COLUMN: 1976 vs. 1994

From Corin Brown's "Bonin' in the Bone Yard," Fall '95 So said this old, prematurely fat Penn alumnus/golf caddie, Class of 1976 who was passing through town, checking out his college haunts. My friends and I met him a couple of weeks ago, while we were playing pool. It was a brief, parenthetical encounter with an old life-weary sage, brought to reality by pure happenstance. Nothing more than a unique episode neatly inserted into an otherwise predictably ordinary autumn afternoon at Penn. This old guy (I think his name was Jack) fondly waxing nostalgic about the way things were -- back in the day of the exposed collar -- reminded me of a particularly poignant scene in Easy Rider. Half-way into their trek from L.A. to Mardi Gras, Peter Fonda's character and Dennis Hopper's character randomly stumble upon, then latch onto, an alcoholic lawyer -- played by a young Jack Nicholson. After this totally random collision of kindred spirits, Nicholson's character began to influence Fonda's and Hopper's characters by exposing unspoken, subtle glimpses of his personal philosophy on life (before promptly getting himself killed). While his appearance in the movie was brief, the impression he made was a deep and penetrating one. Jack, the alumni, made the same sort of impression on me and my friends. It was a Thursday afternoon and my friends and I were innocently playing pool when, completely unheralded, into our lives rolls this whirling dervish, fat alumnus Jack and his sidekick Hillbilly (not a Penn graduate). Hillbilly was a gnarly, tractor-pull watching hayseed from South Carolina with more vermin camped out in his ratty-ass facial hair than Willie Nelson. They visited only as long as it took them to finish a beer, but they didn't escape without Jack, the fat alumnus, telling us how the seventies were, and specifically, how good the seventies at Penn were. We all froze up, enthralled like little preschoolers engrossed by the stories told by police officers during career day. The seventies Penn world that Jack laid out in front of us that afternoon seemed like the backdrop to Fantasia or Alice in Wonderland -- utter suspension of reality. During the time it took Jack to consume one 16 ounce beer and for me to shoot a game of pool with Hillbilly, our immensely riveting and fat alumnus spun fantastic yarn after fantastic yarn about ridiculously cheap, accessible kind buds, mountains of cocaine Tony Montana would be proud of, and too much sex to go around for all the boys and girls. And fat Jack wasn't just talking about those fucked-up seventies frat guys. (Golly gee! Those boys must have been really high!) Fat Jack was covering the whole school, although I bet Van Pelt was open on Saturdays back then, too. And then they were gone. Fat Jack and Hillbilly hit the bricks as soon as their two cups hit the floor. Needless to say my friends and I have never experienced anything like the seventies and if we hadn't been listening in pure awe, with our mouths painfully agape, we probably wouldn't have noticed fat Jack and Hillbilly's shockingly absurd little visit. This always happens too. Whenever the sixties or seventies come up in conversation with my friends, the breakdown of the "what ifs" on the sex and drugs is almost always punctuated by one of us muttering, "... god damnit, I wish we were this age back then! Penn's so beat." Then we always end up launching ourselves into protracted dialogue on why things aren't the same now as they were back when they were good. And all kinds of different theories get thrown out, most of them focusing on some form of conspiracy involving the adult/parental/authoritative powers-that-be and their influence on AIDS, the no-keg rule, why the girls here won't put out/why the girls here aren't as hot as the ones from home, and the hassles of getting a bag. Personally, it all sounds pretty far-fetched to me, but somehow, I imagine most people at Penn wouldn't have liked it here in 1976. Say we had to move back to 1976. What a shame! We wouldn't have e-mail. We wouldn't have Sega. We wouldn't have Beavis and Butthead. We wouldn't have call-waiting. We wouldn't have cellular phones. We wouldn't have PARIS. We wouldn't have 898-MELT. We wouldn't have SportsCenter (that's a toughie.) We wouldn't have speech codes. We wouldn't have those mint High Rises. We wouldn't have our fake ID's. We wouldn't have AIDS, Madonna, Roseanne, Bill Clinton or Jacks cigarettes. We wouldn't have kids learning how to program a VCR before learning how to read Green Eggs & Ham. Oh yeah, and on July 4 we'd have to celebrate our country's 200th birthday. What a big fucking shame! If we went to school here in the seventies we wouldn't have any of those fine quality items. Shit! Then I guess all we'd have to do is get ripped everyday on whatever we could get our hands on, straddle a fat keg in the middle of College Green, pick up a fat degree and get ridiculously laid 24-7. Plus Led Zeppelin would just be getting big. Sounds real tough. Yeah, I think I'd be able to survive. Trust me, it wouldn't be that bad. Pussies. Corin Brown is a senior Political Science major from Newton, Massachusetts. Bonin' In the Bone Yard appeared alternate Thursdays this semester.