Cocktails With Newk

          Newk came down from Connecticut to visit a friend in Pound Ridge so we arranged to go out drinking down my way one night. Newk and I were in Animal House, the real original Animal House. Our fraternity brother Chris, nicknamed Pinto, had written the original story for the Lampoon and then the movie script. The goings on at Animal House were much grosser, unspeakably so at times, and could never have been put into ANY movie. Macabre. I much appreciated going to Dartmouth and being a fraternity brother at Animal House, Alpha Delt, as it enabled me to keep up the high level of excitement I demanded in my life. My name around the house was Seal because I was sleek. So said Magpie who named me.

I acquired a few other names as times went on, my favorite being the Phantom. I got this one because for a while I took to going down to the house to eat at around 9 PM when the sandwich man came by. My digestion had gotten so bad from my drinking and other upsets in my life such as organic chemistry that I couldn’t hold much down and would very quietly barf up my food. As I was too lazy to go upstairs to the bathroom and didn’t live in the fraternity, I would go off and barf quietly in a corner on the floor behind an easy chair or sofa. After doing this several times everyone, at the insistence of the janitor Al, began keeping an eye out for the Phantom Barfer. I took even greater pleasure in barfing here and there surreptitiously for the next several weeks. Everyone was eyeing everyone trying to unmask for once and all the Phantom. It was pretty much concluded that a member of one of our rival fraternities was sneaking in somehow but no one could figure out how. I finally got caught. My last name was the Mustard Man and the incidents surrounding the acquisition of that one gave rise to the scene in the movie where John Belushi pours mustard on himself. I thought it a clever disguise at the time.

          Anyway, Newk and I began drinking at the Willow Inn, the bar I first started at when a few friends had taken me out on my 16th birthday. I don’t remember how it started but one thing led to another and by 4 AM Newk and I were in White Plains filling up all the quart beer bottles in my car with gasoline at an all night gas station. The attendant helped us twist up paper windshield cleaning towels and push them into the narrow necks of the bottles creating, of course, Molotov cocktails. Newk got so taken by all this he was sneaking up the back stoops of houses near the gas station stealing milk bottles and anything else he could find in the garbage that would work until we had about a dozen of these suckers. I drove north into the suburbs and stopped at Kensico Dam where we began throwing the cocktails creating huge walls of fire on the 300 foot high face of the dam. We threw a few elsewhere also and then I began to head toward Pound Ridge to take Newk home to his friend’s. Newk had one more cocktail and lit the wick in the car as he was sitting there. I told him to get rid of it as it scared me so Newk waited until a car was coming towards us and lobbed the cocktail up over my car. It came down and ignited the entire road in flames right behind me. I waited to see the brake lights of the other car in my mirror and never did until they must have been right on the wall of flame. I knew they skidded to a stop as I only saw one brake light meaning he had fishtailed. I figured the guy driving was a drunk. Who else would be out at this hour and not see a twenty foot high wall of flame in the middle of the road until he was right on top of it. Drunks. 

          Newk made the mistake of eating while we were out drinking and had barfed out the window of my car painting the whole door with flecks of a Stewart electric roast beef sandwich. You know, one of these things they would heat in those small ovens in back of the bar before microwave ovens. I thought nothing of it and just left it on the car. My parents spotted it two days later when they drove by my favorite bar, the Central Bar and Grille, in downtown Chappaqua. This place was a classic. It even had a discreet gold leaf letter sign in the window ‘Ladies Invited’. Yeah, right. My mother was so angry she made my father stop and come in the bar and take me outside and show me the barf and they demanded I clean it off. I DID ….  a couple of days later. Nobody’s going to tell me what to do! I was about 20 at this time.”