Shawn Collins' Blog

Affiliate marketing and other stuff from Shawn Collins, co-founder of Affiliate Summit.

Cisco, Sanford and Son, a Payphone, and Post-it Notes

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It was summer 1991, and the lease on my Knox Box apartment was up. I hadn’t renewed it because I was moving into the fraternity house for the next year. So, I crashed at the frat with a few other guys until Hell Week was set to start and we would settle into our rooms.

My temporary home was room 13, right there when you walked through the front door of the house. During the semesters, this was the first stop for many people when they came to the house, and the summer was no different, except there were far fewer people around.

Room 13 at PiKA

When I wasn’t working my summer jobs at Cluck-U Chicken or Campus Rec, I was hanging around with guys at the house. My typical downtime fun was having a 40- or 64-oz bottle of Private Stock malt liquor and a bottle of Cisco (a very strong, disgusting fortified wine) and watching some TV with the guys.

That summer, it seemed like Sanford and Son was always on, so I think I saw every episode a couple or three times. One day I was enjoying a marathon of Fred Sanford’s antics with Lance, and when the drinks kicked in, I decided I really needed to call my girlfriend.

There were no working phones in the house, so I had to gather all my change and walk across the street to a payphone. I was so psyched to talk to her as I dropped my coins into the phone. I excitedly punched in her number, which was long-distance, so I think it was like $1.50 or more for the first few minutes of the call.

My heart was beating fast as the phone rang on the other end. Then an unfamiliar voice said, “Hello.” I asked if my girlfriend was there, and the person on the other end said I had the wrong number, and they hung up.

That was it. I spent what little money I had on that call, and I was left deflated.

Then I got a great idea. I was the Secretary for the Interfraternity Council (IFC) at the time, so I hopped on my bike and rode over to the student union to call her from the IFC office. As I pedaled across the University of Maryland campus, I kept repeating her phone number in my head to be sure I got it right this time.

It was less than a mile on my bike, so after my quick ride, I locked up my bike and headed into the office. I speed-walked to the phone with a smile on my face, punched in the correct number this time, and prepared to chat.

The answering machine picked up, and I left her a message dejectedly. She had no way to call me back, so I probably wouldn’t talk to her until she came back to campus to get ready for sorority rush.

Oh well, I didn’t want this trip to be in vain, so I fired up the office computer and played Sim City for a while. After I got bored of that, I decided to head back for more hang time. On the way out the door, I saw a big stack of Post-it Notes and grabbed as many as I could for no particular reason.

I got on my bike and pedaled back across campus with one hand holding a bunch of Post-it Notes. All was well until I headed downhill on McKeldin Mall and veered off the sidewalk. With one hand on the handlebar, I went head over ass and landed in a heap.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up in bed, and it was nearly midnight. Lots of hours had passed, and I guess I made it back to the frat on autopilot and climbed into bed with bloody arms and legs.

My bike made it home with me, but the Post-it Notes got lost along the way. Everyone else must have been out at the bars, so I climbed back into bed to go to sleep for the night.

Cisco, Private Stock, BB Guns, and Police

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Hank was my big brother in Pi Kappa Alpha, and we hung out a lot in college and sometimes got into mischief. This one night in August 1990 was one of those times.

Shawn and Hank PiKA Christmas Formal 1989

It was the day that two new roommates were moving in with my friend John and me to our Knox Box. There was Chris, who was in PiKA, and his friend and future PiKA, Dan from back home.

Nothing much was going on, so Hank and I picked up a couple of 40s of Private Stock malt liquor (“The malt liquor with the imported taste”) and two bottles of Cisco (aka Liquid Crack).

Cisco would get us pretty blitzed by itself, but it was rough to drink down, so we chased it with malt liquor to make things easier and to enhance our buzz journey.

I think Chris and Dan must have gone to sleep early, because they were already in bed when the Cisco and Private Stock kicked in. In our altered states, Hank and I decided it would be a good idea to take out our BB guns.

Now, since I spent 1989 doing 500 hours of community service, you might think I’d try to avoid doing stupid things that could get me in trouble. That was usually the case, but the combination of Cisco and Private Stock would take me to a place where bad ideas sounded awesome.

So, we had our BB guns, and there was some beef with the guys in the apartment just over a hedge from us. They weren’t home; we were bored, and one of us thought it would be fun to open a window in the living room and take aim at the other apartment.

My conservative estimate is that we unloaded 100 or more BBs into that apartment. The windows were like Swiss cheese. So was their TV. We had a time, and it only stopped when we heard people coming back from the bars.

We quickly closed the window and turned off the lights as the yelling started from these guys, who had walked in on what looked like the crazy shooting scene at the end of True Romance.

That was the end of the carnage. Hank headed off to his apartment, and I planned to get some sleep after hiding my BB gun under some dirty laundry.

But shortly after, there was loud knocking on our front door. I figured it was the neighbors, so I messed up my hair like I’d been sleeping for a long time and walked out, rubbing my sleepy eyes, to answer the door.

It wasn’t the neighbors. It was an officer from the College Park (MD) Police Department. I guess the neighbor guys concluded that only our apartment had the line of sight to obliterate their windows.

I answered the door and turned on the living room lights. The police officer walked in and asked if I had been shooting BBs at my neighbor’s apartment. I acted appalled that he would even ask me that question.

Then, he glanced down at our coffee table, which happened to have dozens of loose BBs on it.

He looked at me, and then at the BBs, and back at me again. I scrambled to come up with a good story.

“One of my roommates just moved out. He worked at a bike shop (which was true), and he sometimes worked on bikes in the apartment. Those are ball bearings from bikes.”

What a horseshit story, but he bought it. He left, and I went to sleep.

But that wasn’t the end of it. The next day, I started getting phone calls from the landlord of the apartment next door. I answered the first time, and he was screaming and yelling that he would have to hire a glazier (I had to look in my Webster’s Dictionary to find out what that was).

I denied it and said it must have been someone hiding behind the hedges, but I hadn’t seen anything because I was sleeping. I hung up, and it was over as far as I was concerned.

The calls didn’t stop, but they did go straight to our answering machine after that. The landlord was increasingly hostile and threatening. He claimed he ran a ballistics test, and the BBs in the apartment he owned matched our “ball bearings.” I knew that was not true because the officer hadn’t taken any of our BBs with him, and I walked up to 7-Eleven and threw them all out the next day.

So, I did what any Gen X delinquent would do… I made a mixtape of a bunch of Hank and my favorite punk and new wave songs. In between the songs, I put clips from the voicemails.

Eventually, the landlord gave up trying to collect money for the damages, and I largely behaved for the rest of that year that I lived in the Knox Box before moving on to the fraternity house.

Welcome to the Knox Box, Chris and Dan. Thanks for not moving out the next day.