Good topic. Junior year my friends and I were in a 3-family house on Wyckoff St about a block or so behind the College Ave Student Center. The guys in the other apartments were cool and our landlord was cool as well. There was this ‘caretaker’-type-guy who lived in the basement and was always nice to us, but he was a bit of an odd duck. He was seemingly always either in the basement with the light on (no matter what time of night it was) or in the garage doing weird stuff (building things that never seemed to get finished, sitting with a friend in intense silence listening to political talk radio, etc.)
One of my favorite random memories there was when a bunch of us were home playing PS2 except our one friend who was at work. He’s a great guy but was a bit gullible and would react to almost everything. He had ordered an Aaron Brooks/Saints jersey and it came to the house about a half-hour before he got home. We noticed the packaging wasn’t sealed well and instead of sealing it up, we carefully opened the rest of it, removed the jersey (which was fine) and replaced it with an XL white Hanes t-shirt that we turned into a bootleg jersey using a Sharpie. We then carefully resealed everything, left the package by the door and waited. He got home, sees the package and goes, “oh good, my jersey’s here.”
...I wish we had filmed his reaction when he opened it up. His face ran the gamut of emotions as he held it up for a good 10 seconds without saying much of anything before stammering, “wha??? Whatthefu???? Whatthefu???? Whatthefu??? Whatthefu????” for a good 30 seconds. Keeping the straightest faces possible, we turn to him and act shocked, saying, ‘wow, you got ripped off, you need to call that site and complain’. He then broke off into a tirade about how messed up it was until he finally started putting the pieces together after a few of us couldn’t hold it anymore and started cracking up...and he then turns to everyone and as serious as anything says, ‘you know, it’s illegal to open up someone else’s mail!!’, which basically brought the room down with everyone cracking up/busting his chops, with someone giving him the house phone and telling him to call the police..and he finally cracked a smile and started laughing.
...a lot of good memories there, including when we used our aforementioned friend’s half-busted station wagon to move to our senior year apartment from 9pm-7am at 183 Hamilton Street at the end of May. We looked like a bootleg version of the Colts moving to Indy and it must have taken 7-8 trips, with us packing the car to the point where you could only see out of the windshield and him driving it to the house while the rest of us would walk stuff over, rinse and repeat. I think we had the market cornered on garbage bags and busted-out random scotch-taped cardboard boxes barely holding it together...I just about dropped onto my mattress on the floor at 7:30 and probably didn’t even stir until 4pm.
Joe P.
