Last Friday, I was smoking a cigarette on the third floor terrace of the Student Union, when suddenly my Spidey senses starting buzzing, and I smelled the familiar stench of burning flesh. When I first peeked out of the concrete alcove, all I could see was blue sky, bright sun, and a couple of meandering simpletons walking backwards across Lee Loop.
However, when I looked to the right I saw a long line of students waiting for cooked meat. I realized with a shudder that this was the College Republicans’ Animal Rights BBQ, part of Conservative Week. I was unable to attend the other events in the weeklong celebration, such as the bake sales to raise money for Social Security and the Pentagon, but by all accounts they were just as vile as the barbecue appeared to be.
As I lit another cigarette and began to hatch a plot to drive the right wing out of our campus like snakes out of Ireland, I was reminded of my childhood battles with the Puritans.
Back when I was in fifth or sixth grade, there was a family on my street that had moved to Latham—a middle class hamlet about ten minutes north of Albany as the Subaru drives—from somewhere in Massachusetts. It was your typical suburban white household: husband, wife, 2.7 kids, yellow dog. They were of Puritan stock, and used their Tupperware/Avon Party connections to inject a certain moral stricture amongst the neighbors: no running around after dark, no physically violent children’s games, and no Offensive Music. Understand, these were the Tipper Gore mid-‘90s, so the ideas were particularly salable to my socially conservative neighbors, my parents, and really anyone that took offense at the notion that the local children might be having fun.
This new buttoned-down neighborhood structure didn’t work for a few of us kids, most notably myself and the infamous Billy Pfitz, a scrappy blonde newcomer from two towns over with a penchant for property destruction and incendiary devices. We couldn’t sit idly by (especially not in the summertime when there was nothing else to do) and watch our neighborhood be turned into an extension of classroom rules. We were idealistic and sugar-crazed in those days, and we still believed in taking a stand, making a difference, beating the bastards. The Puritans had to be stopped, so we began a merciless three-pronged campaign to drive them out of the neighborhood.
First, we made absolutely sure, through relentless politicking and garage-talk schemes, that when it came time for kickball, those demented squeaky clean Puritan brat kids got picked dead last, if at all.
Next, guerrilla warfare. Smoke bombs in their plastic receptacles on trash day, BB gun assassinations of the tomato patch in their backyard, and ripping every last goddamn leaf bag they put out on the curb to shreds with the pegs on our Huffys.
The coup de grace was our noise pollution attack. We would wait until after dark, when the sniveling Puritan mom and dad would call their brats back to the house, and just at the moment we had calculated that the kids would be in bed, we broke out from the bushes across the street from their house, boombox in hand, and we’d play my cassette of Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle at full volume.
Our plan was immensely successful: by the end of the summer, the Puritans had announced to the rest of the neighborhood that they planned to move back to Boston. They said it was because the father had gotten a high paying job as a claims adjustor or some such thing, but Bill and I knew better. As they packed their station wagon for the long eastward exodus, their faces had the clearly disturbed expressions of people whose dreams are haunted by Tha Dogg Pound’s diseased ravings: “Half steppin’ with your weapon on safety… now break yo’ self motha fucka, ‘fore you make me take this 211 to another level… I come up with your ends, you go down with the devil… Seriaal Killaaa…”
(Being 11 year-old white kids, we never really knew what any of the lyrics meant, but it scared the crap out of our parents, so we figured we were on the right track.)
A week before school started, the neighborhood held a bon voyage block party (our first and last, to my knowledge) that felt more like a funeral than a celebratory sending off. Bill and I watched from across the street as they toasted the Puritans, wishing the husband good luck in his career, and promising to stay in touch through the mail. We sprayed them with water hoses until they moved the party inside.
Which brings me back to the College Republican barbecue. I thought maybe if I applied the anti-Puritan tactics of my childhood to the CR’s I could rid my campus of their cynical attempts to shock and offend the UB populace into political action.
In the end I decided it wouldn’t work: I couldn’t pick them last for anything, they didn’t have any vegetables for me to shoot BB’s into, and there are no water hoses in the Generation offices that I could have used to extinguish their cooking flames.
I thought about trying a new tack: I could fill a dozen of those little plastic Easter eggs with my own urine and lob them down at the GOP Youth Patrol from my third floor terrace hiding spot. I nixed this idea as well, however. Too many people on the ground would recognize me as an agent of Generation, and I never like to bring those poor saps down because of my revolutionary tendencies. So I just glared menacingly at the Komsomol locksteppers behind the GOP grills, shaded my eyes from the sun’s domination of the cloudless April sky, and bitched quietly to myself for several minutes.
Is this the fate of college liberals today? I asked myself. To stand off to the side muttering oaths under our breaths as the Republicans sell hotdogs and sugar cookies to raise money for the Defense Department? That’s when I remembered the final nail Bill and I had driven into the Puritans’ stifling control of our neighborhood fun.
I ran to my Subaru, screamed out of the parking lot, bobbing and weaving through Audobon traffic until I finally roared onto Putnam Way, where I slowed down to a crawl, opened all the windows, and hit the barbecue with a full blast stereo onslaught of the Rx Bandits’ “Recapitulation to Overcome”:
“The future is held in the hands who write the textbooks, ignorance is bred when falsified thinking is taught to the youth instead of past mistakes...I can’t wait for the day when I hear us all screaming here comes the revolution!”
The dashing inspiration of my last ditch effort was superceded only by its failure to attract the attention of anyone at all. A few birds got startled. Someone from UB maintenance stared blankly at my car as it passed while he waited to cross the street. One of the backwards-walking kids tripped over the curb.
Dejected and beaten, I drove straight home, made a cruel 7 & 7, and read The Spectrum with the eyes of a broken man.
