Cheech and Chong

So, Dr. Barry keeps me up on developments at our common alma mater, since it also happens to be his current employer.  He shared an email from a fellow with a VERY Asian name, and I asked what the fellow's nickname was.

We always used to get a kick out of the fact that our fellow classmates would have long, foreign names, like Indian fellows named Havnagoodtime Vishnuhere, but they'd say "Call me Skip."  So he knew right away.

And then, my mind went back in time to the year before I met Barry, when I first moved into a now mythical place called Building 22, long since demolished to make room for a parking lot.

In late 1979 I got word from the Honors Director Barbara Clark that Building 22 had an opening.  It was in the "Apartment Area," a gathering of WW II era three story buildings, which contained 2 bedroom/one bathroom units, each building a specialized dorm.  The football team had their own, as did the swimmers, and Building 22 was the Honors Dorm.  It was superior accommodations, since the "Towers" where I lived was a high rise where 44 guys were packed into cracker box sized rooms, with a communal bathroom.

It was fine to live there, and my roommate from Pakistan taught this Long Island Jew a LOT about a culture entirely foreign to me, but Ahmjed was going to transfer, anyway, to Auburn and their Aerospace Engineering Program, and the opportunity to move to Honors was a great one.  I took it.

Well, when I told my mentor Joe, the President of the Honors Association that I was going to Apartment Z, he laughed.  My roommies were both named Mark, therefore the Marks Brothers, and they were the Cheech and Chong of the Building.

And so they were.  One Mark, from Ohio, was pre med. The other, from Indiana, was pre vet.  They were on full academic scholarship, but paid the balance of their expenses by selling weed.  And they smoked PRODIGIOUS amounts of it, to comical effect.

Indiana Mark looked like Sean Penn's character Jeff Spicoli, before Jeff Spicoli.  Ohio Mark was more clean cut -- he ended up with a girlfriend from Colombia, related to one of his dealers.

These guys would listen to Pink Floyd's "The Wall" over and over -- I mean like 10 times per day.  And they had a side kick -- Carl the Swimmer -- a tall blonde guy from Minnesota who somehow kept his athletic scholarship while still smoking huge amounts of weed.

Carl had a roommate, also a swimmer, and he despised him.  I assumed the guy was a true jock, who resented having such a druggie roommie and teammate.  The guy had a comical Greek name, like Nick Papadopolis, or something, and one recurring theme among Carl and the Marks Bros was making fun of the roommie.

They would smoke, with "The Wall" playing, and come up with increasingly absurd version of the hated roommie's name.  I seem to remember Ohio Mark saying "So Carl, how's your asshole roommie Dick ZinVanThropolis doing today?"  Then the three would keel over in uncontrollable laughter.  I'd look on like an Anthropologist observing a primitive tribe.

Later in the Spring, my LI girlfriend Alison came to visit.  We were asleep on night, around 2 am, and there was a knock on the door (I had my own room -- the fellow assigned to me was kicked out for dropping his Honors course).  At the door was Ohio Mark, smiling but stoned.  I asked him what the hell he wanted.  He smiled and pointed outside.  "Dude!  It's been raining all night.  There's a filed in Hialeah where the magic mushrooms grow. We NEED your car to get there to harvest them!"  I told him he was too wasted to drive, and went to close the door.  He put his foot in the way. "I'm afraid I MUST insist, Dave.  I will stand here and disturb you and your lady friend until you comply.  These shrooms are really magic."

I gave over the keys and went back to sleep.  Later that am, the Marks Bros sat at the formica dining table, with full buckets.  My car looked like they had entered it into a mud race.  They DID have it washed.

I lost touch with the Marks Bros, but in the late 90s, one surfaced.  Barry's father was in the hospital in Weston, and the radiologist doing the procedure was Ohio Mark.  Barry knew all about him, and made the connection -- I was their common roommie, a year apart.  "Yeah -- I heard Dave was doing great as a lawyer."  Barry's Dad Sy joked with Barry that he had found a great guy to treat him -- "that stoner guy from UM."

I reached out to Ohio Mark, but he never returned my calls.  I guess, as a big shot doc now, he preferred to keep guys who knew his past out of the picture.

But I savor the memories.  And it's funny how a small reference can bring the mind back, to a time over three decades past.

Rock on, Marks Bros.