I can't remember what they looked like or even what color they were, but more than a decade ago those panties taught me something about the order of things in this world. They were the capper to a night of supreme strangeness that Hunter S. Thompson might have enjoyed. Well, maybe if you threw in some dancing headless chickens and amphetamines.
We were younger then and the world was a whole lot less politically correct. Some 15,000 of us were gathered in an average Central Texas town at an average state university that shall remain nameless (Southwest Texas State University) ostensibly to have facts crammed into our brains, but in reality to turn party into a verb and to figure out once and for all the difference between "lay" and "lie."
Alcohol was the preferred lubricant and plenty of it flowed as we gathered on a hillside across from a towering concrete dormitory to celebrate the end of our first year of college, our first year as adults. All was as it should be. The Apple argued with Ronnie--clad in his Elvis Costello-style black, plastic-framed glasses--about Farrah Fawcett's appendix scar. The San Antonio boys yodeled their favorite Rush songs. And Korn reminded us never--ever--forget that beauty is in the eyes of the beer-holder.
We didn't listen.
She was blonde in a way that always drove me crazy. Mud caked her bare feet as she waited for her turn at the keg. Freckles dotted her cheeks and the curves were in all the right places. Through a drunken haze she looked like my dream date. I imagined us spending our summer together in Austin. With her telephone number in hand, those coming months looked set. Days basking together at Barton Springs, nights spent enjoying free concerts at Auditorium Shores or drinking cold ones in the Armadillo World Headquarters beer garden.
A few weeks later she showed up at my house and proved Korn right all along. The blonde hair was dingy. I couldn't spot a single freckle. Worst of all, she walked in the door gripping a set of steak knives and tried to sell them to me.
Years passed before I saw her again (I didn't buy the knives, but I was tempted by the accompanying apple peeler). She was by then a recovering alcoholic and a leader in the campus Alcoholics Anonymous chapter. I wondered how I looked when she, no longer a beer-holder, saw me through blood-shot sobriety.
All I know is she looked damn good that first night. But you're probably wondering what all of this has to do with panties. I'm getting there; be patient.
No night of partying is complete without one thing, and I decided I had to have my slice of it. I'm talking about pizza, of course. Murray and I headed for his cell in that huge concrete dormitory on the hill. I pushed away his roommate's Earth, Wind and Fire records, sat down on the edge of the bed, and called Domino's for the pie. Pepperoni and mushroom, if memory serves.
My eyes wandered across the room, past Murray's Devo poster and a pile of dirty Izods. There, tacked to the wall, were panties. I swear they were pink, but you've already seen how twisted my memory of this night is. I do know that scrawled across the panties was a name and a telephone number.
Panty raids and food fights may be considered a '60s, Animal House thing, streaking strictly 1973, but at SWT all survive as if in a time warp. I was back recently as a graduate student and teacher and heard a first-hand report that the fabled panty raid lives.
For the uninitiated, here's how a panty raid works: A hormone-intoxicated mob of 18- and 19-year-olds rushes at the female-only dorms, slobbering and screaming "THROW US YOUR PANTIES!" The wide-eyed freshmen women dutifully autograph their raggedest--and often rankest-- panties and send them sailing out the window toward the hungry horde below. The raiders howl at the moon and move in a pack toward a new dorm and fresh victims. Ah, the mating rituals of the adolescent human beast.
A trophy from one such raid glistened on Murray's wall and, incredibly, no one in the three months since its capture had bothered to call the number inscribed on it. At just after 2 a.m. the last weekend before finals, that situation was rectified by yours truly. Par for that night, I didn't remember a thing the next day when a decidedly female telephone caller informed me that I had disturbed her slumber. She said I had rattled off my dorm room phone number and dared her to call me.
Slowly, bits and pieces came back to me as we talked. Her friends grabbed the receiver and talked to my friends. A meeting was arranged that afternoon. Korn, always Mr. Tact, warned, "If you're ugly, we're turning around and getting the hell out of there." Our new co-ed buddies countered with threats of tear gas. All the bravado proved unwarranted as both sides passed muster.
They came over to our dorm en masse that night. Korn somehow talked a redhead into typing his term paper. I think we got a keg. Some of us paired off, some didn't. A new blonde complained of the smell of leaking gasoline as she and I took a spin in my ancient pickup. Korn made the redhead cry.
The semester ended and I never saw any of those women again. Except one, that is. She and the Apple married. His bachelor party, which featured only beers named for animals (Leopard, Elephant, Moosehead, etc.) lasted until dawn and stretched the endurance of the young and immortal.
I called the Apple recently and I could hear his two children in the background anxiously waiting for him to play. I guess it's for them that I write this down. So they'll know that there is sometimes a purpose to even the most ridiculous days of our lives. That the actions we take do occasionally matter in the grand scheme of things. That redheads cry. That gas leaks are dangerous. That we all do eventually grow up. That beauty is in the eye of both the beer-holder and the beholder. That your Dad is a lucky man. And, most important, that there is a reason your Mom keeps telling you to wear clean underwear.
This free-lance essay originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman. Copyright is retained by the author. Written permission is required before reprinting in whole or part. Don't do it!