CHAPTER 1: ARIZONA STATE
I was not a very discerning drinker in college; I would basically ingest anything as long as it contained ethanol. This led to (a) bad grades (b) some very interesting run-ins with the RA’s and (c) some encounters with girls that definitely would not have happened otherwise. I am not going to delve too deep into this last category, as (a) there’s actually not that much to tell and (b) it could only result in embarrassment for the parties involved, i.e. me. [Readers note: I vow to stop using this (a) (b) (c) construction soon, but for now it’s very useful].
As you may know from reading past blogs, I attended Arizona State University for my freshman year of college. When I tell people this, their first reaction is, “Whoa, you must’ve partied a ton.” The truth is, I didn’t party a ton. I partied a little. And sometimes I partied a lot. I probably partied as much as any normal kid living in the dorms, and possibly slightly more. I probably drank more cheap vodka than the average kid in the dorms, and I probably mixed more of said cheap vodka with Gatorade than the average kid in the dorms, but that’s about it. The overall mass of my partying from Arizona State definitely did not equal a ton; it probably equaled about 566 pounds.
One of the reasons I didn’t party a TON was because I was in the honors dorms. This is not because I was an honors student, but because the honors dorms were used as sort of overflow dorms for kids that didn’t get into their first choice of dorms. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I heard the other dorms – some of which were high rises over thirty stories – were absolute cesspools. In the honors dorms academics were at least a small priority for some of the students, whereas in the other dorms the only priority seemed to be spreading sexually transmitted disease.
But anyway, getting back to alcohol: As I said before, I drank a lot of cheap vodka. There is a brand of alcohol in Arizona called “Winners Cup” that sells for six-dollars a fifth. It is a generic brand and you can buy it at Safeway. I drank A LOT of winners cup; it was the brand of vodka most used to mix with Gatorade to make a drink that I think is popular only amongst poor college kids and racist senior citizens from Florida. One night I drank several glasses of “Vaderade” while watching Top Gun with a girl named Sarah Meyer on a 13’’ screen. Sarah later dropped out of school to join the army.
College was the height of my liquor-drinking career, because liquor can be stored in your dorm for long periods of time and takes up less space than beer. I basically only drank beer at frat parties, and I didn’t go to very many frat parties. Plus, the beer available at frat parties was almost always horrible (see: Keystone Light), which didn’t exactly push me down the road of beer connoisseur-dom. The most awesome spectacle involving liquor from my college days involved my friend Nick. Nick’s ancestry is Russian, so he can drink like an ox. One time he came to visit me in Arizona shortly after I had returned from Rocky Point, Mexico for a weekend of “legal” drinking and peeing on stop signs. Rocky Point is basically the Rosarito for kids that go to Arizona schools. Anyway, I brought back from Rocky Point what was left from a gallon of clear tequila that I had purchased for $7.50, and it was the first thing Nick saw when he showed up to visit me. I was kind of sick when Nick showed up (I thought I had the flu but it later turned out to be mono; the dorms are fucking awful) so I didn’t really want to drink. Nick, on the other hand, did. He really wanted to drink. And he drank what was left in the gallon jug (probably about a 1/5th) in about two minutes. He literally just poured it into the back of his throat. I had (and have) never seen anything like it. Several minutes later he was running up and down the halls banging on people’s doors and screaming like an angry warthog.
I left Arizona State in the winter of 2003, but my drinking did not really decline. If anything, it increased…
The suspense!!!