I am 19. I am 19.
I’m with my cousin and friend Peter as we enter the Breezeway, the campus bar at the university I unexpectedly dropped out of a couple of months earlier, spurred by a poker tournament win.¹ We are at the bar to obtain tickets to an upcoming Tea Party show. We are told we need to buy four Molson cold shots each in order to make that happen, so we oblige. We get a call from our cousin Michael, who also wants a ticket, and so another quartet of beers is ordered and drank.
The alcohol, combined with us being together, urges us to break into the Engineering building, and so we do not resist. We dangerously walk across a thin beam to make sure that we can, and on the way we stomp holes into the beam. Then we proceed to traverse between buildings using the overground tunnels, but we climb along the ceiling only, as a spider might, once again to make sure that we can. After coming back inside after a subsequent visit to a Chemistry building roof, a security guard grabs my shirt, telling me I’m not allowed wherever I am.
Peters then runs away, encouraging me to do the same, not out of fear but because, “It’ll be fun.” He escapes, but I paint myself into a corner outside and am tackled by what is now a multitude of Mun Po. Two of my friends who are leaving the school library after a night of studying happen to see me being handcuffed and thrown into the back of a car. The fake police call the real police, who arrest me upon arrival. My cousin, ever the gentleman, not wanting to leave me to face the consequences alone, returns in a show of solidarity for which he has still not been thanked, and he is arrested as well. After over an hour of questioning us in separate rooms, trying to play us off of each other, we are released on our own recognizance. During the walk home, we hug excitedly, gleeful at having been arrested for the first time together. I do not end up attending the concert.
¹ [Author’s note: During the previous summer, I started delving into online poker, which had recently started booming around the continent. I won a trip to Barcelona to play in the European Poker Tour, and while there, I realized that I could have a lot of fun and make a lot of money without taking the university path laid out for me.]