Entry 134: Too Much White Powder Can End A Party In More Ways Than One

Duh! Winning!

I'm thinking of starting every post with that from now on... what do you think?

Okay, kidding.  But I WILL show you this picture:

But I digress.

For the following story I'm going to hearken back to the days of yore...

Back in 2002-2003ish, I lived in a charming duplex with one of my BFFs, Jenkins.  Click his name to read about some of his shenanigans... and know that I could probably make my next 30 posts about stories of him or the two of us polluting the universe.  His hobbies include Fa-Donking, Bomb Burritos, and drunken gymnastics. He's also the reason that Nair now comes with new warning labels:

Jenkins and I lived in the main floor and basement of an old house, and a girl we knew lived in a separate apartment upstairs.  Since we were young idiots we thought the house was great, though my dad still speaks of the place with the same tone he reserves for hooker-filled crack houses or dumpsters full of hobos in Moldova.  I'm paraphrasing based on memory, but if you ask him about it now he usually says something like:

"I'll never know how you spent a single day in that shit-heap of a house.  It was the worst thing I've ever seen.  Had I known how bad it was from the beginning, I would have faked my own death to collect the life insurance and put you up in a decent apartment for a year.  And Jenkins lived in the basement- THE BASEMENT!  You were at least spared from some of the millipedes, dirt, mold, and what-have-you by being upstairs, but that poor kid could have DIED!"



It really is just a matter of perspective though. For instance, the stairs down to the basement included a  very green and trendy feature:

My first attempt at drawing stairs.  

As you can see, the stairs were actually built directly into the ground.  So, in essence, the outside was part of the inside.  Which, kids, is how babies are born.

While we didn't make any babies in our shit-hole house (well, probably not), we decided one day to celebrate our "holy shit we're, like, fucking ADULTS!" house by throwing a massive party filled with underage kids.  Though for the most part each group of music students sort of partied on their own, Jenkins and I thought we could use our powers to summon them all together into one party.  Like how the Planeteers summoned Captain Planet.

That's how you draw black people, right?

It worked, we had a massive amount of people show up at the house, and we perfected the "frozen lemonade but use beer instead of water" drink for all to enjoy.  I'm not naming it, because I've seen fights break out because people disagree on what to call it.  I call it delicious. 

Oh, speaking of Asians.  There were two of note at this party:  our great friend, Natty, who once beat me out of a 1st place trophy at a high school jazz fest (no, I'm not bitter, fuck off) and my ex, Ethyl, when we were just starting to get a bit more serious about things.  Read: she hadn't done anything crazy yet.

Everyone was having a grand ol' time, the music was hoppin', and I was downstairs telling hilarious jokes to young co-eds.  As it usually does, the universe decided to break up my game and throw in an event of awesome and unbelievable scale.  All of the sudden, the group of us in the basement heard from upstairs what sounded like a Dance, Dance, Revolution contest between a herd of wildebeests and Godzilla.  That was followed with screaming and what sounded like a rush to the front-door side of the house.  One drunk guy was heroic enough to scream down a warning to we basement-dwellers, but provided little in the way of information.

I'm working on the stairs.  Suck it. 

By this point we realized that everyone was stampeding towards the door, something was terribly wrong, and there was some sort of smoke cloud starting to fill the doorway and seep into the basement.  Jenkins and I ran up to investigate, and saw one of the most fucked-up scenes I've ever seen in my life.  Since I don't have a picture of the old house, and I'm certainly not capable of drawing it, I will show you the scene via a random picture of a house.  Before:

This looks, literally, nothing like our house.  Great job, Caleb. 

 

 

Here is the scene of devastation we saw when we got to the top of the stairs:

 

What the fuck, right?  It's like Charlie Sheen just sneezed in our kitchen.  As we cough and sputter, waving our hands in front of our face and finding the stereo to turn the music off, I see what you might see in the second picture there.  Yup.  Look closer.  CLOSER.   I'll zoom in on my drawing:

Our very old house had been equipped with a very old fire extinguisher, and poor half-drunken Natty accidentally knocked it off the kitchen wall where it fell to the floor.  There, its safeguards against accidentally going off failed and it flooded our entire upstairs with a cloud of white, cocaine like powder that I read is some combination of baking soda, water, and Justin Bieber's hair.

What was extra funny is that Natty was completely covered in white powder.  He looked like the scene in Ace Ventura 2 where Ace dusts for prints in the cage of the sacred bat.  In his typical unflappable manner, Natty held up the fire extinguisher and said "I think I know what happened."

Indeed. 

Apparently huge commotions, screams, dozens of people stampeding out of a house, white powder seeping from the windows, and a fleet of getaway cars screaming down a residential street is enough to warrant the attention of the police, who showed up promptly about 30 minutes after the incident.  Whoever hadn't scattered, scattered.  That left me, as usual, as the "reasonable" person left to explain to the cops what the fuck had happened.  Which is awesome, because I love telling cops an outrageous story that is perfectly true.  I even showed the main cop the empty extinguisher.  When he saw how fucked up our entire house was, he had pity and gave me a warning.  He gave ME a warning, not Jenkins.  You know why?  Jenkins had vanished.  Ninja-style.  Gone.  I asked him the next day what happened:

No, I suppose they don't.  Lesson learned. 


If you were wondering, most of the white dust finally settled and we spent a day cleaning and vacuuming.  The shit was honestly everywhere though.  Everywhere.  When we moved out and two friends of ours moved in, they STILL complained that they found the white "Natty-Dust" everywhere.   Probably still some there today.

Caleb "It WAS an accident, right Natty?" Shreves

Tweet