Gasping For Air

Our senior year, Brian was living on Brooks and I was living on Cleaney. Brian and his housemates threw a nice 6 kegger to start the year, the day before classes started. A group of sophomores, who thought that they were hot shit, and who we knew fairly well as freshmen had moved into 991 Dana, and just before the party, we got into their house and stole their banners and signs from the inside of their house. When they showed up, we had put the banners hanging out of upstairs windows at Brian's place in the back of the house, and they were complaining that someone had broken into their house and taken their signs. After we laughed at them, we invited them into the backyard to get a beer from the keg, and when they saw their signs, they vowed to get revenge.

Fast forward to a few weeks later. Before they could even get their revenge, we decided to do another, bigger, pre-emptive strike, you know, to let them know to not even try it.

This time, they were having a fairly large party, and knowing this, we decided to have a late night keg at my place on Cleaney. We got to their party and the guys in the house are watching us like hawks to make sure we don't mess with their stuff, but of course, we out thought them. Right when the party was at its peak and there were a few hundred kids there, we had Personette come in the front door yelling that the cops just gave a warning that they had 5 minutes to break up the party. A lot of the kids left, but the guys at the house, all of who were underage because they were sophomores, and some of their friends, all piled up stairs, and Personette said that he would handle the cops and let them know when it was safe to come back down. With the whole downstairs to ourselves, we took everything, and I mean literally everything. All of the furniture was taken out into the front yard and stacked in a pile as high as we could stack it. Everything from the walls came with us. Signs, banners, a functioning traffic light, a deer head, neon bar lights, I mean everything (and I'm not exaggerating).

We take off, and the only part I regret is not being there when Personette gave them the all clear to come down and see that everything was gone. We go back to my place and set up all of their wall hangings in our house, exactly like it had been set up in theirs as best we could. We then called to tell them we had heard about what had happened and let them know about our late night party and to bring their friends.

What a priceless moment it was to see their faces when they walked into our house and realized what had happened. They never sought revenge. The thing I remember about it most fondly was Brian's laugh, him gasping for air to laugh more. He laughed the whole way from their place to mine, the whole time we hung things up, and for about 30 minutes after they saw what happened. What a great, contagious laugh.