Nurse the Hate: The Closet Incident

Everyone seems to have a comment on the "Couch Incident" from last weekend. How could that guy just have abandoned the scene of the crime, leaving the damp aftermath? Well, let he who is without sin cast the first stone...

In my freshman year of college I made the unfortunate discovery of Little Kings 7 oz bottles. It became a game amongst a friend of mine and I about drinking the very stylish "Loose Caboose" on campus bar at Kent State out of their stock of tiny green bottles. As a sidebar, how great was it that I could use my food coupon book to buy beers for $1.25 on Wednesday night at this bleak little on campus bar? What could be a better way to spend a Wednesday night than drinking a sea of Little Kings Cream Ale? It was all atmosphere in the windowless bar area as you watched other equally dopey freshman eat fried chicken strip baskets while seated at charmless industrial tables. I came from Pennsylvania. I was overcome with the cornucopia of delights in Ohio. Who could imagine little bottles of beer sold in little cases? What a land of wonder this Ohio was! (OK, this wore off pretty quickly, but I was 19 and easily impressed.)

A few weeks later I hitched a ride with a friend of mine to visit a hometown buddy at Robert Morris College. Why my friend had chosen, of his own free will, to attend this school I cannot even begin to guess. Even now, I shake my head in confusion. It seemed to me to have all the negative aspects of High School rolled into the bad points of PA. A small campus population guaranteed if you did something stupid on TH night, everyone else would know about it by Friday at Noon. I think the school buildings themselves had been designed by some expat Soviet architect that used a wet shoebox as a model for the drab classrooms. If someone had escaped from East Germany, and been accepted into this school, they would have said "I am sure this is a good school, but maybe we should return home. This depresses me.".

I come rolling into town with a couple King cases, anxious to share my exciting new discovery. I hadn't seen my high school pal in 6 months or so, and I figured he had become integrated into stereotypical college life like I had. I went to class, but I also unsuccessfully chased girls, drank lots of cheap beer, ordered pizza at 2:15 am, and was a general fuck off. That's what everybody did, right? We crack into the tiny beers, and I'm ready to p-a-r-t-y. I am assuming that we'll go to some kegger, and later wind up at the cool local bar. I am pretty sure that my mind also had created the scenario fueled by bad teen movies that I would hook up with some really hot girl since I was this "exotic guy" all the way from Ohio. She would probably be a cheerleader too. This would be an epic night.

Well, it turned out that my friend was essentially the same guy I played poker with in his Dad's basement when I was 15. He was (and I assume still is) like a 47 year old man that just hadn't received his dead end job, mortgage, 2.3 kids, and Irish Setter yet. His interests had remained unchanged since 6th grade. My friend and his one remaining roommate for the weekend nursed their tiny little beers as I ripped through them like Charles Bukowski. It became evident pretty quickly that drinking this beer in their room was the extent of their plan. There was no party. There was no bar. There would be no cheerleader.

As I continued to work my way almost singlehandedly through the beer, I wondered what I was doing trapped in an all guys dorm on a Friday night. I had no car, and no escape. These guys couldn't even point me in the direction of anything remotely interesting. They just sort of sipped at a beer or two, and talked about maybe getting up a game of Jenga or something. I was in the wrong place. At some point I passed out on one of the vacant beds in the quad bedroom.

I can't even guess what time it was when I woke up with the urgent need to take a leak. It was totally dark in the room. I was as drunk as an English sailor on a one day leave in Bangkok. How drunk is that? Pretty drunk. What do you expect? Those guys hardly put a dent into the beer, and that left it all on me. I was very confused as to where I was and where the bathroom might be located. I have a shred of a memory of being unable to find the door out of the room, and continuing to walk into one of the closets as a potential exit strategy. I just went again and again into the same closet like I was a wind up toy. I just couldn't seem to get out of the room. It was at that point that I decided I was as close to the bathroom as I would ever get, and I would have to let it rip. I don't know what was in that closet, but I am assuming I pissed all over every shred of clothing the out of town roommate owned. And this was no "light showers". This was "heavy downpour".

I woke up the next morning with that incident nowhere on my mind. I was laying in bed with a massive headache trying to remember what time my ride back to Kent was coming to get me. It was then I had the horrible flash of memory hit me. Holy shit! Did I dream that, or did it actually happen? The other guys from the room were down the hall in the john, so I slid out of bed and walked over to the closet. Sure enough, I had left my mark. I had about an hour to kill until I would be able to hop in the getaway car, and there appeared to be no cleaning supplies (like a firehose or team of Mexican hotel maids) available. I went over several scenarios in my mind on how I could ask my buddy for supplies to rectify the situation. I would like to point out, that I had become "lost" in a room about the size of a 15 passenger van. Imagine trying to run this by someone..."Hey, I was in the backseat of the van last night and had to take a leak. Well, the problem was, I couldn't figure out how to get out, so I pissed all over that second row of seats. You know where I can get a mop?". That really didn't seem like something I wanted any part of that morning. As the departure time approached, I still had nothing. I grabbed my bag, hit the door, and got out of there.

It's now time to break the silence. I must come clean. Paul, if your roommate came home and wondered what happened to his closet that Sunday in 1985, it was me. Sorry man. See you at practice.