Supressed college memories

It really is Louis’ fault…he brought it up. He took me back to the scene of many crimes and many bar exams, the Bombay Bicycle Club (near the corner of Mulberry and St. Marys, stumbling distance away from Trinity and Breckenridge Park). He reminded me of records set and challenges almost met.

He made me recall that I own the Trinity University record for number of crackers simultaneously stuffed in your mouth and eaten without a beverage. I have not informed Guinness but I’ve drank a few.

We were trying very hard to enjoy pitchers of beer and burgers sitting on the patio at Bombay. I say trying very hard because the bar ran out of Shiner on tap (at 12:30pm???) and it took an hour for the burgers to get to us, delaying our further adventures. But it was a gorgeous day, Alamo beer on tap was an able substitute, and the story swapping began. “We” included my step-father John, Louis, plus Greg and Charles, who had braved traffic and fire-breathing hay trucks to get to the alumni book signing at Trinity University from Austin (a LARGE shout-out and thanks to all of them). The book signing was great fun and a decent success, but the post-signing festivities are worth recording for posterity (or at least my version).

Before or after (chronology is never my strong suit when relating stories) Greg related his UT college brush with the stellar folks at ATF (which we will not related in detail here for Greg’s safety), Louis dragged me on the hazy trip down Alzheimer’s lane.

While the number is still in question (I think it was 32, Lou was trying to drink that many beers to remember), the championship is not. One big stack, all at once.

We’re talking a stack of Ritz crackers that would barely fit into the expanse of my wide open maw. It took me at least five minutes to chew and swallow, all while Louis and big Steve and others were laughing and spitting beer out their noses.

This either followed or preceded (again, chronology is probably best suppressed) the launching of several large citrus fruits (thankfully the only item within reach, except the beer and it wasn’t leaving our firm grasp) by means of a well-engineered man-sized slingshot attached to the balcony on big Steve’s dorm room. Lou was an engineering major, and the monstrosity worked almost to perfection. It was made with”gazilchers”, those long sickly yellow plastic tubes the chemistry majors use to tie each other up with (and other experiments). Maybe big Steve was a Chem major, but frankly I do not recall.

For some unknown reason, people walked or ran the track at night (instead of eating crackers and drinking beer, go figure). I present for your enjoyment Exhibit “B”, the campus map. Notice the neatly prescribed arc from the dorm building (marked “56” on the map) to the well manicured E.M. Stevens Stadium (“42”, no relation to Bush). This was a certain indicator of Lou’s cracker-jack (pun intended) engineering skills, which allowed us to repeatedly refine our launching skills. The mechanism itself was well done, it was the aiming of the flying citrus that took some refining. After a couple of parking lot shots (refer to map), we managed to “rein down the fruits of the heavens” on multiple health-conscious individuals.

We’re still not sure which was funnier: the cracker eating or the people jumping on the track as oranges exploded around them.

If there are any officials from Trinity reading this, it’s just fiction I made up…no, really. No animals or Trinity mascots were injured during the making of this story.