The Column Caper

This was originally done on my 360 page. So if you read it there, you don't need to bother reading it again. Also, you may not actually want to bother reading it now, but I'll lead that up to you. Everyone thinks they can write and be funny, but not everyone can. I'm pretty sure I fall in the latter group. And in case I don't see you or hear from you, enjoy your holiday and try to stay out of jail.

One night a few of us were sitting around the fraternity house, enjoying a few brews. As luck would have it, we ran out of beer and a couple of us had to head out on a beer run.

Now, since this was during the middle of the week, and we weren’t actually drinking that much, it really wasn’t a big deal. If it had been the weekend, a beer run would have consisted of firing up the VW rabbit, dragging the treasurer out with a wad of cash and heading off to the beer distributorship, with a couple of our more burly brothers. We didn’t fuck around on the weekends when it came to beer. We had a system, it worked, and if you weren’t in the beer acquisition chain of command, you stayed the hell out of our way. On the weekends, we never ran out of beer and as I look back it, it was one of the few, true accomplishments of my term as president of the fraternity. Sure, maybe we had low expectations, but that just makes it so much easier to achieve 100% satisfaction.

Anyway, on this given evening I headed out to the local store with my roommate. There was a convenience store a few blocks up the street, and since we were really only looking for a few 6 packs, we decided to hoof it up to the store for the exercise. You know, like the 10 minute walk was really going to offset the thousands of calories we were pouring down our gullets that evening.

On the way to the store, we passed this big old mansion on Main Street that was under renovations. It was a beautiful old house, with monstrous Greek columns on the front porch. Well, normally they were on the front porch, but since the porch was undergoing a major overhaul, the columns were lying on the front lawn in nice neat rows.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen a whole lot of these fluted columns standing up, but never lying on the ground. They looked so unusual there on the ground, so mundane, compared to the way they normal look. In hindsight, I’m not really sure what piqued my curiosity (or my buddy’s) about these columns, but something did.

We ambled up the store, spent some time comparing the intrinsic differences between various low quality alcoholic beverages, consummated our purchase and headed back. Along the way, we paused at the mansion and again were intrigued by the columns.

Now, I’m not really sure what led me to jump the short wrought iron fence and attempt to pick the end of one of the columns. In any event, what initially began as a somewhat inebriated theoretical discussion as to the weight of these columns lead to where both of us were inside the fence, had one of said columns up on one shoulder, and our beer slung under the opposite arms.

At this point, what’s a fraternity brother supposed to do, right? We were concerned that trying to place the column back on the ground may actually lead to us dropping our precious beer, which would have been a very negative outcome, at least to our perspective. We decided that the best course of action was to carry the column back to our fraternity house and employ the assistance of our bothers to rectify the situation. As we headed down Main Street, Greek revival column on one shoulder, beer swinging from the other arm, we began to sing that stupid dwarf song from Snow White “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go…”. Once we got to the house, we managed to ring the door bell and waited patiently as our fellow brothers got their heads around the fact that at 10:30 at night there were two guys with beer and a Greek column at their door. Even for fraternities, this doesn’t happen every day.

A little while later, once all the hullabaloo settled down, we were sitting back, enjoying our hard won beers and watching the late news, when the door bell rang. There, at the front door, much to our surprise, was a member of the local law enforcement agency. Since we were all white kids from the suburbs, with a strongly ingrained respect for authority, we politely asked our fine officer what brought him to our house so late that evening. Trying to keep a straight face, the cop said to us:

“Let’s cut the bullshit. If you guys put the column in the back of my car, I’ll take it back to the house and that’s where this thing will end.”

Try as we might, we couldn’t get the 20’ wooden Greek column into the back of the dude’s cruiser. Look, I know those Ford LTD were big freaking cars, but there is a limit as to what you can put in the back of them. Bodies, yes, columns, no.

So, at about midnight, my roommate and I carried the column back to the mansion, under police escort and placed it back among it’s column mates.

And so ended the column caper, where we learned at even at 10:30 at night, people will call the cops if they see a 20’ column walking down the street.