71 – My Little Town – Simon and Garfunkel – 1975

My Little Town - Simon and Garfunkel

                Another song that instantly takes me back to Blackburn College, December 1975. This song appears on two albums that came out at the same time; Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years” and Art Garfunkel’s “Breakaway".

                I bought “Still Crazy…” and Cat Stevens’ “Numbers” at a small appliance store that also sold albums on the town square of Carlinville, Illinois. I can still picture the interior of that store, but for the life of me I can’t remember the name. As I wrote in my post on “Novim’s Nightmare” (#50), I took both albums back to my dorm room and listened to each with my big red Koss, plastic headphones.

                I bought my first Philip K. Dick sci-fi novel, “The Martian Time Slip,” the novel where Dick posits that autism was an altered state of time perception, in a newsstand, also on the town square, whose name I also cannot remember.

                I can, however, remember the names of the two bars we frequented, Johnny’s, a beer tap, and the Loomis House, where I recall spending many an evening “Happy Hour” drinking whiskey sours to the strains of Kansas (“Carry On My Wayward Son” specifically). In 1975-76, Illinois still had a 19 year old drinking law, so we had that going for us.

                We mainly did our drinking in our dorm rooms, the college provided funds each semester to each dorm to put on some sort of shindig, it was usually a keg-dominated event.

                I also recall coming back after X-mas break 1975 (when my grandfather passed away in his sleep at 71, the first real experience with death in my life up to that point) and drinking rum and coke until I puked. I still can’t stomach rum drinks to this day.

                I also recall having a shotgun contest (where you put an opening in the bottom of a can of beer with your “church key”, put the opening to your mouth, and then pop the top, allowing the beer to sluice down your throat at breakneck speed. I held the dubious honor of being able to shotgun a 16 ounce highboy faster than anybody else could do a 12 ounce. I could open my gullet and suck down the beer in 5-6 seconds) with Tom W. 

                We each shotgunned 2 cans, and then I drove up to the IGA (pronounced “igga”) to buy another six pack. We each shotgunned 3 more, then, plainly drunk, in another of my brilliant driving decisions (see also #63 – “It’s Money That I Love”) I drove back to the IGA to get another six pack, which we then proceeded to shotgun. Tom surrendered at that point (I couldn’t even see my car by that point, much less drive it back to the IGA).

                I climbed up into my loft (my dorm at BU, North Hall, had large openings where the roofline of the second floor met the peak of the roof, where one could place a mattress on a sheet of plywood, reached by a ladder, which then opened up the floor of the room for a red leather couch and chair that I had bought at Accutronics when I left, along with a full sized refrigerator) and several minutes later I became sick and only made it out of the loft into the hallway before I did the technicolor yawn, made up of 8 beers and some corn I had eaten at dinner.

                I felt bad about leaving that mess, but I could barely walk, even after I vacated my stomach. I spent an hour curled around the porcelain throne before I could get up and crawl back up into my loft.

                Sorry, Stan. (the student janitor who had to clean it up the next morning).