Ham!

for a few years in college, my friends dale and annie lived in a house on willie st. this was our central headquarters and crash pad. it was the closest place to walk to after a night downtown, a convenient “rest stop” between classes (when walking all the way back to my house in south park was out of the question), and just generally where we’d gravitate when we couldn’t think of anything else to do. neither john nor i had a key to the place – which, in retrospect was very odd, considering the alternative – so we became adept at breaking in through the window in the spare room. lest you think this illegal or shady, please understand that annie is the one who figured out the best method for breaking in and had us all do “trial runs” to make sure we could do it safely and effectively. (of course, the definitions of “safe” and “effective” varied in direct proportion to how much alcohol we had consumed, but that’s beside the point.)

just behind this house was a street that would occasionally shut down for a block party. this was extremely convenient, and we took advantage of it when we could. the first “official” block party (read: legal) happened sophomore year. several bands were scheduled to play throughout the evening, including kind insight, made up of fellow theatre students. while there was definitely plenty of mind-altering substances about, i only indulged in the alcoholic kind. however, because there was quite a lot of “alternative smoking” going on, i ended up with quite the contact buzz without so much as touching the stuff. so did everyone in a three block radius, probably. it didn’t take long for the munchies to set in, so john, ferruso, tony, and i set off for the dairy mart just down the hill.

okay, two bits of background info: one, wvu is built on the side of a mountain – when i say “down the hill” i’m not talking about a gentle slope on a straight road. i’m talking a winding, mountain road complete with blind turns and a steep grade. the store we were headed to was no more than a block away, but there were a few sharp twists in the road along the way. (trust me, this is imperative to the story, so just do your best to imagine it.) and two, “dairy mart” is a chain of convenience stores in the area, and they sell (or sold, anyway) fresh, warm calzones that were the best drunk food ever. the most popular calzones were the ham and cheese, and the pepperoni. they made three cheese ones too, but not as many as the others; by the end of the day, cheese calzones were hard to find.

the trip down was fairly uneventful. once there, we ordered our calzones and wandered back up to the party. there were no cheese calzones left, so john, being vegetarian, had opted for something else - probably something equally healthy like zingers and more cigarettes. i didn’t eat either ham or pepperoni at the time, so i opted for the ham and cheese; the ham was in four or five large slices and were therefore easy to take out and discard. i began the discard process as we headed back up the hill. now, remember, i’m a little tipsy with a good contact buzz going on. to entertain my friends – and myself – i took out one piece of ham at a time, yelled, “ham!” as a warning, and then tossed the ham into the street. “wouldn’t it be funny if you hit a car with that?” john asked as he laughed at me. and then on cue, as i yelled “ham!” and tossed the pork product street-ward, a small convertible emerged from behind the curve. the ham slice smacked the windshield, dead center. the convertible braked and we heard a “what the hell?” in the near distance. at this point, we were so hysterical with laughter that we had to sit down on someone’s front steps before we fell over. i couldn't hear the car coming over the sounds of mellow music and shouts and catcalls. the sun was only starting to set, so the car didn't have it's lights on for me to see. the timing was just that good. just as we started to be able to breathe again, we heard, “is that HAM? did someone throw HAM at us?” from the guys in the car. fresh laughter broke out and it took us a while to start back up the hill. it took us a lot longer to stop randomly yelling out “ham!” and bursting into giggles…