By Jason Fierstein
Arizona Daily Wildcat
By any means was it new
and exciting, but throwing
a housebreaking party was
a lot more than my
roommates and I had bargained for. It was a gathering of all sociocultural/economic groups from all over Tucson who just wanted to mooch a little free beer, get tanked, pillage, vomit and drive around town with 0.6 blood alcohol levels, but not necessarily in that order.
A couple of weeks back, we hosted our first party to give our friends the outlet for the normative consumptions of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll that they had craved following the first strenuous week of classes. Our plan was to buy a keg, maybe two, to quench the thirsts of the masses, and to promote a Hawaiian theme to our little shin dig. You know, the average fire dancing Tiki men, coconut bras that would happen to "bust" apart in the middle of the party, tunes courtesy of the surf rock legend Dick Dale and his Deltones and maybe even a spitfire pig roast. With the exceptions of our next door neighbors (authentic Hawaiian natives), most of us looked like we just got off the banana boat.
Suds flowed, conversations turned into physical magnetisms, and bodies fell in intoxication. A nameless and mutual friend (who we'll just call "Adrian" for the sake of the article) of the household passed out around 10 P.M. on our concrete sidewalk after drinking the bar out of business and swallowing a half-can of premium Kodiak chewing tobacco in the drunkard state. And then there was the usual swarm of people around him screwing with him and asking him if he wanted to drink more. I was as guilty of the sinnery as were all the other inebriated assholes.
Soon, after word has it that the party's existence spread through the rest of the Tucson community, we had people from everywhere showing up. Two guys, one who was pushing thirty, showed up already drunk, managed to reenact some Texas roadhouse bar fight and created an animosity that scared the shit out of most of us. We dubbed these two hillbillies "Floyd" and "Jed" and knew whatever Appalachian-brewed moonshine they had smuggled into the party packed a punch way more severe than our Bud Light. The two managed to hit on and alienate everyone of our female friends and when it came time to thrown the hooligans out of our party, "Floyd" got angry, called me an asshole, and proceeded to "calm" me down with the following monologue: "It's all good! It's all good! Can't we juz drank sum beers and party? Let's get fucked up and it'll all be good!". He must've hit that sensitive nerve in me, the same feeling of brotherly, Southern love I got when I went to my first Lynyrd Skynyrd concert. Tensions cooled and we let them stay because we didn't want to make a scene. So, they continue to drink like racehorses and hit on women, until they took off in their pickup an hour later.
Into the wee hours of the night and into the morning, strange people showed up, imported drugs and liquors were passed around, friendships were put on the line in light of the drinking and sexual partnerships developed freely. It was your average college party.