Everyone knows that any good night starts in a crowded quad and ends in McCosh. The stuff that happens in between is relatively unimportant- you’re going to pretend like you can’t remember it anyway. It’s not how you get there that matters, it’s the fact that you can tell people about it the next day so that they can idolize your inability to calculate your own level of alcohol tolerance.
Unfortunately, because I’d never been cool enough to actually get McCosh’d, I’d never known how the experience feels. Sure, I’d heard falsely retold stories and some urban legends, but I’d never been privileged enough to witness a Saturday night in McCosh first hand. Last weekend I became a new person when that all changed.
The story of last weekend begins two weekends ago- the weekend before last weekend. A few of my friends and I peer pressured the fuck out of a freshman until he passed out, so that was responsible. After a few good laughs, we realized it was time to come to our senses, call it a night, and fulfill our obligation to begin performing the necessary post-binge therapeutic routine. We turned him over on his side, took his pulse, gave him a sweatshirt to keep warm, video-recorded ourselves covering his body in Sharpie wangs, put his shoes on, carried him outside, began text conversations with the three most recent girls in his inbox, emptied his outbox, and dropped him off at McCosh. I took him inside and explained the situation to a doctor. She smiled, embraced the freshman, and then rather rudely told me to leave. She took him through a door which she slammed in my face, and was gone.
As I struggled to fall asleep that night, a curious thought occurred to me. Why had that doctor been so keen on kicking me out of McCosh? What do they do in there? What can you even do for a drunk person? Give him water and tell him to rest? What was behind that door, a bunch of kids sleeping? Why couldn’t they just do that in their dorms? And what if the colors I see are different from the colors you see?
Come to think of it, I had never actually heard anyone tell me what they had done when they were McCosh’d- just that they blacked out and woke up in there, remembering nothing. I spent the next week searching for answers, but no one could give me any. All primary sources claimed they had been too drunk to remember anything from their Saturday nights in McCosh. The only way to find the knowledge I sought would be to end up in McCosh myself. And that’s exactly what I did the next weekend- last weekend, the weekend before this next weekend.
My wang-artist friends from the week before and I planned it out: we would go up to McCosh and one of them would walk me in and tell the doctors I had blacked out. Then, I would enter the mysterious carouser storage facility, log a few minutes on my Flip Mino brand video camera (both stylish and practical for the situation!), and sneak out. I walked up to the front of McCosh with my friend Lloyd, took a deep breath, and followed him through the door. Years of feigning intoxication for the sake of impressing my peers or taking advantage of girls had prepared me for this moment; I was ready.
I stumbled in, and waited for Lloyd to say the lines. The doctor led me by candlelight through the door she had slammed in my face a week earlier. And then my life changed.
At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flames to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold – everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment – an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by – I was dumb with amazement, and when Lloyd, unable to stand the suspense any longer, texted anxiously, “Can you see anything?” it was all I could do to get out the words, “Yes, wonderful things.”
There was a buffet larger than any I had ever seen with suckling pig more succulent than any I had ere had the fortune of suckling. Everything was made out of gold, even the food, but it didn’t ruin the taste. There were one thousand flavors of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, and only one hundred of them were combinations of other Ben and Jerry’s flavors. The doctor-waitresses literally never stopped smiling; they brought out hand-baked pie after hand-baked pie, and they never got testy when I asked for a different kind or more butterscotch. The air tasted like hot chocolate and the temperature of the room was 30˚F and 90˚F- at the same time, so that everything felt like sitting in front of a fire during a blizzard. The strippers possessed an indefinable type of immaculate natural beauty, and there was nothing dirty about them. There were bottomless platters of crystal meth, and it was the good kind of crystal meth. There were real Sirens, and they were just like in the stories except there was nothing dangerous about them and they didn’t lure anyone into doing anything bad. They were incredibly old and no longer particularly attractive, but hearing their music was more indescribably fulfilling than eating suckling pig and Ben and Jerry’s at the same time while watching clean strippers and doing the good kind of crystal meth, which I was also doing. It was the most perfect night of my life and it will be nearly impossible to enjoy anything else ever again.
What happens in McCosh stays in McCosh. I’ve documented my findings so carefully and so publicly not to gloat, but to inform. Spread the word about what I’ve seen. Until we evangelize, its secret bounty of treasures will remain reserved for only the pinnacle of the social elite at Princeton- the McCosh’d.
-Wolfe
