Fun and Games at the Top Party School in America
How to have a really good time while nearly bankrupting your parents
In my senior year of high school I applied to several colleges. Much to my surprise I was accepted by several of them in spite of my poor GPA. I took the ACT instead of the SAT (it was supposedly less challenging) and got a good score. Maybe that had something to do with it.
I narrowed it down to Fullerton State College, which would have allowed me to live at home, or San Diego State College (the school did not achieve University status until much later).
Fullerton didn’t have a football team. The ONLY positive memories I had from High School were attending football and basketball games.
So I chose SDSC, which had an extremely good football team, and was rated the top party school in the nation by Playboy Magazine (which I stole and read from Dad’s sock drawer).
Dad gave me a full ride. Tuition was pretty inexpensive in 1967, but he also paid for the dorm and a meal ticket at the dorm caf, plus textbooks and other expenses.
I decided to major in engineering because I wanted to be an astronaut. At that time there wasn’t much call for 6’2” astronauts but I figured that would change as spacecraft got more roomy.
Unfortunately you need a lot of math, physics (math), chemistry (weird math that makes no sense) and other heavy duty courses that I just wasn’t ready for.
I recall sitting in a geometry class (I think) where the instructor would draw equations on the board with his right hand and erase them with his left hand. Since his body blocked the board it was really difficult to take notes, much less understand what he was trying to communicate.
Actually, I got the impression that he didn’t give a crap if we learned anything, he was just putting in time until retirement. He probably had tenure.
I think it was this same instructor who, at one point wrote something on the board then said, “from here it is intuitively obvious that this is the case,” and then wrote something else that may have been obvious someone, but from the looks on the faces of my fellow students was definitely not obvious to us.
But we were all freshmen and too intimidated to ask for clarification.
I got a 14 out of 100 on one of the tests in that class.
I talked to a counselor and she set me up to take both an aptitude test and an interests test.
A week later we went over the results and she told me that I had a good aptitude for basically anything that didn’t require math, with slightly higher scores for Printer and Railroad Engineer. Grandpa Fisher was a printer and a large segment of my mother’s family worked for the railway system. Weird.
She also said I was basically interested in everything except Clergy. No kidding.
Her advice was to major in anything except engineering or any of the sciences.
“Thanks for nuthin,” I thought.
So I basically gave up. I’d go to class occasionally, but I mostly hung out with the two seniors in the dorm room next to mine. I was pretty good friends with Larry, I don’t remember the name of the other guy. Call him Bob.
Two things:
Seniors still living in the dorms was a little sus. Most students had joined a frat or moved into an off-campus apartment with some friends by the time they became seniors. But I didn’t know that at the time.
Neither Larry or his roommate seemed to have to go to class or study. I’d spend all day in their room with one or two other slackers playing card games (Casino and Five Card Draw Poker) and they never seemed to have to be anywhere at any particular time.
Bob had a pet piranha (named Pansy) in a 20 gallon tank. There was a five gallon tank under it full of goldfish. There was always one goldfish in the tank with Pansy. When it disappeared, Bob would net another goldfish from the smaller tank and put it in with Pansy.
I never saw her feed, but Bob said she ate about one goldfish a week.
So these are the folks I was hanging out with.
Larry had a VW bug, and every couple of weeks we’d make the 10 mile drive to Tijuana to get a haircut and get drunk.
The barber shop across the street from the college charged something like $1.75 for a haircut (highway robbery) and no matter what you asked for you got a flat top.
I’d give Larry a quarter for gas, we’d have two other guys in the back seat who also chipped in a quarter each. Gas was about 25 cents a gallon so Larry made money on that deal.
There was a very clean barber shop just over the border. The barber would cut your hair any way you wanted for 25 cents. It was almost impossible not to get your shoes shined during the haircut, so I’d tip the shoeshine kid a dime.
$1.75 - $0.60 left $1.15 to get drunk on. This was more than enough.
Drinking age south of the border was 18 and nobody checked ID anyway.
The popular place was the Long Bar (mirrors on either end made it look infinite long). There was a liquor store next door and one of the guys would buy a small bottle of tequila and smuggle it into the bar, then we’d sit at a table and each order one shot of tequila, then refill the shot glasses under the table.
I’m pretty sure they knew exactly what we were doing but as long as we behaved ourselves otherwise and occasionally ordered another round they let us be.
I think that’s why after two semesters of high school Spanish and one semester at El Camino College later on, my two best Spanish sentences are, “Dos cervesas, por favor” and “¿Donde esta los baños?” “Two beers please” and “where are the bathrooms?” They have served me well.
I learned a lot of life lessons during my academic year at SDSC.
I learned not to drink too much tequila on an empty stomach.
I learned not to draw to an inside straight.
I learned that an astronomical telescope can also be used to peer into the windows of women’s dorm rooms over a mile away, and that they don’t always close their curtains if they’re on a high floor of a multi-story building. (Not my telescope, a guy down the hall had one). The House Mother put a stop to that right quick.
I learned how to do my own laundry, sort-of.
I learned that a blade razor is a bad idea if you have severe acne, and that you use cold water to stop the bleeding, not hot.
I learned that I was not destined to be an engineer or an astronaut, although it took me a while to let go of that one.
I learned that it’s not a good idea to flush a lit M80 firecracker down a toilet. (I didn’t do that, someone else in my dorm did. We were in the west wing and had to walk over to the east wing showers for two weeks.)
I learned how to take a city bus, ‘cause I didn’t have a car.
I started to learn that the fact that I was attracted to a women did not mean she’d be attracted to me, although that took way too long to make it through my thick skull.
However, I doubt that was worth Dad having to take a second job to pay for me to party for 9 months in San Diego.
Sorry Dad.
Where did Luke Skywalker get his cybernetic hand?
The second hand store.
“All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt.”
― Charles M. Schulz
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