Second Semester
1/89 - 5/89
"I am a loser geek,
Crazy with an evil streak.
Yes I do believe there is a violent thing inside of me."
-Everclear
So where did we leave off? I'm in College, Skip is my roommate, we're in Student Government, and there are a lot of freaks living in my dorm.
We'll start from there.
Things were pretty much status quo when the second semester started. My grades hadn't been that great, but I blame that on my discovery of the "afternoon nap". I don't care what anyone says, but when you have a break in classes for like an hour or so, and you head back to your room for a quick nap and then end up sleeping for the next five hours, that's the best nap ever. Period.
Of course, the naps made sure I never made the Dean's list. Well, not THAT Dean's list. I'm sure I was on another, secret one.
I was also on one other, special list. One day, while walking through the "Commons" (the main food hall, and general hang out and meeting place on campus), I passed the campus Priest. I'd never met him before, never talked to him before, didn't know him at all. But when I passed him, he looked at me and said, "Hi, Spat."
That scared the crap out of me. Does he get a memo from God or something? A list of people to watch out for? And why am I on it?
Our dorm room became a hang out place for all the freaks on campus. The room was almost never empty. My friends from High School (Mike, Bob, Keith, etc.) would still show up frequently, and we spent a lot of our time trying to find silly ways of freaking out my girlfriend. This was a game I had been doing for years.
Once, in High School, she went away to England for a couple of weeks. While she was gone, we had a few parties in my apartment, and after one such party I found a silver hoop earring on the floor of my bedroom. The day she was coming home, Mike and I went to the local drug store and bought eight toothbrushes. We labeled each one with a different girls name, Bambi, Candy, Heather, etc.. We left the toothbrushes in the bathroom around the sink, and left the earring on the night-stand next to my bed.
When she came back to my apartment, we talked for a while, then she went to use the bathroom while I retired to the bedroom. When she came into the bedroom, she threw the toothbrushes onto the bed, smiled and said, "Funny."
Then she noticed the earring. She picked it up as I sat there waiting for the screaming to start. I can't help it, I liked getting a rise out of her. She looked at the earring, looked at me, and said, "You found my earring! I've been looking all over for this."
Damn.
That was basically our relationship. Me trying to freak her out in some way, shape or form. Hence, the next picture:
I told her I had slept with someone at College, and while she was freaking, I showed her the pic. :)
I can't help it, I'm evil.
Also at school, people liked to take pictures of me while I was getting dressed. I don't know why, but they did.
Ok, no story to go with those pics, just wanted to post them somewhere.
Anywho, during my second semester I fell in with the freaks of College. The Goth folk. The people who wear all black, and listen to Bauhaus, Ministry, The Dead Kennedy's, Sister's of Mercy and all that other fun, uplifting music. One night, while hanging out in my room with some of these freaks, one of the girls asked if I had ever thought of getting a Mohawk. I had thought of it, but never seriously. So she asked if she could shave my head.
I thought about if for a bit, and decided, "Why not?"
I usually wore my hair down, but before certain classes I would spray it up. But since I was lazy, I would basically tilt my head to one side, spray that side heavily with hair spray, then tilt my head the other way and do the other side. I ended up with two stalks of upright hair, with a saggy hair mop in the middle. It was kind of like a Mohawk... except different.
Originally I was worried that I would get weird looks from people and get treated like a freak, and in a way I did. One of my professors would completely ignore me during class when I had my 'Hawk. She's never call on me, never expect too much of me, and when I did raise my hand to answer a question, she would shower me with praise for getting the answer right, no matter how simple the question was. It was great. Basically, I was being rewarded for being an underachiever. I guess she figured I was a punk, or a reject, or whatever you want to call it, or maybe she was scared I was going to kill her after class. Either way, I was happy.
DISCLAIMER!!! The following story is an act of fiction. The events depicted are figments of my imagination, and never actually happened, and I will deny them all if asked.
One of my other Goth friends was named Matt. He was a nice guy, a bit of an outcast, but aren't we all?
Matt had a shotgun. A Franchi Spas 12. An awesome piece of hardware in any arsenal. It's a pump action shotgun that has a button on the pump handle and when you press it and push the pump forward, the shotgun switches to semi-auto mode. Meaning that each time you pull the trigger it fires. No pumping needed.
Obviously, he didn't keep the gun on campus. But I was desperate to fire it. One night, he invited me and my friend Eddy to go out with him to shoot it. We figured he meant at a gun range. He didn't.
We drove out to Deer Park, Long Island, to an abandoned Psychiatric center.
We trekked through the woods to a small clearing and found an old car door laying on the ground. And then we shot it. A lot.
While we were reloading, we saw flashing lights in the distance. Probably Cops called out when someone heard the shots fired. So we snuck away into the deeper woods.
We tried to be as quiet as possible, but while we were sneaking, a small, little, tiny, kitten started following us and meowing like crazy. So Matt turned the shotgun on it. I stopped him before he pulled the trigger, and instead we decided to grab the cat and take him with us. No easy task. I swear we made more noise trying to get the kitten than we would have if he had just shot it.
The kitten thought is was a game. He (She?) ran all around us, jumped into the bushes, came around behind us and meowed even louder. About ten minutes later, Eddy finally caught the little bastard and managed to keep it quiet while we worked our way deeper into the brush.
When we had gotten far enough in, we let the kitten go, and started shooting things again. Not the kitten, I swear.
We shot in semi-auto mode, we shot one handed (ALA Arnold in Terminator), we shot all sorts of things that were lying out there in the woods. It was great.
While we were reloading, we heard shots being fired near the Psych center. That's right, the Cops, or security guards, or whoever, was shooting back at us. We fired a couple of retaliatory rounds into the air, and then ran away with the kitten still following us. (Don't worry, we were too far away from the other shooters to cause any danger to them.)
We loaded a spent shotgun shell into the gun to keep the spring cocked (at Matt's urging) and headed back towards civilization. When we had cleared the woods, we ran back to the car, dropped off the shotgun, grabbed the kitten and went door to door until we could find someone to keep him (her).
We got back into the car and started driving home. On the expressway, a Ford Taurus pulled up alongside us. I was doing about 80 or so, and of course, I was in the number covered Spat-Mobile. The guy in the other car was drinking a beer, laughing at my car, and smiling to his girlfriend as he pulled ahead of me.
I said, "Screw this!" and floored it.
I got up to about 110, but the other car was still faster. He would pull back to me, smile, and then speed up. When he pulled along side me again, I got pissed.
I turned to Eddy and told him simply, "Do it."
Eddy lifted up the shotgun and pumped it.
I read the other guys lips as he mouthed, "Oh, shit!" and slammed on the brakes as he pulled in behind me.
Eddy turned to me and said, "It's jammed!"
So now I'm trying to un-jam the shotgun at 110 mph, while trying to keep the car on the road. No easy task. The other car is still staying right behind me, not risking pulling alongside.
At the next exit he pulled off. I un-jammed the gun, and we drove home and laughed for hours.
And once again, THIS NEVER HAPPENED.
Later in the semester, Matt got arrested for attacking three members of the school Football team in the hallway outside his dorm room. Matt was like 5'4" tall, 160 pounds soaking wet. He was a short, chubby guy, but apparently he ATTACKED three football players. Well, that was the story in the school paper anyway. They claimed that he went crazy and attacked them with a stick that had Satanic Runes carved in it. When the Police arrived, they searched his room and found two bottles of Ether that had been stolen from the Chem lab on campus. Rumor had it that he planned to pump it through the vents in the dorm and then kill everyone.
Yeah, right.
When Matt was finally out, he called me and filled me in. Apparently, the Football players were making a whole lot of noise outside his room late one night. He had asked them to quiet down, and then they attacked him. They hit him a few times before he was able to get back into his room. Once in his room, he grabbed his Bokken (a wooden sword used to practice Martial Arts).
The Football players kept kicking his door, so Matt called the cops. The Football players kept attacking his door, so he opened it and charged them with the Bokken in hand.
They beat him pretty badly.
The Bokken, by the way did have something carved in it; "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick." Not very Satanic in my opinion.
And he did admit to stealing the Ether, but he also stole a bunch of other stuff. Just because he could. He had no intention of using it. And I'm more prone to believe him. I can't tell you how many freaky things I "borrowed" from the Biology lab. And I wasn't planning to build a Frankenstein type monster to kill all the other students. Well, I had thought about it, but wasn't planning it.
Matt dropped out soon after, and I never saw him again.
There were a few other stories I wanted to throw in here; serving food for the midnight breakfast during finals; Skip drinking a whole bottle of wine on Valentines Day and then wandering from room to room in the dorm going, "La la la."; Spring Break with Skip in Boca (that might end up as a story on it's own one day); resigning from student Government by commenting, "Where would one buy a tie as ugly as that?" to the Student Body President in the middle of a meeting; etc. But this in getting kind of long, so I'll end it here by saying that after all the fun I had that semester, I apparently forgot to go to class on a regular basis and ended up on Academic Probation. Oops. Well, there's always next year.
If you have any questions, E-Mail me. Spat@spat-nospam-cave.com
