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.

ROSE TAKES IT OFF

I was a virgin throughout high school. I never poked unknowingly a pair of boobs. I never squeezed a buttock that wasn’t my own. I never kissed a girl on the lips, or the face, or the hand, or blew one in her direction from across a room. I never went on a date. I never even had a female look at me without screaming at me to stop staring before unleashing their boyfriends on me.

I was as pure as a newborn baby - with a slightly more impressive penis.

Only slightly, though.

In fact, the only parts of a naked woman I’d ever seen were either in my head or in any of the various pornographic materials I’d managed to catch a glimpse of over the years.

To say that I was a teeny bit hard up for human contact would be the understatement of the century - the equivalent of saying Michael Bay is a bad director.

While true, it doesn’t even come close to telling the whole story.

My senior year in high school I earned a scholarship to an art college in Ohio. It wasn’t too long afterward that I learned the required courses of the first year included a figure drawing class – a nude figure drawing class.

Oh, yeah.

I was finally going to see some real life boobs!

I fully understand just how pathetic that last sentence must have read to the vast majority of you. I assure you, it sounded just as pathetic in my head. I’m not proud of it. It’s not something I’m going to put on my resume or tell the grandkids when I’m old. It’s out there and I can’t take it back. What’s done is done.

At the time I didn't even care that there would likely be a guy or two thrown into the mix. I’d been in locker rooms. I could suffer though a few eyefuls of penis for the chance to gaze upon the flesh and blood form of naked female.

It was going to be awesome - naked women awesome – which is the most absolute awesome of awesome when you’re a sad and lonely eighteen year-old.

Months passed.

During that time I moved to Ohio and I settled into the dorms at school. I was raring to go! I was chomping at the bit! I was chomping at the raring and going with the chomp!

I don’t know that that last one is supposed to mean and I really don’t care. That’s how excited I was.

It was the first day of the figure drawing class. I was at my desk with my pencils out and pad of paper opened. My fingers were tapping on the desk anxiously. They wouldn’t stop. The instructor said something along the lines of, "The model is getting ready. She'll be out in a moment."

She’ll?

He used the word “she’ll.”

Hells to the, yeah.

It was a woman - a girl – a female - a homo sapien with sexual organs entirely different than my own. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was going to have a womb.

‘Fo shizzle.

I slid my midsection a little more underneath the desk, on the off chance that something began to stir below. I wanted to be prepared.

Keepin’ it real, homie!

Moments later, the model walked into the room.

She was at least seventy-five.

Dayum.

In hobbled an elderly woman named, Rose. Her face was like a catcher’s mitt and her hair like an old bird’s nest. She was probably one of Thomas Jefferson’s mistresses and it was safe to assume she’d been getting discounts at Denny’s since the ‘80’s.

Rose dropped her robe and my world crumbled with it. She looked like a garbage bag filled with drippy-wet pee-poo diapers. She looked like a Barbie doll someone melted in the sun. She looked like a textbook definition of the word gravity. Needless to say, my fears about hiding my midsection were completely unfounded.

In fact, my penis took the initiative and hid itself.

I spent the next hour and a half drawing Rose in various positions I wished she’d never gotten into while listening to her complain that that she was cold, or aching, or that she needed a rest because the arthritis in her hands was acting up.

As I stared at the wrinkly exterior she called flesh and I called the Devil’s hammocks, all I could think was, "Those aren't supposed to be down that low, are they?”

I also never wanted to eat, or see someone eat, or be in the presence of a roast beef sandwich again.

Half way through the class the instructor gave everyone a break. While most of the students went outside to smoke a cigarette or throw up, or throw up then use the cigarette to burn their eyes, I sat in stunned silence. It’s not that I couldn’t move so much as I didn’t want to move.

I never wanted to move again.

With everyone gone, Rose put on her robe and started walking around the room, looking at the drawings everyone had done of her. She nodded her head at some and shook it at others.

Turns out she was a real art snob - you know, for a bag of old beef jerky.

She eventually made her way to me and stood behind me with one hand on her hip and the other scratching at those pesky black hairs dangling from her chin. There was little more than a thin sheen of nylon separating me from her wrinkled nakedness.

She was quiet for a minute, examining my work with her discerning, cataract-riddled eyes. When she’d seen all she needed to see, Rose leaned down and pinched my cheek from behind. "That's really wonderful, sweetie."

I'm not even kidding. She pinched my damn cheek.

Just like my Grandma used to do.

How I made it through the second half of class while comparing Rose to my nanny (who by a cruel piece of fate, also happened to have been named, Rose) is completely beyond me.

Rose, the nude model, was the very first woman who ever flashed me her junk while in something fairly close to the doggie-style position.

Rose reminded me of my grandma.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh at life.

Other times you want to throw a brick at it.

I JUST NEEDED A RIDE TO THE ZOO

"Fuck you, Chris! Fuck you! What the fuck am I supposed to do now, you stupid fuck? Who's going to watch Casey? What the fuck are you thinking, you fuck?"

"I don't know. Call your mom, maybe she'll look after her?"

"I don't want to call my mom again! I fucking ask her to help out too fucking much as it is!"

"Well, what do you want me to do? I can't miss another class. If I do, then I fail. Then what? All this for nothing?"

"God damn it! God damn it, I am so fucking sick of this fucking shit-fuck. Fuck you, fuck! Damn it!"

I was sitting in the living room on the couch of a complete stranger, scratching at a stain on my shirt with my index finger and desperately trying to pretend that I couldn’t hear the argument going on between him and his wife.

I was failing.

The dead could hear these two. Beethoven's corpse could hear them, and he's buried in Vienna—which is nowhere near Ohio—which is where we were. Plus, he was deaf before he died. Plus, corpses can’t hear anything.

So how in the hell did I end up in this most awkward of awkward situations?

Let me explain.

You see, when I was in college I was pretty much invisible. I’m not talking about being invisible in a cool sneak-into-the-girl’s-locker-room-and-watch-them-undress sort of way, either. I was invisible in a far less cool weirdo-loser-who-never-talks-to-anyone-and-has-no-friends sort of way.

A week prior, the instructor in one of my drawing courses told us that we’d be spending the next couple of classes at the Columbus Zoo, sketching various animals.

This sucked for a number of reasons:

1. It just plain sucked. Drawing animals at the zoo? Really? This was seriously what I was paying twenty grand a year for? This was supposed to help prepare me for the real world and land me job and secure me affordable insurance? Sketching monkeys?

2. I didn’t own a car—which meant I needed a ride.

For a dude with no friends of which to speak and no prospective friends on the horizon, who also had most of the student body believing he was a serial killer, finding a ride proved a far more difficult task than it really should have been.

Thankfully, when the instructor asked everyone willing to offer rides to those of us without one to raise their hands, the other weirdo in class raised his.

We were stuck together.

My new carpool pal was a tall drink of water—maybe 6’4. He had dark hair, he was skinny, and he wore glasses. He was dorky in a harmless, greasy sort of way, and his name was Chris.

We always come in pairs. We’re just like boobs. Weirdoes, I mean.

No one else in the class was willing to get into a car with Chris, and no one else was going to let me get into a car with them.

We were a perfect fit.

The following week, Chris picked me up outside my apartment around seven in the morning. His car was a piece of junk. The bumper was bent. The paint was peeling. The back window didn’t work anymore, and there were three or four crumpled up McDonalds bags on the floor of the front seat. There were fifteen more scattered throughout the back.

The dude really liked McDonalds.

He was sicker than I originally thought.

"Hey, if it's okay with you, I've gotta stop at my place before we head to the zoo."

I really didn't have any interest in going to Chris’s apartment. Scratch that and revise—I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in going to Chris’s apartment.

             What was I supposed to say, though? “Stop at your apartment? I think not, nerdlinger! You drive straight to the zoo or I’m out of here!” Maybe I should have slapped him on the back of the head or coiled up my fist and popped him right in the ear?

             The guy was doing me a favor and keeping me from failing by agreeing to give me a lift. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t the forties, he wasn’t my servant, and I wasn’t Ms. Daisy.

I said the only thing I could. "Sure. No problem."

       Looking back on it now, I realize I should have punched him in the ear.

Twenty minutes later, we arrived at his apartment. The inside was a sty. It was messy like an anus—the sort of messy that could never truly be cleaned—messy like Russell Brand.

Also, it smelled a lot like a twelve-year-old boy’s bedroom—you know, kind of like ejaculate and crusty gym socks. Spread haphazardly across the floor were at least thirty more crumpled up McDonalds bags. On the dining room table there were three more and on the kitchen counters more still.

             Chris pointed me in the direction of his couch and grunted “Give me one second," before heading out of sight and into another room.

Wedged between the cushions beneath me, I found another McDonalds bag.

Was he really eating all this McDonalds?

For a moment, everything was quiet.

On top of his television, I noticed another McDonalds bag. Underneath the bag was a videocassette with a piece of brown piece of tape on the side. Written on the tape in a thick black marker were the words, "KELLY'S GIANT TITS."

Okey dokey.

"Fuck you, Chris! Fuck you!" A thin twenty-something girl came storming into the living room area with her fists clenched. She was pissed. She was really pissed. My new pal, Chris, was right behind her. He had his hands pressed tight against his head. It looked like he was trying to keep his brain from exploding.

"What do you want me to do? I don't have a choice!"

"Fuck you, Chris! Fuck you! What the fuck am I supposed to do now, you stupid fuck? Who's going to watch Casey? What the fuck are you thinking, you fuck?"

"I don't know. Call your mom, maybe she'll look after her?"

"I don't want to call my mom again! I fucking ask her to help out too fucking much as it is!"

"Well, what do you want me to do? I can't miss another class. If I do, then I fail. Then what? All this for nothing?"

"God damn it! God damn it. I am so fucking sick of this fucking shit-fuck. Fuck you, fuck! Damn it!"

The thin girl snagged hold of a crumpled McDonalds bag and whipped it in Chris’s direction. It hit him in the face, bounced off, and ended up wedged in the metal of the crummy chandelier. Before he could react, she grabbed another, reeled back like a major league pitcher, and chucked it at him. This time Chris was ready. This time Chris got his hands up.

The minute his hands were in front of his face though, she charged and kicked him in the shin.

She was smart—despite her McDonalds-clogged arteries.

"AGH!" Chris keeled over, reached for his leg, and stumbled sideways. Trying desperately to keep his balance, he grabbed for a nearby chair, missed, and ended up flat on his face. Satisfied with her attack, the girl immediately marched back into the room from which she came and slammed the door behind her.

I’d seen something I shouldn’t have seen. I was sitting on a couch, next to a crumpled up McDonalds bag that I shouldn't have been sitting on.

I wanted to leave.

I wanted to be anywhere but where I was.

I envisioned myself charging at Chris, knocking him over, and running all the way back to my apartment. Once there I’d pull my hair out in clumps, cut open my head, tear out my brain, and throw it in the dishwasher.

Chris hobbled to his feet, stuck his fist in the air, and screamed, "Damn it, Kelly! What’s the matter with you?”

Wait—that was Kelly?

Her boobs weren't that big.