

Suite Dream

Phil Wohl

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2006 Phil Wohl

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter I – Bittersweet

Chapter II – Brick Wall

Chapter III – Change Is Good

Chapter IV – The Roommate

Chapter V – Summer Lovin'

Chapter VI – So Suite

Chapter VII – Just One of the Guys

Chapter VIII – Midnight at the Pile-On

Chapter IX – Break Up, Light Up

Chapter X – Hoop Screams

Chapter XI - Boys Are Back in Town

Chapter XII – Nightclub Night

Chapter XIII – Beer Hunter
Chapter XIV – Suite Games
Chapter XV – What a Dickstein!

Chapter XVII – My Buddy Slips Away

Chapter XVI – Concert and Crash

Chapter XVIII – Bed in the Baja

Chapter XIX – Bonfire Season

Chapter XX – Last Licks

Epilogue

Foreword

I'm not much for crowds. In fact, group activities usually leave me wanting to run until my legs fall off. There have been so many instances when I held the wall up while at a party or a school gathering. My life had become a standoff between my crowd phobia and people misinterpreting my shyness for the obvious markings of a prima-donna.

My friends and girlfriends have always been solo excursions. Quiet is one of this earth's greatest gifts to mankind. That was, until I turned 18 and went to college, where alcohol and quiet repel each other like oil and water. The funny thing about drinking is that it is much more effective when done in groups. Solo drinking usually leads to its desired outcome, depression. Drinking and college are definitely both social events worthy of crowd mentalities.

I was fortunate enough to experience one of the most enjoyable years of my life while surrounded by a group of buddies. What started as a spark of a roommate friendship, blossomed into a genuine group effort where life was never boring. I has spent my life in sports but tended to leave all relationships on the court, or the field, after the game. My sophomore year of college presented me with the rare opportunity to be just one of the guys. My name is Paul Adams and this is my suite dream.

Chapter I – Bittersweet

To say that "life is bittersweet" would be like looking at a mansion and saying, "Wow, that's a big house." Life has always presented me with a cruel twist of love and hate, of right and wrong, of good and bad. I tend to be such a middle-of-the-road person that polar opposites tend to leave me fairly paralyzed from the stress.

Elementary school was one of the best experiences of my life. It was great except the time when I had to use leafs to wipe my ass following an unexpected, emergency delivery in the woods next to the school. The impact of living in South Field, New York was generally positive. The one thing you have to understand about New York is that the people there are totally crazy. Once you get over the general neuroses of the population it becomes fairly easy to shrug off being called a "Scum bag!" or a "Fuckin' asshole" about as often as the wind blows.

By the time I got to high school, things were starting to happen for me. Yeah, I was still holding up that same wall at parties but my confidence had grown enough to keep my head up and make eye contact with people as I walked down the hallway. This is not easy task for a teenager who had advanced note writing to a veritable work of art. To this day, I have never been caught passing a note in class. I've never had to suffer the ultimate humiliation of the teacher interception followed by the public reading of the oh-so-private message. The fact was that at least 85 percent of those notes were blatant attempts at making fun of the teacher. The other 15 percent were scattered among "How much does this class suck?" "Will this class ever end?" and "I'd rather listen to Principal Kerry talk about the school's no tolerance policy ten more times than be here."

A strange thing happened on the way to completing high school – I completely focused on sports and only picked up my textbooks to move them in and out of my locker to fetch my lunch. I wasn't stupid just remarkably unmotivated. It would be an easy out for me to say that I was on drugs, or that I had discovered beer, but I was just a lazy bastard. If I'm not challenged I tend to get a bit laid back and locked into a brain freeze condition. Good thing I could shoot a basketball through a hoop in the dark. It was also a good thing that college coaches were coming to my games and I was producing.

In retrospect, it was amazing to me how uninformed both my high school coach and my parents were about the colleges that were pursuing me. Not only was my head still frozen but it had inflated to Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon proportions. That's the tragic thing about big heads – the more they grow, the louder the explosion when they pop. It was so hard to keep a level head when everyone was paying me as many compliments as the Prom Queen.

My bittersweet theory takes into account that everything has a yin and a yang, a high and a low, a Starsky and a Hutch. Appearances can be the most deceiving element in my two-sided theory and life. A perfect case in point was my trip with my parents to Piedmont College in Rhode Island.

The Piedmont coach had seen me play basketball and wanted me to check out his college. I had visited a few other colleges but was left feeling that I needed more. It was almost like eating plate after plate of Chinese food and then finding your way back to the kitchen a few hours later to eat something else.

Needless to say, Piedmont's campus rendered my parents and me speechless. The moment we stepped onto its soil I knew Piedmont was the college for me. Yeah, I'm sure that the Trojan horse also looked real pretty as it rolled into enemy gates. That's part of the reason why I never liked gift-wrapping. The moron that invented the colorful covering must have been giving a real shitty gift and wanted to disguise the contents.

Case in point: do men usually wrap an engagement ring? Of course not! Women know from the minute they see that box what is about to transpire. I've even seen people wrap obvious things like footballs, rakes, and books. I really had no defenses for the beauty of the Piedmont campus, and I think people receiving gifts are in a similar predicament. You need time to work up a reaction to new things; when it is thrust in your face there is nowhere for you to run or hide.

Life felt real right on that visit but I was unaware that the bittersweet door swung both ways. What made it right for me to enjoy a moment of pause after much hard work and a job well done. The school, after all, was going to give me a free ride to college; they were going to cover all of my expenses except beer and books. It would have been foolish of me to think that those signs were pointing to happiness.

I have to say that being 18 and out of my parents' house didn't exactly suck. Gone was the tension of being a pacifist being surrounded by a bunch of combatant personalities. I liked to fight as much as I liked vegetables, instead preferring the quiet of my own thoughts and a hamburger with French fries. I really didn't know what to expect from college. I mean, I had only drunk two beers in my entire life and those came after a big basketball win.

My parents and I made the three and-a-half hour trip up to Piedmont and they left after we had lunch and visited the local K-Mart to get some necessary accessories. I remember my dad buying a few copies of Ghost in the Machine by Sting and the Police, after we heard the music playing. We were spirits in the material world that afternoon.

The dorms at Piedmont were set up like luxury apartment buildings. To say that my dorm, number 10, was sweet would have been my first understatement of my time there. Everything in the dorm was carpeted, even the self-operating fire extinguisher. That afternoon, I met the group of people that would be my suite-mates. Yes, suite-mates. There were four floors in the dorm with four separate suites on each floor. Inside each suite were three rooms where two people shared a room.

To be honest, I have always had my own room at home. Although my family respected my privacy as much as Martha Stewart overlooks details, I still had my own space. My roommate was a little red-haired guy named Fred Jenson. I couldn't help feel a strange vibe from the 24 year-old that spent three years battling an undisclosed ailment and spent just about every weekend at his parent's home in Massachusetts; so much for not having my own room.

The weather was really nice that first day, being that it was early September, but I immediately noticed a strange phenomenon: my suite-mates were hooked on soap operas. In the room to my left lived Charlie Breuger and Sal Mariani; the room to my right was Edward Van Nostrand and Larry Dyer. Being in the center room had its advantages, but privacy and quiet were not two of them. The minute you opened the door to the suite you could walk a straight line into my room. The noise from the other two rooms also found their way through my walls.

Breuger was the guy who brought the television; he was also the one who got everyone else hooked on the soap operas. Yeah, everyone but me; I was already familiar with the daytime dramas before I met Breuger. General Hospital, with Luke and Laura, was Miami Vice before Crockett and Tubbs patrolled the coast of Miami. I also liked The Young and the Restless with Nicky and Victor. We definitely were not the most active suite on campus.

With such a group of adventurous mates, it was no wonder that I didn't taste a sip of beer until the end of my first month. With a full course-load of classes, including Accounting I, Intro to Business, Business Communications I, English I, and Intro to Getting My Ass Kicked, my head was spinning like a top. I was never a person who studied as much as I should; in fact, I barely ever cracked the seal on a book. My learning was more of knowledge by osmosis technique. I figured that if I made contact every now and then with the books as I shuffled them in and out of my backpack, the wisdom would filter through my veins to my empty brain. I also had this theory when I was a kid that women took a pill to get pregnant.

Basketball practice didn't start until October 15th, so I pretty much chilled out the first month and-a-half. Little did I know that my teammates were playing almost every day in the gym. It must have slipped their minds to tell me that I could, or should, join them and play. They were about as supportive as people drinking alcohol at an AA meeting.

Meanwhile, back at the suite, Edward Van Nostrand was really starting to weird me out. Mr. Ed use to make some real strange sounds in the bathroom; by strange, I really mean strange. Half the time I walked into the bathroom, I wasn't sure whether he was jerking off, pushing some shit out of his pimple-covered ass, or giving birth to an alien. Whatever he was doing behind that stall door was definitely requiring a great deal of his energy. He used to walk around campus talking to himself, and he was in the library when he wasn't in class. I only heard that he was in the library because I set foot in the library as much as I did the gym during my first months.

By the time October rolled along, I thought it was about time I started playing some basketball. I was in the middle of playing in an intramural tennis tournament and had made it all the way to the finals. My priorities were definitely in line; the only thing I had avoided was drinking, but that would soon change, too. By the middle of October my world would come crashing down into a reality I never knew existed.

The guys in my suite were constantly studying. Four of them six were accounting majors, while Mr. Ed was a UFO specialist and I was a Business Communications major. Nothing I had previously experienced prepared me for the slap in the face I was about to receive. I was used to coasting along and getting by on basically fumes. This was college and the only way I was going to leave with a diploma was to open my eyes and start working hard. Lessons are usually learned when you do something incorrectly, and I was about as far away from correct as possible.

October 15th came a lot faster than I had hoped. My body was bent out of shape and I was about as ready to run up and down a court as I was to balance assets with liabilities and shareholder's equity. While my suite-mates were impressed with the fact I had a full scholarship, I had done absolutely nothing to further their praise.

I'll never forget my first practice with the Piedmont College Braves; it was like I had stepped out of a dream where my legs and arms weighed more than an elephant's appendages. Survival was the name of the game on day one, not basketball. Looking back, the two-hour practice was tame compared to other workouts I had to endure. I went through practices in high school that burned my lungs worse than that. It wasn't my lungs that were damaged on that first day it was my blatant lack of heart.

The walk back to Dorm 10 must have taken me at least 45 minutes. The quarter mile stroll usually took me about 15 to 20 minutes, but I was having trouble simply putting one foot in front of the other. Once I began my long ascent up the stairs of my dorm to my third floor suite, I cursed the day I moved into a building without an elevator. That walk up those stairs was about as painful as seeing two really disgusting people kiss. In hindsight, I would have rather kissed a frog's ass than walk up those stairs.

In the category of just when you think it can't get worse, I thought I was paralyzed when I woke up at 7:15 the next morning. With only a few minutes to shower and get out the door to my 8:00 a.m. accounting class, time was definitely something I didn't have. What I also didn't have was any foreseeable way to move my aching, inflexible body out of bed. As I began to move slowly I felt like the tin man who was left out in the rain over night. It was too bad I was up the creek without an oil can.

I thought it was cruel and unusual punishment that I had to sit through a day of classes that interested me as much as listening to monks chant; what was really cruel about my ever-changing life was that I had to go back for a second day of practice. The bright red color had drained from my tired legs but I was dreading another day of uphill walking on flat surfaces. The look on my face was one of confidence, but my head was filled with mostly doubt and confusion.

About 15 minutes into practice my body started to feel a lot looser and more familiar. I thought to myself, "Maybe you were that guy that they brought here to make the team better." That was, until the coach lined us up for a one-on-one full court drill. I was paired against freshman walk-on Paul Richardi; a walk-on is a player who makes the team without a scholarship. Richardi was a gangly 6'5" guy who had all of the grace of a buffalo. His clumsiness combined with my lack of leg strength proved to be a recipe for disaster.

The object of the drill was to put the ball in the basket, which was a task that I thought I had already mastered. We went up and down the court a half-a-dozen times before the ball squirted loose and Richardi accidentally nudged me backwards. I instinctively put my right hand behind me to break my fall and it worked like a charm. Coach Blanda blew his whistle as I slowly got to my feet. I tried to move my right wrist but it was stuck in a painful lock; I motioned to the coach and softly said that something was wrong with my wrist. He initially told me to get back in line and then he inspected the gimpy wrist and reluctantly pointed me to the training room to get it checked out. An hour later I was at the hospital and I had a cast on my right arm from my right fingers to my elbow. Hello college, goodbye basketball for four to six weeks.

My life had started to spin out of control so I was glad to slow my downward roll a bit. The mesh cast was my daily reminder that the stakes had been raised and I had to step my game up a bit. There was a month until the season started and I had never missed a game in my life. The fire had been relit under my dormant ass and I was determined to get it right.

Before I could get it right I had to drink some of my blues away. A bunch of girls on the floor above us were having a party the night I broke my wrist; I found out about it when I returned from the hospital to my dorm and was approached by a girl named Kathy O'Connell on the stairwell to my floor. She noticed my arm and said, "You're on the basketball team, aren't you?" I wasn't sure how she knew that being that I had been in the gym three times in the month and-a-half I had been at school. She quickly told me about the party and I told her I would be there.

I was primed for action by the time I walked into the girls' suite that night. It was a Friday night and I had no plans beyond my fourth floor social exploration. I was somehow able to pry my new buddy Sal Mariani away from his accounting books. The one thing I liked about Sal was that he was always up for a party, regardless of how much work he had to do. Van Nostrand was nowhere to be found on the planet, Charlie Brueger was watching the show Dallas and could not be bothered, and Larry Dyer was anything but sophomoric.

In those days I was still pretty soft-spoken and introverted; I didn't have much experience with women and was really weak at starting conversations. My lone serious relationship was a two-month stint in my senior year in high school; by the time I left for Piedmont the relationship had been over for at least a month. It was my second experience with a girl but the first time I had circled the bases. I guess you never realize how comfortable and familiar you get with someone until you have to start all over again.

Sal and I walked into the suite and my senses immediately noticed the difference between a suite full of girls and a suite full of guys. The main room was as neat as the library, it smelled like fresh flowers, there was a party going on but it was quiet, and I actually felt calm in a social setting.

Sal said, "I'll get us a few beers," as he headed straight for the cooler in the bathroom. I don't know how he knew where the beer was but I was glad to be with an experience partier.

I was surrounded by a few girls that were signing my cast by the time Sal returned with a couple of Bud's. The only way I could have drawn a bigger crowd was if I walked into the party with a puppy. We had a real good time at the upbeat, yet tame party. It was the first time in my life that I was really able to appreciate the healing and relaxation powers of a cold beer.

It had been quite a day, but at least I was able to avoid the remainder of practice. I felt a huge sense of relief when the doctor put that cast on my arm. Nonetheless I was pretty tired when I went back down to my room after a few hours at the girls' suite. I got out of my clothes and put a t-shirt and shorts on; then I put some quiet music, dimmed the lights and nestled into my bed. My head barely hit the pillow when there was a knock on my door.

Usual suite protocol called for a knock on the main door before entering the inner sanctum. I didn't hear a knock on the suite door before a knock on my door, so I assume that it was Sal coming in to shoot the shit.

I casually said, "Yeah, come in."

I should have known it wasn't Sal; if it were Sal at the door, he would have said something like "You decent?"

The door swung open and a tipsy, red-faced Kathy O'Connell walked in. She closed the door and confidently strolled over to my bed.

I had only kissed two girls in my whole life and I by the looks of Kathy, I was a few minutes away from number three. I really can't remember what the hell Kathy said to me after that point. She might have said how sorry she felt for my wrist and me; on the other hand, she might have said, "You sure look like you could use a sponge bath."

Within minutes of her arrival, Kathy was on my bed making out with me. With my right hand out of commission, it was time for my left hand to have all of the fun. This unique opportunity also gave me pause to work on my left side kissing skills, where the head is cocked to the left. Sounds weird but we all have a dominant kissing side, just like we have an ear that we like to use when we talk on the phone. I use my left ear when I talk on the phone; when I try to use my right ear my brain just won't function the same way.

Back to the two of us kissing on the bed; she was my introduction to guarded New England girls. They dress conservatively and are no different in the bedroom, or couch, or floor. I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule but I didn't find them. My lack of experience cost me a chance to get Kathy's multi-hook bra off. My girlfriend in high school would always quickly take off her bra and spare me the embarrassing fumbling and bumbling. Who invented these things anyway? It must have been Houdini himself because he wanted to get all of the girls.

Kathy might have been drunk but I still wasn't warm enough to melt her frigid heart. Kissing and groping was as far as she would go despite the fact I had unhinged two out of the three clasps on her bra. She left after about an hour of sweaty action with a quick kiss goodnight. Within minutes of her departure I was asleep, barely impacted by the woman that was just in my room. I figured it was better than spending another night alone, but not much better.

We barely spoke again after that night. It was probably a combination of her embarrassment and my general disinterest in seeing her again. I like people with passion, whether it's focused or misguided. Kathy had about as much passion as a blackout; the spark-less encounter was bound to remain just an encounter not a relationship.

Chapter II – Brick Wall

It's really a pain in the ass to have a cast on your arm. I remember going to accounting class almost every morning with my cast still dripping from the shower I quickly took. That first semester of college was a huge learning experience in class, on court, and on campus. I had such a simple view of college before I arrived that it's no wonder that I completely got my ass kicked.

My life was difficult but at least I was free; there is nothing like being on your own and battling the sweet struggle of independence. The Assistant Coach of the basketball team was an Italian guy named Augie Cardinalli. His name was about as Italian as the alumni who supported the school with millions of dollars. I was naïve to think a Jewish boy from New York could change what was already set in stone.

Coach Cardinalli offered me a ride home one weekend as an exchange for going to scout some high school hopefuls at a pre-season camp. My parents immediately offered to put the larger-than-life coach in our house and the homebody coach quickly accepted. He was looking forward to a home-cooked Italian meal and thought my mom would be stirring a pot of sauce when he walked in the door. I have learned that appearances can be quite deceiving.

The minute Coach Cardinalli walked through the door of my parents, Mezuzah-laden house, I was completely screwed. He had been calling me the same nickname that my friends called me, Pauli, and assumed that I was as Italian as cannolis and pizza. My grandfather had shortened our last name from Adamson to Adams when he arrived in New York to avoid discrimination. Mission not accomplished, grandpa', and the fun was about to begin.

When I got back to practice the next week, I could sense that something was up. I was treated as an outsider since I arrived on campus but now was completely on my own. Three weeks had passed since I broke my wrist and my hand was starting to feel better. I had been working so hard on my left hand that it was starting to respond to the extra attention. I had always worked on my left hand as an additional option but now it was nearly as strong as my right.

A week later, I was begging Frank the athletic trainer to take me to the doctor and get my cast off. I had never missed a game and wanted desperately to get back in the action. Frank checked my grip and was astonished that I was able to squeeze his hand so tight. Forty-five minutes later I was back in the gym sinking shots with my right hand. Coach Blanda put me into a scrimmage and he was shocked when I hit a few shots.

My strong play was attracting the attention of the other players and the coaching staff. Whether I was Jewish, Italian, purple, or green, it was hard not to try to make the team better.

Shortly after I returned, starting center Vincent Damarco panicked, got into his car, and went home to upstate New York. The junior center was dangerously close to losing his starting job and decided to pull as much rank as possible. We were a week away from the start of the season and our starting center was throwing a tantrum.

The Damarco family was one of the school's biggest boosters; roughly translated, they demanded that Coach Blanda drive up to talk to them. He obliged and the family made him promise that their son wouldn't lose his starting job. Coach Blanda had little choice and gave in to the demand, because it was either listen or lose his job.

I'll never forget the first game of the year. We were down by six points in the first half when Vincent got banged in the head and acted like somebody had shot him. He was always hurt in practice and often sat on the sideline resting in while everyone else was busting their ass.

Coach Blanda yelled down the bench, "Adams!"

I leapt off the bench and headed toward Vincent on the floor. He held his left hand over his left eye and squinted with his right eye at the sight of me coming toward him.

He looked at Coach Blanda and whined, "He's not coming in for me!"

Coach Blanda looked at Coach Cardinalli and shook his head.

"Vincent added, "I'm staying in." I never saw the light of the first half the rest of the season.

I barely survived the first semester and finished with a paltry 1.8 grade point average. The second semester I recovered slightly and peaked above the Mason Dixon Line with a 2.1 grade point average. I hadn't been with another girl since I made out with Kathy after I broke my wrist. I was truly an outsider looking in to a world that had abruptly turned its back on me.

I did a lot of soul searching that summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Piedmont. The easy decision would have been to give up and go to school closer to home. I think my dad asks me at least a dozen times if I wanted to transfer. He kept bringing up a story that occurred during the previous year. He told it like this. "I remember walking through that hallway and Vincent DeMarco's father approached me and told me that I might as well get you out of the school, because you weren't going to play."

I must admit, the odds were completely stacked against me but that didn't stop me from working my butt off that summer. I worked at a day camp all day and then worked out with free weights and played in basketball leagues at night. I also met this girl at camp named Jocelyn who just graduated high school. She was going to Cornell University in the fall but I was trying to take advantage of every moment we had together. I knew once she headed off to school that I would be just a summer memory. Part of me wanted more, but most of me was focused on recommitting myself both academically and athletically for my sophomore year.

I thought all summer about the abuse I took my entire freshman year. It didn't matter that I could excel on the court because I was still a rookie. Going from the top of the mountain to the lowest depths of the earth was a humbling existence. Being a lone wolf most of my life made it tough to bow to the hazing that took place.

Shaving my pubic hair was the first demand the upperclassmen hoop players put on the freshman. What a bunch of gay bastards these guys were, and I mean no offense to people that are actual gay; I would never even think about demanding anything of any other person except hard work and dedication. These mother-fuckers were so consumed with tradition and ridiculous rituals that they forget to lace their sneakers up when they walked on the court. The team won a total of six games and lost 16 my freshman year. Yeah, it was a real joy to watch these guys stroll through loss after loss.

I also remember watching a few guys I trounced in high school play major minutes for other teams we played. It was very embarrassing to be chained to the bench even though I had the game to be a major contributor. Being Jewish had always made me proud, and being snubbed because I was Jewish only firmed up my resolve.

With all of the guys in my suite being non-Jewish, it was impossible to confide in any of them. The hardest part of learning for me is always the pain that accompanies the process. My dad even thought I was lying when I told him I was the best player on the team. But, the basketball situation was the least of my problems.

I knew it was time to step up and get to work in the classroom. The coaches told me that I had to get my grade point average above a 2.2 in my sophomore year. It was painfully obvious that were trying to do anything they could to get me to leave the school and release themselves from the financial obligation. I guess I didn't read the fine print on the Letter of Intent they had me sign. In my mind they would never have the option to tell me when to leave, because I would go when I was good and damn ready!

I came back for my sophomore year in the best mental and physical shape of my life. With my basic accounting classes completed, I was free to take a bunch of classes that I had realistic chances of earning at least a B grade. Public Speaking, Intro to Psychology, Creative Writing, Marketing Management, and Business Ethics were the courses that gave me hope. Yeah, taking an ethics class was a pretty ironic twist to a pretty messed up journey.

Things were a lot different the first day I set foot in the suite that second year. Gone were my roommate Fred Jenson and his too old for college ass. My new buddy Larry Dyer was glad to move to the middle room with me, as his wacky roommate Eddie Van Nostrand kept walking right on out of the college when school ended the previous year. Charlie Breuger and Sal Mariani still occupied the left room, and Charlie brought back and even bigger television for the second year. Our newest suite-mate, living in the right room alone, was the one and only James "Taylor" Harris.

It was amazing what a difference a new roommate made; with Larry by my side I was able to bounce things off the junior accounting major that didn't make sense. I was no longer a freshman in so many ways. I was in the gym and the weight room the first afternoon I arrived at school. Despite my parent's requests to tag along, I took the car that I bought over the summer and drove myself to school.

My parents made a deal with me that if I got a full scholarship they would give me money toward a car. My maroon 1980 Ford Mustang was anything but a muscle car. The six-cylinder car handled fairly well but the brakes were pretty suspect. Who was I to complain, I finally had my own car! It felt good not having to bum rides off other guys and be able to go out and clear my head every once in a while. I had come to the conclusion that being a freshman sucked even more than the first year of middle school. I thought I had all of the tools coming into college but still wound up completely getting my head handed to me.

I was so locked in that first month of school that I only socialized on Friday and Saturday nights. Many college students start the weekend on Thursday night, but I chose to hit the books for a change. Mind you, I still wasn't studying more than two hours a night, but I got my work done.

I had come to college weighing about 205 pounds but had gained about 20 pounds of muscle over the six months leading up to the October 15th first day of practice. What a difference a year made; I was in such great shape that I was looking for to the start of practice. In the month leading up to the start of practice, I had effectively taken over the minds of my teammates. By the time we walked into the gym that first practice I owned any and all comers.

Coach Blanda was still doing his best to ignore my strong play and promptly buried my deep in the second team for our first scrimmage. After my team, the second team destroyed the first team the coach took me out and made me watch. I guess scoring nine out of my team's eleven points was too much for him to bear. In hindsight, I probably should have walked off the court the previous year and never returned.

Watching was pretty much all I would do the first few months of the season. I had aced all of my mid-terms and my focus had shifted from sports to academics for the first time in my life. The mix between sports and school was usually about 70/30, but it had shifted to more like 30/70. I wasn't blind to the blackballing that was in my face. It became of utmost importance for me to focus on the things I could control. Getting good grades was definitely in my control but the amount of playing time I did or didn't receive was up to my tainted coach.

My second season with the Piedmont Pioneers was almost a mirror image of the first. I was seeing more bench time than the old lady who feeds the pigeons at the park. My suite-mates were starting to get on my nerves about my lack of playing time. I kept telling them that I deserved to play but they didn't believe me. Finally, I told them to come to one of our regular inter-squad, Sunday afternoon scrimmages.

The minute I saw Larry and Sal walk in the gym to the open-to-the-public scrimmage, I was ready to go. Not that I needed an excuse to torture that whiny bastard Vincent Damarco, but he had it coming. I scored 12 points in the first four minutes of the scrimmage on 6-7 shooting. Damarco tripped over the foul line and was gingerly escorted off the court like someone had shot him in the leg. He wasn't going to be embarrassed in front of the 25 students that had gathered in the gym.

I looked straight in starting power forward Chris Paulino eyes and said softly, "You're next, bitch." Paulino gamely suffered through another 28 points of my misery before the final buzzer sounded on the second team's rout of the first team. I had glanced over to my two suite-mates during the game but waited to talk with them until I got back to the dorm. They didn't understand how frustrating it really was for me to dominate my teammates in practice but be glued to the bench when the games started.

Accountants must have balance in their lives in order for things to make sense. What Larry and Sal witnessed destroyed any previous t-account knowledge they had accumulated. I walked into the suite expected quite but was greeted with the intense ranting's of Sal Mariani.

He yelled into my room, "Larry, Paul's back!" He then approached me and asked, "What the hell was that all about?!"

I replied, "I told you I could play. You guys didn't believe me."

Larry chimed in, "We just thought there must be a reason that he wasn't playing you."

"Like, I suck," I said looking at Larry.

Sal interjected, "You definitely don't chomp."

After that day my suite-mates and many of their friends went to every home game and heckled Coach Blanda. The rough treatment of the coach became a fad because the team hadn't won a home game all year. In fact, not much was going right for a team that struggled through a record of 2-10 in the first half of the season.

Chapter III – Change Is Good

I went home for the Christmas/New Year break and told my dad it was time – I was done being demoralized while watching these boring games. There was little pleasure to be gained in watching something that could have easily gone a lot smoother. I only went back for the winter session because I was going to be taking a cool Asset Management class. The class combined with living in the awesome upperclassman townhouses was enough to entice me back to tolerate some more sports misery.

The three-and-half weeks I spent during that Winter-session seemed like months, or years, at times. I'll never forget the day I walked around the school after class and discovered that the professors had posted the Fall Semester's grades on a bulletin board. I went through class after class and intently searched for my social security number and the corresponding letter grade. One, two, three, four, and the five B's later I had compiled my first 3.0 semester and was no longer an average C student.

The team had a game that night in a tournament in Massachusetts. Coach Blanda knew about my grades, because when we were down 20 in the beginning of the second half he didn't hesitate to put me in the game.

I was shocked when he shouted, "Paul, go in for Damarco!" I didn't response at first because he called me by my first name, so I clumsily took my warm-ups off and entered the game. Six minutes later, we were down four points and I had accumulated 12 points, six rebounds and three assists. The home team's crowd was stunned to watch a guy who hadn't played all night score at will against their team. They were even more confused when Coach Blanda looked down the bench during a time-out and said, "Vincent, go back in for Adams." The team moaned and went back on the court and quickly handed the game away by 22 points.

My dad came up to watch the next night's consolation game. He had seen the box score of the previous night's game and wanted details. He even talked to some of the guys on the team, who excitedly recounted my wild six-minute stint. It was no consolation to me that my view from the bench remained unchanged throughout the game that afternoon. There was no call from a coach who must have been read the riot act from the previous game by boosters who wanted my feet to remain in cement shoes for good. This was my last game in a Piedmont uniform. With the spring semester only a few weeks away, it was finally time for me to move on.

My dad was on the phone that night with a coach that had shown interest in my when I was in high school. By midnight, Coach Shaw of Rawlings University had excitedly promised my dad that the school would gladly pay my way. My parents would have to pay for only one semester because the school had used up all of its scholarship money for the year. I got the call that night and started packing before I even hung up the phone. By nine o'clock the next morning, I already talked to Assistant Coach Cardinalli, because Blanda was nowhere to be found, and had packed my car and left Piedmont University without hesitation.

As I drove away from the townhouse, the moment once again was bittersweet. The three-and-a-half hour drive back home gave me time to collect my emotions and play back the key moments of my year-and-a-half metamorphosis. I had such simple expectations when I first arrived at Piedmont – play a lot of basketball and do a little schoolwork. What I wound up doing was doing a lot of schoolwork and playing very little basketball.

I managed to balance the good times with the bad on the drive. The first great time I remembered was the Grain Alcohol Party we threw in our suite and the end of the Fall Semester. Grain alcohol is like 800-proof paint thinner that destroys brain cells with the velocity of a speeding bullet. The guys in the suite made this punch that not only got us all drunk but also knocked us out. We woke up the next morning in a pile in Charlie and Sal's room with heads as heavy as anvils. What made it a night to remember was that we did it all together, as suite-mates. Being shunned by the basketball team made me even more appreciative of the time I spent with the guys in the suite. I would have crashed and burned without their support, especially Larry Dyer.

The worst memory I had at Piedmont happened about a month before I left. We had just lost another game on the road and, as usual, I had a good view from the bench. I had hit rock bottom and the world no longer made any sense to me.

The world had never been so cruel to me that I was unable to overcome extreme obstacles. I felt like a failure in a situation that gave me absolutely no chance to succeed. Even though I had turned my disappointment on the court to satisfaction in the classroom, the feeling of helplessness left me crushed. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I sunk into a deep funk that lasted until the sun came up.

Sitting in front of the rippling pond on that crisp December night taught me that I could only control my end of the bargain; that banging my head against the wall, no matter how much courage and intestinal fortitude it took, would leave nothing to show for my effort except painful bruises. I was definitely better for the effort but a little damaged in the process.

I smiled when I remembered the night I tried to "jam" with James "Taylor" Harris as he played his guitar in his room. Jim was about as smooth as asphalt but he thought he had a set of golden singing pipes.

Now, I'm no stranger to singing my ass off. I was in chorus from sixth grade through high school, so I could belt out a mean Ave Maria. Singing a duet with the self-professed James Taylor was like a picnic with ants. His laid back style and my lack of style translated into fingernails scratching against a blackboard. We got frustrated and drank a couple of beers and kept singing and drinking until we thought we sounded good.

My social life at Piedmont was another source of frustration for me. I never could get in sync with the women of New England. In fact, the only girl that I spent any time with besides Kathy O'Connell was girl from North Dakota named Nina Ashling. Nina was a nice girl and I was a nice guy, yet we could never find the right moment to be nice together. We had a brief connecting encounter in the beginning of my sophomore year at a party in my dorm. We went back to my suite and talked all night, and even kissed a bit in between. Since Larry always occupies our room, the physical activity remained light and the conversation went as well as it could on a few gallons of beer.

I was a bit dazed as I flipped coin after coin into the tollbooth receptacles on the uneventful trip back to New York. When I got home my family consoled me like someone had just died. Despite the fact that my parents had seen the dramatic improvement in my grades, the Piedmont experiment was largely viewed as a failure: my failure.

My definition of failure is not succeeding when you have a chance. I had about as much chance to excel on the basketball court as a jet's chance of soaring inside of a hangar. In fact, I felt even more confident about college knowing that I could compete in the classroom. Playing sports was second nature to me but studying used to be as foreign as trying to find my way in the dark. I had finally given myself a chance to succeed in school and was rewarded with excellent feedback in the form of grades.

A few days after I drove home, I was not only itching to get the hell out of there but was on my way to check out my next destination. I had seen Division II Rawlings University on television a few times because it was in the same division as a few local colleges. Thankfully, the school was a good hour away from my parent's house. It was the kind of drive you had to think about a little before getting in your car. I had a different feeling in my stomach on the drive up to Rawlings than I did initially going to Piedmont. Piedmont was so new and so clean that there had to be some dirt to be dug up somewhere.

I had both my windows and my eyes open as we approached the Rawlings campus. By the smell alone, I knew that water was nearby. The intoxicating windswept aroma caressed my lungs and eased any anxiety left in my body. My dad followed the signs to the main administrative building and we met with a wonderfully, pleasant women named Sally Mitchell who went over my transcript and lauded my recent efforts. She said that most of my credits were transferable and I decided to major in English, with a minor in Business. My dad said about three words in the hour we spent with Mrs. Mitchell because he was waiting for the athletic part of the tour.

When our meeting was over, Mrs. Mitchell led us out to the building's main room where my eyes were brought to joyful tears by a wide panoramic view of the water. The late afternoon sunshine glistened off the endless seascape of water and all at once, I knew I was home. The Rawlings Dolphins could have played their home games outside in the middle of winter for all I cared. With the water as my muse, so many of the boundaries and obstacles that confined my existence were already melting away.

In many ways, I have never left that room and its awe-inspiring view. It's like that when you finally find what you are looking for. When I need to regain focus it's always helpful for me to return to a time or a spot that helped me calm down and arrange my thoughts.

My dad looked out at the water view and said, "Hey, it's the water. You ready to go to the gym."

I was able to take a few extra moments as he emptied his bladder in a nearby bathroom. I looked to my right and saw a door that led outside; I took a few steps onto the large stone patio and let the air sweep over my relaxed body. It had only been a few days since I escaped from New England, but Piedmont College was now the furthest thing from my mind.

The sun was setting as my dad ushered me back into the building and to his car. What an incredible sight that was; the sun seemed so close that you could walk into it. My calm state was ramped up when I walked into the gym and that musty smell invaded my senses. My dad and I walked through the doors and noticed that there were now only five white guys in the gym, including us. There were 12 guys on the team and two of them were white - so much for Piedmont discrimination. Come to think of it, there might have been less than 10 black students at Piedmont College.

Coach Shaw was a white guy with a great deal of soul. He remembered me from high school and jumped at the chance to add me to the mix the following year. The truth was that he was having a real slow recruiting year and was happy when I fell into his lap. When the guys on the team looked at me with a challenging stare, I wished that I had my sneakers with me to show them a little something-something. But, that would have to wait a few days until I joined the team for practice.

I went home for a few anxious days and then drove myself back to my new school, Rawlings College, for a little New Student Orientation. Coach Shaw made sure I was well taken care of by giving me a personal guide instead of making me sit through hours of tiring presentations.

The guy that showed me around was the diminutive, yet crafty, Sam Johnson. Within two minutes of the initial introductions, he had persuaded me to join his Intramural basketball team. I knew I would be practicing with the school's team, but also realized that I couldn't play in any games. Scholarship athletes must sit out two full semesters, or one year, when they transfer. A whole year without playing in basketball games - what a goddamn relief! I had just turned 20 years old, and it had been over 10 years since I had gone without playing on a team.

I applauded Sam's initiative by agreeing to play for his intramural team. Sam rewarded me by helping me to get in the coolest dorm on campus, the Beachside dorm. The dorm was located adjacent to the sandy Baja, which was an area that was a few miles from the nearest beach. Johnson had his own room on the lower level of the two story u-shaped structure. I would be on the other end of the complex on the upper level in Suite 524. Sam also brought me to the nearest beach, bought me lunch on the school's dime, and helped me get both an ID card and cafeteria pass.

I spent that Friday night with a smile on my face, and reveled in the fact that I was so near my favorite place in the world: the beach. I put all of my clothes away in the right closet and set my bed up on the left side of the room, because that closet was cleaner and the bed was the firmer of the two. First come, first served was the theme of that day. The room was empty when I got there because all students had to clear all of their stuff out after each semester. Other students occupied these rooms during the winter session, but they had also cleared out a few days before the makeshift cleaning crew went to work. You could hear a pin drop that night, but that would change for the better in a matter of hours.

Chapter IV – The Roommate

I woke up on Saturday morning and was greeted with bright sunshine and the above average temperature of 45 degrees for February 1st. Weather omens are usually good indicators for me, so I rolled out of bed and took a quick shower before strolling the 200 yards down to the Barrister Building for brunch. My eyes lit up like a pinball machine when I saw a wide assortment of my favorite sugar cereals, including Cap'n Crunch, Cocoa Krispies, and Sugar Pops. I took a little bit of each hoping to achieve blendmeister status. Fresh milk filled a few glasses on my tray before I came to the mother of all food offerings: the omelet station.

The guy behind the counter happened to be a student who said, "Why don't you try a ham and cheese omelet."

Not being one to argue I nodded and then accepted the full plate a few minutes later. While I was waiting, I loaded a few bagels in the toaster and breathed a sigh of wonderful contentment.

I jokingly said to the omelet guy, "If you guys have ice cream in here, I might never leave."

The guy, whose name was Larry, said "The machine is over there, but you'll have to wait until dinner for it."

I rolled out of the cafeteria about an hour and ten pounds later, with no thoughts or plans for the day. I had already registered for my classes and strolled through the campus bookstore to beat the crowds. About five yards into my journey back to the dorm my body became extremely exhausted and was threatening to shut down. I barely made it up the stairs and through suite screen door on the way to my bed. A few hours later I was in a daze when I heard the front door of the suite slam closed. I slowly sat up as this guy with a mustache slung a duffle bag into the middle of the room.

He said, "Whoa, I guess you got that side of the room!"

I stood up to say hello, uncurling my long frame and he said, "Wow, big time! You're a big mother-fucker! You can take whatever you want!"

Yes, Chris Tilson arrived and had awoken me from my slumber. We shook hands and then I slid my docksiders on and followed him out to his car. I could honestly say from that first moment, if we weren't roommates we would have clashed. But we were roommates and we were rarely seen apart after that.

A few seconds after I carried his mini-fridge into the room, Chris positioned it, whipped out a case of beers and deftly positioned at least ten beers in the electric cooling box. He flipped me a beer and we toasted on having a good time. I've never been one for warm beer, but this tepid can of Budweiser tasted especially sweet. Although my previous roommate Larry Dyer was extremely helpful with my schoolwork, he was about as wild as a turtle. My suite-mates at Piedmont were not party animals, so the peer pressure to drink was quite minimal.

The drinking age at the time was 18 in New York and 20 in New England. I reached my 20th birthday a week before I left Piedmont. Being able to go into a bar legally was quite a liberating experience. I felt so good, in fact, that I drank for about three hours straight. The girl bartender kept slipping me drinks all night and even drove me home when the alcohol-fest was all said and done. Little did I know that the bartender fly trap was being set on a guy who was having trouble completing a simple conversation by night's end. It was just my luck; I finally had a woman who was interested in me but I was too drunk to finish the job. I think she even tried to kiss me at one point but that went about as well as the rest of her master plan.

Chris was different than any other guy I had ever met. From the beginning I trusted him like a best friend, like the brother I never had. He, in turn, returned the good vibrations without hesitation. The best relationships that I have had in my life are the ones that required little or no effort. We never had to walk around with those stupid my name is... tags.

That day rolled on and the beers got colder and colder and more guys walked through the door to complete the suite. Chris had briefed me on a few of the guys he expected back. The first guy he talked about was Tom Williams, who occupied the room next to ours. Tom and Chris were good friends who used to hang out together, but Tom was a bit of a loner. Not being one to make a grand entrance, Tom slinked in the suite during the middle of the night.

Across the suite in the room near the bathroom dwelled Kyle Sepulsky and Walter Masterson. Kyle had a girlfriend named Kim that we were instantly introduced to and would see every now and then when the two of them would emerge from under the covers. Walter Masterson, Jr. was a real piece of work. He had transferred from one of the notorious party schools in upstate New York and was a proud member of the Army Reserve. Walt was one of those people that you never knew whether he would laugh at your jokes or slice your throat with a machete. Talk about a fine line...

In the room next to the Kyle, Kim, and Walt show was none other than Brad Lebeuf and his cheeky partner in crime Alan Billings. These guys were both juniors and thought they were hotter than shit coming out of a dog's ass. Actually, the flaming shit-head of the two was Lebeuf, who was easy to fuck with. The guy was so sensitive that if you looked at him wrong he would cry bloody murder. I tried to stay away from that imbalanced bastard as much as humanly possible.

That first Sunday night Chris, Tom, and I drove to the beach in Tom's small Datsun B-210. Yeah, Nissan used to be called Datsun in the 1970s and the early 1980s. We stopped at the local beverage store and shuttled a six-pack each of cold beers to the beach. This would be one of the few times in my dealings with Tom that he was both at ease and drinking at the same time. Chris drank beer like he was guzzling bottled water, and I was destroying enough taste buds where the glorified piss water actually elicited a somewhat pleasant response when it flowed through my mouth.

We hung out at the beach until about eleven o'clock, which was just about the time when we ran out of beer. Tom barely got through three of his beers so Chris polished off two of the remaining Bud bottles and I took care of the other one.

Chris looked at me as I drained the remaining suds from my last bottle and said, "Dude, you're a sponge."

I looked at Tom and then at Chris and replied, "Man, if I'm a sponge then you're a vacuum."

Chris quickly shot back, "I once knew this girl that we called Hoover."

Tom jumped in, "Wasn't that the girl from high school who did the entire lacrosse team."

Chris started chasing Tom, "No, just the guys with big shlongs."

I was cracking up as Tom hurriedly said, "Too bad you missed out!"

Chris eventually caught Tom and made him pay the price for cutting him down. Tom was a thin, straight-haired dude who pretended to know karate. Chris and I knew we could beat his ass in if he stepped out of line, but we loved the fact that Tom would never back down. He was usually a lot braver after a few beers than he was when sober, but who isn't?

There were so many parallels between Chris and I that it made us even more comfortable. We were both athletes, he was on the lacrosse team and I threw a ball through a hoop; he was a low B student and I was about the same; he came from a solid family with two sisters and so did I; and we both never played head games.

He was even able to look past the fact that I was Jewish. He and Tom would say every now and then, "Paul doesn't act Jewish," or "Paul's parents must have taken the wrong baby from the hospital."

That first one both offended me and complimented my blending skills at the same time. The latter statement was one I often hypothesized, although my theories were often based on "hatching" or "being dropped off by aliens" more than "switched at birth."

It was funny, but I felt a change in me the minute I stepped into class that Monday morning. Classes like Earth Science, English Literature, Creative Writing, and Great Books replaced courses with the word accounting in it. I had wasted so much time avoiding my studies in the past that I quickly became as efficient at completing my work. You see, this was the first break I had from competitive sports since I was seven years old. Thirteen years without a break from the physical, and thirteen years without much emphasis on the mental side of life.

The pressure of playing intramural sports was about as strenuous as taking a nap in the middle of a crisp fall afternoon. My team won every game that we played and were barely challenged on our way to the championship. We beat a bunch of faculty members, including the diminutive Coach Shaw, who I carried on my back to the hoop for the better part of an hour before he fouled out. The championship game drew a better crowd than most of home games the team played that spring semester, and it felt good to be back in my element and appreciated again.

For a change, my exploits on the basketball court were not a topic a conversation where I lived. Chris was busy preparing for the lacrosse season, Tom was either high or surfing, Labeuf was on the crappy tennis team, Walter was married to the screw-off top from a jug of Boones Farm wine, Kyle was into Kim, and Alan followed the insane ranting's of Labeuf. I had absolutely no interest in whipping out my pride, or unzipping my pride, to prove how much of a man I was. I was comfortable just being Paul, Chris's roommate, and just another one of the guys.

It had been a long time since I had been one of the guys. I had to scan back to elementary school to remember a time when I had more friends than fingers on one hand.

Growing up, the guys in the neighborhood did everything together. We would play any sport, from baseball to hockey, as long as it involved at least six of us. I can remember so many afternoons at the school's baseball field playing one-field, self-hit baseball. We had one guy playing first base, another guy playing the left side of the infield, and the other playing the left side of the outfield. If a lefty batter came up we would shift over to the right side of the field and the extra player would play the infield or the outfield, depending on the strength of the hitter. Maybe one out of ten guys was a lefty, so the games were usually fair.

The street hockey games got physical so physical by the time we got to sixth grade that we had to stop playing because too many guys were getting hurt. The school's principal, Mr. Barbaccia, called a bunch of us down to the office after Bruce Feldstein got his front teeth knocked out by Kyle Robertson.

He forcefully said, "You guys better find something else to do, or somewhere else to do it." With a few months until graduation, we suddenly ended our afternoons of playing at Wildwood Elementary School.

It was weird how Brucie's lost teeth ended an era and my age of innocence. The days of riding our bike up to C&C Stationary store to get baseball and basketball cards and the slinking into Tinkerbell Bakery to plunk down 50 cents for a mouth-watering black and white cookie were over. Yes, I would still make the trip a number of times in the years that followed, but I would often be alone in my pursuit of the perfectly balanced bi-colored cookie.

I really enjoyed being part of a close-knit group of grade-school guys just trying to have some fun. Our aim was simple: We just wanted to be boys. Schoolwork and cleaning up our rooms were the furthest things from our pure, young minds. Somehow, Principal B's warning had moved all of my friends away from their boyhood pleasures and left me completely in limbo by myself. Extremely competitive middle school teams that tended to exclude the weaker players replaced local club teams. My athletic ability, which was once seen as an asset to my friends, was now viewed as a source of irritation for my old friends and their pressure-packed parents.

It was quite an adjustment trying to stand up to the pressure of being in middle school. I really didn't feel any different being a teenager than I did in grade school. Aside from the frequent lack of erection control, everything else was generally copacetic in my life. It was nothing that a good stack of books and notebooks couldn't shield. When I limped out of class, it was probably one of the few times that I found a definite use for those books all year. I was interested in girls but I had absolutely no idea what to do with them. Looking at them and their blossoming forms was good enough to paralyze any young man.

While many of my friends were experimenting with drugs, alcohol, and discovering what the various "bases" stood for, I was trying to find my place in a world gone wrong. The group of friends I had while growing up were now guys who barely acknowledged my presence when they passed me in the hallway between classes. Time seemed to go by so quickly between feast and famine. I would have to wait until my junior year of high school to become more mainstream again and even then, I had trouble breaking away from my strong loner roots.

The remainder of my first semester at Piedmont was blissfully quiet. The school's administration changed its mind and decided to pay my way the second semester I was to sit out. The school's Provost, Michael Hart, who had taken his turn trying to guard me in the intramural championship basketball game, spearheaded this good faith gesture. I would like to think that my good play got me the extended free ride, but my gut tells me that my skin color had something to do with it. Being the only productive white guy on the basketball team was an advantage I had no choice but to accept; that, and the fact that it saved my parents a ton of money.

I was probably more excited to play in the school's intramural softball league than I was to play in the basketball league. Baseball had been my first love, my reason for being night and day as a kid. Growing up watching players such as Tom Seaver, Roberto Clemente, Reggie Jackson, Willie Stargell, Johnny Bench, and many others, gave me a strong foundation for our national pastime. I played centerfield and batted fourth on my team, which was composed of a bunch of guys from my dorm. We even went all the way to the championship game but eventually lost to the top pitcher in the league. This guy bordered on throwing fast pitch, so it messed up most of the guys in the line-up that were used to a moderate pitch speed. By the third at bat, I had been able to adjust to the speed and managed to scratch out our only hit of the game, a single to right field. It was a pretty weak single for a guy who had led the league in home runs and runs batted in, but it was a hit nonetheless.

The funny thing about me playing softball was that resident ass-wipe, Brad Lebeuf, saw me walk in one day after a game and started this conversation:

"So, now you're a baseball player, too. I bet you don't play tennis, though." Brad said in a whiny, slap me in my face, tone.

I tried to ignore him, "Yeah, I can play a bit."

Labeuf was instantly ready to spark the flame, "You know I am on the tennis team."

I emerged from my room with a cold drink. "Yeah, so what's your point?" Of course I knew where this was leading but I wanted to hear him challenge me.

"I bet I could kick your ass in tennis!" Lebeuf exclaimed.

I looked behind me like he must have been talking to someone else. "So, you're going to kick my ass in tennis?

"I'm so sure that I'm going to beat you that I'll bet you a case of beer against only a six pack if you lose."

I thought for a moment because I wasn't sure where I had put my racket, or even if I had left it at my parent's house. I walked back into my room and moved a pile of clothes aside until I spotted my Rosignol graphite racket. The thought of changing out of my Astros baseball jersey and sweatpants never even crossed my mind, but I did change my baseball turf shoes for a pair of handy tennis sneakers. I walked out of my room and said, "Let's go."

We were sitting around that night and Chris said in a loud voice, "This beer takes really good, Paul!"

He did that for the better part of an hour until Lebeuf emerged from his room with a puss on his face and walked out of the suite. I barely broke a sweat in conquering the weak Teflon tennis game of Brad Lebeuf. He didn't hit particularly hard and his serve barely passed over the net. My hard first serve was miraculously accurate even though I hadn't played in months. Adrenaline and the beer definitely had a hand in my intense focus. I didn't like Lebeuf and his arrogant tone, but I also wanted to gauge if I could play tennis on the college level. I wound up playing on the Piedmont tennis team my junior and senior years and enjoyed the experience immensely. If I hadn't whipped Lebeuf that spring afternoon, I'm not sure I would have had either the courage or the interest to play on the tennis team.

Chapter V – Summer Lovin'

I got more accomplished in my first semester at Rawlings than I was able to stumble though in a year-and-a-half at Piedmont. It wasn't a shock that once I became free from my repression the rest came pretty easy. Making the Dean's List made me feel a huge sense of accomplishment, which was a positive feeling that I could not share with my family. Since I wasn't playing basketball on a school team, my worth on the home base was limited. The positive aspect of breaking free from the pat on the back syndrome was that I was now on my own. As much as my parents tried to keep the chord attached, I had somehow managed to cut it, tie it off on the oak tree in the backyard, and walk away.

Looking back, coming home every summer was a lazy man's excuse to do nothing. The best thing I did was sign up to be a counselor at a nearby summer day camp. Camp counselor by day and basketball player two nights a week; the rest of the week gave me time to slow my life down a bit and find a woman. My limited success with women had me a bit frustrated and jammed up. Self-love is one thing, but there's nothing like the real thing. I had a brief fling with this girl named Karen Zwelk after finals ended. It was a one-night stand where no clothes were removed and we both passed out from the accumulation of alcohol in our tired bodies.

I was 20 years old and I had only slept with one girl in my life. Two years after that initial encounter, I was about as horny as a dog in heat. You know those dogs that race up to you when you enter their house; they hump your leg faster than you can say "Hey, get this dog off my leg and make him put that penis back inside!"

Being roommates with Chris taught me one valuable lesson: CHILL THE FUCK OUT! I tended to plan my every conservative move while Chris was purely a reactionary dude. If he saw a girl he liked he would go over and talk to her. The thought of acting upon my urges was suppressed at a young age by my mother, who often warned me to look both ways when I walked through the kitchen. The woman was about as nervous as a turkey before Thanksgiving. I became so paranoid that I was unable to react in social settings the way I did on a basketball court. Instinct is the law of the jungle and I was getting a first class lesson from the man who was as loose as I was tight.

The first step to lower the inhibition bar is swallowing about as much beer as you can. Being the Sponge meant that about eight beers would give me the necessary buzz required to be bold enough to make a move. I remember the first time the Chris method of meeting women worked for me. About a month after we met, we went down to the campus watering hole and started drinking about as many twenty-five cent cups of piss water we could get our hands on. An hour later I spotted this girl standing by herself in a dark, remote corner of the large room.

Lesson #1: If a girl is standing by herself, that usually means that no one likes them and they are weird.

I went over to Jan and we started talking about something to do with this English class we both had taken. I'm not one for small talk and instantly realized why I had avoided these kinds of conversations in the past. Jan was probably the strangest person I had ever met. She was even stranger than my Aunt Tess who used to wash her hair with dish soap and send us really old candy for our birthdays.

Before I even knew what was happening, Jan and I had walked back to her dorm room and we were lying on her bed.

Lesson #2: Don't drink beer and then lie down, unless you're planning on spinning until you pass out.

Somehow I had managed to get Jan's shirt and bra off after listening to her babble about Edgar Allen Poe for the better part of a half hour. I had seen a few breasts close-up in my life, and countless others in magazines and on cable, but these were new to me. When she lied down on her back... how can I put this delicately? Her breasts vanished. I grew up thinking that breasts were supposed to be perky and facing forward, but these mammaries flopped over the side like they had sprung a leak and ran out of air. After a few minutes of trying to revive these deflated sacks, I dozed off for a few seconds on her chest. She nudged me off of her and I got up quickly and said, "Whoa, it's been fun but I gotta' go." I didn't even wait for her response and quickly, or so it seemed, walked the crooked line back to my dorm.

Old ladies in their 60s had firmer breasts than Jan. I can't imagine what that girl's breasts look like now all these years later. Breasts aren't supposed to be as elastic as pulled saltwater taffy. I never even mentioned that sleepy escapade with Chris but he knew that something was up when I returned that night. The smell of Jan's scented candles tipped him off that I was somewhere I should have been. The girl in bed with him said "Smells like he was with a girl."

Rule #3: When your roommate has a girl in his bed, either pass out on your bed, sleep on the couch in the suite, or wait until they let you in the room.

I passed out cold even before my head hit the pillow that night. Chris and his dates always appreciated that I was a heavy sleeper. They never doubted for a minute that I was genuinely fast asleep and not spying on their action. Chris and I never played games with each other and we respected each other's space. That night, I could have been asleep on the quad, or Jan's collapsible breasts, or the Atlantic Ocean, for all I knew.

Fellows Day Camp was known as one of the best summer camps in the area; they also paid their staff extremely well compared to other camps that threw a few hundred dollars in slave wages at their counselors. The kids in my group were a bunch of ten year-olds that made the summer enjoyable, but the real focus of my summer was female-oriented not kid-specific.

It was the second night of camp and the staff was already out partying. This slick guy named Cliff volunteered to throw a huge party at his parent's rather large house. The guy had obviously done this kind of thing before because his parents were there the whole time. What was his motivation for throwing a party with his parent's permission? And what was his parent's agenda for having a bunch of teenagers stomping around their backyard? I wouldn't want a party of that size in my backyard, but who really gave a crap about the mundane details. It was a party and I was going to be there.

My 17 year-old sister Linda had just finished 11 grade and joined me at camp as a C.I.T. (Counselor in Training). I really don't know how much training it takes to become a counselor, considering that any moron can walk kids from activity to activity when given a schedule. I love my sister but I tend to ignore just about every word that comes out of her mouth. Since the party was designed to accommodate both young and old at the camp, I agreed to take her with me.

When she asked me, "Can you give my friend a ride?" I threatened to leave her boney ass home. She was lucky to be going and I would be damned if I would give someone she just met a ride to the party.

You could have landed a plane in Cliff's parent's backyard; so much for a cozy little gathering. If the camp had a staff of 75 people, including kitchen staff, counselors, specialists, and grounds keepers, then everyone must have shown up. There must have been at least 150 people there and I'm sure that many of Cliff's non-camp friends were there. The sea of people made it difficult to focus and find a comfortable spot to hang out. After just two days of camp, I was still working on remembering most of the people's names.

About fifteen minutes after I arrived at the party with my sister, she was busy introducing me to her "friend" Jessica Taubman. Well, hello Jessica! Any friend of my sister's is automatically a friend of mine. You know, if I wasn't so sexually repressed back then I probably would have trusted my first instinct and walked away from Jessica. She was simply a pretty girl who knew my sister. The two statements, when left apart, held a great deal of weight. But, when you combine pretty and friend of my sister, the result had to be pain.

Jessica had just graduated high school and was headed to Cornell University the following fall. The two-year difference in our ages didn't seem so vast at first, so I went with the flow for a while. To say that Jessica came from a wealthy family would be like saying the Empire State Building is a tall structure. The theme park-sized pool in her backyard complemented the clay-based tennis court. When I went over there, I didn't know whether to swim like a fish or swat tennis balls off the ball machine. Decisions... decisions.

If I were a money-grubbing, penny-pinching, small-minded son of a bitch I would have kissed Jessica's ass until I married her. Even at 20 years old I knew the difference between outpatient surgery and a full hospital stay. I was quite the hot property that summer but my one-tracked, monogamous mindset prohibited me from pursuing any other girls at camp. There was this one girl named Susie Zeller who hung around me when Jessica wasn't lurking. She had an awesome body but she was young, really young. The 18 year-old had an even younger personality and every time I thought of making a move her voice and shallow conversation turned me right off.

I spent the summer hobnobbing at the U.S. Tennis Open in Flushing, New York where I was showered with tennis clothing and introduced myself to tortellini with pesto sauce. I usually have an aversion to all green food, except M&M's, but this delectable blend of basil leaves, olive oil, Parmesan cheese, and pignoli nuts had my head spinning. My mother had never ventured past a spaghetti and meat sauce dish that was so heavy it turned you into a human paperweight after the meal.

One morning I drove my Ford Mustang to the Taubman Estate for another day of U.S. Open Tennis. Not that their court couldn't have handled the matches for the day, but I was going to drive with Jessica and her mom, Victoria, to the matches. Her mom was everything Jessica was not. This self-assured, 45 year-old woman was more my speed than her skittish teenage daughter. We walked into the three-car garage and Mrs. Taubman said, "Let's take the Rolls today. Paul dear, do you want to drive?"

"Do I want to drive? Do I want to drive? I don't know, do I want to drive?" That was the thoughts jumping through my head when presented the keys to the cash-money automobile of the late 20th century.

The truth was that I chickened out and let Mrs. Taubman drive the extremely expensive automobile. I also didn't want to look like the driver for these two ladies. The two of them bossed me around enough as it was, and I didn't need the added pressure of denting the white, four-wheeled beauty.

For a guy in need of some sexual education, I had chosen a girl with little or no experience. When Jessica was created, it appeared they forgot to install her sex drive. There was plenty of shopping and whining on some of her other drives, but no sexual disc drive as far as the eye could see. I got "real" action one time the entire summer and was left with gonads the color of the deep blue sea. Being 20 years old and sexually jammed is like throwing an unopened bottle of soda around and not twisting open the cap to release the pressure.

The only time we had sex all summer was when we came back from the city after a night of even more weirdness. Jessica liked to take advantage of my ignorance in certain situations where I had no prior experience. On this particular night she said we were going to a nightclub in New York City. I was about as familiar with city nightclubs as I was with the inside of Jessica's vagina.

When we walked inside the cool looking place, I was completely unprepared for what was about to happen. We walked right in to the club because Jessica knew the owner and he had us on the list. I was a bit nervous and gave the valet guy the keys to Jessica's white Nissan 280zx and tried to avoid the nasty gazes of the people that were waiting on line. I saw a sign that said, Welcome to the World Famous Chippendale's. I recognized the name but I was so tense that I couldn't think straight.

Once I sat down and was able to look around the room, the need to run grew in me like a climbing weed. I am not homophobic, but the thought of a man undressing in front of me in a place other than a locker room was making me feel uneasy. It was weird but I think Jessica got a kick out seeing people squirm; yeah, that's the kind of person you want to have around you.

By the time we left the gyrating, bump-and-grind scene, Jessica was a bit tipsy from the two wine coolers she had consumed over a two-hour period. I, on the other hand, had drowned myself in a half-a-dozen beers with little impact on the emotional scarring that had taken place. On the drive home, I had finally discovered that she had to be tipsy in order to become sexually aroused. That obviously pointed to the fact that Jessica virtually had to be out of her mind to thaw some of the ice around her loins. I could tell from the moment we walked into her parent's house that I would "get lucky" that night. In reality, lucky for me would have been sleeping soundly in my own bed and to never have met Jessica.

Jessica's sexual inexperience combined with my disdain at watching men strip, made for quite a forgetful session. About three minutes after it began, our initial foray into the world of intercourse had ended. Jessica was passed out on her bed as I removed the rubber from Mr. Unhappy and flushed the slimy receptacle down the toilet. It felt good to have sex again, because it had been a while, but I could have had as much fun with a blow-up doll. At least the blow-up doll wouldn't have beaten me up emotionally.

I was glad when the summer ended and Jessica went off to college at Cornell. Of course, her acceptance into the Ivy League had absolutely nothing to do with the $150,000 donation her parents made to the school. Anyway, I was heading east and she was going upstate and far away from me. It was weird for me to have such a negative reaction to someone that I said "I love you" to, proving that there are obviously many different degrees of love. My love for Jessica was a more of a fill in the blanks, say something to cover the awkward silence kind of love.

I didn't have the balls to break up with her so I was stuck with attempting to carry on a dysfunctional, long-distance relationship. Long-distance relationships are about as successful as an ice cream cone eater during a heat wave. You might get a little ice cream here and there but most of it will leave you sticky, frustrated, and generally disinterested.

Chapter VI - So Suite

Jessica went off to college and my eyes were as dry as my genitals. There were so many parts of my being that wanted her to go, so there was little or no shock value when the time came to say goodbye. She was teary probably because of her nervousness at living so far away from her hair salon. Don't ask.

Soon after Jessica went away it was time for me to head back to school. I barely even said goodbye to my parents and had my car packed in less than an hour. My Ford Mustang hatchback could hold a decent amount of stuff but I knew that year wouldn't be about what I brought, but what I came away with.

At 20 years of age, I would be categorized in school records as a sophomore again. Call me what you wanted, I knew this would be one of the best and most important years of my life. I knew that the dynamic duo of Chris and I would build on some of our escapades of the previous year. I had been a kid who avoided trouble like a plate of liver and onions, but Chris seemed to bring out the free spirit in me and I liked it.

Students were told to report to campus on Friday for the start of school on Monday. Chris had talked to Jimmy Parsons, our Resident Assistant, who told him he would open our room for us on Thursday. Chris's house was on the way to school so I picked his scruffy ass up and we loaded the car up to the ceiling. Good thing that the school was only a half hour from his house because that car was really struggled up a few mid-sized hills.

We arrived at school about noon on Thursday, pulled into a front space at our Beachside dorm, and headed straight to Jimmy Parson's room. Chris walked into his room and the guy was so out cold that he was drooling all over his pillow. Jimmy barely heard us come in but he stuck out his hand and Chris reached into his pocket and slapped a rolled up Glad bag into Jimmy's hand. It looked like oregano but I figured that Jimmy wasn't the kind of guy who had a spice rack sitting around. He pointed to a thick ring of keys on a nail in his closet and we were out of there. I looked at Chris as we walked up the stairs to open our suite door and said, "I guess the beer is on me tonight."

About ten minutes after we unloaded the car, Tom rolled in with a couple of duffle bags strapped around his shoulders. It was really great to see that sadistic son-of-a-bitch; Chris and I had gone out with him a few times over the summer and even went to his parent's house once. Awkward would have been a feeling we would have preferred over seeing Tom interact with his family. His mom lived with his step-dad and his little brother in a cool house near the water. The house was so cool that they had fish swimming through a stream that winded throughout the main floor of the house.

I couldn't quite put my finger on Tom's angst until I felt the tension in that house. While Tom often said that he didn't mind "the guy his mom was married to," it was easy to see that he was butting heads with his sorted past. We couldn't get out of that house quick enough, proving that looks can definitely be deceiving. We went to a local bar near Tom's house that night and met up with the goalie on Chris's lacrosse team, who was the bartender. He fed us drinks all night until we could barely walk; we even had to carry Tom into his house. Chris and I looked around and tossed Tom on the couch instead of carrying his bony ass up the stairs. He was lucky we didn't leave his butt in the driveway.

That first night at school we bought a case of Bud Tall Boys to the beach and drank until we had to pee, which was about two hours of steady liquid consumption. Most guys would have just unzipped and drained the main vein right there, but we all had too much respect for the beach. We also were getting hungry, so the local pizza joint, Maria's, was the destination for both the munchies and the bathroom.

Tom, Chris, and I really enjoyed each other's company but there was really nothing to talk about. The waitress at the pizza joint was much older than us and most of the other college-age females weren't scheduled to start showing up until the next afternoon. Three drunk, horny guys without any potential targets to discuss; guys are really pathetic beings. Guys talk about women like they really give a shit. In the front of a guy's mind is the hope that he can control his own destiny, but gnawing away at the back of his mind is the knowledge that he'll only get some if she opens the gate.

We went back to the suite, drank a few more beers, than passed out on our beds. The next morning we woke up slowly and trudged over to the cafeteria for a little brunch. The official unlocking of the dorms coincided with the opening of the cafeteria. With only a few tables occupied, an echo could be heard from the few conversations going on. I went right to the omelet station and put my ham and cheese order in. Chris went with the works omelet and Tom stocked up on yogurt, granola, and coffee. I guess nobody sent him the memo about beer and pizza clashing with his healthy breakfast.

We saw a few people we knew and then waddled gingerly out of the cafeteria with bulging stomachs. A nap and a few hours later we were all awoken by the sound of a group of people walking into our suite. It wasn't a raucous celebration you would usually hear with a group of guys returning to school thinking their hot shit. It's not as if a summer of picking your ass at the local 7-Eleven's going to elevate you from pond scum to the man in a few short months.

Chris and I had set up our room in a less traditional style the second time around. Gone was our previously flat existence, as Chris would be going air-borne this time around. He had created a bunk-bed-like set-up where our beds created a t-shape while his bed was supported with heavy wood boards and suspended perpendicular over my bed. Chris also connected a steel rod to his bed so he could slide down to the floor at a moment's notice.

The suite noise slowly woke us up like two tired, unmotivated crime fighters. The one thing I loved about Chris was his flair for the unexpected; he walked from our room into the bathroom in just a pair of shorts and no shirt. He scratched his ass first and then his front package as he staggered past a family bringing their son to school for the first time. If that was my kid, I would have dragged his ass out of there and had his room changed. I still had a little pride and a fraction of embarrassment left in my body, so I waited until the nap bulge subsided before I met the new charge. The new kid's name was Brian Whiteman but his mom called him Junior. If it was good enough for mom, it was good enough for me.

One by one our new suite-mates arrived; Chris and I took a few chairs from the suite and sat on the balcony outside of our room. Chris cultivated his nuts a little more as Junior's family left the suite and took him out for his last meal as a civilian. I shook their hands and they took one step toward Chris and then thought better about touching the hand that was doing god's dirty work. We were cracking up watching this white bread family scoot and skedaddle to the parking lot. Tom then slowly opened his window, which overlooked the porch, and said "What the hell are you guys laughing about? You woke me up!" Those words were grounds for a beatin' where Chris came from, so we charged into Tom's fish-net-clad room and piled on his scrawny ass.

Rawlings College was primarily known for its superior Marine Biology department, but its other departments were adequate enough to keep its students awake and engaged. Chris and Tom were both Marine Bio majors, but I majored in English for the time being. Thoughts of switching my major to Business had danced through my head ever since I left Piedmont College. Most of my fellow students were off on things like Seamester while I was stuck in classroom's listening to teachers talk about the brilliant, drug-aided musings of Edgar Allen Poe. Don't get me wrong, I love Mr. Poe's writing, but beer just didn't get me to the same cosmic place as dropping acid.

While Junior was out with his parents, his roommate Danny Tampkin arrived without much fanfare. We were sitting outside on the porch drinking concealed bears when he threw his crap in Junior's room and joined us outside. None of us had ever met this guy who said he lived on the other side of campus the previous year. Once he said his sister's name was Annie, we all said at the same time, "Oh, Annie Tampon." So, from that moment on he was known as Danny Tampon, or Danny T., as he would have preferred to be called.

We still weren't sure if Tom was going to have a roommate and there was still one other room that remained empty until Saturday night. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I wouldn't have believed it. Just when I thought I had left high school behind it caught up with me in an instant; Myron Dickstein was the kind of kid who got on your nerves all of the time.

I remembered when I walked into my first class at Rawlings and there sat Myron in the front row. The teacher called out Mike Dickstein and he said, "Here."

"Mike? Who's Mike?" I mumbled to a few guys in the back row. "His name is Myron." A year-and-a-half of cultivating the name 'Mike' and it took me all of three minutes to unravel the snow job. With a last name like Dickstein it's pretty irrelevant what your first name is anyway. He might as well as called himself Richard, because any way you looked at it he would still have been a Dick.

I saw Dickstein walking through the quad and toward our side of the dorm.

Chris looked at me and said, "Is that Dickstein?"

Tom was now on the porch and chimed in, "No fuckin' way!" Even Danny Tampon knew the score when he yelled, "Go home, Dickstein!"

I shook my head and said, "How did this mother-fucker get into our suite?"

Not exactly the open-arms welcome that Dickstein dreamed of when he went to the housing coordinator and requested a room in our suite. The majority of the time the dorms were jammed and two people lived in every room. Somehow the entire male population found out where Dickstein was living and let him happily live in solitude.

Dickstein lived out of crates like he might have to flee the country at a moment's notice. I guess no one had told him that the school put a dresser of drawers and a closet in each room. Of course, wearing Le Tigre polo shirts and jeans every day sort of took the guesswork out of getting dressed. Myron would have been the poster boy for the Fashion Don't Society, if there were one. His blonde hair and blue eyes did little to aid his comparison to the average surfer dude. Dickstein got his hair cut at the Rawlings Bowl and his eyes were as flat as a punctured tire.

He also had a flair for saying the absolute wrong thing at the wrong time. For instance, we walked into the local beverage center and I grabbed a case of beer and Chris had a few bags of chips. We all threw a few bucks on the counter and Tom picked up the beer and we started walking out. Dickstein walked up to the counter and asked the cashier, "Do Mexican's like Budweiser or Dos Equis?"

First of all, the guy was a Native American; secondly, the moron was about as close as you could modernly get to being scalped. Chris and I walked back toward the counter and he said to the man, "Sorry, he's a special ed student. We won't bring him in here again."

I slapped Myron in the back of the head and said, "C'mon Ed, we have to go back home."

The cashier smiled as I threw a couple of extra bucks on the counter; you could call it thanks for not killing the retard that lives with us payment. As we hit the parking lot I said under my breath, "Fuckin' Dickstein."

After a night of drinking, we woke up slowly and began the painful crawl to Sunday brunch. On the way back I saw this guy sitting on our porch. Before I could even make a sound the blonde-haired dude said, "The name is Ricky Mane" the Southern-drawled guy said as he stood up.

His compact 5' 9" frame stretched only to my chest, so he said, "You must be the man on the hoop team!" I shook his hand and almost ashamedly introduced myself. Tom staggered out of his room and I told him that Ricky was his roommate.

Ricky had this way of making everyone around him feel at ease. It was Chris's nature to confront any new lacrosse player, but when he heard that the Kangaroo Kid was going to be in his suite he completely went out of character.

He looked at me and said, "Dude this is the Kangaroo Kid, the guy I've been telling you about."

We had heard about this guy that the lacrosse coach had somehow recruited from the Australian Professional Lacrosse League. Since there was no American professional lacrosse league at the time, the NCAA had no restrictions against guys who played in leagues throughout the world. This guy was so awesome that he went straight to Australia from high school and starred there for three years before he hurt his left knee.

Ricky had agreed to rehab his knee and play at a college in the states for a year before he went to a new indoor pro league. The guy was a freakin' star and yet he seemed about as down-to-earth as a high school janitor. He was sitting on the porch with his chewing tobacco stuffed in his left cheek and spitting in a gold spittoon every few minutes. The only thing missing from this down home picture was a whittling knife and a small block of wood. This guy was as simple and smooth as a professional athlete could be. It was impossible not to like him and yet, he probably became one of the best-used car salesmen the world has ever seen.

The suite was set: Chris and I in the left, back room; Tom and Ricky in the left, front room; Junior and Danny Tampon in the back, right room next to the bathroom; and Dickstein all by his peanut-dick-self in the front, right room. It was quite a radical change from the suite that surrounded me, Chris, and Tom the previous year. Just getting rid of Lebeuf was addition by subtraction. The Beachside Dorm, Suite 524, would be one of the happiest places in my two-decade life. Freedom of expression was never diminished, unless Dickstein opened his mouth and shit flew out of it.

Chapter VII – Just One of the Guys

I had always dreamed about being just one of the guys. It was easier for me to live a normal existence in school, but once I stepped onto a court, or a field, it seemed to separate me from everyone else. Subconsciously, I'm sure that I shied away from making a connection with other guys. Assuming that people were out to get me was both paranoid and self-defeating, but it was all I had.

My suite-mates didn't give a rat's ass if I could play basketball, let alone throw a ball in the ocean. Although they did feel a little safer having my shade-producing size around if things got rough. For the first time in a long time, I was able to be just one of the guys. Being just another guy meant that there was no pressure to be myself. Maintaining a sports persona is a lot different than being a cool cat in a social setting.

Leaning against the wall with a beer in my left hand was about as difficult as sleeping for me. In fact, Chris taught me the more efficient two-fisted technique that wound up saving us a great deal of time walking back and forth to the keg. It took me a good six months when I first got to school at Piedmont to dull my taste buds enough to enjoy beer. Some people call beer "piss water," but I think there are few guilty pleasures better than that first big sip of cold beer. The pain of minute problems wiped away in a few beers and replaced by a calm buzz that clears the deck for senseless fun.

I started caring less about school and more about pure fun. There was no chance that I would repeat my Dean's List feat of the previous semester; my life had been so structured and programmed in the past that I had to break out! Fuck all of that shit! What goddamn difference did it make if I got a 2.7 or a 3.4 grade-point average. Do people ever ask me years later what my G.P.A. was in the Fall Semester of my sophomore year? Hell no! The fact that I'll never forget my suite dream of a year is more than enough to compensate for my 2.7 cumulative average that semester. It was incredible that I was even able to get out of bed most mornings.

Fall was a relatively quiet time of year on campus but we never looked to other people to set the pace. Chris and Ricky were doing some light work to get ready for the spring lacrosse season and I was busy lifting weights and playing basketball Monday through Friday, but wouldn't be able to play in a real game until early January. Junior and Danny Tampon probably were playing with each other, Tom once got a blister rolling a joint, and Dickstein was well, Dickstein.

Chris and I were fairly inseparable once classes finished at about three o'clock. He used to accompany me to the gym at four o'clock every other day to lift some weights while I was getting a run in for an hour with the hoop team. A quick shower and we were off to dinner, where we usually met up with a few people we knew, including some of the guys in the suite. The only pressure we had in our day was waking up a few minutes before nine o'clock, showering quickly, and running out the door to be on time for our first class. It wasn't exactly the post-teen angst or pimple-faced stress of the average college existence.

My class schedule was fairly simple: Great Books II, Script Writing, English Literature, American Literature, and Linguistics. It was about as much English as one person could take. All of my classes were over by lunch except the Script Writing class, which was by far my favorite.

We would meet one day in class and the other afternoon we would get together in the auditorium to act out or scripts. It was a real buzz to write dialogue and then have other people say my words out loud. We had a real eclectic mix of science fiction, drama, weirdo, and me, the real-life comedian. My play, So What's Wrong With Being Average? was always good for a laugh and made me feel even more in tune with my imagination. My teacher, Mr. Paulson, even wanted to put my play on in the spring for a school theatre project.

I really liked the second Great Books class, along with my Script Writing class, but I was bored to death with my other three classes. These teachers were a bunch of frustrated writers left to teach a bunch of wanna'-bees that they felt were beneath them. The most frustrating part was that I would interpret a poem or story and these fuckin' butt-holes would tell me that my thoughts were nothing like the author's. Unless these guys vacationed with Edgar Allen Poe, I doubt that they knew what that drugged-out genius was thinking. Interpret this.

College would have been so much more fun without all of those classes. I'm sure that most university Dean's would want to shoot me on sight for saying that, but that's the reality in the collegiate pressure cooker. So many different courses with such a vast array of information; it's no wonder that people in college need to blow off some steam.

Being part of an outgoing group of guys gave me more courage to be a little braver in social settings. For some reason, girls would walk in our suite to hang out at all hours of the day and night. It must have been the variety of men in our suite, but most likely it was the high-octane testosterone that was bouncing off our white cement walls. Chicks would flow through in numbers because there was always a good time to be had in Suite 524.

I think most girls came into our suite because they wanted to see Ricky; once they walked in Chris usually took over and tended to pass the ball back and forth with me. Chris had opened me up like a clam protecting its pearl. No subject was off limits, but sex was often the topic of conversation. Although I wasn't getting any, I nonetheless had a lot to say about the topic.

I was still technically going out with Jessica, even though she was at school in Cornell. We talked three or four times a week at least, and she wanted me to come visit her in October. Being a 20 year-old dude with no sex life, besides my right hand, was making me a bit edgy. I needed sex but I was stuck in a relationship I couldn't get out of. Well, I could have escaped if I actually grew a set of balls! But, since my balls hadn't dropped yet, I was stuck in neutral.

The guys often teased me about pulling back when I had chances to score. I think my "safe" status was part of the reason women felt comfortable with me. Women can smell apprehension on a man like an animal picking up the scent of fear from a potential rival. There was this one girl, Anna Valente, who toyed with me like a mouse on a string. She had a boyfriend at home but loved to tease me because we were both so horny we could barely stand it.

I remember this one Friday night in the spring when we wound up back in her suite after hanging out and drinking a bit. She was talking about her sex life with her boyfriend, Paul, and I told her that I had sex only once in the past few years. I knew this dry fact would cause an explosion in her hormone bank and it almost got me where I was unable to go for months. We went back to my room, because Chris usually didn't come in until at least the sun came up, and made out for at least three hours.

Every time my hands roomed to an erogenous zone, Anna made a move like she was uncomfortable so we stopped. Dry humping is the next best thing to actually being there, I guess. To tell you the truth - boyfriend or no boyfriend - I don't think she would have been any different. This girl was a cock-tease of the highest order. I bet she made her boyfriend writhe in pain for months before she eventually gave it up. Another poor bastard!

It was early October and basketball practice was scheduled to start in a week. I had been running a few miles every now and then and ventured out on the refreshing, clear fall day after lifting weights in the gym. Inherently, I don't love running, jogging, sprinting, or anything else having to do with trying to create speed. But, on this day, the ocean breeze guided me toward one of the most beautiful sights my eyes have ever had the privilege of viewing. After crossing East End Highway and jogging past the school's Marine Biology Center, I had a choice to make at a fork in the road.

If I turned right I knew that road would take me closer to the school, but I decided to turn left, where I would probably get to see something new. Houses lined the street on both sides for the next half a mile until my eyes widened and my nostrils flared. I jogged a few more steps until the road ended and the sandy beach took over. In front of me was an inlet and water as far as the eye could see; I was told later that day that Connecticut was in the distance. There was a house at the edge of the inlet that instantly became my dream house. I breathed the clean air deeply into my lungs and felt instantly invigorated. That spot is still one of the places I can go to in my mind when I need to find clarity in my life.

Chris was the kind of guy that made it a point to spread his seed around. The way he bounced from girl to girl you would think that he was in the Screw-Around Protection Program. That was until he passed by Diane McNulty on the upper level of our dorm. She was a petite, 5'4" girl with dark hair and the bluest eyes you have ever seen. The minute Chris made eye contact with this Irish princess his days of being a wandering dude were halted. Diane was a classy girl who would never have given Chris the right time of day unless she had the itch. Word had obviously got around the campus that he was a memorable scratcher because Diane barely hesitated when he made his first move. Guys always think they're so smooth and suave but, in fact, it's usually the women's initiative that seals the deal.

Even though I had known Chris for the better part of nine months, I had a good idea about who he was and what he stood for. That all flew out the window in the four weeks that Chris went out with Diane. I spent nearly every night in the suite waiting for the two of them to emerge from one of their sweaty sessions. I found sitting on the comfortable couch in the suite a better studying alternative to sitting in my dorm room. Not only was I able to finish all of my work in the two hours I was usually out there, it also gave me an opportunity to be more visible to women walking near our suite.

At least one girl a night would walk behind me and whisper into my ear through the screened window as I sat on the couch with my back to them. It was sort of a voyeuristic move on their part and quite an easy way to create casual conversation for me. It was so much more difficult to strike up a conversation with women at the usual social setting, which at college is a bar. I couldn't hear what people were saying with the loud music and crowd noise at a bar, so sitting and having a one-on-one chat gave me a better feel for each person. Drinking beer and conversing is a lot like trying to run with a 20-pound weight around your waist. You can do it but the results aren't pretty.

Chris became so consumed with Diane that we didn't see him much from mid-October to mid-November. I think they were even studying together, which made their coupling even more complete. The next move for Chris was a sweater draped over his back and tied in a knot around his chest. He had completely lost his edge but at least he was happy; that didn't stop the guys in the suite from getting on his case every time he walked into our door. The only guys who he punished for their comments were Junior and Dickstein. Those two weren't allowed to get down and dirty without immediate payback.

Even though Chris was my roommate, the person who seemed the most affected by his absence was Tom. I always knew that Chris and Tom were close, but I never realized how emotionally dependent Tom had become on Chris. While most of the guys were pretty playful with their remarks, Tom would always take his stinging commentary to a more hurtful level.

While Ricky and I would say things like "You got her, so I guess you don't need us anymore," Tom would say "How could you let pussy get in the way of your friends?"

Chris did not see his girlfriend as "pussy" because he was so infatuated with her. For some reason, he took Tom's shit; if it were anyone else, including me, he would have become so pissed off that he would have lost control and kicked someone's ass.
Chapter VIII – Midnight at the Pile-On

The tragic thing about scratching an itch is that it usually doesn't take very long to satisfy the need. Chris went from a powerhouse to an annoyance in a matter of weeks, and Diane was on to bigger and better things. While she was still taking a serious boning from Chris, Diane had lined up Mr. Stiff, Gerry Vaughn, as a more permanent replacement. Gerry was rigid just about everywhere but his groinal region, but his pedigree was far superior to my buddy's - at least he came with papers.

To say that Chris was devastated by the break-up would be like saying that Liberace was barely gay. The guy was inconsolable; the only thing that he seemed to respond to was beer, beer, and more beer. He barely even talked, and was so broken up that he hadn't lit any of his farts on fire for weeks. Drinking was a good idea, but the last time he lit a fart on fire the blast sort of backfired and singed some of his butt hairs and came dangerously close to lighting the back of his balls on fire.

About a week after the dramatic break-up, Chris saw Diane and Gerry Vaughn sucking face near hear suite and he didn't know whether to run over and kick his ass or collapse on the spot and cry. He waited until Greg walked out of sight and then he walked over to Diane's suite and proceeded to whine until she asked him to leave about 20 minutes after he walked through the door. Chris couldn't believe that she dumped him that hard. She was as cold as the inside of a meat locker and Chris felt like a carved piece hung up on a hook.

Later that night, Chris was lying down on his bed staring at the ceiling when Junior walked into the room. I was watching television on Chris's small black and white TV when I turned and said, "Yeah, what's up, Junior?"

He looked up at Chris and said, "What's wrong with him? Is he still moping about that chick that dumped him for that cool guy?"

My eyes widened as I took a deep breath and said quickly, "You better run, bitch."

Chris hopped out of bed and chased after Junior as I closely followed. Junior, that stupid freshman mother-fucker, ran straight into his room instead of bolting out of the suite. I'll give it to that that almost white-haired bastard - he was pretty elusive for a few seconds - like a piglet covered in oil. I managed to tackle him up high and then threw him down on his bed. By that time, Tom, Ricky, and Dickstein had joined me, Chris, and Danny Tampon in the room.

Tom, who was the consummate instigator, yelled out "Pile on!" as five guys piled on top of me and Junior in a stack that even Aunt Jemima would be proud of.

We had so much fun with that initial pile-on that we repeated the ritual nearly every night at the stroke of midnight for the remainder of the semester. I had to be midnight because Chris and I were busy watching The Benny Hill Show at 11:00 p.m. followed by Leave It to Beaver at 11:30 p.m. Once Wally and The Beave got out of whatever trouble that Eddie Haskell had got them into, we were off to flatten Junior. I think I took the brunt of the initial hits being the guy that held a surprisingly cooperative Junior down.

I remember this one high testosterone night when we went through all of the pile-on motions and let Dickstein end the festivities. For some Dickstein reason, he took a running start from the middle of the suite and curled his way to Junior's bed, which was on the left side of the room. Either he didn't zig when he should have zagged, or he was just that pathetic, because all of us froze when he went airborne.

I had known Myron Dickstein since high school when he weighed a paltry 165 pounds. This version of Dickstein was a good 30 pounds heavier from all of the beer consumption, and he looked like Shamu performing a trick at Sea World. The dude was airborne and seemed to have picked up a decent tailwind on the way. The fuckin' guy sailed clear over the pile and crashed through the window on the center wall. It was a good thing that the lower half of his body collided with a small dresser, or the guy would have zoomed clear out of the second floor window and onto the hard ground below.

We heard the crash and quickly disassembled the pile in order to ream out one of the biggest assholes we had ever met. The room was filled with a bunch of "What the fuck, Dickstein!" and I remember saying "How the fuck did you miss the pile?"

Dickstein helped clean up the glass and promised a totally ticked off Danny Tampon that he would pay for the damage. Danny Tampon was not satisfied and even pressed for a few six packs for the trouble. He eventually got a new window and a six-pack from a completely spatially-challenged Dickstein.

The pile was a way for a bunch of guys to blow some steam off after another pressure-packed day of college. Even with Dickstein's incredible miss of the pile, we were back the next night piling on Dickstein. I think Junior was both relieved and very jealous at the same time. It took a few more guys than usual to tame the wild boar that was Myron Dickstein. He was quite the tornado when his temper was sparked.

By the end of the semester, we were drinking every night except Monday and Tuesday. Come to think of it, we even drank while watching Monday Night Football. I remember going to visit Jessica in Cornell one weekend in mid-November. To say that I dreaded being there, and wished I were drinking with the boys, would be like saying that I would rather skip a rectal exam in favor of a massage.

Jessica was about as warm as the inside of an ice fishing hole, but I never got near the hole itself. Two more day of no sex and I was scaling the walls of her dorm room. She was telling me that guys had been asking her out all semester, but she had refused their advances. I was kind of hoping that she would let me off the sharp hook, but the 18 year-old frigid JAP needed to torture me a bit more before I could get up the balls to take a walk.

I tried so hard to make out with her that weekend but she always had an excuse to counter my advances. I got so frustrated, that by Saturday night I was ready to go back home. I woke up early Sunday morning, threw my shit together, gave her a peck on the forehead and told her I would call her when I got back. She barely moved and said something like "Thanks for coming" to me as I walked out the door. I thought to myself, "Thanks for coming? I didn't even cum at all!"

Chapter IX - Break Up, Light Up

It was a long drive back to school from the airport, and I had almost all day to think about my fucked-up relationship with Jessica. There were so many things that I wanted to say to her and I couldn't wait to get back to the suite to call her on the phone. Mind you, this was the mid-80s and cell phones were huge bricks that rich people toted around or stuck in their cars. Nobody at school had a wireless phone, which gave people a chance to be unreachable every now and then.

It was amazing that I wasn't pulled over for speeding on my mad dash back, but I raced up to the suite and made a beeline for the phone. Chris was sitting on his bed staring at the ceiling as I picked up the phone and started dialing. As usual, I got to talk to Jessica's answering machine instead of the real thing. I often thought that my relationship was much simpler with that damn machine than with her. She was probably sitting there screening her calls anyway.

The message I left went something like this: "Hey Jess, this is Paul. I just got back to school and I have something on my mind. Get back to me, we really need to talk." I hung up the phone and looked at Chris, who had rolled over to be able to talk to me.

I shook my head and he said, "You gonna' finally dump that bitch?"

I replied, "Yeah man, she barely even spent time with me this weekend. I need to fuck the shit out something before my dick falls off from lack of use!"

Chris fell off his bed with absolutely no concern about crashing onto the floor. He knew my split personality was about to collide into a painful brick wall but couldn't believe that I had finally had enough.

I spent the next three days trying to contact Jessica, but each time I got her answering machine. Then, on Thursday night, I called and was determined to move on. I realized that Jessica knew that the relationship was over. She was avoiding me because she didn't want to hear the words; Jessica was much more the hunter than the hunted. Her family was used to bossing people around – from household maids to waiters at a restaurant – and they rarely ever lost control of any situation.

"Jessica! Pick up the phone!" I said in a slightly elevated tone of voice. "If you don't pick up, this will be the last time that you hear my voice." Little did she know that even if she did pick up the phone, it would be the last time she would hear my voice.

I briefly looked at Chris, who said "Hang up the fuckin' phone!" As I was about to give up for good, a faint voice crinkled through the line "Hello."

I quickly said, "Why do you always have to make everything so difficult?"

A few painless minutes later Jessica and I went our separate ways. She was avoiding me because she knew what was coming; I felt free even before I hung up the phone.

Chris came over to me and gave me a forceful high ten and said, "It's about fuckin' time, big man!"

I looked at him and said the one thing that he wasn't expecting, "If you ever wanted to get me high, this will probably be your only chance."

The look of amazement and glee on his face was priceless and I was ready to throw caution to the wind.

We went to the beer store and within an hour and three six packs later, we were in usual form. Of course, Tom had nursed only a couple of beers and Ricky showed up mid-way and had also finished a few. Chris and I were going beer for beer, as usual, and he and Tom had finally prepared a smokeable treat for their recently freed buddy. We were all spared of hanging out with Dickstein, because he was away for a few days babysitting his parents' dog while they went away for the weekend to an Accountants Convention.

Nearly 21 years had gone by in my life but I was still a smoking virgin. My parents had smoked for the better part of their lives but I had never tried any type of cigarette. I never understood the fascination that people had with smoking. When people complain about getting cancer, or other smoking-related diseases, I am amazed that they couldn't figure out that putting a smokestack to your lips might not be a good thing. Nonetheless, I was willing to risk it all to let down my guard for a minute.

I made sure to watch the other guys before I inhaled for the first time. It was important to not inhale like I was about to go swimming under water, because that would lead to an immediate coughing fit and certain lasting embarrassment. The boys were impressed with my technique but I knew this newfound skill would not be a habit.

Less than 20 minutes after my last toke, the strangest sensation help close the marijuana door forever.

I stood in the middle of the suite and exclaimed, "What the fuck! I can't feel my dick! What kind of bullshit is this?"

The numbing effect of the drug had gone directly to my central penis system and shut down my most vital of organs. The guys were cracking up and Chris was even rolling on the floor in laughter.

It wasn't bad enough that I lost my best friend, my underutilized lower brain, but I also had a paper due the next day. I sat at my desk for the next hour and basically stared at the paper. By 11:00 p.m. my penis had come back from the dead and I was able to churn out my thoughts for the assignment. The paper somehow wound up being a B+ so I figured either the teacher was blind or I was a decent numb-dick writer.

A couple of days later I was on a bus headed toward the basketball team's first game. I sat out the first ten games of the season but traveled to six away games in support of the team. We had a big coach bus, so the cheerleaders were on board with us for support and to save money. When I was at Piedmont, the players and the cheerleaders both had their own coach buses. If I were playing, having women on the bus would have been an unnecessary distraction. If I were still going out with Jessica, having women on the bus would have been a complete frustration.

I was thinking about anything but basketball on the hour-long bus ride to Straud University. First I finished an assignment I had let go for a few days and then I stared out the window thinking about the events of the past few days and months. I knew that my life had to change going forward; the caution I had failed to throw to the wind held my back from having some serious fun. The boys of Suite 524 had started me down the road toward freeing my spirit and unlocking the beast inside of me. Smoking pot and numbing the hell out of my penis was really stupid and immature but it brought a smile to my face when I thought of Chris rolling around on the floor heaving from laughter.

I heard a soft, female voice behind me say "What's so funny?"

I turned around and said, "How did you know I was laughing?"

"I saw your reflection in the window," she replied.

Just then we pulled into the parking lot of the Straud U. gym before I could even make my move. My teammates and most of the cheerleaders started filing out of the bus and I stood up and faced the girl that was talking to me. I walked toward the aisle and she said "My name is Kelly," and she slowly brushed past me in her cheerleading outfit. "I'll see you later, Paul" she added as she strutted her stuff ahead of me off the bus.

I never realized until that moment that women targeted guys and then gave them the green light on their own terms. I had seen Kelly around campus and practicing with the other cheerleaders in the gym but hesitated to approach her because I was both a pussy and hiding behind a phantom girlfriend. The team lost the game that night but I got to sit with Kelly on the bus the whole way home. She lived in the dorm next to us and had a few girlfriends in the suite a couple of doors down from us.

She said things like "I hear you guys are wild" and "My friends tell me that you're a really nice guy."

The real question was: Did I want to be known as a wild man or a nice guy? Well, nice guys not only finish last they rarely ever get laid. They might get a chance every now and then to make some passionless love, but they very rarely get an opportunity to really fuck a woman. No, I wanted to be the charming guy who would rock the house and deliver the goods.

We got home around 11:30 that Saturday night and, after the bus dropped us off at the gym, I gave Kelly a ride back to the dorms. I parked my car and we started going at it like two wild dogs. We groped each other for about 15 minutes until I said "Let's go to my room."

I limped out of the car and the dark-haired, short-skirted temptress held my hand as we quickly walked up to my room. The suite was empty because all of the guys were at the campus hangout for a pre-Thanksgiving mixer. I quickly put a sock on my door, signaling to Chris that he better keep his ass in the suite and not bother my pursuit of higher learning.

Kelly was definitely the beneficiary of all of my bottled up sexual energy and I thanked the stars for sending me such a flexible and loving partner. After a couple of sweaty sessions, Kelly did the next best thing to letting me loose in a candy shop. She said "I had a great time but I have a boyfriend."

Since I was so happy to have real sex, I replied "Well, if you ever need to blow of some steam my door is always open."

I walked Kelly out into the suite and smiled at Chris, who was sitting with his mouth open on the couch.

I offered to drive her home but I think she wanted to keep a low profile. Within seconds I walked back into the suite and was greeted by Chris holding a couple of beers. "It's good to have my dick back!" I exclaimed.

"I came back to see if you were here, but I didn't realize that you were really back" Chris said.

I looked at Chris and replied, "All that and she has a boyfriend."

He gave me a hive five and we both said "Jackpot!" as we walked out of the suite and down to the party for another 45 minutes until they closed the place down for the night.

I must have been giving off some kind of scent that night because I nearly hooked up with another girl within minutes of arriving at the party. I was getting a few beers for the guys and this girl fell backwards and I caught her. It was a combination of too much to drink and some wetness building up from spilled beer near the counter that sent the girl into my arms. The girl, named Patty, gave me a kiss on the neck and squeezed my ass as she said "Thanks, I owe you one."

She repaid me a few beers later as I was coming out of the bathroom. She was walking toward me and then pulled me into an adjacent, dark hallway and we started making out.

Ten minutes later, she pulled back awkwardly and said "I gotta' pee." I went back inside and met up with the boys, purely because I had satisfied most of my urges for the time being. If I hadn't rump-shaked with Kelly, I probably would have waited by the bathroom door to take advantage of Patty. Chris looked at me and saw lipstick all over my face and neck and said "Dude, when it rains it pours!"

I looked around at the guys and exclaimed "Then let it rain like a mother-fucker!"

Chapter X – Hoop Screams

As focused as I was the first few months of the semester, that's about how blurry things got in the last month. All of that pent up anxiety inside my body released itself like a rocket launch. Word had spread quickly that the boys of Suite 524 new how to make a woman smile. Whether we were witty conversationalists or satisfaction brokers, we became marked but extremely happy men.

Once December hit, I knew my days as a "free man" were numbered. The New Year would end my basketball exile to satisfy NCAA regulations. Some people saw my inactivity for receiving a full scholarship and changing schools as a punishment, but I saw it as a necessary pause and a chance to start my life.

I had been practicing every day with the team and was determined to maintain my lifestyle once the real games began. Playing basketball for me was as routine as riding a bike or hanging out with the boys. Studying during December was supposed to hit a crescendo as the end of the semester approached, but the only things we were majoring in were drinking and carousing.

It was fortunate that I had built up a decent base for my low "B" average. Most of the heavy lifting for the fall semester had already been done and I kicked up my partying and womanizing to an all-time level. With Chris and Ricky as my guides I couldn't go wrong. Chris had seemingly recovered from the Diane fiasco and was back piling up conquests like it was a competition. Although I didn't have the feeling that he was competing against me or anybody else, I knew that my pal was still hurting down deep.

In order to understand college guys, you have to become familiar with the environment that surrounds us. If you think high school was stressful, spend a few months at college and watch the pressure be pumped up through the roof. High school was a pressure-packed, caste-system where weaknesses were exposed and the meek were picked on by the strong. In comparison, high school was a cakewalk because you could go home at 2:15 p.m. every day. Kids that suffered abuse at home could find peace at school, and kids that were pushed down at school could go home at the end of the school day and find peace.

College was a blending of such varied personalities and habits. You not only had to take a full load of difficult classes, but you also had to live with people from all walks of life. People that didn't fit in to the fast-paced life of excess suffered more torture in one semester than they did in their entire high school years. In the world of put up or get the fuck out of the way, it was much easier to give in to the temptations than resist and be ridiculed. Peer pressure was so great that it became almost unbearable to not be swept up by the crowd.

I had started my college career slowly but was now in the full swing of things by my third year. I had seen the year off as a second chance to get things right; in college, there was definitely a right and wrong way to go about your days. Integrating a more hedonistic lifestyle into my world not only freed up my body it also released my mind. By "release" I mean that my thoughts and my views were widened to many more possibilities than before. This newfound freedom also heightened my ability to relax and be one of the boys; to be comfortable with whom I was and not constantly try to maintain a certain tidy image. There was absolutely no room in college to hide and sulk because there was only fun and excitement in our no-limits world.

As much as I was enjoying school, the weight of the Rawlings Basketball world was starting to shift onto my broad shoulders. Even though I was the only productive white guy on a predominantly black team, color was never in my thoughts when I stepped on the court. The local newspaper did a full-page article on me and the impact I was expected to have on a three-win, five-loss team. My confidence was sky-high during practice but tended to both sink and soar during games. It was tough sitting and watching but the balancing act was quickly coming to an end.

Life had become one calm buzz after the other, so pushing past that barrier and becoming completely wasted was an unusual occurrence. Getting up in the morning was a much slower, calmer experience than to be greeted by the howlers at my parent's house. My mom's idea of greeting the day was reminding me every 30 seconds how much time I had left before the bus came. It was a real joy to drive myself to school the second half of my senior year and avoid the pressure cooker. Back at college, Chris and I were masters of the five-minute shower and dress drill. Wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a pair of sneakers wasn't exactly a rigorous task to get dressed.

I managed to make it through my finals and then had a few days off before coming back to resume my basketball career. With all of the guys going home for a month-long vacation, I would be moving into an adjacent dorm for the duration of the Winter Session. My suite-mates were my teammates and I decided to pass on taking a class so I could focus on hoops.

In hindsight, I probably should have taken a class to break up the incredible monotony that set in. This was my first Winter Session on the East End, and both the school and the town were completely desolate. I hadn't spent much time with the guys on the team off the court, but that all changed in a matter of days. With a few days left before my first game, Coach Shaw inserted me into the starting lineup at center. The two forwards beside me were Delroy "Ice Man" Johnson and Calvin Benson, with guards Andre Wilson and Horace "Downtown" Brown filling out the starting five.

The guy who used to play center, Gary Tyrell, left school after the first semester because he saw the handwriting on the wall. Nobody had to tell Gary that I would be starting once I was eligible. Practice after practice went by with me kicking his ass; it got so bad at the end of the semester that Coach simply let me run with the first team so we could gel together. Gary was a nice guy but he was a bit spoiled by his success in high school against inferior competition. I heard he transferred to another Division II school but wound up quitting after not getting enough playing time.

I was headed back to Connecticut, the state of many of my games while at Piedmont, for my hoop premier at Rawlings. I was jittery but focused as I walked into the Mid State University building. I tried to suppress any memories I had from sitting and watching my last game in that gym. Once in the locker room, it felt good to slip on my blue number 24, Rawlings jersey. As much as I enjoyed my freedom, it was time to earn my keep. A switch had been turned on my brain and my previously neutral body.

I walked out into the hallway with my teammates as we prepared to enter the gym. The main doors of the building swung open and I slowly picked up my head to see who was walking in. The sight of Coach Blanda walking toward me had surprisingly little effect. The bad memories of my year-and-a-half torture were well in the rear view mirror.

I walked up to the coach and said, "Hey, coach! What brings you here?"

He was stunned at first but felt much more at ease seeing how welcoming I was to his presence.

Coach Blanda said he was there "to scout Mid State" but we both knew that his mission was definitely two-fold. I really didn't care if he felt guilty for how he mistreated me, or if he just wanted to see if I was all right. No thanks to him, I had survived the harsh reality of life and had picked up all of the pieces even before I stepped onto the court. I made sure I watched where the coach was sitting so I could get a good view of his face during the game.

The 1,500-person capacity gym was about half-full once I stepped into the center circle to start the game. Twenty minutes later the first half ended in grand fashion. I got a pass in the deep left corner and launched a 25-footer as the halftime buzzer sounded. The ball hadn't even gone through the net and I was already halfway to the locker room with a smile on my face. I looked up in the crowd and nodded at my ex-coach and he tipped his imaginary cap to me. It was a good start to my second life in college.

We were down by three points and I had scored 17 points and grabbed 10 rebounds at the half. It was a satisfying comeback, at least until Coach Shaw stormed into the locker room. He yelled, "God damnit!

And then looked straight at me, "Adams, when are you going to get your head out of your ass?!"

There must have been another Adams in the room, because he couldn't have been talking to me. Shaw went out to chew me out for the next few minutes while my stunned teammates looked on in disbelief. As everyone filed out of the locker room and back into the gym, I slowly got up and looked at my coach.

He winked at me, smiled, and smacked my butt, whispering "Go get 'em, tiger."

I had fallen for the oldest trick in the coaching book; somehow I had forgotten my days of playing for my dad when I was a kid. He would always yell at and criticize me to both avoid hurting the other players' feelings and downplay my own contribution. Of course, the fact that my dad continued to berate me when the other guys were gone sort of took any remaining joy out of the event. I would learn to tune out Coach Shaw real quick, just as I had done to my own father.

Coach Blanda made a quick exit after the first half and I was content knowing that I still had a little gas left in the tank. We wound up losing the game by a few points but I was happy to be back in my old comfort zone again. While it is true that "old habits die hard," I was convinced that my basketball career would never be put to rest as long as my dad was around. He traveled nearly two and-a-half hours to get to the game and would have taken a space shuttle to outer space if my hoop-playing-ass were running up and down the court.

That's the fucked up thing about sports; it's never just about the sport itself. There is so much drama attached to a stupid game that you would think that a soap opera and a kid's game collided with the force of two jets. I remember sitting in the locker room after that first game, sweat dripping of my tired body and ker-plunking onto the tiled floor. The smell of old sweat invaded my space like a favorite food around dinner time. The room was as quiet as a library on a Saturday night, but some of the bench players were fooling around.

A few guys walked up to me and slapped my hand saying, "Good game" or "You were doing your thing." There were a few things I was doing out there, so I assumed "my thing" was a lot more productive than merely sitting on the bench and picking splinters out of my ass.

The redness of my legs suggested that I wasn't quite ready for prime time yet; a few more weeks of game action would give my pins the reinforcement they needed to be more effective. I ran my fingers through my wet, cool hair and slowly undressed to take a welcomed shower. The heat of the shower penetrated my aching back like it was some kind of magic cure.

Years of doing yoga and tai chi have taught me that I wasted a lot of sleepless, painful nights in those days. Beer was my pain killer back then; focus, breath, and positive energy work wonders now.

That month of January was both long and cold. I slept most days until about noon and then either practiced with team or got ready for the next game. I was one of the slowest months of my life; it reminded me of the summer my parents didn't sign me up for camp and I had to create me own fun. When you aren't old enough to drive, summer fun usually consists of sweating and watching the grass turn brown. Substitute snow, cold, and a town so empty that even the ghosts left, and you have a recipe for tremendous beer consumption. I even met Coach Shaw at a bar a few times to drink and shoot the breeze. There was only six years difference between us, and the young mentor was always glad to have the company in such a sleepy town.

I missed the guys from my suite so much that by the end of the month-long stretch in solitary I drove to Chris's house and picked his ass up and brought him back to school. As much as I enjoyed basketball, the emphasis on such a single-minded pursuit was starting to get to me. My tolerance for the game had suffered greatly in my absence. My "civilian" life was more to my liking and I was looking forward to mixing the two once the Spring Semester started.

Chapter XI - Boys Are Back in Town

My world had been realigned when the boys of Suite 524 left town. My life had become a little more structured but nobody really have a shit what I had going on; college students are usually completely consumed by their own sense of self that there really isn't any room for anybody else's agenda. My schedule was already pretty full with a mix of educational and social issues on the docket but once I added intercollegiate athletics to the mix, my life seemed to achieve a balance that I had coveted for quite some time.

I was concerned with the look in Chris's eyes as we walked from the car to our suite. He had left in December with an obviously mending heart from his awful break-up with Diane McNulty. Diane had also taken great pleasure in torturing Chris, for some reason, and he fell for the bait like a stupid fish lunging at a worm on a hook. My theory was that Diane was scoring one for all of the ladies; Chris had broken his share of hearts and she was just getting her fill and moving on.

The fact that Chris had to pass Diane's suite every time he walked through the quad only served as further torture for a guy who was already skating on thin ice. I even started walking him through the side entrance of the dorm so he could see the situation from a different perspective. Yeah, that worked as well as my mother trying to disguise Brussels sprouts by hiding them under a fluffy bed of potatoes. There was no shielding Chris from Diane - and let me just say - my dog did me a solid and ate everything green and inedible I tossed at him.

The semester kicked off on Saturday late afternoon when I was sitting in the suite with Tom, Chris, and Ricky drinking some beers before dinner. The precession of people started with Danny Tampon rolling through with his usually short and gruff personality. He obviously couldn't wait to get back to school, and threw his gear in his room and grabbed a beer from the suite fridge. "Where's fuckin' Junior?"

I looked at Chris and then we glared at Dan the Man. "Fuck if we know" Chris said.

I followed up with "He'll probably be rolling in with his white people posse any minute.

Just as I got the words out, Junior walked into the suite and said, "Hey guys. Miss me?"

That mother-fucker loved all of the attention of being the pancake on the bottom of the pile. I stopped Chris from getting up as I saw Junior's mother, sister, and father walk through the suite door in straight-line precision. A few minutes later Junior was walking out the door with his parents, undoubtedly for an evening eating food blanketed with all different types of cheese. He even stayed out all night until sneaking back into the suite around 11 o'clock, only to be ambushed hours later once we all returned from a local bar.

After Junior left with a smack on the back of his head from Tom, we were mulling around and getting closer to going to dinner. Chris was on his was to take a piss and I heard him yell "No way, Dickstein!"

I came running from my room, Tom zipped up his fly and booked from the bathroom and Ricky roll-dodged out of his room with his lacrosse stick, to thwart the lame Dickstein effort.

"You are the weakest mo-fo' on the planet, Dickstein!" Chris yelled.

I added, "Yo man, you were supposed to bring us a case of beer for losing that hockey game in the game room!"

Tom added his usual barb, "What the fuck did you do to your hair? Get the fuck out of here and get us some beer!"

Even Ricky, who was usually as polite as a southern gentlemen yelled, "Welcher!

And Danny Tampon added, "A bet's a bet, dickhead!"

We collectively pushed the awkward Dickstein out of the suite and Tom rigged the door so he couldn't get back in.

Freakin' Dickstein was saying, "Can't I just put my stuff in my room?" but were having none of that bullshit.

We waited until the coast was clear and then we climbed out of Tom and Ricky's window. Tom was an absolute artist when it came to playing practical jokes on people. He might have been a skinny mother fucker with stringy, black hair but he was the man when it came to fucking with people's heads. I guess it goes to prove that if you don't give a shit about yourself, then what ounce of care will you have for other people?

We took our sweet-ass time eating dinner knowing that Dickstein would race to the beverage center to get the case of beer. We even told him that he better get a cold case or his ass would be sleeping on the porch. We weren't being cruel because it took the dude so long to follow through on anything. It was painful to watch the rusty wheels in his brain trying to generate enough power to produce intelligent thought. That just goes to show how much the diploma hanging on my wall is worth.

Dickstein was sitting on the porch when we got back and Tom made him turn away as he climbed through his window and into his room. I looked at Chris with a "How else could he get into the suite" face. Dickstein looked at us like we should help him lug his stuff into the suite. Chris bent over, picked up the case of Bud Tall-Boys, and led us into the suite. That mother-fucker was always looking for a hand-out; I can't remember him ever lifting a finger for any of us.

I guess we were in a charitable mood that night, because we not only let Dickstein have one of the beers, we also let him go out with us to the off-campus bar The Keg. That doesn't sound like such a generous gesture, because you've never been with Dickstein when he drinks. The words "spit shield" immediately come to mind; the guy let off more water than Old Faithful. Not exactly the complement to a "rap" that a guy would be looking for.

With nature calling, I stepped away from the bar and strolled into the bathroom. After drinking 10 beers or so, the endless stream of liquid sprinting out of my member literally brought tears to my eyes. Have you ever taken one of those penis-busting pisses that were so gratifying that it made your eyes roll back from relief? I'm not sure if woman can feel such relief, but guys know that we can't hold the piss back too long.

I put my drained member away, zipped up the fly of my jeans, rinsed my hands quickly, and walked out of the bathroom. My vision must have been slightly impaired by the dim lighting and the beer intake, because I bumped into someone as I entered the hallway. I wound up pinning the girl against the wall with her back to me; the hallway was dark and warm from the heat coming off our bodies.

"You gonna' let me off the wall?" she calmly asked.

"That all depends." I replied.

"Who are you?"

I pressed my body against hers and said, "Does it matter."

She turned around and faced me and I could even see her bright blue eyes in the dim lighting. I had seen Jenny Bishop around campus a few times and definitely admired her from afar. That's the strange thing about college and relationships; like everything else in life, timing is everything. Forcing the issue is pointless because things really do come out of patience.

We went from face-to-face to lips-to-lips in the blink of an eye; the spontaneity was about as fierce as my desire to pee a few minutes before the encounter. It must have been the alcohol at work because I barely felt my back slamming against the wall. It would leave one of those drinking bruises you get and wake up the next day in pain and wondering what the hell you did to cause yourself harm.

Jenny was built like a brick shit-house and must have grown up in upstate New York or the Midwest. Hell, she almost knocked me down when I first collided with her! Since the mixer was winding down, the hallway was pretty quiet except for the occasional inebriated person who was as blind as Stevie Wonder. The heat between us was incredible as we went at it like two wild animals in heat.

It was the mid-1980s and sex was still pretty free in those days. The AIDS epidemic and scare was still a few years off and most of the guys in the suite had absolutely no problem letting their "members" free for a little exercise. Jenny and I had bumped and grinded our way into a small, dark meeting room off of the hallway and quickly wound up on the hard, carpeted floor.

Clothes were flying off like a tornado was whipping through the room. Usually, the oral portion of the festivities would take over until the "main event" was ready to start. But, on this night, there was no denying the horizontal mambo and the impacts of its dizzying dance.

Jenny quickly jumped on top of me and we were slamming into each other like two rams bucking horns. It was the best sex that I barely remember, but I know it was good. I passed out for a few minutes and then crawled around the room looking for my clothes. Jenny had taken her orgasm and scrambled back to her dorm. My jeans and underwear were around my ankles, so I stood up and started to get dressed.

The light from the hallway barely lit the room I was in and my form was barely visible to passersby. Chris came walking through and did a double-take when he passed the room. "Big time, is that you? he said as he stopped walking.

I replied, "I think so."

I was standing in the middle of the dark room with no shirt, sweat rolling down my chest, and my hair was completely messed up. Chris asked, "Dude, what the hell happened to you?"

It was one of those times when "sex was in the air," so Chris said "You mother-fucker! Chris picked up my shirt, threw it at me and said, "Let's get the fuck out of here."

Chapter XII - Nightclub Night

I walked into the Bay Point Dorm at 7:00 on a Tuesday night and headed straight for room 115. It had been a few days since my chance encounter with Jenny and I wanted to show my face. Since she hadn't looked for me, I decided to take the "high road" and see what was up.

I knocked on the door but no one answered on the other side. She had one of those message boards fixed to her wood door, so I pulled the pen out of the holder and started to right as I leaned on the door. To my surprise the door opened and I saw a dim light so I walked in and closed the door behind me.

Jenny, in all of her glory, was lying on her bed with her eyes closed and a pair of headphones on. Since she was lying on only half of the bed, I decided to do the only thing that any red-blooded American would do - I lied down next to her. The funny part was that she kept her eyes closed and used her hands to see who was sharing her bed.

She kept feeling her way until she got to the bulge in my pants. I was watching her face the whole time and I could tell that she didn't know who I was until she felt her way south. Two questions came to mind: Does she feel up all of the guys? And would she remember me from that drunken night? I still haven't found out the answer to that first question but the second answer was a resounding "YES!"

That girl had a strong pair of legs and we had an instant sexual chemistry that I have seldom experienced in my life. An hour after I had entered Jenny and the room, I was out cold while listening to the waves of the ocean crash onto the shore. I awoke peacefully to the sound of seagulls and a kiss from Jenny. She had work to do and I had to float back to my dorm to do a little work. Yeah, very little.

The relationship I had with Jenny lasted until we graduated a few years later. We were never boyfriend and girlfriend; it was more a tidal relationship than a constant flow. There were times when we didn't talk or see each other for months, but there were also days when we would go at it like two beasts in heat.

I don't remember ever having a conversation for more than two minutes with Jenny. What was there really to say, anyway? When two bodies produce such beautiful, unspoken sounds, any words uttered subsequently would certainly come up short. Jenny Bishop marked the first relationship I had with a woman that made me feel like I was doing my job as a man. I had never experienced sex like that before; every other sexual experience I encountered before that was basically meaningless. There was a connection between us that refused to be denied; days, weeks, and sometimes months would go by and the passion would never wane. Wow! What heat! I'm starting to sweat just thinking about it.

The month of February brought with it the semi-formal bash affectionately called Nightclub Night. This was our opportunity to really do things differently; instead of getting drunk in casual clothes we would get dressed up and stagger around instead.

The tables in the school's cafeteria would be cleared away for "white bopping" and the eight o'clock start, but our party started hours before that. Chris and I were busy setting up the bar in the suite Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m. The bar was anchored right outside of our room with a bunch of milk crates and a long table top. The guys were amazing at "gathering" items together at a moment's notice. I never asked where the things came from but I'm sure the discount was of the "five finger" variety.

Many people on campus had secured dates for the big event but the boys of Suite 524 decided to go "stag." This type of event is best left for the heathens and the sinners than the committed and the proper. This was truly a night for us to raise the level of our uncurbed behavior and bring everyone down with us.

The beer drinking started while we were setting the place up and served merely as a prelude for the hard liquor that was to follow. The great thing about our suite was that there wasn't a squeamish guy in the bunch. What I mean by that is that we all liked to drink and nobody was ever excluded... even Dickstein!

Speaking of Dickstein, he was in rare form as he got ready for the festivities. There are people in life that look natural when they play "dress up," and there are others that appear to be pained by the experience. Dickstein's left the top button open on his white dress shirt and loosely made his brown and yellow striped tie. He was one of those guys that still looked sloppy even when he wore his good clothes.

Turning from a sweaty mess to a pair of roommates; Chris and I hopped in the two adjacent showers in our bathroom and clinked our Molson beers over the top of the plaster structure. One of life's true pleasures is a cold beer in a hot shower. Since we were the last two guys to shower, the other guys kept walking in and out of the bathroom to groom themselves in the mirror. Junior was such a youngster - he started shaving and Tom kicked him out of the bathroom saying, "Get the fuck out of here, Junior! Come back when you reach puberty!"

The guy who spent the most time in front of the mirror was Danny Tampon. God only knows why he wasted so much time checking himself out from every conceivable angle; he had as much of a chance of getting laid as Dickstein. Between Danny's cologne, after-shave, hair gel, and after shower powder, he could have opened a drug store.

Being a southern gentleman, Ricky was so damn proper that he would have no alternative other than scoring at will. The guy was a chick magnet to start with, and seeing him in a suit only strengthened his lofty status. Ricky was a slick bastard; I rarely ever saw him with a girl. Mind you, I had seen him talking with flirty-ass girls, but he was incredibly private and discreet about his affairs. For all we knew, he could have been sleeping with the Dean's decent-looking wife.

Being athletes, Chris and I had seen our share of locker rooms. We were both modest and comfortable as we strolled around the bathroom and suite in towels that barely concealed our manhood. From time to time, girls would stroll in and out of the suite asking us what time they should come back for the party. Our senses of humor had mixed and blended into one endless and seamless laugh. Where one of us started the other one would finish and often our jokes involved sex and anatomy. I think most people liked being set free from the normal awkward conversation between men and women. To us, no subject was off limits; no topic was too racy; and no woman was unattainable.

Chris walked into our room and blasted some U2 on our stereo. We listened to their albums so much that we even went to sleep to the music of Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen, Jr. "The boys" from Ireland had struck a passionate chord inside of us and inspired us to reach for greater heights. Tom, who made me listen to the incredible sounds of the band Rush, was also expanding my Top 40 and disco roots. "New Year's Day" was blasting from our room and Tom was sitting in his hammock while listening to Getty Lee and his crew blasting "Tom Sawyer."

I looked over at Chris, who was tightening the knot on his tie, and I completed my knot much in the way my dad had showed me a few years before. It was party time and Chris was behind the bar pouring the drinks freely. He was so thorough that he installed and plugged in a mini-fridge behind the bar.

We were such a popular suite in the Beachside dorm that our numbers seemed to be growing. Our core of seven guys had swelled to 10 within weeks of the start of the semester.

Our first addition was a friend of Danny Tampon's named Brad Fine. Fine was my exact opposite in every conceivable way – he was short (only 5'4"), quiet, and he had never had sex. The first time I met him, he walked into the suite with a Hawaiian shirt on and I turned to Chris and said, "Check out Magnum Pee-Wee." In those days, Tom Selleck was making a good living as tropical detective Magnum P.I., so the comparison was completely unavoidable.

Another other dude that started hanging out with us was Tony Bosco. Bosco was a kind, gentle guy wrapped in a sea of muscles. The 6'2" Hercules been involved in Junior Mr. Universe competitions for years but had cashed his dumbbells in for the refreshing taste of 12-ounce curls. TP, or Sweet Chocolate, as we called him, was soft and somewhat absorbent but became the force behind our drive to be anything but goodfella's.

The final piece of the puzzle was a new friend of mine, Scott Bauman. I must have sought Scott out as a reaction to Chris's problems. It took us a while to come up with a nickname for Scott, but we settled on Bau.

Within a few minutes of the first "official" drinks, the suite door was constantly swinging open. Magnum Pee Wee walked in and then Bosco pounded the faded carpet.

The shots of Montey Alban Mescal Tequila were flowing through our veins and clicking off inhibition and memory switches. I vaguely remembered walking from our dorm to the cafeteria where the Nightclub Night was being held. We must have been drinking for a long time because the event was almost half-over by the time we strolled in.

My last memory was walking in and seeing how wonderfully the cafeteria was decorated. It's strange when you spend so much time at an ordinary place every day and then it seems to magically transform in front of your eyes.

The funny thing about life is the way our brains function. That is what makes this "ride" so interesting for me – things happen from time to time that give you pause – the days are a lot more significant than waking up, eating three meals, watching TV, and then going to sleep.

Speaking of sleeping... I woke up the next morning feeling a bit hung over, but generally refreshed. As is my routine, I usually put on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt before I go to bed. When I looked down on that morning, I was wearing the same sport jacket and slacks that I had on the previous night. My tie was also still firmly secured around my neck. The first thing that popped into my slightly clouded head was "That was a wild night." But, upon further reflection, my next thought was "How the hell did I get here?"

My only black-out experience left me wondering what happened during the missing chunk of time. What was I doing between the time I entered Nightclub Night and when I crashed in bed? It was about 11:30 a.m., so I decided to rustle up any live bodies and get some Sunday brunch. Since Chris only functioned in the hours between 1:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m., I woke Dickstein up and we slowly cruised down to the scaled-down cafeteria.

Once at the cafeteria, we saw Junior and Danny Tampon and I even got a big bear hug from the massive biceps of Mr. Bosco, who said "Man, we had a great conversation last night!" How the hell was I supposed to respond to that? You can't tell someone, "Dude, I don't remember that meaningful conversation."

Instead I said, "I'm a little fuzzy this morning but I enjoyed talking to you, too."

Of course, everything that floats from my mouth is meaningful but I'm sure that a conversation between two big, sensitive, drunk guys must have been as earth-shaking as a baby's first words.

Chapter XIII – Beer Hunter

My second go-round as a sophomore consisted primarily of classes, basketball, and one drunken escapade after another. Every suite idea that Chris and I came up with was focused around drinking.

Deep down, Chris knew that he would eventually pay the price for his lack of exposure to education that spring semester. Honestly, he could have cared less at the time. While his parents were a couple of cool, nice and understanding people they weren't that cool, nice and understanding. What parent would be happy about throwing thousands of their hard-earned dollars down the toilet?

Chris became his own public double negative when he held the truth from parents that previously trusted him. It wasn't as if I was always up front with my parents. The information that I withheld paled in comparison to being the first person in your family to go to college and then throwing it all away.

Maybe that "first kid to go to college" pressure was getting to Chris. Maybe he was in need of professional help for his alcohol and drug addiction. Maybe it was none of my business, even though the dude was my best friend.

When Chris graduated from drinking and partying three times a week to making it a daily activity – like brushing his teeth – I knew the hole had been dug too deep. Going down after him would have been totally foolish and completely out of character for me. Besides, I wasn't unhappy with my life.

Guys have an innate way of ignoring the most emotional of issues. We don't talk about our feelings! I'm not even sure that college girls cross the line and have a good cry after they tell each other the painful, awful truth? We don't cry unless our team loses the big game or our favorite jersey gets ripped. Y'know, I get all choked up thinking about a hole I found in my Tom Seaver jersey. Excuse me a second while I dry my moist eyes off.

I have always been a huge Robert Deniro fan, and admired his work in the film Deer Hunter a great deal. Those scenes when he was a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war and had to play Russian roulette for his betting captives have stayed with me for a long time.

The only thing left to do was incorporate anything we liked into a fun, lethal drinking game. The natural fit was obvious: Saturday night would bring a new drinking game to Suite 524 called Beer Hunter.

The concept was so simple that I couldn't see anything but tears of joy in our future. The first step of the process involved a quick trip to the beverage store. Although we always drank Molson, the thought of seeing our favorite golden beverage being wasted did not sit well. Also, the bottle was not working as a visual for us in the whole Beer Hunter vision.

Chris, Tom, and I walked into the cold, drafty beverage store and immediately started scouting for large quantities of beer at the lowest possible prices. When the selection obviously got narrowed down to cans versus bottles, Chris and I hit the mother-load when we walked in front of a display that read, "PBR: $3.99 per case. Good old Pabst Blue Ribbon; the kind of beer that would mesh better with carpets and walls than digestive systems.

We walked out with two cases of PBR and a case of Molson's, and had enough cash left over to buy a few bags of chips. Tom got lost in the imported beer section and came out with a six-pack of some obscure German beer. He was always trying to impress everyone with his worldly ways and deft palette. I wasn't buying his veiled attempt at sophistication; after all, Tom was the guy that we saw spend most of his time with a blow-up doll the previous year.

Yes, Tom spent most of his days the past year living with a blonde, air enhanced roommate. I came in mid-year to find Tom and Patty - that's what he called "her" - on the downside of their relationship. He had been nursing an abrasion on his most sensitive of skin for a few weeks and seemed confused about the future of their relationship.

Patty had a way of conversing with Tom that none of us could approach. First of all, the thought of having anything in common with a plastic balloon with a few fairly accurately placed holes was bazaar in itself. It all went back to former suite-mate Charlie Breuger's motto: "Any whole is a life saver." At the time I wasn't sure what a candy had to do with sexual gratification, but once my small brain caught up with my predatory nature, it all made sense.

By the end of the previous year, Tom and Patty's "relationship" had completely blown up. Actually, Patty sprung one leak after another until she started looking like Lamb Chop the sock puppet. When that many holes become apparent in a relationship, it becomes a real stretch to patch things back together. Tom was running out of plastic pieces and patience as his companion slowly slipped from his fingers and onto the flagpole at the end of the quad. Patty was up there for a good three days before the Chief of Campus Police, Bill Schmidt or "Schmitty" as we called him, used some of his old-school knowledge and actually looked up for a change. He was pretty pissed for the next week and kept a real keen eye on the flagpole.

I always thought that Ricky was a much better roommate for Tom than Patty. After he caught Tom sleepwalking a few times, Ricky learned to sleep on his back and keep his lacrosse stick within reach. Ricky also brought Tom out of his shell as much as a turtle can be drawn from its protective case.

I had a few ideas for the Beer Hunter festivities but the one that finally stuck was a winner stays on format. We set up the table in the suite with a couple of chairs facing each other. Everyone needed to wear long, cloth headbands. All Chris had to do was look at Tom and the t-shirt off Dickstein's back was instantly converted into headbands. Dickstein was a little pissed, but he seemed to enjoy any attention that was thrown his way. When Magnum Pee Wee and Sweet Chocolate walked in, I looked at Bosco and he ripped the shirt off Dickstein's back with the flick of his wrist.

It was hysterical to see the paralyzed look on Dickstein's face when Bosco approached him. Dickstein tried to appeal to Bosco's sweet side by saying, "C'mon Tony, this is my favorite t-shirt."

I looked at Dickstein and yelled, "Why the fuck would you wear your favorite shirt when you know we all are going to be covered in beer?"

The Dickstein non-response led me toward a quick nod at Bosco. I have to tell you that the second t-shirt made an excellent, absorbent headband.

The rules of the game were as simple as kindergarten math: the loser chugged a full beer. We defined the "loser" as much more than just being Dickstein. He was the person that either, (a) picked a "live" can that wound up exploding near his head; or (b) watched in vein as his opponent opened a "dud."

We were a tremendously organized group when it came to drinking games, whether it is quarters or Beer Hunter. We had a guy or two vigorously shaking up one beverage while keeping the other one perfectly still. The first match-up was definitely a jumping-off point for the whole crazy, soggy night.

I couldn't resist matching up Dickstein and Junior to start the festivities. While Dickstein readied himself in his chair, Bosco was bouncing one PBR off of his bicep and Tom was shaking another beer like he wanted its lunch money.

I was standing behind Dickstein when I said, "Which one of you wants to choose first?" Before the word first left my mouth I was looking straight at Junior and shaking my head "No."

Dickstein jumped right in there and yelled, "Me! I'll pick first!" Junior acted all pissed and yelled at Dickstein, "Fuck you, Dickstein!"

Dickstein shot back, "Too slow, Junior," proving once again that even when Dickstein won, he lost.

Bosco placed his volatile brew in front of Dickstein and then Tom added his slightly dented rocket. Tom definitely had some anger management issues he needed to work out.

I yelled at Dickstein, "Mao!" and we all took turns at gently slapping him in the head.

Dickstein couldn't take his eyes off the dented beer, appearing as if he had discovered the "Theory of Relativity" or something. He quickly grabbed the Bosco-mixed beer and I looked over at Baby Hercules, who could hardly contain his laughter.

The look on Dickstein's face was precious as he confidently clicked open the beer tab, only to have most of its foamy contents douse his head and third shirt. A stunned Dickstein, obviously using Dickstein-ian knowledge, opened up the dented beer and that exploded all over him too. He didn't even wait for one of the better beers to chug; instead, he finished the contents of the two beers that exploded on him.

Dickstein was pretty pissed, but we quickly calmed him down and gave him a chance to redeem himself. This time, we told Junior that he would be able to make the crucial choice. Chris backed Tom up and he shook up a beer while I grabbed a fresh one from the case.

I placed the fresh beer in front of Junior and Chris stop shaking long enough to put his charge in front of him. Junior looked carefully at both beers like he was comparing two used cars. He instinctively reached for the beer I had put down and placed the top of the can against the side of his right forehead.

"Fuck! You guys are cheating again!" cried a disturbed Dickstein.

He picked up the other beer and once again relieved its explosive contents all over himself.

We were all rolling around in laughter as Dickstein got up from the chair and a cocky Junior yelled "Next!"

Chris never hesitated; he was sitting in that chair quicker than Junior could say "Oh, shit."

The other rule we had was that the winner was the one that made the choice of beers to open. So Junior, as the winner, would once again be selected from the two beers.

The two beers were placed in front of Junior and it looked like he was almost willing himself to lose. Chris didn't like to lose and often beat the crap out of Junior when he stepped out of line. I also didn't like to lose, but kept my responses to verbal barbs instead of picking up my hands.

Junior mercifully picked the exploding beer can and Chris instantly ascended to the winner's circle. Tom couldn't resist going against Chris because he was the "King of Conflict" in the suite. A few seconds later, Tom was slowly chugging a bottle of his German import after being a handed a Molson and he said, "I'm not drinking this shit!"

Bosco, Magnum Pee Wee, and Danny Tampon were quickly dispatched and then Ricky took a seat. I did not want to go against Chris and usually avoided any chance to compete against my roommate. There were times early in our relationship that I had to prove to Chris that I had a set of balls, but those days were long gone. I let him shine and he let me shine.

Chris looked Ricky in the eyes and then picked up a beer. The usually quiet Ricky taunted Chris by saying, "You don't want to beat me, Bomber is next."

Chris called me Bomber all of the time because the legendary sports writer in the local newspaper had nicknamed me "The Mad Bomber" because of my long-range shooting on the basketball court.

Chris looked up at me and then opened a winning beer near his temple. A few "Oooohs" could be heard echoing around the suite while Ricky grabbed a Molson and chugged it. I walked around for a few seconds and then took a seat across from Chris. My competitive juices started flowing for a second and then I started thinking about how much Chris was going through. Chris then gave me the "Let's Go!" look and all bets were off.

"Ohhhhhhh!" the guys screamed in unison as Chris wiped the sudsy beer of his red face. I got up and we both chugged beers in unison.

"He motioned at me and said, "I'll get you next time, Big Time." That was the nickname that Chris had given me as a term of respect and I called him the same name in return.

It took less than an hour to go through the first case of Pabst Blue Ribbon. The initial thought that went through my head was, ""If this beer was awarded a blue ribbon then what kind of dishwater came in second and third place?"

We were all drinking pretty freely by the time that Scott Bauman came in with a few girls from the suite next door. They were always curious about the commotion rocking the walls and often dared to walk into the fracas.

The last match-up of the night took us full circle from our first round of Beer Hunter. A drenched Myron Dickstein wanted another shot at Junior, and we were happy to oblige.

Dickstein was so wet that the beer was dripping from his matted dirty-blonde hair and his headband made from his favorite t-shirt. I placed two beers in front of Dickstein to make sure that it was a fair fight. He had to know that we would ultimately never let him relax, though.

He picked the unshaken beer, opened it, and then started taunting Junior. All of the guys instinctively ended the madness and started shaking any beer they could find to douse Dickstein. Suite-mates then turned on each other and anyone else within spraying range. It was a good five minutes before all of the PBR was drained and both the walls and the thinly carpeted floor were completely soaked. Talk about blowing off some steam!

The highlight for our suite was Monday morning when Edna, the aged woman that cleaned our suite, took two steps into the suite and all we could hear was the squishing of her feet against the still beer-saturated carpet. She took a look around and yelled, "I know you guys are in there listening to me! Hell no! I ain't cleaning this shit! You kids are crazy!"

Chapter XIV – Suite Games

Drinking games can only take you so far at college. The female experience must be a lot more even keeled than that of us guys, because we were always in a constant pattern of action and slumber, action and slumber.

When the suite finally dried from the Beer Hunter eruption, Edna was able to come back in and somewhat neutralize the strong beer smell. The carpeting wasn't as slippery and our R.A. (Resident Assistant), Kimberly Joy, was off our backs for the time being. If there was ever a person's name that was an oxymoron it was the dowdy Kimberly Joy.

The bar was still set up between our room and Tom and Ricky's room and we felt it was time it became a multi-function apparatus. I had bought a large, puff basketball net from the local toy store and place on the main wall of the suite. Instead of trying to secure it with weak tape, I took a few industrial-strength nails and banged them into the concrete wall with a brick that I had found behind the dorm. Since there was no toolbox handy, the thought of buying a hammer for one small job just wasn't very practical.

With the basket secured the game slowly developed; at first we were just shooting around and trying to dunk over the bar. As guys would have it, our innocent little court quickly turned into the potential for some serious damage.

We started off with a few Puff Basketball rules that I have abided by all of my indoor hoop life. You have to take a few dribbles every now, and real fouls are called and you get to take foul shots. My initial version of Puff Basketball evolved and eventually came to be known as "Tackle Basketball." This more physical game avoided rules as much as possible and gave even the most marginal of athletes the chance to grind it out.

My basketball season was at a slow point and even I was starting to get restless. The most amazing part was that the sides always seemed to be fair as long as Chris and I were on the same team. We did win the majority of games and even held the court for an hour one night before Bosco and Ricky wore us down and took control.

Even Dickstein held his own in these games; the little penis did rip the rim down one night but we were back up and running the next night when he secured a replacement rim. Aside from a few cuts and bruises, nobody got hurt. During the winter the suites on campus were like 1,000 degrees. Chris and I usually counteracted the heat wave by keeping our window open a crack at night.

The suite was still as hot as a sauna and we all sweated profusely while competing. To replace those lost fluids we kept a constant supply of liquid beverages on hand, but mostly avoided alcohol because it affected our performance. Tom would drink while he played and it made him look stupid the first two times. We all knew that there would be plenty of time to look stupid after the games.

The funny part of the "Tackle Basketball" game was the impact it had on our downstairs neighbors. I felt like I was a kid again back at my parents' house; my mom used to yell up to my room, "What's that banging?" every time I had a friend over and we were playing Puff Basketball.

The suite's "mother" was Kimberly Joy and her pack of tampon-wearing suite-mates. She even had me come downstairs one night to hear the pounding of the guys playing upstairs. There was definitely an earthquake reverberating in the Beachside Dormitory. Hearing Bosco pounding his massive legs on the floor sounded like a herd of elephants were rumbling through the suite.

There were even occasions when Kim would communicate with us through our non-functioning thermostat. The funny thing was it felt like we were on The Love Boat and she was Julie and I was Captain Stubing.

She would say things like, "You guys almost done up there?" and I would come back with "One more game until the finals."

At first, we tried to bribe her with beer but that landed on deaf ears. It took a while, but with a little digging I found out that little Kimmy had a weakness for Fig Newton's. I always liked the dancing Newton and the "Big, Fig Newton" jingle on the commercial but I would rather wipe my ass with sandpaper than eat that stomach explosion waiting to happen.

Our thermostat conversations would always end with, "Newton's on the way," and I would dispatch Junior down to her suite. They liked Junior because he was a young, fit, blonde kid. They often kept him down there until the pounding stopped; he would brag and make up stories about "Giving them what they wanted" but I think what they wanted was their toenails painted and their legs shaved.

Chapter XV – What a Dickstein!

I make fun of Myron Dickstein a lot, but the other side of the coin is that I also protected him from harm. If I was a completely heartless bastard – which I'm not – I would have buried that son-of-a-bitch years ago when he got on my nerves.

The guy has always been a thorn in my side but he has also been one of the few people in my life who could talk straight to me. Sure, you don't want to hear about the one shot you missed after a good game, but at least he was watching and knowing me.

All of this familiarity did little to stop me from going after Dickstein. Although I had soft spot for the square-shaped lug, I felt it was my duty to both lead the charge and make sure the action didn't get out of hand. It was hard not to throw up my hands in disgust when he was around.

Like the time I was in Dickstein's beaten-up, old Volvo and he were dangerously close to running out of gas. Now, I couldn't tell you why I was in his car instead of mine, but I'm sure that same thought was bouncing around in my head when his engine started sputtering in the middle of nowhere.

I yelled, "This car better not stop right now or I'm going to kill you!"

Luckily we were headed downhill and the car managed to maintain enough steam to roll near a gas station. That was the last time I either rode in the car with him or pushed his car into a gas station.

I really have no problem giving Dickstein his due as a gambler. I suppose that if he was the average chance-taker, then I was Vegas. My odds-making skills were always on stage when Dickstein was in a competitive mood.

The guy was a lefty but it seemed that his left hand was his weak side. He was as clumsy as he was awkward, but the real focal point of my prognostication was his dreadful judgment.

I always saw Dickstein as sort of a Contrarian Index – meaning that his thoughts would usually be on the wrong side of the fence. I don't know what cosmic forces aligned against him, but he was definitively jinxed. There must have been a chip implanted in his brain at birth that impeded any joy reflex. Plain and simple: the guy was a pain vacuum.

As a boy growing up in the midst of action, I often shied away from any games that required extensive periods of sitting. Some people like board games such as Monopoly, but I tend to get tired and bored long before those little silver houses hit the boardwalk. The games that I played as a kid were more like Bobby Hull Hockey, electric cars, and that football game with the moving, vibrating players. When I reached my teenage years, I even delved into the world of Stratomatic Baseball and Basketball. This card- and statistics-based sports game gave me the opportunity to let Pete Maravich or Walt Frazier score 85 points in a game, or let Reggie Jackson or Tom Seaver have the greatest games of any century.

One afternoon when I was walking in town, I decided to duck into the toy store. Strolling through the store was unfulfilling until I reached the section with all of the sports toys. I turned a corner and there in front of me was the mother-load of all mother loads, the new version of Booby Hull Hockey.

If you are unfamiliar with either Bobby Hull or his game, let me explain. Mr. Hull, nicknamed The Golden Jet, was a great, powerful player for the Chicago Black Hawks in the 1960s. The guy was the Wayne Gretsky, Babe Ruth, or Michael Jordan of his time.

As far as the game that bore his name... players slid up and down their zones in a series of pulleys or rods; even the goalie had a rod that controlled his side-to-side movement. The other cool feature of the original game was that a scoreboard hung over the ice and was attached by two plastic connectors on the side of the oval-shaped ice. Each center-ice face-off began with the drop of the puck, which was facilitated by dispensing the puck through a slot that guided the puck to plop down right on center ice. If you ever had the game, you know what I'm talking about.

The game I bought was just about as cool as the original, but the guys removed the scoreboard because they felt it "impeded" their sight line to the action. Some games were so fast and furious that blood started trickling from overworked fingers.

It didn't really matter that I had regained my touch around the net and could pass pretty well again. When Dickstein was across the table, luck would most likely flow to your side no matter what your skill level was. Things were pretty slow one weekday night, so I decided to stir things up a bit.

I challenged Dickstein to game but included a few twists to peak his interest. First, the game would be to 11 with each goal counting as a single score. Second, I would spot him 10 goals. Third, and most interesting, if he lost he would have to run through the quad in his underwear; if I lost, I would have to run though the quad with nothing on but my birthday suit.

At the time, only four people were hanging out in the suite – Bau, Dickstein, Ricky, and me.

Ricky quickly yelled for everyone to "Get out here! Bomber just laid down the law!" Chris was half-asleep and stayed in bed and Tom was not around, but Junior, Danny Tampon, and Magnum Pee Wee came out to see what was going on.

The stakes were pretty high for this game, so I needed to concentrate a bit in the beginning. The first six goals I scored were pretty efficient and stopped any thoughts that Dickstein had even a remote chance. When I scored to make it 10-8, Dickstein started to sweat and get that usual "I love the punishment" face. I haven't seen Dickstein in years, but can envision him in cuffs being ordered around by a dominatrix. That sadistic bastard loves pain and torture that much.

A funny thing happened as I was rolling to victory. Although it didn't change the outcome, it probably shocked me enough to leave a small deposit in my underwear. Dickstein was a real chance taker when he played games – he would load up for that one big shot that usually never materialized. This dependence on the fictional dramatic shot often left him wide open for a counter-attack.

The puck went around the goal and bounced to Dickstein's left defender. He made it obvious that he was going for the one huge shot by cocking his elbow and violently twisting his left wrist. I never really saw the thunderous blast as it whizzed through the air and sped toward my goal. I never reacted to the puck until it made a "thud" sound and deflected off of my goal post. I woke up quickly from my brain-freeze and flipped the puck down the ice for a quick goal.

The guys had been rooting against me all game and were yelling and screaming "Hit the post!" and "Oh, shit" for the next few minutes until I ended the game and won 11-10. In hindsight, it worries me a bit that those guys were all rooting against me. Did they just want to see me naked? I'm hoping that it was just a case of rooting for the underdog.

There's no doubt that I would have run naked though the quad if Dickstein's miraculous blast had found the net. But, that was the story of his life in a nutshell... he couldn't win. The only times that he emerged victorious was when I let my foot off the gas. Chris and Tom would never let him win, but Ricky and I had a heart and let him win to lift his spirits.

As usual, Myron tried to appeal to my soft side and ask for leniency. "It's really cold outside" was his plea. I think if it was just the two of us I would have let it go, but the guys were pretty much pushing him out the door into the 24-degree night. He removed his jeans and his raggedy t-shirt and started his ascent to the quad. The site of him running in his tighty-whities brought tears to all of our eyes. Looking like Gandhi on the other side of a hunger strike, Dickstein tried to take a few steps and then head back upstairs. The guys were yelling and attracting attention and wanted him to take a full 75-yard lap.

People were peeking out of their windows and a few others opened their doors and started clapping as the guys led the chant of "Dickstein! Dickstein!" Even in his underwear, Dickstein was filled with pride with the sound of his name being chanted. He probably wouldn't have been as satisfied if he had beaten me – although the sight of me streaking through the quad might have worked out fine.

Myron was lucky on this night that Chris and Tom weren't active participants. Tom would have kicked his clothes in the bushes and locked the door of our suite so Dickstein couldn't get back in. However, the rest of us were satisfied to let the conquering hero back in the suite and give him a bunch of high-fives in the process.

Chapter XVI – My Buddy Slips Away

I managed to survive through the end of the basketball season and felt pretty good about what the team had accomplished. We got to the second round of the playoffs with only five decent players all year. It was tiring and I was a bit relieved when the final buzzer sounded. I was looking forward to a few weeks of rest and then starting the softball season.

It was March and there definitely was a bit of madness in the air. Chris had become more and more withdrawn from the suite and seemed to be spending all of his time partying with the lacrosse team at a hotel where most of the players were staying. This hotel was a real dive, and these animals nearly destroyed the place. It was a good bet that if these guys had put down a security deposit, they would not be getting it back at the end of the year.

After a while I didn't even try to see what was bugging Chris; after all, he was a non-scholarship, Division II lacrosse player that was skipping school to party full-time. As much as I valued his friendship, I also held integrity and pride in high regard. If a girl had triggered his mental breakdown then I really had lost respect for my buddy. Even though he was slipping away I knew that he would be on his own to climb out of the mess. It's the kind of pain that starts with a blindside crash in the back of the head and then consistently produces a dull headache for the rest of your life.

The semester was already three months old and Chris had attended only two classes, total, all term. I never found out what happened in those two, hour-and-a-half classes that caused him to bolt. I'm not really sure what the lacrosse coach was looking at when he saw the mid-term grades of his team. Come to think of it, since most of the team was pro, semi-pro, or substance abusers, grades really weren't the issue. Coach Keller probably crumbled the grade list with the same reflex he used to terminate other school communication.

The lacrosse players ate, breathed, and slept lacrosse, and even carried their sticks around with them wherever they went. We've all seen these guys, either playing with a ball or twirling a stick with an imaginary ball. They constantly looked like actors going through a dress rehearsal. Conversely, I didn't walk around campus shooting an imaginary basketball or dribbling a real ball just because I was on the team. The thought of being that egocentric or self-absorbed would be embarrassing to the average person.

To say that I was bitter about Chris's disappearance would be accurate to the point that I missed hanging out with him. The same guy I met and instantly connected with the previous year was missing in action. Deep inside I knew he wouldn't be coming back; he had sunk too far to be brought back. Chris had become the guy I envisioned he would be if we weren't friends.

Spring was a different time of year in the suite. The nicer weather catapulted everyone outside, which meant that we would be hanging out much less in the suite. I used to go to all of the home lacrosse games in support of Ricky and Chris. It was true what they said about Ricky – even on one good leg he was able to control the game. It was a pleasure to watch this pro in action. Chris also played a significant role on the team, but was limited to do most of the guts work, while Ricky got most of the glory by shooting the ball into the net.

I never knew what Dickstein did with his time other than go to classes. Since he wasn't studying very often, it was anybody's guess (if they cared) what he was doing. Spring sent Tom into the ocean to look for various mollusks to either steam or barbecue. Many Marine Biology majors would don their wetsuits and scour the sandy water depths. It was a good way to apply their craft and eat the freshest seafood in town.

Tom had also retreated to spend more time with his Marine Bio friends because of Chris's attitude shift. I was able to conceal my hurt a little more than Tom, who even approached Chris and asked him, "What the fuck is wrong with you, man?"

A drunken Chris responded, "Fuck you! What the fuck do you know?"

Tom responded by running away from Chris like an abused dog with his tail between his legs. The changing of the guard was about to begin.

Chapter XVII – Concert and Crash

The minute we found out that U2 was going to play at the Coliseum we went out and bought 10 tickets. The April 2 concert was first advertised in February when the suite was tight and Chris and I were still inseparable.

Since the arena was about five minutes from my parent's house, I ordered five pizzas and we stopped at the local beverage barn for some beer so we could do a little tailgating before the show.

After a few beers and many slices of Pizza Shack pizza the old suite vibe had returned for one night. After all, there was no better cause to come together than to see "the boys" for the first time. U2 was still our favorite group and unity was definitely the theme on this night.

We managed to get seats in the same row and were placed across in the following order:

Junior, Danny Tampon, Magnum Pee Wee, Ricky, Tom, Chris, Me, Bau, Bosco, and Dickstein. Being between Chris and Bau was awkward for about five minutes and then we just rocked the house during the concert. It was like a bunch of girls that thought about some predetermined seating order. Certain guys just couldn't be seated near each other – Tom would have thrown a hissy-fit if Dickstein was in reaching distance. The only three people that would put up with Dickstein were Bosco, Ricky, and I, and I had to put up with him on the drive to the arena.

The concert was amazing and we listened and sang to U2 all the way home. In my car were Chris in the front seat and Bosco and Bau in the back seat – Bosco and Bau refused to sit squished with Dickstein in the back seat so they made him sit in the hatchback. The guy was hysterical on the drive home because the rest of us would call out "Beer!" and he would pass a cold beer up.

Dickstein had volunteered to drive his car, being that he and I grew up in the same home town, but nobody would step foot in his death box of a car. Instead Tom drove his small Datsun B-210 with Ricky in the front seat and the trio of Junior, Magnum Pee Wee, and Danny Tampon in the back seat. Mag was the perfect guy to sit on the hump because of his diminutive size.

I was feeling pretty good about my relationship with Chris because it was the first time in weeks that we had connected. The drive home was great and we went to sleep to even more U2 music.

The next morning life returned to normal as I got up to go to class and Chris remained asleep. The next time I talked to him was two days later when he came home one morning, tripped over my bed, and said "Oops!"

I sleepily replied, "Don't worry about it," and we both went to sleep.

On a rare day off from the Intramural softball league, a few of us strolled out to the quad to have a catch. At first, it was me and Dickstein until Bosco and Bau came out from their suites and joined us. Dickstein, as usual, was having a little trouble in the catching and throwing department and the ball would find the bushes as much as a glove.

About ten minutes into the catch I threw the ball to Dickstein who had his back to the dorms. I thought he caught the ball but heard a huge crash like the ball went through a window.

"How did you miss that one? I threw it right in your glove!" I yelled at Dickstein.

Bau chimed in, "What the fuck, Dickstein!"

"You're fuckin' blind, Dickstein!" Bosco chimed in.

Dickstein looked down at his glove, unsure of he had actually caught the ball. He looked surprised at first and then pulled the softball out of glove with his left hand and proudly exclaimed, "I caught the ball!"

I looked confusingly at Bau and then Bosco and said, "What the fuck was that?"

We heard some commotion on the other side of our dorm and we ran to follow the noise. As we turned the corner we could see this guy running away with a bloody head.

The picture became a little clearer when we saw his car was crashed into the side of our brick dorm. I'm not really sure how the guy veered off the road, jumped a two-foot curb and then crashed into a huge building that was at least 50 feet from the road. The guy's girlfriend even got out of the car and yelled, "Where are you going?"

Eventually Schmitty and the keystone cops caught up with the driver and detained him for what must have been rigorous questioning. We all assumed the guy must have been on some serious drugs and he was freakin' out. It was a good thing that it was a quiet time of afternoon or he could have hurt somebody.

# Chapter XVIII – Bed in the Baja

As time marched on the guys in the suite adjusted to Chris's absence. With Sweet Chocolate and me on the same softball team, and Bau playing on our rival team, we had plenty to talk about. The softball schedule was pretty compact and we had to fit 20 games into a schedule of only a month.

It's funny how things shift so quickly in college. Attention spans are shorter in the spring than they are in the colder months, especially when your school is across the street from the beach.

Tom was the master of the practical joke; however, his lack of sane judgment and a basic indifference to life put him in joke's way sometimes. He often took his shots at me, like a fly circling your head, but I stood firm waiting for the right opportunity to strike back. I wasn't much for practical jokes behind people backs, preferring to do things in people's faces instead.

One afternoon Bosco and I were coming back from a victorious softball game and we went into the suite to get a couple of beers. I bent down to get a beer and saw Tom dragging my mattress out of the suite. I stepped toward him and he saw me and said, "Bosco, give me a few minutes."

Bosco might have been a few inches smaller than me but he spent summers as a bouncer and I wasn't going to press my luck and fight with a friend. That, and the fact that I couldn't move really influenced my decision to plan my revenge instead of going crazy.

In the category of Tom once again takes it too far, Tom once again took it too far. He not only dragged my mattress out of the room, he also went back for the box spring and frame. Bosco and I were talking about the softball game by the time we both walked on the porch and saw what Tom was up to. He had managed to use some of the massive fury built up inside his small frame to drag my bed into the Baja.

For those of you keeping score, the Baja is a rougher-looking version of the beach. I will probably never know what propelled him to do this to me. Tom really didn't live by a book, the code of which you could look up.

A few people had left their rooms and were laughing at the site of my sleeping apparatus in the sandy Baja. A few seconds later I had ejected all thoughts of the bed from my mind and was now focused solely on making Tom pay. He would never fuck with me again!

The previously bouncer-like Bosco had seen the look in my eyes and got the hell out of my way. I am truly from the school that you don't get mad, you get even. I was pretty strong in those days and revenge only made me more determined. I set my sights on Tom's bed and carried each piece out and threw it over the balcony and into the bushes below. Next I picked up Tom's dresser and tossed it over the railing. Then I dragged his desk outside and tossed that into an adjacent bush while the now-growing crowd cheered me on.

The removal was only the first part of my plan. I figured that if Tom could disrespect my living space so much that he would have to sleep out in the quad. Recreating the set-up of his room in the middle of the quad was both fun and entertaining. Even Tom got a big kick out of it! People were coming down to take pictures of Tom lying in his bed with his eyes closed.

We got about ten minutes of fun out of it until we felt a few sprinkles falling. People worked together to retrieve my bed and carry Tom's furniture back up to his room. We had a few beers, cooled off from all of the fun and commotion, and were able to keep the suite tight and the emotions light.

Chapter XIX – The Bonfire

With the school year winding down, it was time to reflect on the year gone by and make plans for the following year. Before I could move ahead there was a decent amount of digging to do to find meaning and then seal away certain memories.

The process of moving on was made that much more difficult and easier by Chris. He had completely removed himself from my life and the life of my suite brothers, and appeared to be on a track that would lead him away from Rawlings.

It was May and Bau, Bosco, and I decided to share an off-campus house the following year. Chris didn't appear interested in looking ahead so I had to make plans without him.

The very first house we looked at was a small two bedroom that was a few blocks from the beach and the off-campus bar. We rang the doorbell and a familiar face answered the door. I looked at Bau who, in turn, looked at Bosco for clarification. We all knew the female face but couldn't place the person.

She took us on the quick tour of the house and when we got to the house's only bathroom, all of the pieces fell into place.

There was a huge bend in the shower curtain rod, so I asked 'What happened to the shower?"

The girl responded, "My boyfriend has epilepsy." She kept walking through the house until she reached the larger bedroom and said, "This was our room."

On the nightstand was a picture of the girl and her epileptic boyfriend. I gestures to Bosco like I was driving a car and crashing it.

Bosco then turned to the girl and said with a straight face, "Wasn't that the fuckin' guy who crashed his car in the side of the dorm?"

She was a bit embarrassed at first and then responded, "Yeah, that's my Frankie."

Needless to say we were a little creped out by the prospects of discovering other bent or broken items as we lived in their love den. A few days later we found a large three-bedroom house that was ten minutes away from campus, but gave us room to spread out a little.

Once the weather had turned a bit warmer it was officially bonfire season. I'll never forget my first bonfire – the sight of a fire with flames as high as a house lit up the beaches sand dunes like we were Native Americans taking part in some sacred ritual.

Although it seemed like a religious experience to me, most people took the opportunity to put their minds elsewhere. With Chris nowhere in sight, Bau, Bosco, and I toasted to our future of fun.

Not only had Chris disappeared, but Tom was also missing in action. In fact, Tom was so shaken by Chris's cold shoulder that he never returned the following year. The last few weeks of school he stayed with a friend of his off campus and returned to collect his stuff when everyone else had left for the summer.

As each beer settled in my body, I looked toward the awesome power of flames for clarity. Although it's pretty hard to gain focus when you're buzzed, I tried to dig deep and make sense of it all.

Alcohol must be a depressant because I was feeling awfully sorry for myself. I was glad to have a plan for the following year but was nonetheless still disturbed about Chris's disappearance. Why was it that I had so much trouble keeping friends? Maybe that was the answer – you can't keep a friend – the relationship lasts as long as it's possible. I did everything I could from my end and I concluded that it wasn't meant to last.

Sitting and sulking just wasn't working for me, so I got up to stretch my legs. I walked around the huge sand dune and headed toward the water. The ocean waves always had a way of refocusing my thoughts and quieting my mind. It was so much calmer on the other side of the dune – gone were the sounds of chatter and laughter – all I could hear was the rolling of the waves onto the shore.

I found a dry patch of sand and plopped down to relax. A few minutes of sitting and watching the waves led to a stint on my back looking up at the full moon and bright stars. For me life didn't get any better than that – I couldn't imagine what college students at other schools did to relax, and at that moment I couldn't imagine myself being anywhere else.

"Feeling sorry for yourself again?" a familiar female voice said.

I didn't even look up at the person as I responded, "What is the deal with Chris?"

"Don't worry about it. I'll be your friend," Jenny said as she sat on top of me.

And just like that, I felt better. Rolling around near the shore with Jenny didn't hurt my spirits either.

It was amazing how in-tune with each other we were. I can remember a time a few months before our beach encounter when I had a feeling one day that Jenny needed me. It wasn't as if I was just horny and needed the pipes cleaned.

When I walked into Jenny's room her head was down and the room was eerily quiet. She looked up as tears rolled down her cheeks and said, "I knew you would come." She had just gotten off the phone with her mother who told her that her grandmother had died. I stayed with her the whole night until she fell asleep in my arms.

It didn't really surprise me that Jenny showed up that night I was feeling a little low at the bonfire. Jenny and I were like guardian angels to each other; maybe I had taken it for granted, but she was probably the best friend I ever had. Just being around her made me feel better and it didn't hurt that we kicked up some sand that night until the flames subsided and it was time to head back to campus.

Nobody even noticed that we were gone, which gave even more credence to the my assertion that time really did "stand still" when I was with Jenny.

Chapter XX – Last Licks

The end of the school year would so much easier without final exams. Most teacher confine the test to material learned after mid-terms, but I had one Statistics teacher, Mr. Trangan, or Triangle, that put a stake through our hearts and tested us on the entire 400-page textbook. I was definitely hoping for the almighty sweeping curve. In baseball terms, it was the last licks or the final at bat of the school year. All of the big parties and events were done, and our suite had already seen better days. My exams started on Tuesday and ended Friday morning with the mother of all tests, the Statistics nightmare.

I probably could have studied a little more for my first four exams, but it probably wouldn't have mattered – all of those classes were cinch B's anyway. The minute I walked into that Friday morning at 9:00 am Statistics test, my mind was done with the semester. All I heard were groans and sighs from the 24 other people in the class. I was paying special attention to the two people that I knew would get A's, and even they were laboring through the hellish test.

I figured that all I had to do was score somewhere in the middle and I had a chance for a B. In hindsight, it probably would have helped if I had even the slightest idea of what was going on – I was lost after he said "Good Morning, I'm Professor Triangle" the first day of class. Some classes seem like you're taking a foreign language and some teachers refuse to come down to a more average level. Yes, most college students strive to attain an elevated standard but you have to build the foundation before going any higher.

I survived the Statistics test but my brain was pretty fried. The B- I received in the class was a small consolation to trying to stay awake in class for four months. My cumulative average for the semester was 2.9 and set the stage for my full conversion to a business major/curriculum for my junior and senior years. Being off campus definitely improved my focus and led me to make the Dean's List three out of the next four semesters.

I walked back from my statistics test and ate a full lunch, so I could absorb all of the alcohol I was planning to consume. It's never a good idea to drink on an empty stomach.

I had a case of beer in the cooler and was planning on drinking until I got real silly! Bosco was the first guy to join me on the porch and we drank alone for the better part of two hours. Junior and Danny Tampon were busy packing and would come out every now and then to see how we were doing. "Yeah, we're getting hammered, walk your boney ass back inside!" I said more than a few times.

There was no sign of Chris, Tom, or Ricky, and I heard that Dickstein was looking at a place to live the following year. That was classic Dickstein... he would always wait to the last possible second to do anything. Although we never got in an actual discussion about our living arrangement for the following year, I figured that one year trapped with him in the same location was quite enough.

It was about 4:00 pm and Bau had finished his last exam and made his way up to Suite 524. Bosco and I were two big guys that had consumed the better part of a case of beer; we were like two big bears walking around the forest looking for trouble.

I walked back in the suite and made a beeline for Junior's room. That neat mother fucker had packed all of his shit and was waiting for his parents to pick him up – they were eager to beat the traffic and get their son back to Upstate New York in time for the weekend. He was such a pussy back then, but would change his ways in subsequent years when his balls dropped and hair started growing. He wound up being a real wild man and a disciple we all would have been proud of.

The first things that came into my vision were Junior's stripped bed and the window next to it. That window looked a lot better since Dickstein tried to outdo the Wright Brothers and fly over the pile and spread his wings.

I told Junior to "get the fuck out of the way!" and then I proceeded to open the window as wide as any kid's mouth saying "Ahhhhh." Amazingly, both the mattress and box-spring fit through the opening with surprising ease. Bosco had staggered in after me and said, "Pauli, let me get the other one." I moved out of Sweet Chocolate's way as he hoisted Danny Tampon's box-spring out the window and probably set some kind of bed-tossing, distance record.

I was going to toss his furniture out of the window, too, but I had done that one already. For some odd reason, Bau had taken it upon himself to run down behind the dorm to watch us throw the beds. That would have been all right but he brought a few rolls of toilet paper and was lining the phone and power lines with the one-ply paper streamers.

Our isolated event had turned into a public display by the time he finished unrolling the toilet paper. A campus cock, I mean cop, was dispatched to check out the situation and straight arrow observers were more than willing to point to the second floor window where the beds were tossed from.

Bosco and I weren't scared, and when heard the cop report back to home base, "There are two white-striped mattresses that were thrown from a second-floor window of the Beachside Dorm," we knew that we probably should fetch Junior's bed.

We somewhat quickly retrieved the mattress and box-springs from behind the dorm and the day-care cop followed us back to the room. Between the time we walked downstairs and returned to the suite, Bau had disappeared. When the cop said, "You guys are going to have to talk to Schmitty at central base.

Bosco replied, "What's the problem officer? We got a little excited and now we made everything right."

The officer responded, "That's not the problem. We have to get someone to clean up all of that toilet paper."

Schmitty had been one of my biggest supporters at the basketball games that year. His probably took a liking to my game more because of the color of my skin than what I was actually doing on the court. He nearly choked on a donut when he saw me walk through the door of five-o central.

"Paul, what are you doing here?" Schmitty said like a parent questioning his kid.

"We were just blowing off some steam, Schmitty," I responded.

"Did you throw a bed out of the window?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said quickly.

Then he said, "Don't lie to me, boy," for no apparent reason.

He must have said, "Don't lie to me, boy" a few times because Bosco was losing patience when he said, "Lying about what? He just told you the truth and I threw a bed out the window, too."

The chief then finished his unorthodox line of questioning by asking us, "Was there another guy in a red sweatshirt throwing the toilet paper?" Bosco and I looked at each other and were tempted at ratting out our friend that let us take the fall. I looked at Schmitty and said, "No, it was just us."

"Well, I'm going to have to fine you $50 Paul for disorderly conduct and Bosco you're going be fined $25," Schmitty concluded as he wiped the glaze off his fingers so he could write out the ticket. We tried to just give him the money and leave but he slowly wrote the ticket and kept telling us to "Take it easy" the rest of the night.

By the time we left police headquarters, most of the alcohol buzz had worn off. The incessant droning of Captain Schmitt must have brought us back to our senses. We headed toward Bau's room to find out what happened to him and get him to buy us a case of beer for our troubles. The three of us made quite a trio because Bosco and I didn't even have time to kick Bau's ass. He had already gone to the beverage store and bought a case of cold beer. That bastard must have known that two wild bears were on the loose and he better give us what we wanted.

"Where the fuck did you go? Bosco questioned.

Bau replied, "When I saw security coming toward me I ran to my room, locked the door, and changed my clothes."

I chimed in, "Did you switch cars and destroy the empty toilet paper rolls, too?"

Bau learned a valuable lesson that afternoon. After that day he never left us to swing in the breeze again. If we went down, we went down together. You could say that we were pretty tight, but we never had the crazy fun I had with the guys of Suite 524 and my Suite Dream.

Epilogue

I managed to see Chris and Tom one more time before we officially went our separate ways. Chris had this brilliant idea to go to a water park that was two hours away. We took Dickstein along with us, but when we got there at 9:00 am the park was closed. Chris forgot to check that minor point, but he cushioned the blow by starting to drink beers from a cooler he brought.

Now, I've never been one to drink in the morning and didn't have as much fun with him when he was drunk and we all were sober. Chris told us that the school at put him on probation, but he would be allowed to return the following year proving that money talks.

Chris's parents were so furious at him, however, that they cut him off at the knees right there and then.

His dad told him that, "You need to learn a lesson from all of this. If you can spend my money with no regard then it's time for you to earn your own keep." Chris was not out of school but he was also given six months to get out of the house and find his own place. Talk about cutting the chord...

When I dropped Chris off at his house, I knew in my heart and gut that it was goodbye. I got out of the car and we shook hands and crashed into a power hug. Chris fought back the tears for a few seconds and then said, "You go find that big time for the both of us." I really didn't know what to say as he walked away and I got back in the car.

It was an end of a short, but extremely memorable era. Chris went to real life and drove a truck for a furniture store and I went back to school and had an awesome junior year. I always think of Chris whenever I drink a beer... after all, he'll always be one of my best friends and one of the guys I'll never forget from our suite dream.

