2008

An excerpt from a chapter of the current writing project.

 Previously:

Goose Loonies

2002

2007

2008

I first moved into that house on State Street known as "BOX House" after Andy and I were kicked out of the fraternity sometime in December. In reality, we hadn't technically been kicked out; we had merely thrown a huge rager at the frat house while the rest of the house was on a trip to Canada for a date party that Andy and I weren't allowed to go on for some ridiculous reason or another. The party got out of control -- no doubt how we had intended it -- and at some point a fire extinguisher was thrown down a staircase and a couch cushion lit afire. The fire department showed up to the scene just as the bus from the date party was pulling up at 2:00 a.m., at which point I was conveniently passed out in my small closet of a room on the third floor. The following morning, the fraternity standards board sentenced us both to six months of social probation on top of what we had previously accumulated -- an entire lifetime to us then -- and before the week was over Andy and I were carrying our futon down State Street towards BOX House, where our friends Al and Brett from freshman year said we could live in the unfinished basement through the remainder of the school year for a fraction of the rent, plus utilities and keg funds.

Our short careers in campus Greek life were over. What had started so promisingly on that early September Saturday -- Andy and I dressed in gameday oxfords and ties on the ledge of the pillared front porch, dancing and guzzling beers while our first Ann Arbor gameday as frat bros paraded blurrily by down State Street -- had gone south about as quickly as that Michigan Football season. I won't bother to bore you with the details of intrafraternity drama, except to say that I learned that Fall that some men would always march through life to the tune of some drum I would never hear.

Though geographically we had only moved a couple blocks down State Street, for Andy and I leaving the close-minded halls of the fraternity house for the more hedonistic digs of BOX House was like being released into another world, liberated. The people were different, the houses were different, and the parties were different. It was almost like moving to an entirely new city, where there was a whole new crop of cute girls to meet and a whole slew of new drinking establishments to imbibe in, only there were less rules and no dress code. Andy and I quickly fell into the house party lifestyle that Al and Brett and our other new roommates were already firmly established in there, and we spent that semester touring Greenwood, South Forest, White Street, Packard, Catherine and Hill, and all the other Ann Arbor streets, toaasting late night beers with strangers we had only just met, eagerly flirting with every blonde or brunette who gave us the slightest interest, dancing while the speakers blared in our ears, shouting "Sweet Caroline" when Neil Diamond comes on the playlist, partying until the crack of dawn and generally having the times of our lives with all of those Engineering students, business school kids, pre-med, pre-law, and liberal arts students who overflowed Ann Arbor's townhouses and apartment complexes.

We developed a close circle of friends who were scattered in houses throughout that area of off campus housing -- a group of heavy drinkers with whom we threw big parties for twentieth and twenty-first birthdays and for Holidays and for the simple fact that it was Thursday or Friday night, with whom we got day drunk on Saturdays and Sundays because we had no other pressing demands on our times or because there was half a keg leftover from the night before, and with whom we wallowed on living room couches with during the inevitable Sunday morning hangover; we pregamed at each other's houses and in our later college years descended upon the bars together, drunkenly shouting and stumbling on the sidewalks, often having drunk so much at the pregame that it was all we would remember of the night. In youth's obliviousness, we drank as if we reigned supreme there, as if we would one day be the doctors, lawyers, and engineers of America, as if we had found the keys to life's ignition in the bottom of a bottle, and as if our parents' generation had missed that revelation. All the while, we shuttered to think that it would ever end.

I can't speak to North Campus' reputation as the land of Asian students and Engineering nerds, or to Kerrytown's reputation as the radically-progressive, LGBT/hipster-friendly scene, because frankly I rarely left my bubble on central campus, but the reputation of our neighborhood -- and our house in particular -- for its raucous tailgating and its binge drinking culture was certainly well-deserved. And even among that cross-section of the student body, the seven other guys I lived in BOX House with represented the far left end of the spectrum when it came to partying, which I knew, after living among the conservative, rule-abiding fraternity guys for almost an entire semester, was precisely where I fit in.

On one of my first nights at the house, a random Wednesday night, I came home from class and walked in the front door to discover one of the neighbors passed out on the living room floor; Ross and Peter were drinking forties of Steel Reserve and watching television, paying no attention to the man passed out in our living room .

"Brick, we're getting fucked up tonight. You in?" Peter asked me, and I knew right there and then that BOX was right where I belonged.

We got our shit done and took our education seriously, and we would extract ourselves from that environment when our studies absolutely necessitated a trip to the library, but when it came down to free time -- and we had more free time during that pristine time known as college than we would ever have again -- we set no limits. We drank with reckless abandon.

I fell in love with that house that winter. Over the years, BOX House would become my final harbor from the rapidly-advancing real world, a safe haven where I always knew I could get drunk with someone and forget even the worst personal tragedies. There, we drank to celebrate when our sports teams pulled off thrilling victories, and of course we drowned our sorrows when they lost. We drank there in the mornings to kill a hangover before class, we drank there in the afternoons before a lecture or a presentation, and we drank there in the evenings while writing papers and watching sports. We drank there for every event there ever was in college -- something to settle our nerves after a big midterm or exam, something to toast new internship offers and new relationships, a bottle of whiskey to help us forget a bad breakup or call from home, always a shot of courage right before anything important. Every night of the week, there were people drinking at the house, and if not there was always someone up for it. But what I loved most about that house was that, there, your drinking was never that much worse than anyone else's, and there was sort of an unwritten rule that, no matter how bad someone had fucked up, you were never allowed to call someone out for drinking too much -- a rule which became more difficult to follow as we turned into Juniors and then Seniors and some of us even fifth-year seniors.

In the mornings, if we weren't too hungover, we would descend from the front porch onto the sidewalks that took us on a ten minute walk along State Street towards campus where, after cursorily putting in our days in the classrooms and lecture halls of academia, we fled back to the house to drink our nights away. It was an extremely mild winter and spring that year, for Michigan's standards, and on St. Patrick's Day and any other day the sun decided to peak out from behind the gray clouds of winter we gathered on the front lawn and on our front porch, huddled around beer pong tables and gallon jugs of "jungle juice," dancing and flirting with whatever girls found their way to the house while the stereos blasted cheesy eighties songs and nineties rock jams, day drinking until the sun started setting against the backdrop of our echanted college town. Then in the evenings we regrouped for round two, when we wandered from one house to another, from one drinking gathering to the next, as from one room in a house to another, oftentimes carrying to-go beers -- as if all of Ann Arbor were but an endless block party to which we had an open invitation.

April

April is waking up to a thermos of Irish breakfast tea on a rainy morning, only to return home from work at the end of the day saddened by the hatred out there in the world -- building like a pressure cooker in America these days, it seems -- day in, day out; isolate myself. Can you really blame me for not identifying with a society that can't even collectively agree that the ultimate endgame of human evolution is global harmony based on a mutual understanding? ☮

And the story's only mine to live and die with/

and the answer's only mine to come across/

But the ghosts that I got scared and I got high with/

Look a little lost

- Isbell

2007

Previously:

Goose Loonies

2002

Excerpt: 2007

A February winter's night in Ann Arbor, I'm walking headlong into a slanting snow down North University -- the city lights of bustling State Street diminishing rapidly behind me in great whipped gusts of white wind. I'm carrying Jack London's Tales of the North in a Border's bookstore bag and a Starbucks hot chocolate in my bare hands, which are red and chapped from the cold. This is part of my court-mandated attempt at living the sober lifestyle for thirty days; as part of my probation for my second Minor in Possession of Alcohol arrest in four months, I have to wake up at 7:30 each morning and walk two miles to the Ann Arbor Police Department to take a breathalyzer test with a cast of characters that looked like they had come straight from the halfway house, sign my name on a sign in sheet, and then walk a mile back to campus and wait for my first class.

I figure this is what people who don't drink do in the evenings -- go to coffee shops and bookstores and go for walks -- but I can't shake the feeling that I just don't seem to fit in with that scene. Walking home, I can only wonder why it is that my classmates in the bookstores and coffee shops of campus seem so inaccessible to me. The long-haired bohemians in loose fisherman's sweaters; the hipsters in tight pants smoking cigarettes outside the coffee shops; the Rastafarians with their Bob Marley dreads and their Mexian pancho hoodies; the grad school intellectuals in tweed sport coats and thick-rimmed glasses discussing Dostoevksy in the bookstore cafe; the bookish sophomore girls hiding behind Macbooks in the coffee shop windows; even the student activists who are passing out pink flyers for some cause or another: how I longed to sit down and have coffee with all of them, initiate a conversation about books or life or the weekend social scene outside of fraternity row or anything at all because I want to know all kinds of people on campus, but, having pledged that Fall, I am technically a "frat boy," and everyone seems to think that Greeks and non-Greeks don't get along (no matter how progressive Ann Arbor is) -- or maybe I'm just shy -- so I settled for thinking that maybe we would be friends in a different life, and I walked out again into the blustery mid-winter night. I made my way past the Red Hawk Bar & Grill and Ashley's, where rosy faces talked merrily at high top tables in the frosted barroom windows, casually sipping big mugs of craft beers, and crossed State Street at the cross light onto North University towards the freshman dorms.

Ann Arbor doesn't need any more snow. Across North University, central campus is already covered in several inches of it, every artery and crevace clogged with it, every walkway and every staircase sprinkled with salt, the big frozen branches in the diag courtyards layered with frosting, the brick towers and pillared lecture halls drooping with long icicles like glacial stalagmites. I hang a left at the CC Little bus stop, but not before a blue campus bus streaked with yellow rumbles forth down the street, motoring through icebergs of slush, splashing the sidewalks and spitting clouds of smoke from its exhaust pipes, the few lonely faces in the bus windows all tragically attached to their phones and iPods.

I stop at the walkway bridge over Washtenaw Avenue to look over the railing. It is one of my very favorite spots on campus. From there, you can see the four dorms on the Hill lit up by the golden lights of individual dorm rooms in the hazy, frozen sky, like candlelit windows in British castle towers -- Alice Lloyd, Couzens, Mosher-Jordan and Stockwell glittering over Palmer Field, where in the Fall semester underclassmen play frisbee and tennis and jog laps around the track, but in the winter months it is desolate, barren tundra, lurking like a moat beneath the brick dormitory towers. I wonder what the people in those windows are doing in those tiny golden specks on the skyline, and I forget where I am for a moment as I daydream of coeds scrambling off to the dining hall with their perky hallmates, of lonely Asian students studying Math and Chemistry books under a desk lamp, and of party kids taking shots of Smirnoff vodka and Jose Cuervo tequila in crowded dorm rooms. Standing there on the bridge, there's something dream-like about the hazy golden silhouettes of the dormitory windows in the snow-laced skyline, something magical about your first winter away from home in a college town when the snow is falling in February, when the white orbs of the street lamps along the campus walkways seem to be floating in the falling snow, when the campus has grown somber in the evening hours and the big iron lion statues outside the exhibits museum seem to be watching you.  Eventually I make my way across the bridge towards Alice Lloyd, Couzens, MoJo and Stockwell on the Hill, shivering, imagining I'm walking home to the four houses of Hogwarts.

On the tree-lined path I hear the synchronized patter of two dozen boot prints fast-approaching around the bend, and in a matter of seconds the ROTC corp rushes past me in a cold gust, running in the opposite direction towards campus in their army boots and parkas, their heavy breathing visible in the frigid air. At the back of the two single file lines I spot my old buddy from high school Steve Lewis. Steve smiles and points at me as he passes me before disappearing into the snowy horizon, and I can't help but think about how different Steve and I are now. At one time, our paths were almost identical. We were the only football players in our Honors English courses throughout high school, so we always did group projects and presentations together. We had even both wound up at Michigan. But while Steve ran off in one direction with the ROTC cadets, I was walking home to the dorm in the opposite direction, trying to calculate in my head how soon two beers would be out of my system if I had my last sip at 9:30 p.m. And I couldn't figure out where our roads had diverged.

I cross the street at Observatory Street and make my way along the sidewalk that is lined by pointed black fence posts, the spears which guard the Forest Hill Cemetery, where I went for a long walk that November afternoon on the eve of the Michigan -- Ohio State game when Bo Schembechler died. True to its name, the cemetery hills are forested over with oaks and huge evergreens and white birch trees, and up in the jagged black tree branches there are hundreds of heckling crows barking like paranormal sentinels, casting an eerie pall over that stretch of road every time I walked home alone at night; I'm happy to turn the corner onto Washington Heights, away from crows and head stones and onto my home street, down which I walk under the big arching wind tunnel, and there she is, Mary Markley Dormitory -- the place that after sixteen years in Millwood had so quickly become home to me.

When I finally make it up to 2nd Elliot Hall, it is almost 8:00 p.m., and my hallmates are already well into the festivities of a Thursday night in a college town. The door to our R.A.'s room is closed; he's probably gone as usual, but it didn't really matter to him anyways -- a black student from Detroit, CJ would drink with us if he we saw him out at tailgates or parties and even came to our end of the year party when we snuck a keg into one of the rooms for our last hurrah. The East and West coast kids -- in perpetual outfit of flatbrimmed LA/NY hat and sweatpants -- who all rushed Sammy and AEPi, the Jewish fraternities on campus, are all huddled around a big screen TV in one of the rooms, passing around Grey Goose -- and only Grey Goose -- screaming at the Knicks-Lakers game on TV. Further down, in another room, my buddy Nick and the other stoners and hippies are haplessly fumbling through dresser drawers for a lighter or missing keys, anxious to go out on some psychedelic hike through the Arboretum or to some basement rave. Nick's roommate Will and another Beta pledge from another floor are dressed in khakis and Ralph Lauren dress shirts and tying their ties, not drinking yet because they don't know what's in store for them at tonight's pledge event at the frat house -- a couple weeks ago, we all rolled on the floor laughing when Will came home so drunk that he crawled through the hall neighing like a horse, which we later found out was a result of having been locked in a room with his pledge brothers and being told they couldn't leave the room until the keg was empty. The Engineering and Science kids are all playing Halo in another dorm room, from which there are explosions and flamethrower blasts echoing into the hallway. Some of my hallmates are going into and coming out of the community showers, their towels draped around their waists and shower caddies in their hands, and I wonder why they're not drinking yet if they don't have to take a breathlyzer in the morning. In the room next door to mine, my friends Zac and Max, two of the student managers on the football team, are doing a power hour with a couple other guys from the hall; Zac yells my name excitedly, but he remembers that I can't drink, and we settle for a head nod and a wave. Though we are an eclectic group, we all managed to get along pretty well. You always knew you were welcome in any room if people were drinking, where you'd promptly be offered a shot or a beer.

I scan my student ID and open my dorm room door, and I find my roommate Andy and my best friends Al, Brett, and Tyler from across the hall playing beer pong with a group of cute girls I've never seen before, and when they see me, they mob me, smelling like beer and whiskey, but I'm not in the mood -- I don't want to be reminded on what I'm missing out on tonight.

"Are you sure you don't want to come out with us?" they ask me, insisting that it will be fun even if I'm not drinking, but I tell them no thanks, and because they empathize at least with the shittiness of my predicament, they leave it alone and go their own way, drunkenly careening into the Ann Arbor night. I'm left alone with a room full of empties and Red solo cups.

I turn on the Red Wings game, which is just about to start, and decide to clean up the dorm room a bit. I grab my first of two beers -- and two only -- set aside for the game, crack it, and sit down with my little folding recliner chair in front of the box television in the corner of our room, ever envisioning those February nights in the mid-nineties when I would watch the game with my Dad while he drank his Labatt's out of a coozie. "Ahhhh, that's good stuff," I am amused to find myself saying out loud, just like he used to say.

I don't blame my friends -- not even Al or Andy -- but I have no problem wallowing in my solitude. We were all accutely aware of our fleeting time left together, only six or seven weeks left in our magical year in Markley together -- making the timing of my probationary terms the ultimate punishment -- and partying was all that mattered to us; we were merely freshmen.

My Own Worst Enemy

"But the thing is. . . I think your mind is too much on the writing so that you really don't have time to really sit down and go into whatever this is that's flailing you, all these people flailing you, and so that you're not really hungup on that, it's just a feeling that you don't deal with, and so you, you know 'cause you've got too much other things on your mind. . . Yes, it's just because you're writing, see, you're really only concerned about the writing."

- Cody Pomeray (to Jack Kerouac), Visions of Cody

Waning Everything

Holidays

Christmas Eve at my Aunt Mary and Uncle Paul's in Ann Arbor, the same Christmas Eve with the Cullen's that I remember so fondly from my childhood years, all of my aunts and uncles and cousins gathered to celebrate with presents and food and beer and the warmth of a big Irish Catholic family, the only difference now that there is a new generation of Cullen's tumbling through the house and tearing open presents and that all of us are much older now, wiser and more broken in our own secret individual ways. My cousin Robert is in town, and he tells us stories of his latest adventures to Rio de Janeiro and Thailand and Cape Town; I realize that I have become the other guy -- the one who settles for a job and a dull routine in a nowhere town just so he can buy some groceries -- feel sad. Afterwards I go over to my cousin Frank's condo to watch the game, fantasy football championship on the line -- quality cousin bonding time, the closest kin I have.

Christmas morning at Mom and Dad's in Millwood. Like always, I feel strangely sad returning to Millwood, a sadness that I feel when I look into the woods of our boyhood summers and when I see my dog Rudy getting older and when I see different families in houses I used to know and when I have to leave again. Presents under the tree, John Denver's Christmas album playing on the stereo -- my namesake -- 1st edition Hemingway Death in the Afternoon(!) Get a text from Caitlin: the surprise destination of our trip with her family is to Cuba. Long drive to Clarkston for Christmas dinner with the girlfriend's family, thinking about Christmastime three years ago, when I was going through alcohol withdrawals and I missed Christmas altogether. Seems like a long time ago.

Toronto. Fight in the lobby of Mississauga Hilton. No sleep. Stay up late reading Kerouac in the internet cafe, listen to two young black Canadians discuss their plans to set up a shelter for at risk black youth; listen to three late-twentyish Canadian Muslims discuss the theories of evolution and religion in earnest, and I feel proud to be part of the world for a brief moment in time, proud of diversity and multicultural harmony. Three a.m. wake up call. Pound a red bull, shuttle to airport, in the sky over Buffalo and Pittsburgh and Georgia and Orlando and finally the Keys, over the blue-green waters of the Caribbean and over the red dirt junglelands of Latin America.

Havana. La Floridita -- the bar where my Hemingway began the final draft of "For Whom the Bell Tolls". Eat fried chicken in a backyard restaurant with live chickens walking around the patio picking up scraps, wonder if they're for dinner tonight. Happy to drink two Coca Cola's after sipping on Cuban soda most of the week. Morro Castle, a huge eighteenth century fort where the Cubans used to fight off pirates. Must have found some of Hemingway's muse at La Floridita, spend half the night writing in the poolside bar under the moonlight (forgot to pack my Benadryl). Following morning is day on the catamaran: swim with dolphins, dock at an island for lunch, wade into the clear blue ocean with white sands. Lots of easy time with the girlfriend. I remember the joy in life for the first time in what's felt months, another mini-depression having plagued me for almost all of November and December, it seemed.

New Year's Eve, watching the College Football Playoff in one of the rooms in the resort, surrounded by Spartans: NYE consequently another bust, but it's always been overrated in my book anyways. Last years new years resolution: write one chapter per month. This years new years resolution: write one chapter per month.

Wake up at the crack of dawn on New Year's Day, feeling the old familiar nerves of gameday. Eat breakfast by myself; take a stroll through the resort; swim a few laps in the pool, listening to the fat married couple from Edmonton (Canadians everywhere), smiling deep down because all my life I've loved Canada and Canadians and their mannerisms and non-confrontational worldviews; walk the beach in the early morning hours, getting high off the anticipation of my beloved Michigan Football gamedays. Check the hotel TV: no luck. Find my way to a secret hidden internet cafe to illegally stream the Michigan game on pre-purchased Wifi cards. Chickened out of trying to sneak my dip into Cuba (couldn't decide whether or not I wanted to confide in my girlfriend's parents that I was in fact a tobacco user) and the one tin I carried on was now down to about two heavily recycled pouches, so I snuck into the gift shop that morning to buy a pack of Cuban cigarettes. Five minutes to gametime, head to the huge marble patio in front of the lobby to smoke my pregame cigarette, imagining myself some Cuban drug lord looking off from his plantation veranda over the vibrant green and red dirt farming fields of sun-scorched Cuba.

41-7. Feel guilty for having ever doubted Jake Rudock; excited about the future with Harbaugh.

Reading Kerouac's Visions of Cody by the pool, much of which is direct transcriptions from audio tapes between Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassady, the beat hero of On the Road, while they smoke "T," and sitting under the Carribean sun by the pool I get high right there with Neil and Jack, and no one else on that pool deck knows I'm high but me. Whenever I read Kerouac, I wonder how he knows my soul, knows it on a level that is almost spooky; daydream whether I was him in a past life.

Restless nights in my poorly air-conditioned hotel room (shared it with my girlfriend's brother Brendan) (TV is broken(!)(!)) reading more Kerouac, or going down to the poolside bar where I would go back in my head to the year 2005, the last year before I left home for the first time, transcribing memories on notebook paper while somewhere in the distance a Cuban cover band plays Sweet Child of Mine.

Back to reality. Want to shoot myself in the face within a half hour of being back at the office. Time to write -- escape this two-horse world for a while.