Storytime Sunday: This Ceiling Sure Looks Inviting

Tequila has a tendency of convincing you certain things are good ideas. None of them are actually good ideas.

My last year at Whitman, I lived in a party house. Like, had a giant living room / foyer where we held bumpin' concerts regularly. Rosaacs, it was called (because it was on the corner of Rose and Isaacs streets). We had a lot of adventures. One night the guy who would become my roommate there called me up and asked "wanna go commit some federal crimes?" But that's another story.

There were four of us. There was me, obviously. There was J., a hilarious manly man astronomy major who tried (unsuccessfully) to switch to archaeology; he basically ran the house, he ran the concerts and loves Old Granddad, Pink Floyd, and dirty blues. There was S., a Swazi astronomy-math combined major who smoked whole trees of pot and drank cheap beer constantly (along with stealing my and Jake's booze); when he got deported, we found his room even messier than mine, with bottles of piss accumulated among the beer cans knee deep in places. And there was I., the diabetic sophomore who always got blacked out and lost his insulin pump; it's a miracle he survived.

We were hanging out drinking one winter night with friends mostly from the FUSH (Fucked Up Shit House). We = me and J.; I. and S. were off getting fucked up elsewhere. So all of we were hanging out in the kitchen taking bong rips and shots (except J. - he'd never touch weed). One of the FUSH people noticed a hatch in the ceiling. "What's up there," he asked.

J. shrugged. "I dunno!"

I took my shot of tequila. "Only one way to find out." See, at that point I'd been in the habit of crawling into tiny spaces for some reason. Crawling into walls, you know, like this. So I figured, fuck it, let's check this out. Tequila said it was a good idea, at least.

J. grabbed a ladder and set it up underneath. I wrestled my way to the top and pushed the square up, then slid it to the side. "Whoooaaaaa..." There were pipes in there. And a crawlspace big enough to hang out in. And... what's that against the wall there? I pulled myself up, sticking to the 2x4s and keeping my weight off the drywall ceiling.

"Hey, someone pass me the tequila," I called down. One of my friends dutifully handed it up.

Just drinking tequila in the ceiling. WCGW?

I was enjoying my ceiling tequila, but there was something missing. There's something about confined spaces that just screams "hotbox me!" So I drank a little more tequila and asked for the pipe and a lighter. You know what happened next.

I was getting comfortable up there. As I drank more tequila people started to wonder if I ever planned to come down. I wasn't thinking that far ahead. I had my Hornitos and I was happy. But all good things must come to an end. Eventually I was summoned to climb down. Easy enough. Just shuffle backwards along the 2x4s same way I came in. What could possibly go wrong?

I was going along all right, laughing like an idiot the whole way, when something fell out from under me.

You see those pipes there? Yeah, they're actually important.

As you can see, I couldn't stop laughing at my fail, face-arming myself because my palms were occupied holding me up. Once I calmed down enough, I shuffled over and climbed back down through the opening that was actually supposed to be there.

Repairing it was an adventure. J. took charge - it wasn't the first time he'd had to replace drywall in that house. We went to Home Depot, got a sheet, took it home, drank some bourbon, cut it, replaced the old sheet, drank some beer, spackled, painted, good as new.

Then we drank more. The end.

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