Flashback, part 4 of n

War in Iraq. Recession at home. Me in a funk. It can only be…1991.

The second year of college was, if anything, worse that the first. No distraction provided by orientation activities, no assorted excuses to meet and socialize with people. Just me, plunked down by myself, because the girlfriend’s sorority obligations for Rush Week basically kept her boxed up. And through the simple expedient of failing to specify a roommate or a private room, I found myself in my new dorm room all to myself…for a while anyway.

It was a weird first couple of weeks. I actually had time to myself for once, which drove home the point that I really was down to “with her or by myself.” One of these days I’ll write about September 1990, when it all went wrong, but in September 1991 I spent my time scribbling on the walls of my dorm room with multi-colored chalk, which lasted about a week until the RA came by. He never said a word about the curious decor, but mentioned that I would have to accept a roommate unless I wanted to pay the 50% markup for a private room. I gave in, and two weeks later some quiet guy showed up who I saw very little of thereafter. I also cleaned up the walls, which were covered with profanities directed at the Greek system and the school generally, interspersed with diagrams of running plays. Which makes perfect sense once you realize that at the time, I was consumed with two things: my own internal rage and hatred and despair, and the wishbone offense.

No, really.

Having finally taken a working interest in all sports the year before, I was now determined to learn as much as I could about the principles of the triple-option and the archaic systems of full-house backfields from which it was ultimately derived. Which in turn led me to the single-wing, the double-wing, the original Chicago T, and the like…and led me to consider my school’s football team, disbanded since 1939. So I went for the yearbooks.

The yearbooks for 1919-1930 were a revelation. They were completely unlike what I was used to – mock letters to the editor, pages of snarky remarks at the expense of faculty and freshmen, and a surprising number of campus organizations. For instance, two literary societies, and every student belonging to one or the other – sort of the AFC and NFC of the school, if you will. Sports – more varsity sports than would exist again until the mid-1990s. Put it this way: there were more varsity sports opportunities for women in 1925 than there were the entire four years I was there.

Numerous fraternities and sororities, of course, many no longer in existence – but other groups, too, which seemed to be nothing more than ad hoc collections of students. There was the “D.D. Club,” which manifested a year later as the “Jazz Babies,” who were presumably fond of devil music. There was, intriguingly, the “S.C. Club,” whose members wore crossed pistols for an insignia, met in “Crook’s Cave,” and considered themselves the heirs to “Jesse James and his Gang.” And most intriguing of all, there was the “C.O.D. Club,” which boasted of office hours from midnight to 4 A.M. and hailed themselves in verse:

Drunk last night, drunk the night before

Going to be drunk tonight, if I never get drunk no more

For when I’m drunk, I’m as happy as can be

For I am a member of the C.O.D.

I was hooked. Well, as much as I could be hooked. At the beginning of school that year, you could count the number of times I’d ingested alcohol without taking your shoes off, I’d never smoked one single cigar, pipe or cigarette – I was damn near a teetotaler. (Stop laughing. I mean it. I was a slow developer.) Of course, by the end of the fall, I’d bought my first pack of unfiltered Camels. It’s in a box somewhere in my ancestral home and I think it’s still half full.

This was around the time I joined the Pep Band. Because they were thin at trombone, the Jazz Band decided they’d have me as well, and by November, I was playing Glenn Miller tunes in a very very old auditorium for more military brass that I’d ever seen in one place until I started shopping at Pentagon City Mall nine years later. The rapid influx of “Satin Doll” and “God Bless the Child” and “A String of Pearls” and “Little Brown Jug” and (sigh) “In The Mood” didn’t do anything to diminish the sudden onset of temporal distortion.

By the time the semester was done, Alabama was 10-1 and headed for a bowl game, the Redskins were something like 12-1 and on the way to a 14-2 regular season and their last Super Bowl victory under Joe Gibbs, and I could tell you all the ins and outs of both offenses and why the one-back set with an H-back to the weak side was a superior alternative to the Run-and-Shoot (a.k.a. the Chuck and Duck). I was also ticketed for three weeks in Central Europe in January, on the heels of my class on “The Soviet Union In Transition” (which began with a coup and ended with the whole country going tits-up; I think everybody got an A because most everything we learned got fed into the wood-chipper by finals).

And I was a different person than the one who was writing on the wall.