Rum Punch can Kill

The island of Jamaica has an expected Caribbean flavor complete with world-class sunsets, white, sandy beaches and turquoise blue water that is offset by the soft, rolling mountains that stand on a distant shore.

This was all easily visible from the nearly two hour drive we took from the airport in Montego Bay southwest to Negril; however, what also was visible was the extreme poverty and desperation of this island nation’s people. I couldn’t help but feel a bit guilty as we passed shack after tin-roofed shack on our way to the resort that would house us for the week. Undersized children chased stray dogs in the streets while dodging zooming buses and cars that seemed indifferent to the children’s proximity to the moving mounds of steel.

My pity quickly evaporated on arriving in Negril. Our group traveled with Student City, which put us in a place that’s labeling as a “resort” was charitable, at best. The rooms were small and the bathrooms grungy. Some in my group were crammed four into a room, with only a one double bed to share. And when we headed out for our first night of fun, we were greeted by the poor Jamaicans I had grieved for not three hours before, but would not shed a tear over the rest of the week.

Spring Break is their time to make money; unfortunately, they never seem to let you forget it. Before getting to the club, we had to get a cab, which proved an adventure each day. Not yet having changed any of our money into Jamaican, and somewhat unsure of the exchange rate, the cabby extorted our group of 12, which he crammed into a mini van, for $20 to travel one mile. Then, when we got to the bar, we were greeted by bartenders refusing to serve anyone without green in their hands, and when they finally produced a drink for you, it was in what could not have been more than a six ounce cup, requiring one to travel back and forth to the bar, all while waiting in a throng that never thinned.

But, don’t cry for me Argentina. It was still a great week, despite the bumps in the road, and this week, I’ll be rolling out my favorite stories. Today, I will attempt to lengthen the legend of BC, who when last visited in this space was making his way to the ER to have a bee bee removed from his ass.

BC is a three-term Spring Breaker, having gone to Acapulco, Mexico, his sophomore year and Cancun last year. I was warned by my big brother, BSB, who had traveled with him to both locales, that he would bring it.

“Like an athlete who rises to the challenge in the finals, BC will be staggering around drunk Wednesday morning while everyone else is popping Advil and chugging water,” he warned me. And true to his word, there was BC, Wednesday morning, greeting me at 10:15 a.m. as I headed out to breakfast, blacked the fuck out.

After finishing breakfast, I headed down the beach to our day drinking locale and ran into a couple guys in our group. They quickly filled me in on what BC had accomplished in the last hour. While standing at the bar awaiting a drink, he decided to relieve himself all over the floor. As he giggled and showed everyone what he had done, another guy stepped to the window, and a confused look came across his face as he tried to realize why he was standing in a pool of liquid that was probably decidedly too warm and large to have come as excess off a wet bathing suit.

Not wanting to miss an MVP performance from my former roommate, I grabbed Audrey by the hand and hustled her less-than-pleased self down the beach as fast as I could. When I arrive, BC is standing in the middle of a circle, screaming unintelligible insults to all who pass. I join the circle, and begin to get filled in, but no sooner than I finish my question does BC walk up behind a girl, getting as close as he can to her backside, and shoots a torrent of liquid out of his pants and onto her feet, while giggling the entire time.

After BC’s pee party, he entered the day’s drinking contest. On that day, it was a two-person chugging relay race. After facing a cup of rum punch (never again will I be able to stomach fruit punch), the contestants ran to the shore’s edge, grabbed a bat and spun ten times. BC was the anchor, and headed down towards the surf with a lead of a couple seconds that quickly evaporated. He seized the bat and began to spin. But after only three spins, he began to lose his footing and tumbled into the water and floundered on his back as waves crashed over him. He finally found his drunk footing, and believing he was done spinning, started running parallel to the water down the beach, away from where we were. He ran a good, drunk, 20 feet before someone retrieved him and sent him back.

Still smiling, and still believing he was going to seal the victory, he traipsed up the beach toward the finish line, but his progress was impeded by a meat head that he almost certainly insulted earlier in the day. The meat head jumped into his path, raised his arms, and decked BC, lifting him off his feet and sending him to the sand with a thud. He then spent a good ten seconds merely trying to stand up before confronting said meat head and his douchy friends, before we rushed over for back up. Unfortunately, the competition was being run by a Student City rep, Victoria, who was almost certainly 50-years old and had been in Jamaica shooting black tar heroin for a good portion of her miserable fuck existence. Even more unfortunate, BC had drunken run-ins with her the day before, when she kicked him out of a competition and he responded by calling her the C-word (the one that refers to a female’s reproductive organ) at unprecedented decibels. So, as BC toppled to the earth from the meat head’s body check, Victoria encouraged the behavior, calling BC a “tool” and egging on the idiots.

(A brief aside to explain the annoying nature of this Victoria. All week, she ran these drinking competitions, and all week, she made horrifying, grotesque references to “dirty bananas” and how many she had seen on the beach. She also openly encouraged guys who spilled drinks to jump up on stage and moon everyone, which was certainly more painful for the spectators than for the drunk idiots who had no recollection of the event later. Finally, after everyone started ignoring her and stopped participating in her asinine games, she drew a boom box in the sand, plugged real head phones into the drawing, and proceeded to wildly and suggestively dance on the beach for our spectating pleasure. Remember, this woman is pushing AARP age and in a bikini.)

We finally pull BC away from the idiots, and he promptly flops into a chair, exhausted and drunk. He soon passes out, and while all of Audrey’s sisters were worried about him (“I heard he never gets like this!”) we all chuckled and headed back to drinking. Not even a half hour later, one of Audrey’s dumb slut sisters comes running up to me, terrified.

“Carter, BC is bleeding and we can’t wake him up! You’ve got to take him home, he might need to go to the hospital.” Somewhat concerned, but mostly confused, seeing as how he had been passed out for 30 minutes and had been relatively undisturbed, I hustle over to where his lifeless body lay slumped in the beach chair. As I came upon the chair, I noticed a red liquid dripping through the chair and pooling on the sand underneath him, but it didn’t exactly look like blood. As I arrived by his side and inspected further, I laughed aloud at the stupidity that surrounded me.

“Jesus, Brooke, its fucking strawberry syrup, they were taking body shots earlier and they probably dumped it on the drunk, passed-out kid. He’s fine,” I exclaimed, ignoring the fact that his liver was screaming for mercy.

Every 20 minutes, BC would wake up, saunter around for a few minutes, trip over something and make us all laugh, and then pass out face first in the sand, requiring us to pick him up and place him back in his chair. Finally, after about two and half hours, he woke up for good, and I took him back with another brother to the hotel. But BC never goes quietly.

The first group he came upon was playing a friendly game of pepper with a volleyball. BC barged into the middle of it and screamed at them to pass it to him. The horrified players tried to ignore him, bumping the ball high in the air as BC stood in between them and futilely flailed his arms in an attempt to hit the ball. After we had laughed hard enough at the two strangers’ expense, we pulled BC away and headed down the beach. But because he had spent the last two hours between comas and rolling around in the sand, he was covered, so I tossed him into the ocean to clean off. While he was doing his best not to drown in the surf, he looked up at us with that goofy smirk. I was sure he was peeing again.

“Hey guys, look at me, I’m a CRAAAAABBBB!” he screamed as he crawled through the water. The angelic look upon his face and the pure joy he had reminded me of a middle-schooler, not a drunken 22-year old. He frolicked in the water for a few more minutes, tried to tell everyone that passed that he was now a crustacean, and splashed us with water. But, as with everything, all good things must come to an end, and I wanted to get back to drinking, so I grabbed him, pulled him out of the water, dragged him back to the hotel, and threw him in bed to sleep it off around 4 p.m. Amazingly, and to his credit, he was back at it at 10 p.m., in the club, fist bumping away, with nary a recollection of his day.

Come back Friday for the story of PSP, who smoked a joint with a Jamaican that he believes was laced with meth and the aftermath that ensued.

Everytings Irie, Mon

I returned home yesterday from a week spent in the Caribbean sun-burnt, tired and a little hung over, but the remnants of my last Spring Break could not rival the pit in my stomach that had accompanied me to Jamaica.

The source of anxiety was the future, of course, and how barren mine appears. Before losing my shirt and donning flip-flops and board shorts for the week, I had a job interview that I presumed had gone well. After dropping my bag to the floor and proving to my mother I had returned with all my limbs, I fired up my bored laptop hoping to find a job offer, but instead, merely disappointment.

I love Ryan Howard, but I never hoped to mimic his pension for swinging and missing. The sting from another rejection letter lingered well into the night, a companion with a whiny, unceasing and pessimistic voice that brought me crashing back to earth off my high from Negril.

“See how much trouble you’re in?” the voice would whisper in my ear. “Graduation is only two months away, your friends will be off to contribute to society, and all your frivolous time in college will finally bite you in the ass.”

“What will you do? Where will you go? How will you survive?” All questions that swirled through my head and tormented my night until dawn brought the distraction of a day at my internship. As I stepped out of the shower, loaded up my toothbrush and looked into the mirror, a smile crawled across my face. I smiled because I had spent the last week in a third world country, a country filled with desperate men and women who depended on my peers for their yearly sustenance and to plug the holes in their tin roofs. I smiled because while it stings to be told no, I only heard you can’t from that dastardly devil in my head.

Many will be forced to scrap and scrape harder than I, and many more have been told no while their fridges lay barren and the lights flicker at night. I still have two more months in the cushy cocoon of college, and fretting them away will not get me employed. But I shall Press On, with persistence and determination, while enjoying the setting sun of my college career.

A Dangerous Drive

Three years in the Greek community at State College has allowed me to build a vast web of contacts and friends, and consequently, it is difficult to traverse campus without crossing paths with someone I recognize. It is a nice ego boost, having so many familiar faces at a university with more than 20,000 students, but yesterday, my arrogance-filled need to wave to all I passed nearly cost me.

After dropping off Audrey at her house, I headed down the main strip in State College Town on my way to my parents’ house. As I approached one of the many stop signs on the street, I noticed a fellow Fraternity member to my left on foot, and turned to wave as I began to slow the car to respect the approaching stop sign. When I turned back to the road, I realized my mistake and slammed on the brakes just in time to avoid several years in prison. I had nearly mauled two girls crossing the street in Audrey’s car, and the looks on their faces could not accurately be described as pleased.

“You do realize you have to stop, right?” the nearly-flattened girl muttered in disgust as my mouth hung agape in shock at the atrocity I nearly committed.

“Oh my God, I am so sorry,” was all I could mutter as she turned her back on me before I could even check to see if she was ok.

The fraternity member, Tankass, so dubbed because of his well-endowed rear-end, bounded in the passenger side door as I rolled up the window, checked my limbs and thanked God I had not killed the poor girl.

“I think you ran over her foot,” Tankass said as he shot me a glance and strapped on his seat belt.

“Are you kidding?” She’s not limping. If I did, why did she run off?”

“Probably because she’s afraid you’ll take off the other one,” he helpfully offered.

I paused to watch the girl cross the street and head down a side street before accelerating and dropping Tankass off at home. She had no noticeable limp or injury, but thoughts of a legion of cop cars chasing me entered my head and charges of a hit-and-run flying from a black-robed judge’s mouth caused me to shudder.

I was fortunate not to have hit her, and I was in the wrong for taking my eyes off the road and failing to stop at the stop sign, but allow me take this opportunity to pass the buck and some blame on to the pedestrian. Pedestrians have no idea how to cross the street on our campus; they often get to a street corner and merely cross, assuming the motorist will see them and stop. The motorist is certainly in the wrong if he strikes a pedestrian, but you learn to look both ways before you cross the street when you are three-years old, and far too often in State College Town, a pedestrian dashes out in front of a car locked into the Dave Matthews on their iPods.

I feel privileged to call into question how my peers cross our town’s streets because I spent my formative high school years in Metropolis, and quickly learned how to cross the street. And you know how I learned?

Because I was struck by a motorist due to my stupidity. Freshman year, I was a member of the school’s cross country team, and because we were downtown, we practiced in the city. One day, I experienced the fabled “runner’s high,” which transformed the chore of running into an exhilarating experience that has never again been duplicated. On this particular day, we were practicing in one of the city’s parks, and as I came to the edge of the park, I was forced to make a right and run half a block down the street in order to cross safely at the light.

However, I elected not to do this. I quickly glanced to my right and noticed the light at the end of the block was red. I leaped the fence separating the street from the park, crossed the first lane, which was parked cars, through the second lane, which was stopped and backed up from the light, and into the third lane, where I was promptly struck. I rolled onto the hood, slamming my elbow into the windshield, which cracked from the impact. I rolled off the windshield, taking out the passenger side mirror and radio antenna before landing on my backside on the street.

Fortunately for me, I did more damage to the car then it did to me. The motorist stopped, I choked back tears from the embarrassment of being an idiot and running into the middle of a busy, downtown street, and my coach faked concern while stifling laughter. I jogged back to school, had our athletic trainer check me out, and headed home on the train. The incident, however, stuck with me. I would be called Pontiac the rest of my days by members of the team, including my aforementioned coach, who was my teacher junior year and never referred to me by name, only as “Pontiac.”

I dodged a bullet yesterday, but pedestrians should not assume motorists know what they are doing or are paying attention. Before you jump out in front of a car, make eye contact with the driver to confirm he is going to stop, even if he has a stop sign. I learned how to drive on a manual, therefore, I will probably never learn how to make a complete stop in my life, unless of course my luck runs out and I do kill somebody. Or maim a girl’s foot.

Winning Won't Cure All Ills

Championships are celebrated by confetti from the rafters, immortalized by photographs of grinning victors, and congratulated by fans, friends and family. But Wednesday night at The Colosseum on Campus, the spectators fled the stands before the final buzzer sounded, the champagne was flat, and fittingly, the Campus Intramural Services staff did not have a camera on hand to photograph the frustrated victors.

The Fraternity League Championship was contested between my Fraternity and one of the smaller chapters on campus last night, but it was hardly played, more survived. As one of my fellow seniors said as we exited the gym, the game was “a waste of time.” Our victory was marred and ruined by the antics, whining and horrendous show of sportsmanship and class by our opponents, who had stunned the Greek world by defeating a perennial powerhouse and our chief rival in basketball, robbing us of a chance to defend our title in a rematch of last season’s championship.

I have played basketball since before I could tie my shoes, and have outlined my love for the game before. Basketball is beautiful, and has long been a constant in my life while other things shifted into equilibrium. All games have rules, but basketball has a culture. You enter the gym, lace up your sneakers, pick sides, and officiate your own game, calling fouls, travels and baskets. The games get heated, and you always want to win, but there exists a mutual respect between you and the guy in the other color, because you both are in the club, you both are ballers.
Unfortunately, not everyone who heads to the playground is in the club. Some people forget that winning isn’t worth it if the game drags on as an offending player whines and calls phantom fouls and travels to give his side a leg up. But justice on the court is swift; his teammates quickly freeze him out, and he will have trouble getting back on the court, because few will be willing to put up with his tired act.

Last night was the equivalent. Thankfully, campus does provide student officials for the games; however, they do not have a future career in the discipline. While they often botch calls, mangle the rules and slow down the game, they are at least consistently poor. It isn’t expected that they will get every call correct, or even most calls, and their crime is typically calling far too many fouls, not too few.

These facts escaped the vanquished last evening. The game was over from the tip, as we rushed out to a quick 22-5 advantage as our opponent sat back in a zone and were picked apart by three-point field goals. I had a tough half, finishing with no points and four fouls, not all of which were well called, but I merely shook my head and headed to the bench as my teammates started the second half with a large advantage.

They had no interest in going quietly, but instead of mounting a comeback, they merely took what was going to be an embarrassing defeat and made it an unenjoyable mess of a game. They repeatedly flopped in an attempt to draw charges, and were outraged when they were called for blocks. They cursed, talked trash, and chased down fleeing officials headed for the scorers table to document their latest infraction. By the end of the game, they had two players thrown out after receiving two technicals, one of whom was forced to leave the premises or risk his team forfeiting the game, three spectators removed for verbally abusing the officials and only four players left to finish the last pathetic minute of the championship contest. What should have been a crisply played game turned into a free-throw exhibition for our team, as they slapped, hacked and pushed their unjustified frustrations on our team.

While I was peeved that my career had closed on such a low point, and that our opponent’s thuggish and immature response to the poor officiating had ruined any possibility of satisfaction from winning our second consecutive title, I was most disappointed by another example of Greek-on-Greek hate. While it is no secret that rivalries exist between the Greek chapters on campus, it is so discouraging to see them become petty bickering matches, often followed by destructive vandalism. I dislike a great number of fraternities on this campus, because I have great pride for my own and want it to be the best, but have forged mutual friendships built on respect towards other chapter’s basketball teams and players, because they are in the club. My brothers have disappointed me with their brutish behavior to rival chapters in the past, and unkind words have passed my lips towards other fraternities, but this offense struck home, robbing me of my joy, passion and ultimately, my last win.

Instead of my last memory being as I dreamed it, surrounded by my brothers as we hoisted our second trophy in as many years, it will instead by the surly faces of our opponent, chasing down the referees and taunting our fans as they scurried for the exits, just happy to have not witnessed a fight or serious injury.