Fire in a liquid form

Back in the late ‘70s, some friends of mine who were a few years older moved out of their parents’ home and in with a bachelor friend in his late 20’s. The Superbowl took place in January back then and they decided to invite some of us over for a party. Somebody brought chips and dip, someone else brought pizza and someone brought beer. I myself contributed a bottle of 190-proof Mountain Clear I’d got in Colorado a few summers prior. It was simply fire in a liquid form. Anyway, it wasn’t a bad party. A girl friend of ours sat next to me on a glass table and broke it; another friend got drunk and started swallowing fish from the aquarium. Someone else vomited on himself – it was the ‘70s. I thought it was a really cool idea at the time. Next thing I know I had moved out of my parents’ house. I was living in a co-ed dorm at Cal State East Bay. It was pretty much a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah. We’d been to Berkeley a few times where they really knew how to party. It wasn’t uncommon to see a flyer for a 50-keg fraternity party posted on a telephone pole on University Avenue. I remembered the party in Napa; the Superbowl party. I decided we should throw our own Superbowl party. We made flyers, distributed them throughout the dorm and bought a lot of beer at the liquor store down the street. I think we had two black and white TVs in my friend’s dorm room. I remember one of the girls threw a beer bottle at the TV and broke some champagne goblets.

The next year we decided to go even bigger. A few or our friends had moved out of the dorm and into an apartment on Kelly Street. This time we had a whole keg of beer and several color TVs. We also had Kamikaze races at halftime. The Kamikaze is rumored to have originated in Japan during the American occupation at a bar on Yokosuka base near Tokyo. In a Kamikaze race, you drink a kamikaze, run through the house (or apartment), run around the house, run back in, blow up a balloon till it pops, spin three times and answer a complex mathematical problem, all this while carrying an egg. You lose if you break your egg, fail to pop your balloon or answer the question wrong. It’s a relay race and the winning team got a fifth of Jack Daniels. Sometimes people would slip and separate their shoulder. One year a young woman peed her pants. I myself rammed my head into a guy’s stomach one time ‘cause he wouldn’t get out of the way. I feel bad about that now.

It’s 29 years later and my friends are still throwing that party each Superbowl. Only now there’s a pre-party banquet the night before along with golf Saturday afternoon and full-court basketball Sunday morning. The latter is getting increasingly difficult for many of us to pull off, I must admit. Some of the guys have teen-aged sons who can out-run us. The party took place in San Francisco this year and I made the mistake of exercising on Saturday morning and exploring Chinatown on Saturday night. Not long after the first game the next morning I felt like I was wearing lead boots. My heels felt like they were on fire. Fire in a liquid form. This time my friends had rented out a hall on Market Street with a small movie theater. But because of liability issues, there were no halftime Kamikaze races. But they’ll be back next year and so will the party. I call George’s Superbowl Party (named after a friend of ours, not myself) “the original classic.” No one had put those two nouns together “Superbowl” and “party” prior to that. Now thousands of Superbowl parties are held each February. But none can be called “the original classic.”