old moments that make you smile

i got to perform at a college recently, and damn if it didn't bring back some memories. college was a liberation from the small-town high school i went to, and i embraced the energy of my return to the concrete landscape of a big city, combined with the forward/progressive thinking, and an ideology built on learning youth usually has.

first thing i did at the show that reminded me of my academic life was: when the other comic stepped into a public bathroom to rid himself of some digested waste, i waited about 40 seconds, then opened the door, turned off the lights, heard a "um... hey, someone's in here..." and giggled and closed the door.

it used to be my favorite thing in the world to do, back in the days before locked switches and emergency lighting. the best place to pull an asinine move like that was mc donalds. there's rarely a window in a fast food bathroom, so when i'd walk in and see two feet under the stall door tapping along to elevator music, i'd flick the switch and leave. hell, my bladder could wait the few minutes, and munching on french fries dipped in a hot fudge sundae was a great way to pass the time while waiting for an aggravated face to exit the bathroom. keep in mind, this was in the days before cell phones, which now would be able to provide limited illumination to someone trapped in such a predicament.

my favorite memory from college has to involve my upstairs neighbors, though. i lived in a 3-bedroom apartment on e. park place, on milwaukee's east side, and the idiots upstairs were constantly throwing long, loud, overnight parties. though an understandable event on a saturday night until, say, midnight or maybe one a.m., their sleep-busters would still be raving at 4 or 5 in the morning on occasion. my roommates and i attended one shindig, but this wasn't the breakfast club and we weren't being forced to interact with those outside our social circle. the party people were the downside to college, those who use it as an excuse to get an interesting combination of stoned and drunk while listening to alternative music made only as an excuse to be haughty (i.e. "if you don't like it, you just don't get it, duuuuude.") while pondering whether or not your hand is a part of you, or you are a part of your hand.

so, as i found these all night parties especially annoying on the nights when i had class or work the next day, i got into the habit of stealing their fuses to end them. we lived in an old, old building with old, screw-in fuses housed inside a fire-hazard of a fuse box in an enormous and dusty, dilapidated basement, and one morning around 3am, the party in full swing and with me irritated beyond words, i snapped. i went down to the basement--a room that given its size had multiple entrances and exits; i could be in and out without being seen easily--and walked up to the fuse box.

like a cat burglar about to pick a safe, i rubbed my fingers gingerly, then as quickly as i could, unscrewed all four fuses and darted. i started giggling as soon as i heard the music silence--of course i could hear it in the basement; their apartment was only on the 2nd floor and they needed to play it loud enough to have to shout at one another when inches apart--and i knew they probably thought they had blown a fuse. keep in mind, these guys were not brain trusts, and the first time it happened, didn't have any spares on hand. they got to live from 3am to 10 am without power, when the hardware store opened.

(screw in fuses aren't sold at your local 24-hour 711)

thus began the pattern: every so often, probably five to seven times in all, they would push a party past the point of kindness to the public around them, so i would away to the basement and steal their power.

i think once, because they really pissed me off, i stole their fuses, waited for them to be replaced--after the first couple times, they started keeping spares handy--then waited for the party to die and then re-stole them when all was quiet. my hope was that someone in the apartment would over-sleep and miss an important test and/or get fired from a job or the like.

you know, i always expected them to set a trap for me, but it never happened. maybe because as upset as they were at having no power in their apartment, they always had an excuse to eat the ice cream in the fridge, and nothing ends depression like ice cream, right ladies?*

college, as the saying goes, while the best of times, was also the worst of times. i had no clue what i wanted to do with my life, so i puttered along taking courses that interested me, not those that set me on course for a profitable future. i ended up an english major, and had to take several writing courses to graduate. i only remember two of them, but they were bookends when it came to learning experiences.

the second memory is of a high end, four our five hundred level course, and therefore a lot of fun and taught by an experienced professor. the first recall, however is of "an intro to writing" or "writing 101" type of bullshittery. it was taught by a mousy teachers aide who lived up to every stereotype of someone with limited knowledge, but great ego, meaning she probably went to bars at night and regurgitated gordon wood to impress the locals. it would be easy to assume i irritated her as much as she irritated me.

one story i turned in received much in the way of discussion. i'll go on record and say that even though i don't have a copy of it anymore, i'll bet you dollars to donuts it wasn't very good. it probably contained college arrogance, where because you're young and cocky you think your shit doesn’t stink even though it's horrendously funky, and it was no doubt as poorly written as anything a teenager does, but that's not the point. the point is, then, that it was wonderfully violent.

i remember the basic storyline of the tale, which involved a setting from my own life, that of a bartender working in a warehouse district who would close up late at night and be all alone in a very bleak part of town. the restaurant had a huge, walk-in safe, a leftover from the 1920's, and every night the closing bartender would put all the cash into it and spin the dial; every morning the manager/owner would open the safe and head to the bank.

that was the reality, the rest was both fiction and a minor fear i had working there. in the story, one night a man who has been casing the place for a few weeks steps forth to rob the till. sadly, his timing is off, and he has come after the bartender has locked the money in the safe, a place entirely out of reach. this set the would-be robber off, who then went apeshit on the bartender, beating him to a bloody pulp and achieving an erection in the process. as he stands over the dead body, aroused and licking blood off his lips and eyeing/admiring the pollack like splatters, he hears sirens--the bartender was able to trip the silent alarm--and steals away into the night, getting away scott-free.

why did i write it? as said, youthful idiocy. "i'm gonna write a violent story where the guy gets turned on! that'll shock everyone." were i a massive egotist, i'd proclaim i had written a reservoir dogs ear scene before it was cool, but again, my story was most likely crap. but that's not what the teacher had a problem with; the problem, as i was told, was that i didn't "justify" the villain's behavior.

i apparently needed a back-story to explain why he was a criminal, why he was violent, why he became erect when violent: "did uncle dirty-finger touch him?" "was his dad abusive?" "was he an orphan..." all questions i couldn't give a fuck less about. i argued point that the beauty was in NOT knowing any of these things, that random violence was much more frightening than explained. sadly, i wasn't clever enough to argue either hannibal lecter or michael meyers at the time, and received a less than stellar grade.

it's my own fault for not being able to debate a little better, but damn if the other day i wasn't reading about how the re-made "halloween" and crappy "hannibal rising" were just absolute wastes of celluloid for the very reason that would have made my writing teacher happy: the fear of lecter and meyers was in not knowing what made them tick. we first met meyers as a young child, butchering his older sister. there is a vacant stare on his face, and donald pleasance describes him simply as "evil." there is no explaining him, which means there is nothing to precaution; evil can exist anywhere, and that's what's scary. when it comes to lecter, he actively and openly enjoyed his carnage; not knowing why was all the more frightening in "silence of the lambs." sadly, the remake of "halloween" added childhood sexual abuse or some such nonsense, and "hannibal rising" gave us a revenge theme. suddenly our monsters were just fucked up individuals, and when you understand something, it's harder to fear it.

i take nothing sitting down, so i challenged my grade with the aide's superiors and eventually got it changed. while i may have argued my case slightly better with whatever review board i petitioned, i'm sure my grade was raised simply to make me go away. either way, i loved fighting the machine, because that's what college represented in my eyes: a time and place in life to test the standard way of thought, and have a fuck-ton of fun in the process.

*sigh*

nostalgia.






*side note, what's amazingly fucked up about technology today is: if you go to google maps and enter "2513 e. park place, milwaukee wi," you can spin the street view picture to point southeast and can see the apartment building where this all took place. my unit was on the first floor, directly to the east of the apartment with the white, plastic chair on the porch. mind-boggling.