I ended up getting on campus around 7 after stopping to grab two slices of pizza. Thankfully phone calls had been made en route and I was included in the beer run. I arrived on campus, giddy as a school girl, and walked up to the house. My glorious return to college was about to begin. I took a deep breath and opened the door to the townhouse...
The scene was a familiar one: kitchen table position randomly, empty pizza boxes and sub shop wrappers littering the 'living' room, wooden chairs provided by Siena used as dinner trays, TV sans remote lying on an up-turned desk, dirty floor requiring shoes to walk on, overfilled trash cans that are emptied at the last possible moment. I was home.
The original plan had been to pre-game at the townhouse then head to downtown Albany to meet up with a friend of ours flying in from Indiana around 11:30. That, however, did not come to fruition. As we began drinking heavily, I received several text messages that Jake's flight was delayed "for no fucking reason!" and he wouldn't be getting into Albany until at least 3 a.m.
A curveball was thrown into the mix and I tested and sufficiently destroyed the cardinal rule I set for myself that weekend: to not go to Landing Zone.
So naturally...we went to Landing Zone.
Landing Zone is the kind of place where you remember walking in the door, drinking a couple beers, but don't necessarily remember how you woke up in one of the freshmen dorms the next morning. It's a kind of 'handle with caution' type of place. It is also one of the dumpiest places I've ever been to on a consistent basis.
Using the word 'bar' to describe this place is really walking a fine line between merely stretching the definition and just straight up lying. It's more like a frat basement. You stand in a long ass line, hand the bouncer the most fraudulent fake ID of all time, pay a $5 dollar cover and you're in. Now if I wasn't clear on how fake this ID could be, let me try to hammer home the fact that there have never been people that have given less of a shit on how many underage college students they can jam into a bar without being in fire code violation. Or actually breaking fire code and just not caring.
This is a place where using the ID of a 38 year-old isn't off limits. Why not switch races? They don't care. If it scans, you're in. If it doesn't...well put on a smile and you're in. I'm sure you could doodle a picture of yourself with the caption reading: "Hi I'm Alex and I'm 21!!!!" and they'd take your wrinkled five dollars and strap on a wristband.
To give you another perspective on how much of a dump this place really is, during the week it serves as a truck stop. On more than one occasion we have actually talked with truckers that are still on their bar stools at 1 a.m. surrounded by loud, rowdy kids and nubile young college girls. Not creepy at all. On more than one occasion during my undergraduate years we encountered a man missing teeth and wearing, well, a trucker hat sitting at the bar drinking with all of us. I remember his name was Aldo and I remembered him talking about buried treasure.
There is a good possibility that he's either still there drinking, or dead.
Now if the screening process for underage college students to consume alcohol wasn't enough to make this a shining beacon of blackout, the perk of knowing a bartender was even better. And, 10 times out of 10, you did. Or you knew someone who knew someone who did.
In our case, the cards were largely in our favor. The bartender that night happened to be a good friend of mine through my undergrad years and I fully intended on paying as little money as possible.
As George W. would say: Mission Accomplished.
Beer after beer was put in my face and I never reached for my wallet. I never paid to get in either. So after piling a hefty amount of alcohol from the pregame into my body, I was now in control of getting basically whatever I wanted.
Even though I had been to this place more times than I can remember and that is healthy for a developing teenager, I had a first that night.
Posted up against the wall, I was a comfortable distance from the bar yet far enough from intimate conversation. I'm not sure exactly what transpired, but I found myself talking to a rather unattractive freshman girl. She must have sensed weakness when I was alone and dove in for the kill. She identified herself as a freshman and I as an alumni, which immediately made me feel creepy. She asked where I was from, I stupidly responded with the truth. "OMG I'm from New Hampshire too!!!!" She told me she was from Exeter, a town close to me and let me know she went to Proctor Academy. The synapses in my alcohol-imbued brain were firing slowly, which prompted me to tell her I tried to get a job there this year (which is true, but silly to say because it lengthened the conversation).
"OMG! I know the assistant dean to the janitorial services of the admission counselor to the vice president of student affairs headmaster of children there! Give me your number and I will get you a job when I wake up TOMORROW, I SWEAR TO GOD!!"
So it was at this point where I, for the first time ever, gave a girl a fake number.
As she finished typing the phony digits in her phone, she turned to me and said "So you're Alex May right?" as she started inputting my first actual first name.
I paused, thinking quickly for being so drunk, and replied "Mayben... Alex Mayben."
The rest of the night included more drinking, more seeing people awkwardly that I hadn't talked to since graduation and more drinking.
Because we're so old and weary from our new position in adulthood, Tom and I decided 1:30 was a good time to leave and found a cab. Being the crafty economics major that he is, Tom somehow made sure that everyone else paid for us. I threw in a dollar, my only expense of the night, and sat back for the duration of the ride. The underagers around us were heavily intoxicated and talking shit to the cab driver, to which he responded with: "Yeah, well I got a .44 on me, so try and fuckin' run!"
The entire weekend I kept thinking Did that guy really say he was packin' heat??
We got back to the house and Tom immediately thought this was his chance to audition for a show on the Food Network. We found some frozen chicken fingers and threw them in a frying pan on the stove, to which he flipped haphazardly in the air like this was secondhand. Three or four fingers were lost to the beer-sticky floor. After eating the lukewarm chicken, we did some more exploring in the fridge and pulled out some lasagna.
Microwave? No, not on 'Cooking With T-Hop'. Just throw it in the frying pan!
The rest of the weekend would follow suit. I became the first non-baseball alum to play in the alumni baseball game. One freshman from Georgia thought it'd be a good for the coaches to see him playing hard; to show them he was a gamer. What the douchebag didn't realize is that he was playing with people that hadn't played college ball in, say, 40 years but also with someone who had never played a day in his life past tee-ball (me).
So this kid hit a dribbler to the shortstop who fielded the ball and threw to where there was the oldest man--perhaps the first baseball alum ever--playing first base. Whatever athleticism he had when he was a young, fit twenty-something in college was lost a long time ago. He booted it naturally, so as it dribbled into the dugout this Georgia moron sprinted to second and when the throw to shortstop bounced through his legs into left field--where I was playing--he made a turn for third as I charged to the ball and ran home to test the tee-ball arm I possessed. I did all that I could to try and hit him, but missed my mark. He was immediately booed by everyone after crossing home plate.
We had a ridiculous party later that night and I would again have moments where I felt aged. The freshmen ball players were pretty embarrassing, having the air of trying to be the cool kids on campus. The quote of the night, however, came from a cute brunette who, as I was making my way through the crowd of 18 year olds, turned to her friends and said: "I CANNOT wait for Wednesday... I'm getting my braces off!!" Wow.
The next day I collected my belongings, looked around the house, thanked God that I didn't have to clean up the mess and left to return to my grown-up life with my job and all my responsibilities.
I woke up Monday morning and took a shower, putting on my coat and tie, and packed my briefcase to prepare for the day of teaching. It was only moments after I shut the door to my apartment that I frantically reopened it and ran to the bathroom to scrub off the black 'X' scribbled on my hand from the bar Saturday. Not necessarily a step in the right direction when entering a classroom of middle schoolers.
But like they say, you can keep the adult out of college, but you can never keep college out of the adult.
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