Way back in the Fall of 1990, I was a Sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, suffering through a degree in Electrical Engineering, paid for by the US Navy. For the second year in a row, I was living in Jester West Dormitory, a rather infamous dorm modeled on a prison. But Jester wasn’t infamous for bad reasons. It was infamous because a lot of crazy stuff happened there, stuff administrators hated, and students loved.
My freshman year was spent on the 11th floor of Jester, known as the “Honors Floor.” I should have known better than to choose anything with “honors” in it, because that was where the geeks, weirdos, nerds, theater students and all around losers congregated. But by some stroke of luck, I landed in a hallway with the only six cool people on the entire floor. My roommate went by the name “The Man Dland,” across the hallway were Ollie and Pat, and Harvey and his roommate nicknamed UPA (for “The Ultimate Party Animal) were a few doors down. And luckily the truly weird didn’t venture down our hall.
One of my early introductions to the craziness of Jester came in Spring of 1990, when the UT Basketball team beat Xavier in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament to advance to the Great Eight, far exceeding expectations. The entire campus went crazy, especially Jester. Everyone congregated in the courtyard, jumping up and down, hollering and screaming in ecstasy. It was the perfect environment for more mayhem.
I remember looking up and seeing a window on the 7th floor open slightly (you could only crack them). I saw a flash of light, a thin cylinder poking out the window, and I knew exactly what it was- a Roman Candle. Some rube lit off a Roman Candle and started shooting it at the crowd. Now, you would think this would have caused the crowd to panic, but oh no, not a UT crowd. They knew it was a Roman Candle, and they started shouting, We Want More, We Want More.
That’s when my roommate Dland and neighbor Ollie remembered…they had fireworks too. If the crowd wanted more, then more they would get. They took off like a shot, rode the elevators to the 11th Floor, grabbed the fireworks and a lighter, and proceeded to one-up the Roman Candle shooter. Jumping Jacks, they had Jumping Jacks. Firecrackers, they had those. Camilla Flowers, and Saturn Missile Batteries and Red Rats, and all the thing I loved as a kid, they had. And the more they lit and threw at the crowd, the more the crowd chanted, “We Want More.”
The University of Texas has its own police department, unfortunately named UTPD- and pronounced “ut-pud” by all the students. They had no law enforcement power, but they could arrest, pull over students, and call the Austin Police Department if a law was violated.
UT-PUD finally arrived on the scene to put an end to the “We Want More” chants in regards to the fireworks, which was admittedly an unsafe situation. But they had a reputation for not being the sharpest tools in the shed, as well as the roundest marbles in the bag. They never met a donut they didn’t like or a cheeseburger they didn’t eat. I think standard issue waist size was 42”, and this was in 1990 before the world- or at least the US- got morbidly obese.
Instead of counting up to see which floor the fireworks were coming from, and then calmly taking the elevators up to easily end the situation, they decided to storm the dorm. Well, at least in their minds. You see, “storming” meant entering the stairwell, and “rushing” upstairs. That sounded like a good idea to them, until they hit the fourth floor with seven floors remaining. I remember the stairwells having windows in them, where we could see the shadows of the UT-PUD officers as they ascended the stairwell. So we started timing how long it took for them to reach the next floor, and then the next as the fireworks rained down. Each one took longer than the last one, and we could see them start to rest, gasping for air on the final three flights. It was absolutely hilarious to watch unfold.
They arrived just as my friends fired their final volley, threatening them with expulsion, jail, the electric chair, and anything else they could gasp out. All The Man Dland and Ollie had to say was, “What took you so long?” They had never planned to get away with it.
Although UT-PUD huffed and puffed for the direst of consequences, in the end, a campus disciplinary board thought the best course of action was for Dland and Ollie to write an essay on why shooting fireworks at an assembled crowd was bad. And why beating Xavier in the Sweet 16 was good. That’s just how it was in 1990 at college at the University of Texas.
By the time Sophomore year arrived, nothing had changed. Jester was still crazy, and UT-PUD was not about to cure cancer anytime soon, as I was to observe once again. And honestly, this is one of the funnier things I remembered from my time at UT.
While residents of Jester did find unique ways to cause trouble, it was usually outside visitors that caused the most. These were kids who didn’t get into college, but were coming to visit friends who did, and the #1 thing they had on their mind was drinking as much as they possibly could in the shortest amount of time. After all, wasn’t that why you went to college?
One evening, I went down to the 5th floor (I was now living on the 7th, away from all the Honors dweebs) to visit The Man Dland, and his roommate Chris, who was a pretty cool dude. When I arrived, Chris introduced me to two friends who’d come to visit and who’d come to drink. They had two things they were very proud of: fake ID’s and a bottle of Diesel 190 proof neutral grain alcohol.
Now, most people have heard of Everclear, but they haven’t heard of Diesel. Diesel is the cheap version of Everclear, known only to hard core boozers who want to get the most drunk at the cheapest rate. These two kunkel-heads had a bottle.
Their grand scheme, as they gleefully explained it, was to go down to Sixth Street (this was when Sixth Street in Austin was a fun, cool place, not the “Dirty Sixth,” shithole it has sadly become along with the rest of the city), use their fake id’s to get into bars and clubs, order the cheapest drinks, and spike them with the Diesel 190 proof neutral grain alcohol they were going to sneak in.
While I was no alcohol expert at the time, I was taking plenty of Engineering Math and I told these goobers they were going to get too drunk, too fast. To them, that sounded like a good thing, and they thought I was egging them on. Perhaps I was.
As a visitor to the dorms, they were supposed to register if they were going to spend the night so they had to get on the access list. At 10 pm every night, free access to the dorms was cut off, and you had to show your student ID and Jester sticker to get in, or you had to be on the access list. Most people just let their friends in via the stairwell (the same one assaulted by UT-PUD the previous year), and that’s what happened with the Kunkelheads.
Around midnight, for some unknown reason, I decided to stretch my legs and go downstairs. I certainly hadn’t been drinking, I’d been studying, and it was time for a break. It turned out to be one of the funniest breaks I ever took.
When I got downstairs, I saw the checkpoint had been set up, manned by an RA (“Resident Advisor”) with a clipboard, seated at a long table. Behind the RA was an UT-PUD officer on duty, to calm down any rowdy students or visitors, and call the real cops if there was real trouble.
That night a female officer who was 5’2” and sour was on duty. I didn’t blame her for being sour, she was facing a night of drunks she had to keep from entering the dorms. But she wasn’t prepared for the Kunkelheads.
Right before I was about to head up, I saw them approaching, without their bottle of Diesel. I knew Chris had driven them to Sixth Street with no intention of driving them back, so I have no idea how they managed to return- probably hitched a ride. To say they were skunked would be a vast understatement. It was a miracle they were standing or walking, but these were experienced drunks, hardcore boozers.
They staggered to the table manned by the RA, demanding to be let in. They were so drunk they’d forgotten they didn’t register as a guest, so their names were nowhere to be found. They insisted they had registered, and things started to get heated. That’s when the UT-PUD officer walked up to the table, told them to calm down, or they would have to leave and face her wrath.
When they saw her, they started laughing uncontrollably. “Ohhhhh, it’s UT-PUD, we’re in big trouble now,” they cackled. She didn’t like that, and told them they appeared to be drunk, that if they didn’t leave she was going to call APD and have them arrested.
They didn’t flinch a bit when she said this. The taller of the two looked down at her with a dopey grin and said, “You’re not going to do that, because you don’t know how. You see, we know a secret. We know…..
….you can’t spell STUPID without UTPD.”
Her jaw almost hit the ground when he said that. And just when her face started to turn beet red, the half bottle of Diesel he’d drank kicked in, and he retched all over the lower half of her uniform pants and shoes. Not just once, but repeatedly. I honestly didn’t think that much puke could come out of one human being. But it did. All over her shoes. And all around her shoes.
She didn’t know what to do. She was totally shocked and stood there as he puked and puked and puked, then collapsed and passed out with a satisfied smile on his face. His friend just watched the whole time.
After standing in absolute shock for at least a minute, she finally stepped away to call APD- and there it was. Two dainty footprints in the middle of a puddle of puke.
APD arrived, boxed up the two Kunkelheads, and threw them in the drunk tank. Then the janitor finally arrived to clean up what was truly a mountain of puke. The poor girl was beside herself because she didn’t have another uniform to change into, she stank, and she had several more hours to go. Plus everyone there had spontaneously howled with laughter when the Kunkelhead said his final line of the night.
The lasting hilarity was this- the stomach acid from the puke stripped the top coating off the cement floor, except in one place- where she had been standing. For the rest of the semester, you could see the outline of two dainty footprints, reminding everyone who saw them of one eternal, lasting truth:
You Can’t Spell Stupid Without UTPD.
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