The Least Accessible Keg – Freshman Halloween part 1

Halloween is a particularly magical time for college students.  Girls dress up as sexy/scandalous (fill in the blank) and guys dress up as, well, that’s pretty much irrelevant.  Everybody gets especially drunk and incentive for learning that person you are about to hook up with’s name is almost totally diminished, as you can just jokingly call them by whatever it is that they’re dressed up as (one of my closest friends found himself pursuing Sarah Palin one year, and to this day, none of us can remember the girl’s actual name).

Being from a religious, Southern bible belt family, I was never allowed to dress up like the devil or anything resembling a demon as a child.  This was hardly a huge limitation of my options, but I always resented it a little bit.  In college, my parents weren’t around to veto my Halloween costume ideas, so I knew exactly what I wanted to be:  SATAN.

One of my favorite movies as a child was about an adopted ginger kid who was a mischievous hellion for his new parents.  In one deftly executed montage, he shows up at a little girl’s birthday costume party dressed in a red onesie-style devil outfit.  It was cartoonish in its lack of detail, but also a charming depiction of the ruler of hell.  The ginger, Junior was his name, ran around the party being a dick.  He popped balloons with his pitchfork, threw presents into a fountain (because this little girl was rich enough to have a fountain at her house), and just malevolently wrecked shit everywhere he went.  This was the look I was going for.

I started shopping for my costume weeks before halloween.  As I went up and down the aisles of Party City, my love of halloween grew and grew as I saw the selection of costumes for girls (sexy school teachers and naughty nurses and lewd law enforcement oh my!).  And up and down the aisles of Party City I went.  And then up and down the aisles of Walmart.  And then up and down the aisles of other places selling Halloween costumes.  That Halloween, I learned that costume manufacturers decided that Lucifer was a woman, a very sexy woman who doesn’t wear a lot of clothes.  They didn’t have any Satan costumes for guys.  They had horribly high maintenance Demon costumes, but nothing for the big man himself.

Exactly like this actually.

At this point, I was running out of time.  Halloween was just days away and my disappointment with costume shopping was   bringing out other bad feelings as I began to realize that I hadn’t been invited to any parties and I didn’t know where I would go once I was dressed up.  I ended up settling on a Priest costume.  It was nothing flashy, just a black robe thing with a white collar and a plastic cross necklace.  I still got my religious irreverence jollies, but in my heart I was disappointed that things didn’t work out.

Surprisingly, I had more luck in finding parties.  Apparently I wasn’t the only horny college guy who loved this holiday.  I had two parties in my calendar, one for Friday and one for Saturday.

The Friday party was pretty wild.  About 80 people had crammed into an apartment and I’m sure each of them woke with bruises the next morning because I’ve never been accidentally elbowed so many times in my life.

Somehow, the hosts of this party (who I never actually met) had set up an ice luge.  For those who only consume their booze through minor variations of drinking it out of a cup or glass, an ice luge is a big freaking chunk of ice that angles from a high point downward with a series of trenches serving as playground slides for liquor.  Girls line up at the ends of each trench and a guy administers alcohol from the top of the slides, admiring the cleavage of the girls below causing him to pour far too much.  The unconsumed liquor ends up soaking the girls and making a mess that none of the guys seem to mind.  If anyone ever tells you that college guys are stupid, correct them:  College guys are brilliant, they just only use their intelligence for evil.

By the time we arrived, the ice luge had begun to melt from the stifling body heat that flooded that apartment.  Water was cascading off of the counter onto the kitchen floor and was puddling out into the carpeted living room.  Had their been enough space between people, someone could have easily slipped and fell in the tiled kitchen.

Reaching the keg, which was conveniently located in the bathroom tub, would probably have been one of the greatest achievements of my entire life.  Apart from the beating I took from uncoordinated drunk people accidentally bumping into me as I clumsily slid through the crowd, the location of the keg posed another logistical challenge.  Anytime someone needed to use the bathroom, the keg was locked away from my grasp.  Of course being an enormous crowd of drunk people, there was a chaotic line (read:  jumble-fuck) for the bathroom.  I waited amongst my costumed counterparts with a red solo cup in my hand and a sobriety that nagged for me to admit that this party was overpopulated and awful.  I never reached the front of the line.  The people I came with were ready to leave within about 45 minutes of arriving.  I managed to push my way through hoards of people, but didn’t actually meet anybody new that night.

It was an uncomfortable party, but I wasn’t overly bummed out until we got back to my car – or rather, where I left my car.  The apartment complex was gated and had a fascist security guard that we assumed would be tallying the number of people claiming to visit the apartment that hosted the party.  Luckily, we were smarter than that inquisitive man at the gate.  We just decided to park at a nearby bank.  There were some open spaces next to the sign that read, “Tow Away Zone.”  As several other party goers arrived at the same time to join us in utlilizing the forbidden parking lot, we gave a collective shrug, content in the power of our numbers.  After all, they couldn’t tow away all of us, right?

Honestly, I can’t say whether they could tow away all of us or not.  I don’t know how many cars they towed that night, only that mine was the one that they started with.