THE GAME WE CALLED COLLEGE

"So, what do you wanna do?"

That was me.

"I dunno."

That was my best friend, Eric.

"Me either."

"College?"

"Play college?"

"Yeah, sure. You want to?"

"Yeah, okay."

We were about eight years old at the time and, as you’ve no doubt gathered from the exchange above, we called the game "college."

Most of the time, Eric and I spent our time together collecting bugs or building forts, or pinning dead bugs to the walls of our forts. On the rare occasions when bugs and forts weren’t enough to cut the mustard - or just when the weather sucked – we would generally fall back on "college.”

I know exactly what you’re thinking, "What the fuck is college? If this son of a bitch types the word college one more time and has the unmitigated gall to put it in italics without telling me just what in the hell he's talking about, I'm going to shove my hand down his throat, grab his intestines, pull them through his mouth and wrap them around his neck like jaunty little scarf.”

First things first: You’re awfully violent.

Second things second: To make a long story short, the game of "college" basically consisted of, Eric and I hanging out in my bedroom, talking to each other and acting out what we imagined our lives would be like when we grew up and found our way to college.

It was simple and it was sort of gay.

When I say gay, what I really mean is lame – the sort of gay that has absolutely nothing to do with becoming aroused by the wonderfully lucid smell of man ass.

Most of the time, anyway.

What’s that? You think the game of “college” sort of, kind of, maybe just a little bit sounds like something a couple of girls might do? You think it has a lot in common with pre-teen pigtailed females bouncing around in their bedroom acting out situations like meeting a hunky guy, or getting married, or having a big beautiful wedding and somehow inexplicably becoming a princess?

Well, if it sounds like a girlish sort of thing for a couple young boys to do, that's because it was.

The only major difference between what we were doing and the games of our penisless counterparts was that I don't recall Eric or I ever fantasizing a “college” scenario in which we donned a pretty pink dress and married a dashing young prince in a flowered gazebo near the ocean.

Well, wait. I guess there was that one time.

The thing both amazing and pathetic about the game of "college" was the type of situations we seemed to think would regularly happen to us once we came of college age.

We expected loads of women and mountains of booze. We anticipated an endless parade of parties, and piles of crotchless panties – some filled with drugs and others were filled with the more traditional female genitals.

Maybe even a few filled with both.

An afternoon of “college” would generally begin with Eric sitting on my bed – basically chillin’ with just a little bit of illin’ – you know, like college kids do. He’d pretend to hear a nonexistent phone ring and promptly pretend to pick up.

"Hello? Yep, this is Eric. Oh, hey Shannon. Yeah. Sure. What are you up to? Oh, really? Yeah. I think we can do that. Totally awesome. Sure. Yeah, see you then, sexy."

In the pretend world Eric was a smooth talking pimp with game so big it could hardly be contained. In the real word he was sort of a weirdo – and a dork – and sort of gross.

Eric pretended to hang up the pretend phone and turned to me with as lecherous a grin as an eight year-old could possibly muster. "Guess who that was?"

I was sitting on the pretend bed at the opposite end of the room in our pretend dorm. I rubbed my hands together like a cartoon villain and smiled. "Shannon?"

"Yep."

"What did she want?"

"She's on her way over."

"No shit?"

"Yep, and she's bringing, Debbie."

"Radical!"

Yeah, that's right, I said radical.

Don’t judge me too harshly, though. I was only eight and the Ninja Turtles were popular at the time. Everything was either radical, or bodacious, or totally tubular.

We immediately scampered to tidy up our pretend dorm and make it somewhat presentable for the visit of our pretend – no doubt ample breasted - college cuties.

I knocked twice on the wall with my fist. "They're here."

After making my way to the pretend door and pretending open it up, I stepped to the side and let in the pretend girls. As I pretended to watch them pass by I also pretended look at their pretend butts, and pretended to mutter the word "dayyyymmmm" silently to myself in my pretend imagination.

Wait - enough of this.

"Pretend imagination?" Isn't that basically the same thing?

I really need to stop typing pretend.

I’m not going to though.

I should, but I’m not going to.

It’s amusing me to no end.

Every time I do it, I chuckle to myself.

Eric and I pretended to spend the next ten minutes sweet-talking the girls. Mindless small talk - even pretend mindless small talk - ended up getting really old, really quick, and before we knew it we'd removed the shirts of our pretend female companions and were pretending to cop ourselves a pretend feel.

The Muppet Babies used to pretend like this - minus the boobs of course.

Not long afterward we’d managed to get their pretend everything off, and soon after that the orgy was underway.

Eric was propped up on his hands, staring at the bed underneath him with a truly terrifying grin and humping the air at a ninety-degree angle.

Taking a moment from pretending to give it to my pretend girl-toy doggie style, I spotted Eric out of the corner of my eye and felt the need to speak up. "It wouldn't work like that."

"What do you mean?"

"It wouldn't work. A real pussy isn't on top like that. You need to do it on more of angle." In order to show him what I meant, I flipped over my pretend girl, placed her pretend legs on his shoulders, rotated my hips and began to hump the air.

It was disturbing.

My know-it-all bravado also annoyed, Eric. "How do you know where a pussy is?"

"Everyone knows. It’s obvious."

"Shut up."

"You shut up."

"No. You shut up."

"You shut up infinity."

"You shut up infinity plus one."

"Fine. Do whatever you want, but when the time comes to actually get it on with a girl at college you're gonna feel pretty stupid."

Out of the many, many things wrong with the situation as a whole, this is the one I chose to point out.

Seriously?

That’s just stupid.

In time I'd come to the awful conclusion that the craziest notion we had while playing “college” was that the women in college would call us and ask to come over - or for that matter, talk to us at all.

The pussy placement predicament was the least of our problems.