Crazy Days and Crazy Nights

 When you’re an undergrad, living in a college town known for anarchist wine and cheese parties, and you're sharing a house with three radical Pentecostal students, you never know what you're going to come home to. 

 I worked from Friday evening into early Saturday morning, at a hole-in-the-wall donut-hot dog shop. while many were partying uptown, i served stoner dogs and donuts to inebriated, drug-fueled students in the later hours of existence, going home in the wee hours just before dawn, when the city fell into a silence rarely seen.

Compounding the slow walk home, when faced with all-you-can-carry free "day-old" donuts, I would carry three waxed-paper bags of donuts in one hand and a 32 ounce mountain dew in the other. Dropping off one bag on my girlfriend's front steps, I would carry the two remaining bags home, finishing my caffeine drink as I climbed the front steps of the beige house, and wandered in to stash my donuts in the fridge. That morning, like most Saturdays, I lay down on our tie-dye couch cover on the living room sofa after gobbling a circa 4 AM cruller, only to awaken sharply to a wet patch on the back of my stinky shirt. 

Peering over the edge of the sofa, I smelled the wet carpet first. Just water. But a trail of it. Leading into the next room...and up the stairs. Hmm. 

By the time I opened the upper bathroom door, it was obvious. Someone must have been sloppy in the bathtub last night because there was water all over the floor. The light bulb revealed more danger as I maneuvered from one spot to another attempting to skirt the incident zone. Finally, gripping the side of our clawfoot tub, I discovered damp lint, curly hair, and what looked like an emptied bottle of anointing oil. It had all the earmarks of a serious Pentecostal Party.

I headed to my room, worn out from having to slap Stoner Dogs together at record pace to keep up with the night’s demand. I collapsed on my bed and fell asleep. When I woke, noon had passed, and the house seemed quiet. I ambled down the stairs to find our resident journalism major sitting on the couch nonchalantly reading a textbook in the same area I discovered serious water "damage" in the wee hours of the night. When I asked him about the evidence, he said that several people had followed him home from a fellowship where a young man expressed the need to be baptized. Seizing on the opportunity, our man had offered our bathtub…and a place on the sofa…

When I reflect on the antics of my housemates in those years, I am amused by how unpredictable our lives were. It seemed like we constantly entertained some wanderer, who often found themselves sleeping on our one-brick-leveled couch. From the Birdman with the weak bladder, the radio broadcast engineer who didn't like walking home alone, to the bespeckled Nazi Henchman look-alike (in Raider's Of The Lost Ark), the tie-dye covered sofa saw more characters than an old B movie. Meanwhile, we kept our clientele stuffed with ladles-full of hot chicken soup, Gem Soda (with a delightful amount of yellow food coloring) or Ski (a concoction so lethal you could watch the caffeine floating around in the bottle) and enough ice cream to build an igloo before crashing on the said sofa... 

Those may have been “crazy days and crazy nights,” but the most potent drug we possessed, other than caffeine, was our random humor...original music pieces featuring "the screen," slam-dancing to worship music, and poetry readings of the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

So, to come home to wet carpet, and a trail to...or from...the upstairs bathroom, was not so unusual that it should have surprised me. In fact, it was all good experience for the stranger things that came my way later in life...when I held an air hose at a toilet paper machine for ten hours at a time, when I appraised a white supremist campground for tax purposes, and when I ran away from the young Amish woman chasing me around the barnyard...until I could speed away home...