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I passed Robert coming out of his room, on his way to National Guard training, smiled at him and said sup. Robert’s real first name was Carlos. He was born the son of a NASA space engineer, in the Yucatan while his father and mother were stationed there. We never called him Robert though, we all called him Goat. He had grown up under his father’s shadow (literally because his father weighed almost three hundred fifty pounds), and his fifteen year old brother looked up to him as a role model to be mimicked. We met Goat’s little brother on Family weekend, got him high and coerced him to moon Main Street traffic from the roof of our dorm. This was the same night Goat was given his nickname. We were all playing Dungeons and Dragons after his little brother went on his THC ass showing tightrope walk on the ledge of the building, the dope-induced laughter had died down, leaving a residue of hunger that radiated from every person in the room, bags of Doritos passed around and 40s of King Cobra taken from the poor kid’s refrigerator in the room we had slovenly taken up temporary residence in.

Someone cast a spell on Carlos that turned him into an animal of the group’s choice, it was unanimous—a goat, the perfect nickname because this kid would eat fucking anything. He scraped cafeteria plates for his campus job two times a week, told us he often found himself so hungry that he’d finish food from the discarded plates. And although he was open to eating refused food items from unknown donators, Goat refused to drink beer because it was carbonated. He opted for cheap wine, the ghetto shit I used to drink when I was fifteen, Boon’s Hill, Mad Dog 20/20, and some nasty ass homemade red wine he got from some dunsky on the second floor. Goat ended up puking that night and passing out in the bathroom stall, his head in a moppy puddle of piss and his size 13 shoes pointed toe up to the ceiling, his lanky legs extended flat from underneath the stall door. Being the good friends we were, we took several pictures of him and displayed them in the glass case next to the stairwell on the third floor.

Goat was a member of our get high crowd, the in-crowd inside our in-crowd that included Mark, Goat, Tim (who I haven’t introduced yet) and myself. We each packed fully loaded dugouts and every day was a better reason than the last one to get high. We’d often make it through our first few classes sober and then each of use would feel that itch, the itch that only marijuana connoisseurs know, the pulsing voice in one’s mind that says yeah, this is cool but wouldn’t it be better high? And that was the question that followed us around and barked in our heads whenever we saw something interesting while sober.  For us, the answer was inevitably yes, it would be cooler, man—much, much cooler.

Tim was another Magistrate and the only other person I met that year that was as sure about what they wanted to do in life as I was. Tim was from a small religious family in a town like a baby metropolis whose crown had just emerged from the birth canal and he was as opposite from religious as one could get. His life’s ambition was to be a criminal psychologist. He told me once that all human life boiled down to chemicals in the brain and anything beyond that assessment was pure speculation. Tim was the last man I did acid with, the sanest crazy person I ever met, a skinny blonde-haired kid like me, but with a few inches on me in height.

We got along okay at first, Tim and I, our relationship consisting of wassupmans in the hallway on the way to and from classes. He was a cigarette smoker and a standard occupant of the smoke benches outside Kohl Hall. I was and still remain a non-smoker; my mother smoked throughout my childhood and I detested the smell then and to this day nothing pisses me off more than standing in someone’s fucking cigarette cloud. Tim came walking up one day with a packed bowl and sat down in our circle, lit up, inhaled with eyes closed, his head back, he passed the bowl capped with the lighter without even looking who he was giving it to. After we were all well and stoned, the introductions began and the circle was sealed. This was without a doubt one of the coolest introductions I have ever witnessed.

The last major member of the Magistrates was Darren Jefferson, just out of the Navy with a college stipend and the only other member of the group besides me who was of legal drinking age. Darren and I had chosen the right age to come to a freshman dorm because we were like the Godfathers, cotton in the cheeks, muffled mush mouth—If I buy this beer for you as a friend, there will one day come a time—index finger punctuating the consonants—and that day may never come, when I will ask you for a favor. Darren was the most laid back red head I ever met. He didn’t smoke pot, preferred the liquor and beer ticket when it came to substance abuse, was a big club man, a raver minus the head trip. He had a closet full of rayon shirts and when something met with his disapproval, he had this way of scrunching his lips upward towards his nose in a constipated smiley face scowl.

Darren was also one of the only three people in the Magistrates who had an accessible form of transportation, giving him a leg up on me in the Godfather category because not only could he buy the beer, he could drive to buy the beer.  Darren wasn’t a deep man but he had lived through naval training, rising as high as he could for an enlisted man in the time he spent there, and he came out with a clear head an was open to new ideas—I always respected him for that. Darren wasn’t necessarily a staunch Republican, headstrong enough not to be brainwashed by anyone else’s liberal agenda, but still pliable enough to be moved when the moment was right.

My favorite memory of Darren happened one Thursday bar night after racking up a seven dollar tab drinking dime beers, most of which went to the eighteen year old cooze we brought home with us hoping to get draid that night (draid is a slang term for drunk and laid). So Darren and I were sitting with three girls, Mark, and Phil at the pizza parlor in the campus Union that stayed open till 3 A.M. This is the old school Union I’m talking about now, before they redid it to make it look like Carnegie fucking Hall, gum stuck under every table, and bathrooms that smelled like pussy and Gouda cheese. That night, we were all balls deep into cheese bread and personal pizzas when I looked over at Darren, his head hanging with his eyes closed, mumbling to himself. I said Darren, what’s wrong, dude? He said this cheese…it’s making me sweat. He couldn’t have said a weirder sentence at that moment and I said what dude? He pointed to his half-eaten, grease-stained pizza box and said this cheese…making me sweat. He got up, ran from the cafeteria and we didn’t see him until the next afternoon.

Start reading …And the Third Floor Magistrates Took the Rape from the beginning.

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