The Beer Board

I loved living there, okay, loved living with Tor and Ken and Adam, with Linda just across the hall. It was like a virtual quint, the amount of time we'd either spend with her in her single, or she'd spend with us in our quad. We had two rooms. We put all the beds into one room. In the other, in our main room, our "entertaining" room, we'd made this fake fouton out of a turned-over bookcase and an extra mattress. It was up against the window.

Spring term, Linda and I would crank the stereo. Fine Young Cannibals. She Drives Me Crazy. We'd jump up and down on the not at all bouncy fouton, shouting at the top of our lungs. We'd open the window to let the fresh smell of spring into the room. We'd yell out the window.

Our other spring term project (although it was probably started during the winter) lasted much, much longer than I think any of us expected.

All of the halls in Musser were lined with white tile. Like a bathroom. Not exactly the most aesthetically pleasing architecture, most certainly not the dorm featured in all of the campus literature. The one saving grace was that there were half a dozen large bulletin boards, a good four feet tall, five feet long, three on each of side of the dorm. Between various door decorations and whatever people decided to put on the bulletin boards, it wasn't all that bad.

Well, actually, it was.

The boards were a nice idea, but people crapped them up pretty quickly. I mean, even if somebody decided to cut out a whole bunch of photos from the latest J.Crew or Benneton catalog and pin them up, you wouldn't be surprised to see mustaches or other graffiti by the end of the weekend. It wasn't like the dorm was this horrible broken down place. It's just that people didn't really care. You live there for a year, do your time, then move on to a better spot on campus.

I'm sure it was Linda's idea. We maybe came up with together one night, casually, all of us in our room, drinking whatever cheap case of beer we could pick up at the Muni. There was a board across the hall from us. We walked past it every day, every day thinking how much it sucked. We're sitting on the floor, or on the "fouton of luuuv," picking at the beer labels.

We could do something cool. Something different. We could do something that nobody has ever done before, that would be cool, and that drunk grafitti writers could respect, and it could be all artistic and everything, and I'm absolutely certain that if it wasn't Linda's idea, then she was largely responsible for it's implementation.

We wrote a letter to the appropriate campus groups. We used Linda's Macintosh, printed the letter in a clean New York font, requesting building maintenance to remove all of the crapped up scraps of paper that tattered our board, and then please, please, paint it white. A solid four by five rectangle of clean, unblemished whiteness.

From there, we stopped ordering kegs of beer for our parties. Bottles only. We wanted variety. We wanted any number of different brands of beer: Pfeiffer, of course, because it was a staple, but also MGD, Kiran, Budweiser, Old Milwaukee, Coors, St. Pauli Girl. We started looking for cases of beer based not on the price per bottle, but on the colors and shape of the label.

Saturdays and Sundays we walked our black plastic garbage cans down the hall to the shower. We filled them with halfway with lukewarm water, then brought them back down to our quad. Homework was done on the fouton, or in the chairs lined up next to the bookshelves. Linda did much of the work. Empties were added to the garbage cans, left to soak for thirty minutes, an hour. Labels were carefully peeled off, laid out along an empty bookshelf to dry. Some labels were more difficult than others. You had to be patient.

When the labels were dry, we'd glue them to the board. Patterns were formed. A Pfeiffer border. A large swirl of MGD labels. A checkerboard of Bud and Bud Light. We didn't have any kind of master plan as we began to glue the beer labels to the board, but we recognized the patterns as they began to take shape. It was a work in progress. We'd drink and soak and paste.

Nobody touched it. Nobody defaced it. This was a surprisingly brilliant, completely accidental strategy. Drunk college students living in a crappy dorm tend to break shoot. But when they'd stumble up the stairs to third Musser, turn right, look right again at the collage being created, they were humbled.

It's beer, dude. It's beer and it's art, and, f***, dude, it's f***ing beer.

We'd drive down to the Muni. Linda was the only one old enough to buy. Before we'd left, she'd stood in the hall outside of our rooms. There were too many people involved, now. We'd all stand there, all of us, Ken, Adam, Tor, Aaron, Dave, Gates, KQ, and we'd survey the patterns, an eye on the decreasing white space, and we'd think about how many cases we'd need, what brands to look for, as we invited more friends to another spring term party.

Help us, we'd write. Help us finish these cases of beer. Help us finish the mural.

On the bottom left, Brady carefully cut out the Pfeiffer wording. He filled the space with each of our names, hand-drawn to match the red script, something you probably wouldn't even notice unless you were looking for it.

It's been awhile since I've visited Northfield, but the board was still there at our five year reunion, and I'm pretty sure I remember it there at our ten year reunion as well. Who knew it would last so long?