This is part of a new series we're doing for FN during The Doldrums in an effort to entertain you, still write something semi-Dolphins related and just experiment with a bit of fiction as writers ourselves. The gist of these posts consists of fictional, very short stories involving Dolphins players. We'll probably toss out about one or two of these a week depending on the flow of real world action and our own schedules. Again, this is just an experiment for fun; these will have varying degrees of success. Some of it may be amusing and some of it may fucking plain suck. We're just giving it a go and seeing what comes of it. Again: This is purely fictional so the characters and situations have nothing to do with the real world. Enjoy!
Jim Jensen is seated outside the Harvard Lampoon castle on a slushy Wednesday night in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was October 8, 1980. He’d had half a bottle of Torero tequila, a particularly shitty brand he’d purchased for $5.95 on this special occasion. More than drunk, he was sitting on the steps outside the main Lampoon edifice with his arm supporting him. Elbow rooted firmly in the concrete as he unknowingly swerved a little even while seated.
“Let’s go Jensen. It’s time.” someone said behind him.
Jensen pushed himself up off the floor. He was wet and his jacket smelled terribly. Soaked in the Boston haze night after night, he’d never bothered to wash the damn thing. Throwing the bottle in the street, Jensen followed the stranger into the Lampoon building. It looked like a quirky version of some Magic Kingdom castle but thinner and more insidious. Entrance was only allowed to close friends of members or members themselves. If you were a close friend but a lay Harvard student, you were not allowed entrance. These were strict guidelines with particularly harsh ramifications that most members dared not to breach.
Inside were 4 white, boyish and manicured faces. Their eyes and cheeks gleamed in the soft candlelit glow of the castle’s interior. Sure, they were smart – soon to be politicians, joke writers, Hollywood men of power dating coked up and pilled up socialites. High on parties and Upper East Side lifestyles where ‘The Negro Problem’ was addressed and good drugs were available for children that have never feared a damn thing in their lives. It was all ahead of them. They were well aware. These were not Crash’s type of people. He was a Pennsylvania kid. Sharp and scrappy. ‘Fuck these guys’, he thought. He’d met one of these freaks in the bowels of a Boston bar. The kid told him about this castle and Crash being a guy that was absolutely hell bent on adventure and lunacy, he’d paid the kid $20 for a grand tour. Sure enough it was interesting. There was a feeling of ghosts, of too much LSD use, of parties, of laughter, wild affairs conducted in tucked away rooms, well-to-do Americana, and all the secrets the walls could barely digest. He was shown several secret passageways throughout the building, ancient Samurai armor that had been used as catcher’s equipment for pickup baseball games and in the center of a large dining hall the most ridiculous fucking thing ever:
“That right there, Jensen, is the largest chair in all of Massachussetts”, Thurston beamed.
Sure enough that fucker was huge. It was easily 10 ft tall, 8 ft wide, wooden and right at the head of a table in no way proportional to that monstrous thing.
“Care for a hit of some of this, Jensen? My brother just shipped it in from Humboldt. Some fine weed they’re growing out there these days”, offered one of the other nameless boys in a fine silver bowl. Being that Crash was never one to say ‘no’, he sat right in that big fuckin’ chair, put his feet on the dining table, lit one of the jazz cigarettes up and took a huge hit. Before the Orange Bowl, before Marino, before the sounds and smells of those humid September Miami nights and before he really was ‘Crash’ to millions of motherfuckers, Jensen absorbed the surroundings of the room and exhaled gently.
