they told me!

Now, we had amplification issues here. Chavez did not own an electric guitar and Adam had an old Fender with a tiny little black amplifier. The amplifier did some work and the good news about Chavez was that he had a twelve-string and the damn thing was pretty loud on its own. But it was still hard for them to compete with the sheer wall of sound that I could coax out of my drumset, even when I was trying to play softly. To make matters even worse for Adam and Chav, we were pretty pitiful and often would spin a CD at top volume on a boom box in the room, and play along with it. With all this going on... on top of my being the world's most hyperactive drummer, our "shows" were sweeping in their decibelic audacity.

I have to admit to being pretty nervous about playing my drums in a residential neighborhood of houses built with very thin walls, at first. But after a couple of "concerts" no one was complaining, and I started to find my groove.

On a side note, We happened to live next door to two of the few civilians in the entire neighborhood. It was an elderly couple, the husband of which, was a very ornery old man. Without being judgemental, I would guess that we were dealing with a quiet doting wife who wanted to move away, and an angry old man who would be damned before he'd give up his land to a bunch a' college pukes! This guy used to get pissed at us for everything and anything. But for some reason, noise never bothered him. He never complained about our "playing" once, even though some girlfriends of ours who lived three or four houses down often told us they could make out the songs we were playing while watching TV in their living room (Day Tripper, they told us, was always the easiest to recognize). But Old Man Neighbor, he never breathed a word of complaint... about the music anyway.

A couple of weeks into our run as a band, we were in the bedroom one afternoon playing along with Kickstart My Heart by Motley Crue and I was really feeling it. Just as we got to the "Whoa!!! YEAH's!!! I looked up and, there was our downstairs neighbor (the one whose bedroom was directly below the room we were playing in) standing in the doorway, waving her arms frantically. I stopped playing and motioned over the noise for Adam and Chav to cool it.

I looked at her and said "hey, whassup?"

She waved a hand absently in the air and said "Uh, hi. Listen, could you guys play a little qiueter?"

I replied, "sure, what's up, you studying or something?"

"No." She smiled and seemed to get a little nervous at this next part. "It's just that, well, um, my bedroom window just shattered."

Rock N' freakin' Roll baby!!!

My senior year, I lived in an apartment on one side of campus with my friends Adam and Vinnie... yes, Vinnie. Chavez lived across campus in a part of town I rarely if ever walked to... unless there was free beer involved, of course, which was rarely the case. We called this part of town, appropriately enough, "off-campus." So the only time I really got to see Chav, was down at the bars.

"The Simps" were on Thursday nights back in those days and it just so happened that Thursday night was also the biggest night of the drinking week in Syracuse, mostly because of a bar called Faegan's and it's invention, "flip night." What would happen on flip night was, you would order a beer and, after pouring it, the bartender would flip a coin. If you called it right, you got the beer for free. And my luck being what it was, Faegan's made plenty of money on me.

But most of this is neither here nor there, since the important part of this tale happened, not at Faegan's, but at Chucks. Chucks was the bar you went to if you were underage. You did this because the folks at Chucks were sort of loosey-goosey about their ID-checking procedures, and besides, the bouncer, known to us as Big-John, was a close personal compatriot of mine, and, at six-nine, 290, is the largest man I have ever called "friend." Big John was on the Syracuse track team and was capable of hurling an 18-pound ball of lead 56 feet through the air. I tried it once and, after a few minutes of gruntin', was pretty much able to do no more than extend my arm. The shot, or whatever, simply rolled off the end of my extended arm and embedded itself in the ground near my shoe, for a final shot-put distance of about 18 inches.

Anyway, I was born late in 1971 and my parents decided to rush me into public school, thereby dooming me to forever be the youngest in my class. So, since I didn't turn 21 until December of my senior year in college, I wasn't able to experience the splendor of Faegan's for most of that year. As a consequence, I was relegated to spending my nights in the darkened cellar that was, Chucks. My friends, God bless 'em, usually suffered along with me so that I wouldn't have to drink alone.

The Simpsons was a Thursday night ritual, as well, back in those days. Usually, we would all gather together, watch the show, then head out to drink. Chavez, living way out in the hinterland as he did, would usually meet us at Chucks a half hour or so after we arrived, his walk being that much longer than our own.

So there we are, on this particular night, knockin' 'em back in Chucks, laughin' about the Flaming Homer and generally having a good time, when in walks Chavez. Now, did I mention that Chavez had an extremely short temper back in college? Well he did. So, in walks Chavez, who looks at us and immediately sees we are most of the way through our current pitcher. Chav looked at me and said, "I'm gonna go get us something to drink. What do you guys want?"

Barley able to control my giggles, and assuming that, as on every other night, Chavez had seen the Simpsons, I managed to sputter out, "Why don't you go get a Flaming Homer!"

Instantly, the entire table erupted in laughter and, I'm pretty sure, Big John fell out of his chair.

The look on Chavez's face said, "you just opened up a whole new can a' whup-ass!" Chavez took two giant steps towards me, grabbed me by my shirt collar, lifted me up out of my chair, and screamed in my face "Fuck you man! Why don't YOU go get a flaming HOMO!!!"