All year our apartment sat in waste, yearning for the sticky floors, passed out whores and broken furniture

I was not satisfied of the quality of submissions for Westfield, so I'm adding a little piece of my own. The other stories seem to be only from RA's, seemingly with an anti-booze agenda.

For a little background, the main degree there is Criminal Justice, and most people I knew intended to become eventual police officers. Although many learned to settle with "part-time security guard" instead.

When I applied to this place in the mid-nineties, I (like most of my freshman classmates) had heard rumor after rumor of how great the party scene was back in the eighties. That was before they closed the campus bar, made it a dry campus, closed the frats, and generally did everything else possible to make sure no one had a good time. Despite the rumored assurances that Playboy had once named us a top party school, reality had something else in mind.

KGB agents guarding the doors 24-7, and a policy to kick students off campus for 5 weeks (along with 5 drug/alochol awareness classes and a $50 fine) for possessing even a single beer. One of those dinks once tried to stop me for having an open can of Coke on a weekday afternoon. Granted his suspicions of rum were indeed correct, but I just ignored him and hit the stairwell. He never found me. (PS: I still think you're a dick.)

My senior year opened with 2 of the greatest (although briefest) parties I've ever hosted. Each was cut short after the smell of fun filtered out beyond our screens and doorways.

The first Friday of the year was our first visit from the cops. They told us to leave, now!

A lot of people filed out, only to return a minute after the coppers left. The dance party continued. People continued getting trashed, the radio was bumping, and soon a few young lovelies began to dance on the tables for us. The pigs returned for their second visit of the evening minutes later. They cleaned the place out room by room. again. Party over.

The next friday it was repeated. More people, more booze, more noise, more cops.

They didn't like that we preferred girls grindin' us to Snoop after a dip in the punchbowl, rather than honor their request for silent study on a Friday eve. They dropped the hammer on us.

We were their yearly "example" for having 2 hours worth of parties in the first 2 weeks of school. Oh boy, real anarchists, we were. We were informed that if we so received so much as noise complaint for the rest of the year, those turds would make us homeless.

If I had a car I wouldn't have cared, but it was hard enough to walk across campus to class, never mind across town.

All year our apartment sat in waste, yearning for the sticky floors, passed out whores and broken furniture that would signify a good time had by all. The booze still flowed and the greens got mowed with due dilligence, but any time more than 20 people would accumulate the fuzz would just wait for ANYTHING to bust the kids. God forbid a bunch of 21-year-old seniors have a party. In America. Land of the Free?

Then came Spring Weekend, the once-a-year blowout party where the young'uns start sneaking in our booze weeks in advance. More city cops attend this festival than students, and the Public Safety Department sports a boner for months in anticipation of busting the kids and their evil 12-packs of Natty. One kid started moshing by himself at the show, and was rough-handled and hauled out like he just opened fire at a petting zoo.

Others followed. The local PD scumbags had to prove their value somehow, and since there were no doors to kick in (a very regular Westfield Police Department practice at the time) so they started arresting indisciminantly anyone who dared gyrate with a crowd around them. We're not talking moshers here -- it was a friggin' reggae band. The singer (not used to the Westfield Police) pleaded for reason and calmness; not an easy find when the cop mentality rears its ugly head.

The Thursday before the weekend began, we had been visited by some college staff and reminded that nary a peep should be heard from us if we intended to remain there beyond the night. We assured them that we would play ball. Yes'm.

A keg in a trash can makes it up four flights easy enough. Public Safety has a precinct right outside our stairwell, just across the courtyard. The seat in the office has a perfect view into our apartment and entranceways, they just sat on alert and waited for someone to act up.

Thursday went off without a hitch, (surprisingly) as Monique and Jasmin, our evening's entertainment, taught us new lessons in the use of produce and other non-traditional items. Very interesting. Later I found out that they also were willing to indulge their clients beyond a looksie -- knowlege that would have benefitted my buddy Rush when he walked in on one of them in the bathroom, whipped out his junk, and said to her "You've seen a lot of these. Whatd'ya think of this one?"

Herb's coke-bottle eyeglasses pulled off their first Double-Pen later in the evening, one of many other firsts for the crowd. He still hasn't washed his glasses, I'm betting.

They two ladies left a little early though, possibly due to my neighbor's coked-up, roided-up friend giving her an airplane spin for some reason, as a crowd of forty dudes continued to press in for a closer look. Too far out of control -- no wonder the ladies got scared.

The ladies left. We got our weekend's free beer, booze, tip money, and a liter of Bacardi Limon from the profits of the tickets already, though, so it wasn't that big of a loss.

The Bacardi would soon come in handy. Our female friends decided that the best way to deal with their jealousy over our entertainment was to dress the part themselves after the stippers left. They came up with their best "Well, I can show it too ya know" outfits and proceeded to get the party going again, kicking the used carrots and dirty Blow-pops aside.

My buddy's drum set and amps were set up in the living room, and people took turns jamming out between the constant Dance-Party. Everyone was hooting and hollering at the top of their lungs, a constant for the next few days. It went on long into the night, one of the only evenings where the police hadn't made an appearance. They were too busy busting everyone else, for a change.

After the school-sponsored concerts of Saturday afternoon, my roomate approached some of the guys from Itchy Fish in the beer tent, and soon they were up in our place continuing their set. All the students in the courtyard heard the noise, and soon every inch of floor and furniture had a writhing body packed into it.

The place was ripping. Most people hadn't slept more than a few hours in the last week, setting alarm clocks to make sure their buzz was in full effect by late morning.

Saturday was known to be the best day of all, where an influx of chemically induced smiles creeped on everyone's faces in even greater abundance than the previous day.

Since the cops were such punks about kids drinking beer, it became less risky to resort to the plethora of wonderful mood enhancers that fit much more easily in our pockets than cases of Busch bottles. You name it, it was there. On the one weekend where even the non-users were open to anything, good times were ingested by all.

This all worked well to our advantage, and along with the giant inflatable pool we were able to convince some young ladies that the best way to compete for the before-mentioned 1-liter bottle of Bacardi was to enter the wet t-shirt contest. It worked nicely. Of course, t-shirts were not conducive to victory.

I did feel bad for the winner, who unfortunately dropped the bottle in the chaos of the post-victory celebration. Our neighbors to the South weren't too happy that the buckets of water we kept pouring and splashing around were now dripping through their ceiling and down their walls, wetting everything. (Sorry about those posters and everything else you had in there.)

Rumor spread that they'd called the campus police. So we began to dump buckets of water out the back window, our only recourse. Of course, they hadn't called the police at all; and no one apparently noticed the 5 gallon rain drops that kept falling onto the sidewalk, either, so the cops did not arrive.

The band played on, and soon all of our furniture was ruined from the dancing feet covered in a week of floor sludge. There were too many empties from the week to throw away, so we just let them get trampled to form a protective mat against the beery mud covering the floor. It tracked everywhere, even up the walls.

This gave off the ambiance of a Hammer Party, the perennial favorite where just prior to us exiting for the night, we go ahead and smash everything at the party, including all of the furniture and bottles that we can find. Since this was our own apartment though, that idea of a Hammer Party lost some of its brilliance, despite several initial attempts by others.

Finally the cops made their obligatory first and second visits, each time leaving among assurances that we were going to stop this madness. Yeah, we'll turn it down and shut the windows. Too bad the windows already were shut, and you can't turn down a drum kit. Everyone was so wasted that it didn't matter. We just nodded, agreed, and did everything else to assure the police presence would end for a while.

It never happened. Right after they left, an old fan that had worn out from constantly diffusing "smoke" clouds was tossed into the mix of feet and garbage on the hallway floor. Seizing the opportunity, I yelled at everyone around to get them to assist me in flattening the thing. We began to stomp in earnest, a crowd forming around and cheering.

The moment peaked when Laura decided to whip what remained around by the power cord, sending the fucker off the fourth floor fire escape.

It landed at the feet of Tim Manning, bike-cop-extraordinairre. Anxious to get back at kids like those who bullied his punk-ass in high school, he marched up the stairs. They already had us surrounded and were about to raid us anyway, so within seconds they were everywhere. Party over. We met with the R.D. later, a performance that was recorded for posterity and added to the video tape we recorded of the entire mess.

I had to leave most of the best details out of this story, which is admittedly pretty lame, but there are names to protect. Particularly since most of the partygoers in attendence are now police officers in Massachusetts and beyond, and no cop likes to be reminded of their hypocrisy.

Lets just say its not likely any of them will be able to pursue political careers untill everyone's memory's fade. Luckily enough, that won't be much of a problem.