By early November I was already well on my way to being a millionaire thanks to the oil crisis. Buddy was well on his way to a totally different type of crisis, this one involving his grades. Even though he started attending a few classes and no longer slept through the F-Tests, Buddy had uniformly flunked every single midterm. You could see a haunted look start coming to his eyes when he tried to get me to help him. I did try, but the boy was hopeless. He would buckle down for a day, but then go right back to drinking and doping. By the beginning of November his parents must have found out about his grades, because he was suddenly getting long phone calls on the pay phone in the lounge. Buddy was frightened, but didn’t have the discipline to do what was needed to catch up. He didn’t do much better on the next round of F-Tests, and I knew time was getting short for my roommate.
The hammer fell Thanksgiving. I wasn’t going back to Baltimore, and Buddy’s parents showed up at our door bright and early Wednesday morning. They were not amused by their son’s antics. His father peremptorily ordered Buddy to pack up; his mother looked me over disdainfully and demanded to know why I hadn’t helped her son get the A’s he deserved. Buddy must have been throwing me under the bus all semester. There was nothing to say, so I kept my mouth shut and watched. It got really amusing when his father opened his closet to help pack and found Buddy’s bong. Buddy immediately claimed it was mine, at which point I just laughed. Buddy was gone fifteen minutes later. He left ‘my’ bong for me, but I noticed he managed to hide his stash and take that with him.
It was a perfectly serviceable bong. I cleaned it up and put it in my closet.
The school closed after all classes on Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, and wouldn’t reopen until Monday morning afterwards. That left me with a major dilemma. The dining hall would be closed from Tuesday after dinner until Sunday after lunch. If I was already a Kegger, I could eat there, but we hadn’t been officially rushed yet. I was going to be eating out for several days. I had already mentioned the problem to Jim Easton and Mark Malloy. I couldn’t move in, of course, but I was invited to eat there for a few days. Two or three of the brothers lived far from home, and wouldn’t travel until the Christmas break. The same sort of thing occurred even during the summer. There were always two or three guys living there and not moving back home. I would have to talk to them about that.
As it was, three guys were staying over, Jack Jones and Bill Swayzack, a pair of sophomores, and Marty Adrianopolis, a junior. I asked if I could come over for the day. They agreed, and I sweetened the deal. If they coughed up a few bucks, I would stuff and cook a turkey dinner. That got an enthusiastic agreement, although they were all very curious about whether I could cook or not. It was one more way to cement myself as a guy worthy of being a Kegger. I collected a fiver from each of the other three and went on my way.
Wednesday I woke up and went jogging around the eerily deserted campus. It was kind of chilly to start; the snow season in upstate New York is considered to start by Thanksgiving, or sometimes even sooner. In later years Marilyn and I had occasionally taken the kids trick-or-treating in the snow! We had already had several inches of snow, but it wasn’t snowing just then. I was almost warm by the time I got back to the dorm. By lunchtime I was showered and shaved. I drove the Galaxie down to the Price Chopper mall on Hoosick and went into the Italian place for a couple of slices of pizza and a (now legal) beer. Then I went shopping. The fifteen I had collected from the three brothers, plus another five from me didn’t really cover the dinner, but I had sufficient funds to cover the difference. The house was very quiet when I rolled into the parking lot. Marty heard me coming in through the back door by the kitchen and helped me carry the load in and put it in the fridge. Afterwards he invited me into the living room and we had a couple of beers while watching television.
Afterwards, Marty and Jack Jones and I drove to a diner in Albany for dinner. I remembered it from way back, Jack’s Diner, an Albany landmark since the dawn of time. Many a night we’d get stoned and get the munchies and drive over there at two in the morning and demolish an entire cheesecake. We ate and then I drove the guys back to the house and I went back to the dorm.
Thanksgiving morning I skipped the run and drove around until I found a Denny’s that was open for breakfast. I loaded up on bacon, eggs, and toast, and then drove out to the frat. It was time to start prepping for dinner. Even though it was the smallest turkey I could find, I figured I would need to cook it about four hours and would need a good hour of prep time before that. I let myself into the kitchen.
I had left the turkey in the refrigerator overnight, but it had been frozen and hadn’t totally thawed out yet. I filled up one of the sinks with scalding hot water and dropped the unwrapped bird in. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective. I also got out my stuffing mix and started making that. Dinner was going to be a fairly traditional Thanksgiving feast, just cut down in size a bit — turkey, stuffing, gravy, fresh green beans, rolls, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie. No, I wasn’t going to make a pumpkin pie, but I had bought one at the Chopper. The rest I could do. It felt good to be working in a kitchen again. I hadn’t really done any fancy cooking since breaking up with Jeana.
Bill Swayzack came in and found me with my hands inside a turkey’s guts, pulling out the bag of gizzards. I set that on the counter and dropped the bird back into the water to finish thawing. “Wow, you really are going to town on this, aren’t you?” he exclaimed.
“You bet.”
“What do you need me to do?” he asked.
I thought for a second. “Got a corkscrew?”
Bill stared at me for a moment. “A corkscrew? What for?”
“For removing corks from wine bottles. Just see if you can find one.”
He shrugged and departed. He must have looked all over, because he didn’t come back for another ten minutes. By that time I had the turkey out of the water and draining onto some paper towels. I had a stick of butter melting in a pan on the stove, and I had opened a can of chicken broth (I don’t think they make turkey broth, or at least I’ve never run across any), all to be added to the stuffing mix.
Bill returned with a battered looking corkscrew. “I found it down behind the bar.”
“Hopefully it’s sanitary,” I commented. “The alcohol should kill any germs anyway.” I pointed at a gaudy case over on the far counter. “If you want to help, open the case, and open a bottle of wine.”
“Now?”
“Why not!? You’re the boozemaster for today.”
Bill laughed at that, and opened the case on the side. He gasped slightly when he saw what was inside. He pulled out a bottle and set it on the counter. Marty came in just then to see what was up. “Go get some glasses,” said Bill.
Marty shrugged and wandered off, returning with three matching water glasses. Okay, so we were being a bit more informal than normal for a wine tasting. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Well, I know you’re supposed to normally have a white wine with poultry, but this is the first week of the Beaujolais Nouveau, and I thought that would be a nice change. It’s also pretty cheap,” I explained.
“Beaujolais new… what?” he asked.
“Give the glasses to the boozemaster,” I answered. Bill laughed at that and went to work on opening the wine up. Meanwhile I started mixing the melted butter and some broth into the stuffing. “Every year on the third Thursday of November, that year’s Beaujolais Nouveau is released. It’s a fairly inexpensive red wine from France.”
“And you bought an entire case of it?” asked Marty incredulously.
“Well, it isn’t that expensive, and you’d be surprised how fast it will go. Besides, there are four of us, and the normal ratio for a party is one bottle of wine per guest.”