An Even Bigger Butterfly, Part 7.
Wendy was, frankly, a gibbering lunatic. She didn't mind displaying this fact in public, either. Chances are, if you haven't met someone like her, you won't because you're in solitary confinement. Otherwise? I recommend garlic, crosses, silver, fresh-hewn ash stakes, and, if all that fails, surrounding yourself with pretty girls and boys to distract the beast. She wasn't terribly picky in her distractions. A mop of shiny black hair with a veritable graveyard of Manic Panic attempts hiding at the scalp level. Two spindly legs, invariably in a black mini that looked like it was stolen from Roseanne Barr. Big, brown pleading eyes that said, "Shackle me! Confine me before the moon rises again!"
Yes, Wendy was Trouble for some. Thankfully, I was already aswoon over my lethal friend from downtown...at least for a little bit longer. That train was headed for a curve, and doing 90.

Teri was a really pretty girl, light eyes (I never got close enough to verify their color, though not for lack of fumbling effort), glasses, brown hair, and if memory serves, she was wearing a polo shirt that night. Teri was in a couple classes with me (probably the Honors College, before I dropped out), sang in the college choir with me, and never seemed to remember my name from one meeting to the next. I had a damn-near-black fern on my head, making me appear seven feet tall. I wore some of the worst-coordinated outfits since Paul Benedict on The Jeffersons (and somewhat proudly, as it disproved the urban legend of my homosexuality). Didn't matter. Every time I saw Teri, I had to remind her who I was. This did nothing to cool my ardor; for some reason, I thought she was one of the hottest women at any party. As I write this, I don't know why. All I remember is her being really, really attractive...even when there was considerable competition.

Competition was running hot that night, too; my friend Gina had stopped in with her recently-extradited-to-CT friend Dawn. Dawn was this post-modern sensible chick with feathered hair, eyes you could swim in, and a laugh that started somewhere near her duodenum. Needless to say, the Estroscope was working overtime.

My Guthrie-Sense was so distracted that when the cops showed up, I was completely surprised. That was a first.

An Even Bigger Butterfly, Part 6.
If you're a bassist, then you know a drummer. If you don't, you should either find a drummer or take up something less strenuous and demeaning...perhaps being a lot lizard, alligator proctologist, or bunk punk at the nearest SuperMax facility.

My Drummer (when it's the one and only, you capitalize) was/is/will always be Matt. He's been my all-too-willing accomplice, musical and otherwise, for about 16+ years. As such, we have a history, a bond, and enough blackmail material to have the other guy put down like a rabid dog.
Matt's role was usually that of a facilitator; he made things happen, usually from out of left field, and with him in place, as he was that night, life was never boring.

Matt pulled up in his styling K-car (this was 1991, after all) and immediately started piling gear into the Pit. While it may have looked like a plumbing experiment gone horribly wrong, any trained eye would have identified it as an overpriced drum kit of considerable proportions.
Matt assured me, between trips to and fro, that there were even more girls coming, which confirmed Jacques' theory. The only problem, and he freely admits this, was his choice of wheelmen.

Dio Phil is a terrible, terrible driver. I'm pretty sure he could hit a parked car WITH a parked car, in fact. He's a good cat, even though he keeps trying to kill me (indirectly, of course!)
Exhibit A in my case against him is the fact that he was driving three girls from Southern to my house on that night.

Phil had it down to a science: he would blast past the end of my street at furious speeds, go about a mile, then call my house from a payphone. As his failure mounted, his despair started to get the better of him. If memory serves, he eventually just waited for us to pick up, then started mewling like a newborn.

Heeding Phil's third frenzied plea (somewhat), we took turns walking to the corner of my street and watching him drive by. After the 11th pass, I stepped out into Ocean Ave. and flagged him down.
There is only so much suffering I can stand to watch, although I find that threshold growing daily.

The girls, thankful to their respective deities, were more than happy to leave the Philmobile. One was Wendy, a known problem child with barely enough mental stability to nurture complete sentences, much less sustained conversations; the second was Teri, who possessed an amazing brain...but forgot who I was between meetings, even if I had hit on her (which might say worse things about my technique than I'd previously realized); the last one was M., and she's the one you should be watching.

An Even Bigger Butterfly, Part 5.
There is a thin gray line, like some kind of mental grout, between our functional mind and our id...mine had been chipped away by a really boring adolescence. As such, I attacked parties the same way the Allies rolled on France. There was no tomorrow, no leaving early without a new friend, no work to do...there was only that night, and those people.

By 6pm, the bottles were lined up (by class of liquor) along the kitchen counter, the snacks were on the kitchen table, the living room looked like higher primates lived there, and my buddy Jacques was chain-smoking Camels on the front porch.

Jacques is from a very, very affluent community to the south of mine, the kind that people who aren't from Connecticut are talking about when they use "Connecticut" in a sentence. He provides a strangely strangled mirror image of me, even now. He's smart but he did something with it, he's a good guy who never really quit being a Boy Scout, and he's a generally class-ignorant cat who comes from money.

I stepped out for a Newport (this was during my Keith Richards Smoking Phase, when I spent as many waking moments as possible with a cigarette in my hand) and answered Jacques' unspoken question.
"Yes, I'm sure there'll be girls. Wendy's going to crash the party, and you know she had to bum a ride from somebody."
Jacques nodded, smiled, and took a long puff.
"That girl's crazy."
I took a long drag and gave him my I Know Stuff About Stuff Look (patent pending.)
"Then maybe her friends will be really interesting."
Being a fairly unintuitive soul, I had no idea exactly how right I was.

An Even Bigger Butterfly, Part 4 or so.
After drowning my considerable sorrows in caffeine, I hit the streets of my beloved Elm City. In no time, I had uncovered an opium den, a white-slavery ring, and several varieties of Papist pedophiles.
Then I left Yale, and made my way to three liquor stores. Having filled the Oldsmobeast with alcohol (a fairly commonplace sight in those days), I sped home to prepare The Pit for company.
I will wax nostalgic, and you will indulge me. The Pit was my bedroom from 1987-1994. A converted basement rec room, it was part speakeasy, part command center, part swingers' club, part fashion disaster, part rehearsal space, part ready room, part pub, and all mine. I loved it, and if such things were possible, it loved me right back.
The 25x15 foot space was adorned in movie, rock, or comic book posters, and an entire wall was dedicated to Playmates (this was mainly for my friends, in all honesty; I preferred the notion of live girls.) My pride and joy was a 6x4 poster of Jimi Hendrix. (For any of you who follow such things, that means the poster was bigger than Jimi himself.) There was a fully functional wet bar, TV, VCR, stereo, discrete escape hatch from the adjacent back room, and a waterbed the size of a Buick.
In short, it was Heaven, and soon there would come a host of inebriated angels, all singing its praises.