The Time I Was Almost Possibly Horribly Assaulted by Frat Guys

His dying regret was being unable to personally
run over Hitler with his wheelchair.

Franklin Roosevelt once said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Considering FDR lived most of his adult life in a wheelchair while putting himself through four presidential elections and carrying on at least one affair while married to a cousin who also happened to be Eleanor Roosevelt, the guy clearly was one of the more fearless people who ever lived.

But I've had fear. Several kinds:

• The fear that the angry black cricket in my basement will locate me before I locate it. 
• The fear at Disney World during the Tower of Terror ride, which required special tools to pry my carpal-tunnel-locked grip on the so-called safety bar.
• The fear in bed, haunted with the visions of Nazi face-melting the night after I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The kind of fear I'm writing about today is a different kind of fear, a fear you experience right before something really really horrible is going to happen. That something hasn't happened yet, but it's the anticipation that ratchets up the horror.

Let's return (flashback-wise) to college, where a short stroll from your off-campus house would take you to an array of taverns you could frequent any (and every) night of the week, and you can make spur-of-the-moment plans like deciding at 6:37 on a Wednesday night to go out and get hammered.

I wasn't planning on going out on this particular weeknight during the first week of my senior year, but my friend Jerry called and let me know that Billy was in town. I knew Billy vaguely during sophomore year (we all worked at the student magazine, but in different capacities), but I hadn't seem him since. My limited interaction with the guy made him strike me as someone who, as people say in hindsight about serial killers, "kept to himself," so I wasn't expecting an very exciting evening.

I didn't even know that Jerry knew Billy well enough to host a welcoming party for Billy's return to college from wherever he'd been, but Jerry filled me in on some details, one or two of which I should have paid more attention to. (I might be inaccurate on the exact details, but the gist is correct and even if I'm off a bit, these recollections are worth sharing.)

THE DETAILS REGARDING BILLY

Set your alarms!

Billy and Jerry had lived together. They were matched up randomly with a couple of other guys in the way colleges do. (I forget the details, but our school brokered off-campus housing arrangements for transfer students.) Two of the guys they lived with would play Pink Floyd records (I think Dark Side of the Moon) at 2 in the morning every night. The way Jerry described it, he meant literally — literally literally — every night at 2am.

Billy had shown an impulsive lack of self-control on at least one documented occasion. From what I recall, Billy and some other guy were messing with traffic cones or something, and when they were caught by campus security, the other guy was ready to surrender and receive some minor punishment or (more likely) a "don't do that again" lecture. You know, like a normal person would. When the guy looked at Billy and said something like, "Shit, we're busted," Billy yelled "Run!" 

(An amusing related digression to this part is that when they were thrown into the backseat of the security car, one of their other friends was already there, having been arrested for something else, moments earlier. I always wondered what the security guy thought about the happy reunion taking place back there.)

Billy drank. A lot. One night, when Jerry and Billy stayed home, Jerry had noticed an unopened gallon bottle of wine in the fridge. Billy was in his room during the entire evening, but each time Jerry returned to the fridge, he noticed the level in the now-open bottle going down, until it was completely empty. Jerry finally went to Billy's room and found him there, just staring glassy-eyed at the ceiling.

Billy "went away for a while." Basically, to dry out. People don't usually drink an entire gallon of wine on a lark, and it doesn't take much training to realize that such a gesture might be a symptom of a larger problem. So he was gone for a year. Until now.

So Jerry and Billy were going out, to celebrate(?) his return to school. Would I like to join them?

WHAT'S THE WORST THAT CAN HAPPEN?

My live-in girlfriend, the future Mrs. The Anthony Show, decided to stay in and asked me not to wake her when I returned. Billy and Jerry arrived, and we set off for the bars.

[Insert montage of the three of us drinking at a couple of different bars, to the sounds of some annoying song from this era. The #1 song at this time was "End of the Road" by Boys II Men, but I never listened to that, so we'll use this chart-contender from the same time instead:]

Eventually we ended up at one of the more hole-in-wall bars that attracted both students and townies alike. (Buffalo townies: picture that.) I'd made a mistake by trying to keep up with Billy, while Jerry had stopped drinking much earlier. My only memory at this point was surreptitiously pouring that second shot of Ouzo onto the floor. I was having trouble standing, but Billy looked bored and as if he'd been sipping Evian all night.

For reasons still unclear to me, we decided to make one more stop before returning home. We arrived at The Steer, whose website touts its lunch and dinner offerings — but when a venue is steps away from the University at Buffalo campus and one of the larger concentrations of its off-campus residences, and is open until 4am every single night, you know the appeal isn't the "banquet facilities."

When I was at college, people nicknamed that place Da Stee-yah because it was known as a "Greek bar" populated by Long Islanders with far worse accents than my own. I'd never been in the place before, and as soon as we walked in, I was expecting a record needle to scratch while the entire populace turned to stare at us in horrified silence. However, we were so beyond different to these people, who were either blond, beefy, ball-capped, or all three, that we probably just looked like pieces of furniture moving around the place.

We soon waded out onto the outside deck, where students were drinking out of clear plastic cups. My two companions and I weren't drinking, and when you're at a crowded bar without a cup or bottle in hand, you can start to feel self-conscious.

You'd feel even more self-conscious after what happened next.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
We were standing really close to these two guys: one dude was your average guy with no out-of-the-ordinary identifying features, while the other one was short, with short blond hair. Both were enjoying themselves, and Shorty was finishing a story. He spoke English, but because I was drunk and he had a voice that sounded like a combination of puberty and chain smoking, all I could hear was a high-pitched gravelly Yahyahyahyahyah.

As for Billy and Jerry and me, we were starting to get our bearings. No one had even started talking yet; I'd just planted my feet and expected the three of us would form a small circle and begin to establish a conversation. Instead, without any warning and while showing absolutely no change in emotion, Billy grabbed Shorty's cup of beer and pitched it off the deck and into the street.

I didn't watch Jerry's reaction. I just stared, as if I were watching a movie. Shorty's friend, with more confusion than anger in his voice, looked to Billy and asked:

Hey! Why'd you throw my homie's beer?

Why'd you throw my homie's beer? Though I couldn't move, my mind was racing with a couple of questions:

• Did he really say "my homie"? Could there ever be a situation where I'd refer to someone, without irony, as "my homie"? Ever?
• Why did Billy throw that guy's homie's beer?
• What happens now?
• How does Billy respond to that question?

And it was at this point that I started to notice the fear. The feeling only increased with Billy's reply to shorty and his friend:

I felt like it.

The way he emphasized felt meant he didn't have to add you idiots.

"WE...ARE GONNA DIE"

Otis! My man!

I was reminded of what Otter said when he and his fellow Animal House Deltas realized they were the only white folks when they stepped into the all-black bar to see Otis Day. Though I was still very hammered, I was logical enough to know that I was actually going to literary die — on the other hand, I wasn't sure how we were going to get out of there alive.

For the moment between what happened in the previous paragraph and what happens in the next paragraph, I felt, for one of the few times in my life, that real Fear. It's the kind of moment you see in an old John Cusack movie, only I was living it. In my panicked, inebriated mind, I considered punching Billy in the face myself to show everyone that I too disapproved of his actions. I also considered running, but I didn't want to abandon Jerry. (What would become of Billy, by this point, I didn't care.)

In quite the anticlimax, we were able to leave the bar without being maimed. Shorty and his friend, who weren't friends with the other hundred people at the bar like I'd feared, just cursed a lot and were convinced that Billy was too drunk and lacked the mental capacity to know what he was doing, and they let us drag him out of there. We didn't even have to buy Shorty another beer, so it was win-win.

CODA

I just look at this picture,
and I need an Advil. 

I can't remember much after we left The Steer. I don't remember saying goodbye to Jerry and Billy and I don't remember staggering the half-mile home. What I do recall is collapsing in bed, only to wake up myself and my girlfriend as I navigated myself to the bathroom to throw up several times, pausing only to breathe and curse Billy's name.

The next day, after I woke up near noon, nursing a hangover that felt like a Clydesdale was balancing itself on a single hoof perched on my frontal bone, I learned from Jerry that Billy woke up at 8am and made all his classes like nothing had happened the night before.

And that's pretty much the end of that story. Incidentally, I never saw Billy again, but I noticed he's Facebook-friends with Jerry. I'll have to ask Jerry to ask Billy if he remembers that night. Maybe not. Anyway, here's a song that combines both drinking and fear, "I'll Believe I'll Have Another Beer" by Fear.

Remember to enjoy your beer and single-serving gallons of wine responsibly!