Poland. College. The last LAN party I ever had. Me, my cousin Georgios, and two friends, Głaz and Gigi, are all at my apartment. My Mother and my sisters are gone on vacation and we have the place for ourselves for a couple of days. Everyone brought their desktop computers with the huge CRT displays, we networked them all together (old-school BNC connectors, bitches!), and… well, you can imagine what followed — playing games at night, sleeping during the day, eating pizza, watching shopping channels, etcaetera. Judd Apatowski with lower production values. Living life to its fullest.
A couple of days in, Głaz wakes me up with the words that rank somewhere in the Top 5 of phrases you never ever want to be awaken with:
“I clogged the crapper.”
And clog, indeed, he did.
I’m not going to go much into details of what happened during the next two hours. Recall these montages they do on C.S.I. with quick cuts and hip music and work looking so sexy and awesome…? Now imagine the exact opposite. There was a lot swearing. I remember flipping coins to figure out whose hand was going in. We made some contraptions from my Mom’s knitting kits. We stumbled upon a special unclogging substance called The mole: In granules and I recall one of us even, in the act of courage, tasting the thing to determine… I don’t remember what exactly. We were desperate.
Finally, we decided someone had to make the necessary sacrifice, dress up, and go find a stick of some sort to fix things the old-fashioned way. (Yes, it indeed took us two hours to come up with this brilliant scheme.) It was Gigi who was the “lucky” one, so he took a shower, dressed up, and away he went.
15 minutes passed.
Half an hour passed.
45 minutes passed.
The place, as you can imagine, doesn’t exactly smell like roses anymore, and we’re all angry, and hungry, and anxious, and most importantly, since we just woke up, we all have to go!
Finally, 50 minutes after his departure to find a stick in a doggone backyard, Gigi comes back.
“Where the fuck have you been?”
“I went to the KFC to eat some dinner.”
“And what about the goddamned stick?”
“I forgot.”
And there you have it. True male friendship at its finest.
— San Francisco, 2007–2011.