"That Time I Found An Old Woman's Porn Stash"  

Welcome to the first installment of a new segment to my blog chronicling some recollections of my college years of the mid/late 90's. This first recollection takes us back to my second senior year in college.



I was getting drunk at "Friday's" on a Tuesday. My roommates and I needed to throw a few back, having just been verbally beaten by the previous occupant of the house that we'd just moved to. We'd only lived there five days and we'd already had a run-in with the management, but I'll get to all that in a bit.

Let's start with my living arrangements. For two years I lived in a fraternity house which made it very difficult for me to concentrate on my studies. You see, I have a very short attention span and I often get distracted by shiny objects, like kegs. So I decided to look for a new house with three scholastically minded friends of mine.

We found a great place right down the street from the fraternity house, it was close to campus and totally secluded. When I say secluded, I mean the house was located behind another house. I'm not kidding, the address was 33 1/2. The only way to get to it (much less see it) was to go down the driveway of the house in front and then cut across a backyard littered with kids toys.

The house was a carriage house back in the olden days before MTV. There were all these rusty iron rings in the outside wall for the original owners to tie-up their horses.



This place was hidden like the bat cave. This was both good and bad, because we were now able to hide from the party people from our old house, but if we wanted any sort of food delivered it was a major pain in the ass.

This was a typical conversation with the local pizza delivery guy:

Me:
Ok. My address is 33 and a half, Bellevue Avenue.

Pizza Guy:
Did you say "and a half"?

Me:
Yeah, it's actually a carriage house that's behind another house.

Pizza Guy:
A what?

Me:
It's a house behind a house. You just need to go to 33 Bellevue, then walk down the driveway and it's the half a house in the back.

Pizza Guy:
(Silence)

Me:
How about you call me when you get here and I'll just come out and meet you in the driveway.

Pizza Guy:
Cool, see you in 20.



So when we moved in, the house was completely bare, except for the master bedroom downstairs. The landlord told us that her mother was living in there, but now she's on vacation and if we would clean out her room, she would give us a discount on rent that month. She instructed us to just pile it all in the living room and she would have her husband stop by later in the week to cart it all away.

We took "vacation" as a code word for dead, so we started moving everything into the living room.

After moving the mattress and dresser we went to work on the bedroom closet, where we unearthed quite an interesting find — a shoebox containing a pellet gun and a 1980's Playgirl magazine with Robert Redford on the cover.


Apparently the little old lady liked her private times
rough & Redford.


So a few days passed and we were all just sitting around watching TV, when we hear a key turn in the lock and an old woman walks in.

Us:
Um...Can I help you?

Old Woman:
Who the f@*k are you kids!?

Us:
What? We live here, who are you?

Old Woman:
I f@*king live here!

Us:
What? No we rented the place on Thursday.

Old Woman:
Well you must have talked to my daughter, I was out of town and she didn't tell me she was renting my house out to kids! I told her no kids! No kids! I don't want any wild parties in my house!

Us:
Well we don't want parties either, that's why we moved here. To study.
(I'm not sure how we kept a straight face after saying that)

Old Woman:
To study huh? What are you freshman, how old are you boys?
That one looks like he's 12.
(gesturing to my friend Jay, who really did look 12)

All Of Us:
23, 23, 22, 21. Actually two of us are grad students and the other two are juniors.

Old Woman:
Grad students huh? Well you looked younger. I guess you're ok.
So what did you boys do with my pellet gun, did you steal it?

So this was our introduction to the previous tenant of 33 1/2 Bellevue. We later discovered that this crazy old woman had been using the place as a "crash pad," only sleeping in the house a couple times a month. Her daughter decided to rent the place out, but never informed her mother that it was rented.

We did return the pellet gun to her, but I think she was too embarrassed to ask about the Playgirl magazine. So what happened to that magazine? Well that's a story I'll have to save for my next post:
"That Time It Wasn't What It Looked Like."

Give a squirrel a nut :)