First Part of Book

Later, whilst walking through a parking lot, I caught the scent of herb. I quickly located the culprits, and identified them as friendlies.
“We were just walking through the parking lot, and smelled some weed, you guys wanna smoke a joint?” I said to the smokers, holding up a joint.
“You wanna hit a pipe?” One of them replied.
“Sure.” Taking the pipe I say “I’m Tom, and this is Eric and Ryan.”
They introduced themselves as Jim Grey, Andy Duscene, and Ryan Lesko. Jim and Andy knew each other from York, ME. They had gone to high school together and found themselves rooming at NESCOM. Jimbo insisted that everyone call Andy; ‘Douche’. Ryan Lesko was from Plymouth MA, and his claim to fame was that his uncle was Matthew Lesko, the guy on TV who says you can get free money from the govt., they’re a weird family. It was a chance meeting, and a strange one at that.
By the way, I was a T.V. Production Major at the New England School of Communications, or for those in the know, N.E.S.C.O.M.. And I was aggressively becoming a pothead to spite my parents. I had been rather sheltered for way too fucking long, and I was ready to make up for time lost. I went to NESCOM a 230 pound nerd with a penchant for weird humor and cheap whiskey, and left a 180 pound, drug dealing dope fiend. Though for good or ill I have never left the college circuit, it is where the fun is, and for those of us with enough good fortune to know how to tap in on this little known fact, we shall persist.
The campus of NESCOM was actually shared with another institution called Husson College, or for those who attended, Husson High. The three dorms were; Hart, or the Ghetto, Carlisle, and Bell, or the Bell Hotel. There was one academic building for Husson kids and one for NESCOM kids too, though sometimes we had core classes in the Husson building. There was a little library and a dining hall named the Dickerman Center, or “the Dicky”. You’d be surprised at how easy it is to get used to hearing someone say lets go get some dick. The NESCOM building had a TV studio, a radio station, an audio recording studio big enough for three bands, and a giant closet filled with 100,000 dollars worth of cameras and equipment.
For the next couple days my routine consisted mainly of smoking joints out in Douche’s car and playing beer pong in one of a dozen rooms around the dorm. The first real action came one night as I was dancing with a girl in a wicked crowded room, Kanye West was playing on some 50 CD Stereo, pretty sure it was college dropout, that was the major theme song of most parties that year, and it would become a symbol of irony. Anyways, all of a sudden, the door swung open and hit a group of people, spilling drinks everywhere. An R.A. stormed into the room and flipped the beer pong table onto the people sitting on the couch and started screaming about nothing. I started to crack up because I knew that none of those people on the couch planned on getting beer-soaked by an R.A. that night. When he saw that I was smiling, he got up in my face and said we were all getting written up. That was when his boss walked into the room.
“What is all this yelling about?” she asked
“These kids don’t understand the severity of this situation”
“Why is it such a mess in here? Was there a fight or something?” she asked again
“No,” he replied “I uh, ya see, when I came in they were…”
“Playing beer pong and listening to music, oh and dancing” I interrupted
“Why is the door to the closet on the ground?” she asked
Nobody said anything, everyone in the room just looked at the R.A.
“I see, can I have a word with you out in the hall?” she asked the R.A.
Moments after they closed the door I was pushing through the crowd towards the window. We were only on the first floor so I slid the window open, gently removed the screen by way of a swift kick, and walked out to the but hut for a cigarette. I sat on the picnic table as I watched what I counted to be 19 people climb out the window and disperse. Some walked around to the front door, some went over to the parking lot, and a few walked over to the but hut. One of them was the girl I was dancing with from earlier. Turns out her name was Christine, she was from St Johnsburry, Vermont. She had two friends with her, Darcy and Lindsay. Darcy was by far the most attractive, she had a man named Josh who was actually cool enough for me to keep my creepy eyes off Darcy, but enough of that. We smoked some buts together then I invited them inside for some beer. Christine was one of the only people from Vermont that I knew up there and we got along pretty well. We drank a few beers, but I didn’t feel like I was really getting anywhere, Lindsay and Darcy wanted to go out and get more trashed and I think Christine did too. I wasn’t necessarily drunk enough to try anything with Christine at that point either, so I suggested we go down to Douches room and take Whiskey shots and maybe hit the Gravity Bong. Ah yes, the Gravity Bong, it was, and probably still is, a wonderful creation. The finest Macgyver instincts ever witnessed in real life. I have made many Gravity Bongs, and this one looked like it was designed by some half Chinese half German engineer who dabbled in architecture and fluid dynamics. For those of you who don’t know, a gravity bong is three parts. A bucket filled with water, a 2 or better yet 3 liter soda bottle with the bottom cut off, and a screw on cap with a bong slide going through the middle. You pack the slide, lower the bottle into the water, screw the cap on, light and pull up on the bottle, gravity will pull the water down, creating a vacuum in which smoke from the slide on top will fill up the empty space created by the upward motion and subsequent cavity in the bottle. And they say stoners are inarticulate. Anyways, Douche poured shots for everyone, I started packing the gravity bong, and an hour and a half later we were all hopelessly shitfaced. It was beautiful. We were playing up and down the river, it is a simple game of cards in which the dealer asks red or black, you reply, he puts down a card, if you are wrong, you drink two, if you are right, then you give two. He repeats this question to everyone else playing, as well as the rest of the following questions in due order. Higher or lower than your first card, but this time being right or wrong is worth 4 drinks. Then the dealer asks in between or outside, that is worth 6 drinks, anyways it just gets ugly when people are drinking whiskey during the game and taking hits off the gravity bong in between turns. This went on until around 3 in the morning, I think we killed a bottle of Jack and half a bottle of Jim, needless to say we were having trouble making sound judgments. We all went out for a cig, and for some reason everyone but Christine and I had sucked down their cig and gone inside like they had somewhere to be. We ended up making out for a while on the picnic table, I was about to stop and ask if she wanted to go back to her room and well…but before I could pull away, someone yelled something vile from one of the windows in Carlisle.
“HEEEYYYYY MAANNN, FFFFUCK HER BRAINS OUT YEAHHHHH”
She stopped, I wanted to think of something witty to say, but all I could concentrate on was the fact that I was still holding her breast under her hoody.
“I gotta get outa here,” she said as she started to get up and walk away “I got class real early”
“But it’s a Friday, there are no classes tomorrow…”
Christine vomiting, somewhat violently
“Shit on a stick, this is ri-fucking-diculous, if I had a nickel every goddamn time.” I said as I stood up and walked over to her. I grabbed the bulk of her hair as she lunged forward again and expelled a massive column of nastiness. She ended up getting a fair amount on herself, enough for me to be pretty grossed out, a task not easily accomplished. After she was done, she looked like she might make it 8, 9 steps before she’d be sleeping outside. So I put her arm around me, and started shuffling her towards her dorm. To be perfectly honest she had gone from bad to worse to complete decadence, her face wore a glazed over look of astonishment that she was in motion, and not lying outside in a puddle of vomit. Bangor, Maine is a pretty cold place, maybe enough to kill some drunk passed out girl lying in a puddle of vomit, but it was still pretty early in the year and she might have survived. Anyways I finagled her room number out of her, and as were walking up to her floor we were stopped in our tracks by a rent-a-cop. I tried to explain that I was just helping her get back to her room and that she was in no condition to be walking by herself anywhere. I don’t think he bought it, he walked with me to her room, then we picked her barely conscious body up and put it so she was on her side laying on her bed.
“Magnificent” she said, strikingly articulate for her level of drunkenness, as we were walking out the room. Neither of us said anything as we walked down the hall, or down the stairs or as we walked out of the building together, but our silence was broken before we got to the but hut.
“Holy stinking shit” proclaimed the rent-a-cop
“Actually its vomit, her vomit, next time don’t make baseless assumptions Serpico” I said as I walked away, he just stood there looking at the vomit like it was the scene of a murder or something of tragic significance.
I went back inside and put on TV, Quantum Leap was playing, I watched it. I watched it pretty much every night I lived in the dorms at NESCOM, I mean, what a sick idea for a show…send some guy to go fix terrible events in the past, who can’t get down with that?