normally, they would find each other outside puffing away as curls of cigarette smoke formed chains of solidarity around our necks. i was in fact very much a part of the bad girls smoking crew. like something straight out of an emily dickinson poem:
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
my undergrad years were very much like that. the crew of malcontents to which i belonged shared our poverty, our cynicism and our drugs the same way our opposites shared fashion tips. we were the 90s versions of hippies and radicals in torn jeans, flannel shirts listening to nirvana at all hours of the day and night. our beliefs were based on concepts shaped outside of pampered suburban childhoods or the virtues of having two parents. we clung to each other for our visions, truth and doc martins in the face of our vapid classmates.
but mostly we stuck together for the drugs.
despite our empty wallets, we quickly learned the basics of investing and good citizenship. by combining a few measly dollars, we could buy enough drugs to share the assets with all investors -- like a marijuana mutual fund.
oh we were frugal. our knowledge of dime bags only can take a college student so far when ramen noodles never quite satisfied the munchies we'd develop. still, most of us could never call home and ask for money to buy food even if it went to when taking into account we could again pool our finances to pay for the $6 dominos pizza special, we still always felt like we came up short on money.
what we were not short on was fun. yup, we were the kids who stole the bell from the library. we used it to ring it at parties and say,"yup shit's officially out of control."
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
we rather liked our no name status on campus. we partied by and for ourselves, sometimes letting friend-of-friends in our fun. it was one of those nights when we discovered the flammability of beckys and negroes.
it was a routine saturday night sitting in someone's dorm room on campus. we had yet to get kicked off or have the local cops come to arrest john fidelis. we had no clue who the fcuk was john fidelis. we were partying with eric.
who the fcuk is john fidelis?
we often said that ourselves. until of course, we discovered "eric" was john fidelis in three states and desperately wanted by the cops for something we didn't really care to learn what for exactly.
so it was a pretty routine night, nothing out of the ordinary. we were drinking and smoking, passing the pipe from person to person, until we smelled smoke.
a different type of smoke. not the sweet ahhhh scent of pot, and not the pinch of clove cigarettes and certainly not the black curtain of marlboro reds we chained smoked back then. it smelled worse.
becky or someone sitting next to her had dropped an ash from one of our lit smoking devices and instead of hitting the floor to burn us and the dorm into extinction, we were burning becky. the fringe of her torn jeans had caught the hot ash before it hit the grungy carpet. becky was on fire.
it took a moment for our drug and drink induced haze to clear enough to grasp what was happening. BECKY WAS ON FIRE.
and we laughed. oh god, how we laughed! BECKY WAS ON FIRE. hell, becky even laughed with us. after she realized the guy that pounced on her was not going for a cheap thrill.
thankfully someone had the good sense to dive on becky and pat the bottom of her legs down until we were sure we wouldn't lose her to the burn ward. aside from adding new scars to a ancient pair of jeans and some minor bruises from her overanxious savior, she emerged unscathed.
"ding! shit's officially OUT OF CONTROL," the bell captured the moment.
until a few moments later when fluffy, our lovable 6'5" massive black friend began to sweat after snuffing out the flames on becky. he managed to set himself on fire as he bent over becky, the fringe from his cut-off denim jacket was the next item to go up in flames.
the guy standing closest to him refused to touch him. he goes as a black man, "i am the next one to go up in flames, dammit. 'cause everybody knows only beckys and negroes are flammable."
ding!
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