2/1/05
THE NIGHT I CRASHED THE FRAT PARTIES
6 PAGES

I've been meaning to write about the night I crashed the frat parties for over a year now. Fortunately most of what happened that night it is still very vivid and fresh in my head.

It was the Friday after Labor Day and Lauren was up in New Jersey working for the night. This was back when our friend Bill was staying with us for a few months but he was up in Massachusetts for the weekend. I had gotten back home a little after 7 or 8 because I had been making a delivery for work that day. I sat around the apartment, checking email, surfing the web, trying to do a little bit of writing without much motivation.

I ended up going for a walk to get some air. I walked down near the UPenn campus. That's always a nice area to walk through. It's open and inviting and fairly safe and the campus is nice. Plus, let's be honest, there's plenty of good-looking people to look at. As I walked down past the rows of frat houses, I noticed it looked like many of them were gearing up for a party. Their doors were open. There were people milling around on the porches. Music was playing loudly from somewhere inside. Ah to be young and in college again. After a half hour or so I headed back home.

Around 9 or so, I decided it might feel nice to get a little buzz on - not drunk per se, but "pleasantly happy" - so I walked down to the 7-11 to buy a six-pack of MGD. Turns out they didn't sell beer. Apparently nobody in the area sold beer. I had absolutely no idea where to buy beer. Turns out, only bars, restaurants and certain types of stores can sell packaged beer - even liquor stores can't sell it - but I didn't know that at the time. I didn't feel like sitting in a bar either and paying four bucks per beer when I know I can get a six-pack for about that much. (I wouldn't figure it out until a few months later, right as we were about to move out of the city, that there was a place to buy beer a block from our apartment).

So I walked back to the apartment a little annoyed. Then I remembered that we had an unopened bottle of wine in the fridge that had actually been a wedding present from somebody. Lauren and I had been married for over a year at this point, so you can imagine how much we actually drink. I drank a couple glasses without feeling much of anything. The thing about wine is I usually feel sick and headachy before I feel any kind of buzz.

All of a sudden, an idea just popped into my head. I could probably go down to the frat houses and get some drink there. I certainly still looked young enough to pass for a college student. Maybe not a freshman, but an upperclassman certainly. I remember from my college days in Boston that the frats usually charged to get into their parties. Five bucks or so at the door, but then it was all you could drink. I figured I could go down, pay my five bucks, get my fill and then head back home. Or… I could pay my five bucks, drink slowly and hang out for awhile.

I'm probably the only person I know who would do something like this, and who in fact, does stuff like this on a regular basis. When I'm on trips for work, rather than sit in my hotel room bored, I'll go out to bars or clubs by myself. I'll walk around the cities I'm in. Check out local haunts. Drive across entire states if the mood hits me. Hell, I hung out on Bourbon Street by myself when I was down in New Orleans. It doesn't bother me. I'm not somebody who feels like a gigantic loser because I'm by myself. If there's a band, I'll sit and listen. If there's no band, I'll sit and people watch. Or if I really just want to get out of the hotel for awhile and I'm particularly self-conscious, I'll bring a book to read.

I sometimes think of that scene in the movie "Go" where they're in Vegas. The character Simon, after losing his money decides to entertain himself by just walking around and experiencing Vegas. Amongst other things, he ends up walking into somebody's wedding reception, drinking their champagne and eating their cake and hitting on their bridesmaids. I see so much of myself in that character. While I've always been too much of a goofball, and now too much of a good husband, to go hitting on bridesmaids, I am the kind of guy who would crash somebody's Vegas wedding if it meant free food and booze and the chance to just hang out

So around 10 o'clock on this beautifully warm Friday night, I decided to head down and crash the frat parties. First stop though was back at the 7-11 for cigarettes. The way I saw it, since I didn't know anybody, it meant I would be standing around by myself a lot. That was cool, because like I said, I enjoy people watching. But I've found that smoking a cigarette while I'm doing that accomplishes two things. 1) It hopefully makes me look less freaky, less like some stalker scooping for victims. And 2) more importantly, it allows me to put my fidgety nature into something that doesn't look so fidgety. It gives me something to do with my hands while I'm standing around. And actually a third reason is that it can end up being a conversation starter when somebody asks if they can bum a cigarette off me.

So I bought a pack of Marlboro Lights, flipped the first cigarette, the "lucky", around upside-down, an old habit leftover from college, and headed back towards the campus. I could see at least three houses with throngs of people outside on the front porch and on the street in front of the building. I decided to do a quick pass first and see which party looked the most promising. I walked past all three and then stood outside the third house in the crowd. I just pretended to be smoking my cigarette, not worrying about nuthin' at all. What I was really doing was surveying the door. It didn't look like anybody was collecting money for entrance, but I wanted to be sure. I wanted to make it seem like I knew what I was doing and wasn't out of place here. After I saw a couple people walk through the front door unstopped, I made my way up the stairs.

I walked through the downstairs looking for the keg that I knew must be around here somewhere. All around me were co-eds with red and cloudy-clear plastic cups, a staple of any frat party. I found the keg in the back yard and pumped myself a beer. I stood around drinking my beer and smoking my cigarette, just watching the students.

Truth be told, I did miss it. I missed the carefree days of college where you had that perfect combination of freedom without responsibility. I listened to the guys and girls talking about stupid stuff. I gleaned that this was move-in week. Orientation had probably been over Labor Day and now all the upperclassmen had moved in and this was the party night to kick off the year. I watched guys try to hit on girls the only way they knew how. By being loud and goofy and acting like they weren't REALLY hitting on them but just being loud and goofy. That way they could gauge if the girls were into them or not without actually putting themselves on the line for embarrassment.

One by one I made my way down the line of frat houses. None of them were charging which was good. At each one I got myself a beer then stationed myself somewhere where I wouldn't stand out too much, where I wouldn't be regarded as either the loser who's there by himself, or the creepy guy who nobody knows. All in all, I really didn't feel self-conscious. I just smiled to myself watching the college kids at play.

After making my way down the line on this street and the next street over, I decided it was time to head for home. But as I was leaving I saw a group of girls walking down another side street. They certainly didn't seem to be heading back to the dorms. I figured there must be another party nearby. What the heck, I was up for one more stop.

I'm so glad I played stalker for sixty seconds. The house they went into was unlike the others in two ways. First of all, there wasn't a large crowd gathered outside. This house was in what almost amounted to a dark alley, rather than right out on a major Philadelphia street. The second thing that was different was the music I heard coming from inside. All the other houses had been blasting rap music. I don't know why every frat house feels the need to play only rap music at their parties, but it's just a fact of nature. Even when I was in college, the reason I stopped going to frat parties was because the music gave me a headache. I hate rap, don't know any of the songs and have trouble enjoying myself when the music is bugging me. But this last house, I could hear, was playing Van Halen's song, "Right Now." Now this was a party I could get into.

I walked inside. The downstairs wasn't as crowded as the others had been. This was definitely a smaller party. There were maybe twenty people downstairs and they were all gathered around a big beer pong table. For those of you who don't know what beer pong is, it's another staple of every frat house. Basically you set up a ping-pong table (or any large flat surface that's waist-high really), and at either end you set up a bunch of cups of beer. They're set up almost pool table style. Usually there are six cups set up in a triangle, half-full of beer. You have two teams of two competing. Each side takes turns tossing a ping-pong ball at the other side's cups. If the ball lands in the beer, one of the people on the other team has to drink the entire cup and remove it from the table. If the ball bounces off a cup but doesn't go in, the guy that threw the ball has to drink one of his cups. The first team to eliminate the other team's cups wins and gets to play another round.

So I grabbed myself another beer, lit up yet another cigarette and watched the beer pong. At first I stood along the side of the table with about five to ten other guys. At one point one guy standing next to me asked me if this was my house. I said no, I didn't even go to this school. "I'm just crashing," I told him bluntly. The kid was probably a freshman, eager to find a frat to pledge and was looking to get in with one of the brothers.

After another fifteen minutes or so, I saw people going upstairs and coming down from up there, so I decided to go up and see what was going on. What happened upstairs is the reason why this night still sticks out in my head so much and the reason I've been meaning to write about it for so long. There was a group of about 15 or so people gathered inside this one guy's room. Probably 10 guys and 5 girls. Everybody was talking and laughing and a couple of the guys were playing DJ. They would put in a CD and be like, "Oh you have to hear this song." They'd play it loud, bopping their heads along like it was the most awesome song ever while the girls just kind of listened politely.

The music they were playing mostly was from the southern rock group, "The Band." And these guys were WAY into it. Probably three or five of them just kept talking about The Band and how this was a great song… oh you HAVE to listen to the guitar on this part… you can totally tell this guy was tripping some serious acid during this concert. They were so intense. At first they were telling all this stuff to the girls who were sitting there with them, but when they realized the girls had no idea what they were talking about, they just started telling it to each other.

They put in a video of a "The Band" concert and I ended up taking a seat on one of the couches after another guy got up. Other guys bummed cigarettes off me and it didn't seem to strike anybody as odd that I was sitting there. Nobody gave each other looks like "who the hell is this guy."

The couple guys who you could tell were most into The Band kept skipping around on the DVD playing different songs and pointing things out to listen and watch for. This particular concert, The Band had a lot of guest singers come on stage with them including Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, John Fogerty. Whenever somebody different came on stage, the frat guys would give a small history behind them and their connection to The Band. When Joni Mitchell was on, the guys kept saying, "Oh she and (whatever the guy's name was) were totally boning during this period."

I was just kind of smirking to myself throughout this whole exchange. And the beer buzz which, was becoming a bit more than a buzz, was only partly to blame. There was just something so familiar about all of this that I couldn't put my finger on. Finally, while they were showing the encore of the concert when everybody was out on stage singing, the guys who were The Band afficianados said, "Man, this was such a good show. Probably one of the best concerts they ever did."

Inside my head I was yelling at them. "Dude, this concert was in 1978! You weren't even BORN THEN, but you're talking like you were at the show!"

That's when I realized that these guys were just going through yet another phase that a college student must go through. Actually, I guess most college guys don't go through this phase. But the guys I went to college with did. Because we weren't a jock school or a very big frat school. We were a school full of artists and people who think they're artists. And when you have that kind of population, you inevitably get a lot, A LOT of pretentiousness.

Artists above all want people to think that they're different than the mainstream, that they know stuff about culture and art and obscure bands and lyrics and movies and other miscellaneous cultural items that other people don't know about. They need to find a niche that makes them special. What they need is to find something that nobody else knows very well and then make themselves quasi-experts on the matter.

A lot of film guys at my school chose old films, or anime films, or Quentin Tarrantino films, or foreign films, or edgy indy films that make most normal people want to blow their own heads off. Other guys picked an obscure techno DJ to rave about. Still others knew everything by a certain author. Then again, some guys chose beer to get pretentious about. These were the guys that would only drink Guinness and other dark beers and who lament about how horrible American beers are and how in Europe they serve beer warm so they have to make it better. The guys in this particular room had chosen The Band as their particular forte.

The way these people work is all the same. You pick something that commands a certain degree of respect. Usually that means a band or artist who obviously has talent but who most of the general public doesn't know about. Somebody who it's obvious you didn't just get your information by watching MTV. You actually had to dig for your information.

Then you talk about the artist of your choice like they are the be all end all of whatever medium they're in. You tell a couple of stories that you read in their biographies. If it's a band, you talk about their music. You talk about the band members. And most of all, you lament about how good it used to be back then and how today's artists just don't know anything.

For me in college, my niche of choice was Pink Floyd. I bought their albums, listened to them for hours on end. I bought their biography, "A Saucerful of Secrets." I learned the stories about how the band split apart and came back together. I railed about how it just hasn't been the same since Roger Waters left the band. But I said David Gilmour was the most kickass guitar player ever and I got mad, actually got MAD when he wasn't included in the lists of top guitar players of all time. And I talked as though I had grown up with Pink Floyd and had walked with them through the changes over the years even though I had only gotten into them the summer before I started college. Man I thought I was so original at the time. I remember a middle-aged guy one time saying to me, "Yeah everybody goes through a Pink Floyd phase in college." I thought he was just being a jerk. I mean I couldn't imagine ever not liking Pink Floyd. Of course, now looking back, he's right. These days I really have to be in the mood to listen to Pink Floyd. I just can't commit myself to stuff that depressingly mellow very often. And I look back at how intensely into them I had been and I just laugh.

But these guys chose "The Band" as their soapbox. And when the girls they were trying to impress with their knowledge didn't respond with the same awe and admiration they had taught themselves to have, they rolled their eyes and shook their heads and continued talking about it amongst themselves. And I knew exactly what they were thinking: "The kids today just don't get it." They considered themselves last bastions of some fading standard. It's disgusting and annoying really and makes you want to smack these people upside the head for being so pretentious.

But like I said, I went through that phase too. And I think most any college student of reasonable intelligence and appreciation for art and culture goes through that phase. When everybody in college seems to have their own "thing" and talent and brings their own brand of cultural diversity with them, those of us who were fairly sheltered, and even some of us who weren't so sheltered, have to have our own thing to bring to the conversation and make it seem like we have something to hold in higher esteem than others.

After the DVD of the concert was over, the party upstairs kind of dispersed and the conversations ended. It was getting on past one in the morning and I decided it was time to be heading home for real this time.

I walked home feeling good. It had been a good night and a fun one and I had gotten to look back a few years to my own college days. Yeah, I missed some of the mindless fun, but I don't miss the person I was back then. I know in some ways I haven't changed much since college but in other ways I have a hard time remembering a "me" before 1999 the year I graduated and moved to LA. I like the me of today much more than the me from college. I like better where my passions and priorities are than where they were back then.

I got back to the apartment and for old times sake I pulled out my Pink Floyd album "Meddle" and played the final track on the CD, "Echoes" a twenty minute drug trip with guitars and sound effects. I lit up one more cigarette and inhaled deeply, letting the nicotine tingle take me into the music and smiled contentedly.