Life of a Thief - Chapter Fourish

Chapter Five







       



-Why do they call it a Bible again?









Ah, college life. The stories I could tell, it would curl your toes. Unfortunately we only have room for a few details before the story needs to progress, gotta get to the goods before you wonder why you bought this book. Actually, I’m sort of wondering that right now.

To give you an idea of why this is relevant to the book, I need to describe what affect college life had on me. It instilled upon my once simple mind the idea that life wasn’t about status or money or even necessarily happiness. We were put upon this rock to learn, to grow and to experience all we can before we rot in Hell. I know, I know, I said before that we are presently in Hell not waiting to be there. So sue me. I like the word and I’ll use it wherever I damn want to. Plus I’m trying to keep a PG rating here. Okay, maybe PG-17. Thank god for the delete button.



I digress. For the rest of my tragic filled life I hung on to that simple idea that, “None of it really matters.” I came to terms with it and I accepted it. I think everyone deep down knows this and tries to hide it from themselves, I know I did. I mean nothing would get accomplished if everyone, while sitting at the morning table slurping their freshly ground Cuban beans and reading some useless drivel on the state of society, dropped everything they were doing and felt death breath down their neck. Brrrrrr. You can look at it two ways. One; that we have limited time so be all you can be. Two; we have limited time so DO all you can DO. Okay, I lied, there’s three. That being, three; we have limited time. So. Why. The. Fuck. Bother. Surprisingly enough three is actually my favorite response. You might be thinking to yourself, “But life is too great to not care, not feel, not enjoy it to the fullest!”. Right, like how many of us do that? All you accomplish when you have that mentality is whacking your self over and over with your conscience for not DOING anything. You’d be surprised what you can and will do with your life if you take the attitude that, who cares. Who the fuck cares. (There goes my PG goal) You climbed Mount Everest, twice? Good for you. You started a shelter for homeless children? Wow, cool beans. You invented those new clear braces for ugly people who think straight teeth will get them laid? I salute you. Me, I’m content if I eat a hotdog from the guy on the corner and don’t have a heart attack. That takes balls like you wouldn’t believe. You know what’s in those? Well, I don’t and I don’t wanna know either.



That’s it, I’m done. I promise there won’t be any more outlooks on life in this book. No sir. I don’t care what you do with your life, just make sure it’s original. I have a blue wig and a pogo stick in my closet just for that reason. Just don’t ask about the cowboy boots and the slip and slide. That ain’t for you.

College is a place of learning. A place for enlightenment, a place for social skill development, a place of worship. I think it said that somewhere when I applied. I always wondered what we were worshiping exactly. Our freedom perhaps? Or the right to be a complete, drunken, horny jackass with the belief that it was cool. If so, I should be ordained. So college is all these things rolled into a nice fatty blunt. With a beer chaser. Somehow, somewhere you fit into the rolled ends, your classes and homework. There’s the biggest failure of word creation man has ever written, homework. That in itself is a major contributor to the slow downfall of society. Two words, two ideals, two ways of life, opposites crammed together. Home and Work. I’m not sure on the exact origin but if it wasn’t a Japanese than it had to be an American who brain stormed that one. 

So here I am, a newly created precollege dropout waiting to happen. I reeked of it. Teachers would smell it and stand far away from me. Girls would see it and giggle. My friends were oblivious because like smokers, can’t smell their own. So naturally the smelly kids joined forces and created their own fraternity. We called ourselves the.......the...... problem is, none of us can ever remember what we called ourselves. We did however have a bond. The bond of a group of rejects is, let me tell you, stronger than any familiar, militant, cheerleading, siamese twin, your first kissing cousin or any other shared sensation you might have had. It’s strong. Look at Revenge of the Nerds. I bet they still get together and look at women’s underwear.

I think we had an unspoken agreement between each other that we were all in our own twelve step process and doing it in a group was just one more way to advance. I can’t speak for them but I think I was on at least step six. Maybe seven. I know one thing, I was for damn sure not going to let college get in my way of reaching twelve.



Around the second week or so, I’m not sure exactly when, we were introduced to a hallucinogenic called acid. Or just Cid to those of us who knew him better. Cid was a good guy and cheap which is even better for us college goers and it wasn’t beer, which was even better since we were supposed to be of the out crowd. We didn’t want to be part of the In crowd for that would mean certain death or at least the loss of our uniqueness, i.e. weirdness. So Cid became our drug of choice and at the time a godsend. It opened our minds, gave us insight to the macrocosm that before was not only impossible but never heard of. We saw things, did things, became things that I still to this day cannot explain. Let me give you some examples to put it into focus for you.



The first “trip” I took was with an eighth of magical mushrooms and a huge, gigantic, monstrous, who the hell would ever need this amount of green liquid, size Mountain Dew. To those of you experienced in this drug frenzy you know that all you really need is a giant Mountain Dew, and possibly a flashlight to be perfectly content for the evening. Well, I didn’t have a flashlight but I did have the Mountain Dew and a full length mirror to play with. At some point in the night I became what I remember calling “the Hobbit”, an alter ego I created for myself. This other person had a different laugh, speech pattern,

and overall completely different demeanor than myself. I was fine with it at the time because although I knew what I had become I also knew I couldn’t do a damn thing about it, so I just hung on and enjoyed the new perspective on life. I still to this day don’t understand why my girlfriend at the time who was the only sober one of the group didn’t run away screaming. I would have thought the “other” me sitting in the corner laughing a somewhat hysterical leprechaun type laugh would have done the trick, but nope, she held out like a trooper. She never did put-out though, now that I think of it, so maybe I did have an effect on her. Glad I could help.

Side note; the name Hobbit eventually stuck and became my name throughout college. I probably had something to do with that seeing as how I ran for vice president of my giant dormitory under the name Hobbit. I remember having signs up with sayings like “ Do you even know HOW to vote, fucker???!! If so, vote for Hobbit!” Catchy ain’t it. Well, I didn’t get voted in, thank some god, but the name was stuck after that.

Okay, back to the drug thing. Another episode I love to retell involves a black Schwinn bicycle. One night out in the local park by our favorite and mother-like tree, we heard a commotion coming down the road. It was almost pitch black where we were, but the drug has a tendency to light up all surroundings almost to the point of actual daylight, on mars. Like a herd of deer, we all froze. If someone carrying a flashlight would have shined it on us they would have seen five or six pairs of eyes gleaming back like racoons caught raiding your trash. We didn’t know what to do, so we didn’t. We waited. Along the road rolls up a tangle of man and machine. It looked rather like a bicycle with arms and legs and possibly a mop of hair for a seat. The man-bike rolls up to us and collapses. We then find out that it was actually two separate entities, one a beautiful shiny black Schwinn cruiser, the other a strange scraggly long haired man who had issues I only dream of. Up he jumps and before anyone could yell, “hey”, or maybe, “what the...”, or even just, “fuck me”, he starts to throughly kick the crap out of the bike. Then turns to us and yells, “That bike is possessed, you want it, you can have it.” And runs away.

Ya, that’s what I said. What does one do in this type of situation? Should we have run as well, screaming the devil’s name in case anyone wondered why exactly we were running in the first place? Or perhaps we should have just left the evil bike where it lay and casually, while whistling I imagine, walked away and never came back. All these thoughts rolled around in my doped up head but the most logical thing we figured was to well, ride it. I mean who knows, maybe it actually was possessed, and we sure as shit weren’t going to leave an opportunity like that just lying around on the ground. So one by one we hopped on up and tried to ride the wild beast. And one by one, we all fell. I think fifteen feet might have been the longest one of us made it but all in all nothing to be proud of. By the end of a half hour or so we gave up and all agreed that the bike was indeed, evil.

Now I’ve seen some amazing things in my life but never have I witnessed more strangeness, more just plain whacked-the-hell out behavior than when I was on acid. I can’t explain it, trust me I’ve tried, it’s just one of those things. 





College life for us only lasted about four months. I know, I know, we were almost done why not just stick it out and graduate right? Well, we felt unanimously that it just wasn’t our scene and I don’t think they wanted us there anymore anyway. After a couple of underage drinking infractions, drug infractions, a possible attempted assault on my part, and the fact that not one of us actually went to a class, I think they were glad to see us go. I myself, felt like a failure and I was ashamed to no end to have to face my parents and say sorry. If I would have had the balls, I would have shot myself in the head with a nail gun, but I couldn’t find both the gun and the compressor, plus I had no balls. Or any nails.

As short as it was, college changed my whole way of life. It gave me perspective and it erased a whole bunch of bad childhood memories that I know I had to have before. By the way kids, don’t do drugs, unless you really really don’t want to remember stuff. Personally, I think stuff is overrated anyway. Everyone should do at least one hundred and fifty hits of good blotter once a decade to get rid of all the clutter. Besides, like a good pair of undies, once they’re gone you forget you ever had them in the first place.

I haven’t figured the numbers exactly but I think that I must have gone through at least three steps in college. I came in at step six and left around step nine. I’m not sure what my companions reached but we definitely all left ahead of the game. Depending on what game you’re playing. I would also like to state, for the record, that this was the end of my twelve-step program. As I imagine it was for the rest of my group. (Except for a stint of dealing boomers to pay the rent.) We had grown through our childhood and now it was time to end the game and start a new one. In the board game Life we were probably  three spaces from the beginning, I swear there was some magnetic force pulling us to the “return to start” square. All games cheat, the only true way to win is to cheat better. I was now ready to start cheating and play for keeps.