On the eve of the NCAA tournament I decided to write about on of my favorite college experiences. My best friend decided to attend UC Irvine, we will call him Lightweight from here on. This story takes place during freshman year of college during my first roadtrip down to visit him.
A little background for those who are unfamiliar with UCI. The school is located about 1 hour south of LA. The student body consist of roughly 60-65% Asians and less then 5% whites. My friend was one of two white kids in his entire dorm. And this was coming from a mostly white hometown where all but one of his friends were white. To make matters worse almost all of these students went home every weekend because their parents lived close by and wanted them home. This left lightweight alone a lot It is under these circumstances that this story takes place.
We had been in college for a few months and had been dieing to see each other. He kept telling me how bored he was and I couldn’t believe it because I was having such a blast at college, I mean my true alcoholic tendencies were coming out. We planned on a weekend and I was really excited to go down, minus the 5 hour drive. Being a business major I didn’t have class on Fridays so I drove down Friday morning to miss traffic. Lightweight had asked me to grab some booze since no one he knew could buy any. Wanting to show them a good time I had my friend pick up a 30 pack and a handle of rum. At this point in my life I was addicted to rum and cokes, heaven.
I arrived right after his last class and we did some lunch and he showed me around the campus. Getting to his dorm I couldn’t help but feel out of place, we were literally the only white people. I finally realized, on the smallest level, what it feels like to be a minority. Everyone in the dorm seemed cool, although they were all really shy. Except for the gay guy, this was the first gay Asian I had ever met, who was freakin hilarious. His roommate was there as we got to his room. This guy was a piece of work. All of 5 foot nothing, with an obvious short man syndrome, he thought he was the man. I had to bite my tongue as I noticed his huge Mariah Carey posters on the wall. I mean this was back in 2002 but still, fuckin Mariah Carey, and you call yourself a man. The only reason you have gay pop singers pictures in your room is if you are using them to jack off. Anyways this young chap had the ambition to be president of the young democrats and bless his heart. Too bad he complained about everything and had a whiny voice. Even better the dorm had communal bathrooms and he wouldn’t let anyone else even enter the bathroom while he was showering. If thats not bad enough he would belt out Mariah Carey at the top of his lungs in the shower. From that point on his name was Little Bitchard.
The only other white kid in the dorm was a kid we will name Newbie and him and Lightweight were already friends. We all decided to hang out in his room that night and drink with some of the other people on the floor while Little Bitchard was gone for the weekend. To set up the situation only myself and Lightweight had ever drank before, and Lightweight hadn’t drank since he started college. Also, none of the Asians weighted more then 120 pounds, even the guys.
I poured a few rum and cokes making sure to make all of theirs extra weak, especially the girls. We started playing a few of my favorite drinking games: high-low-red-black, up the river, kings, etc. It was soon clear that everyone less me, Lightweight, and Newbie was completely hammered. I was later told they all puked either that night or the next morning. They all had a blast though and we were laughing our asses off. The three of us still wanted to party and weren’t even close to being tired. I noticed a skateboard against the wall and a brilliant idea came to mind.
Let me get this straight, I cannot by any means skateboard, not even sober. At UCI the inner part of campus was a park area surrounded by a paved walkway all the way around campus. Now parts of the walkway were smooth but most were of the gravely nature. Being drunk and wanting to have some fun I thought we should go and skate around a bit, for some reason I always wanted to skate when I was drunk and it never turned out pretty. Lightweight went first because he was the only one who knew how to skate. We followed after him drinking our beers.
We came to a particularly hilly stretch and I couldn’t help but want to accept the challenge. Pushing Lightweight off of the board I jumped on and tried to make it down the hill. Not even 5 second into it…CRASH!! Right onto the asphalt scraping up my arm and knee. No under any other instance this would have been enough, but I was drunk and this was a challenge. I figured that my problem was gaining speed so my brilliant idea was to have the two of the push me so I wouldn’t loose balance trying to kick. 1…2…3 and I went flying down the hill, this time I was able to make it to the bottom which posed another problem. How the hell do I stop? The road make a bend up ahead and I went straight into the grass, fell on my ass, and rolled a good 10 feet.
These highjinks went on for a good half hour as me and Newbie got more scrapes and bruises and Lightweight lost 10 pounds laughing at us. We skated around to a part of campus that had a bridge that linked center campus to various retail shops over the road. Lining the entrance to the bridge were several rose bushes and ferns. Logically I knew there was only one thing to do, push ourselves into them on the skateboard and make snow angels in the bushes. To give you a visual the bushes were about 4 ft tall, so once the board got to the bush you would have to jump off it, twist in the air, and land on your back. As you sunk down into the bush you were to flail your arms as if you were making a snow angel. To get to the bush we had one guy standing on each side of the skater pushing them in the back to gain speed before they jumped.
There are few moments of stupidity that I didn’t have a camera around to capture and this was one of them. I regret it to this day, that was some of the funniest shit I have ever seen. Maybe not so much the falling into the bush, but the trying to climb your way back out of it. We were seriously tore up the next day. Well after doing this on multiple occasions and laughing our asses of the predictable happened, a security guard showed up. Newbie and lightweight took off with the skateboard over the bridge while I jumped behind a bush to hide. Peeking over I saw the guard coming towards me so I took off running.
Being super drunk I was fully convinced this man was running after me and was sure he was going to call the cops. Having never been to this campus before I was completely lost and confused. I kept dodging behind building and looking around for the chasing guard. I was later told that the guard had never followed me, nevertheless I ran around like an escaped convict for 30 minutes. Not knowing how far I was away, and being exhausted from running, I decided to steal a bike and ride it back. I rode back to the bridge to find Lightweight and Newbie sitting there. They didn’t know where I went and were laughing there asses off when they saw me biking up to them sweating. We make it back to the dorm and passed out.
The rest of the weekend was pretty uneventful. Walking by the bushed the next day almost brought tears of laughter to our eyes, again I wish I had a camera. The best part of the weekend, my stolen bike had make the campus police report. Needless to say Newbie and Lightweight looked forward to the rest if my visits…
