A Tale of First Year: Drunk Mike and the Journey to Ginos -vol.1

It was the night of our second day…hm…uh...meaning it was our second night at McMaster University. Most of us anyway, except for the folk who moved in the day before, but that doesn’t matter right now.

Things were good to this point. You bought food off your meal card like it was an endless fountain of money. Twelve dollars for pasta and garlic bread didn’t seem out of the ordinary (little did you know you’d be out of money by Christmas). If you lived in a residence with no A/C, you woke up on a pillow stained with your own sweat and drool. School was a distant thought at this point. You started to get an inkling of how you’d get along with your roommate.

Things were progressing as they should.

It was around midnight.

My roommate Brian and I were sitting adjacent to what would soon be known as “The Field of Dreams”. Derek then joined us.

We sat there for a while trying to figure out what to do, or where to go. After some deliberation we were stumped. However, the answer soon came in the form of five dollar medium pizzas from Gino’s.

Then, as me, Derek, and Brian were about to leave, a figure stumbled out of the large bushes to our right.

I’m just going to call him Drunk Mike. Drunk Mike was tall, gangly, and had braces. He looked like an overgrown tenth grader. He was sporting a t-shirt and pajama pants, and flip flops. Also he was drunk, hence the name.

Drunk Mike wanted to go to get pizza with us, and who were we to be unwelcoming? I mean, it was fucking Welcome Week, everyone was your friend!

So off we set on what should have been a ten minute walk to get pizza with Drunk Mike.

Drunk Mike said some horrid, awful things. Racist, incredibly sexist, and at times sexually explicit things. You might’ve found them humorous, you probably wouldn’t have. I think the only humour comes from the absurdity of the things he said to complete strangers without feeling awkward at all…I’m guessing because he was drunk. Very, very, drunk.

Anyways.

“Man there’s one thing I really want in life,” said Drunk Mike, starting his first conversation with us, “I want to get blown while you know, taking a dump.”

If you can believe it, it all went downhill from here.

“What are they called?” He continued, “blompins, blookins…blumpkin! That’s what I want, I need to find some chick dirty enough to do that to me.”

What a first impression.

We continued down University Blvd., or whatever the fuck that main road from the student centre to the hospital is called, pretty much without incident… or at least Drunk Mike hadn’t said something revolting enough to remember.

That was until some large men asked us for cigarettes. We politely said no (“we” being: Derek, Brian, and I ). In the meantime Mike had started jawing with a group of angry looking guys across the street. We stopped him for fear of our own safety. He then protested, saying that he could outrun any of them.

I’m not saying he couldn’t, he was very lanky and rather fast looking, but still, we weren’t about to let him be the reason for us getting beaten up while he runs away unscathed.

So we hustled along to Gino’s without further incident.

We got the pizza, and started our walk back. Drunk Mike of course, did not pay any attention to traffic, and sort of hustled across the street, with no care for the oncoming traffic.

As we were walking back, Drunk Mike steered the conversation topic towards Drunk Mike’s sex life.

Obviously we didn’t want to hear about this, but he went on.

Drunk Mike’s sex life consisted of this one girl at a party apparently. Unfortunately, he couldn’t stop going on about it. He then went on about how he wouldn’t have sex with members of a certain race, but then rescinded that by saying one of the most offensive things I’ve ever heard.

I’ll go on the record with my belief that this one girl at a party did not exist, and that Drunk Mike would probably take anything he could get.

That’s all I want to say about that.

Drunk Mike soon tired of his pizza. He had two slices. I would’ve taken it, but he wandered away from us into a rather sketchy dark corner. There were some people there, and he was going to give his pizza to them.

Five minutes later, we were still waiting for him. This was an abnormally long time to give away a pizza, but in a moment we were going to find out why. Instead of giving away his pizza, he came back with a dealer’s number written on the box. This was not surprising.

By this time our residence was close, and it was approximately three a.m. . Drunk Mike headed off to his residence, and us to ours.

This would not be the last we saw of Drunk Mike. Not by a longshot. He’d wave to us in Commons, and any other time we saw him. This was uncomfortable. And there was one more encounter at Gino’s, which would eclipse this one in its scope of awkwardness and offensiveness.

Me, Brian, and Derek returned to my room. From my window, we saw some angry guys turning over garbage cans and kicking things.

“YOU MISSED ONE,” yelled Brian.

“YOU WANT TO FUCKING GO?” Yelled one of the drunk angry guys.

It was a fitting end to another night during Frosh Week.

Tales of First Year: An Audience with Anders

It was the first night at McMaster for most of us. You stuck close to the friends you already knew, while feeling out the rest of the first year population. There were countless half-assed introductions to people you knew you’d never hang out with ever again.

“So what res are you in?....cool man, I’m _____, yea man see ya around!”

“Hey, enjoying Welcome Week, yea I totally hate Hedley too! I’ll see you later.”

So the odds were against meeting someone who would leave a lasting impression on you. Luckily for me and my friend Derek, we were about to.

We journeyed along the outside of the campus, heading down the main corridor, passing the Student Centre and the Life Sciences building. There we took a right, hoping to walk a nice loop around campus. After passing ABB and walking towards Thode Library, we were turned back by an orange fence indicating construction was taking place.

So we returned Whidden, however we wanted to orient ourselves better on campus. To do that, we walked past the residence towards Commons, Brandon, and Woodstock.

There in the tunnel we met Anders.

Anders wasn’t the tallest guy, but he was muscular. Built like a fucking tank. He was drunk (an understatement), and like most other people you met during welcome week, he felt the need to introduce himself to us.

So we stood there in awkward conversation. Partly because I was afraid getting my nerd ass beat, partly because it was entertaining.

The conversation shifted to one of the Welcome Week events. The Mac Mixer was like a bad game of “Simon Says”. It involved disorganized commands from a megaphone. One of them was to sit on someone else. I sat on this tall stylish guy named George or Greg or something. Anders however, had something sit on him. Something he definitely liked.

“Man I had this Hungarian chick sit on me. Man she was so hot. She was like this foreign Hungarian chick.”

He went off on this tangent for a minute, during which we noticed something interesting: his hand was down his pants.

He was just chilling there, with his hand down his pants, talking about this “hot Hungarian chick” who sat on him at the mixer.

Personally for some reason, probably because of the absurdity of what was happening, this didn’t bother me.

The conversation somehow got steered towards football, and then towards banished cornerback Adam “Pac-man” Jones.

For all those out there who don’t know about Pac-Man Jones, he was involved in a shooting at a strip club, where he “made it rain” (dropping $80,000 in single dollar bills), then asked for the money back. One thing led to another, and two people were shot. He was suspended from the league for an entire season.

Anyways Anders proceeded to act out how Pac-Man Jones flashed his gun to the denizens of the strip club.

He did this by taking his hand out from the front of his pants, and then putting it in the back of his pants, keeping him arm out like the handle of a teapot. Then he started a sort of staccato dance, stepping forwards and backwards, while quickly flashing his right hand in the shape of a gun out from behind his back, while keep his arm still. He muttered “He’d do it like this man, like this” the entire time he did it.

Predictably the conversation then steered to Pac-Man Jones’ propensity for “making it rain”. He then used the same hand to show how he’d “make it rain”. He did this by putting all his fingers together, moving his hand up, and then spreading them apart.

“Just like this man,” he said “He’d go in there and do it just like this”.

He then added the “make it rain” to his gun flashing dance, alternating between the two.

“He’d be like this man, flash his gun, make it rain, make it rain. Flash his gun, flash his gun, make it rain, make it rain!”

That went on for a good couple minutes.

Then I made a joke about Pac-Man Jones in prison.

He took this seriously.

“No man, he’d be nothing in prison, they’d just take him and beat him, like this.”

He then grabbed me with one hand, and then put a log-like forearm on my neck

Now I wasn’t really worried about him hurting me, more about the hand that was down his pants being so close to my face. Luckily Derek distracted him and his dirty hand with another football question.

Turns out he was a Jacksonville Jaguar fan. Even more impressive was that he remembered the exact score of a game that took place two years ago, in the state that he was in.

As we were standing around awkwardly, this other guy strolls in, obviously stoned and out of it.

His name is Sam.

“Any of you have a cigarette,” he asked.

We didn’t.

We stood there awkwardly for a bit before we went our separate ways. We’d see Sam one more time, but I would never see Anders again.

It was a fitting end to my first night at Mac.