Adventures in Trainrobbing: $1,000 fines and you

If there's a fair argument out there against weed, you don't exactly have the most sound mind to make decisions.  I mean I'd go to Taco Bell and not know what I wanted to order so I'd panic when I was forced to make a decision.  2 1/2 lb burritos and 4 tacos later, I'd be like damn, that was more than I needed.  Especially when you're broke and trying to limit how much money you're spending, being high can be detrimental to the wallet.  I at times got my bank accounts in the negatives, but eh, shit happens in college.  Sometimes very stupid shit happens in college.

My roommate and I had polar opposite sides of our dorm room.  On his side he had all his music gadgets, crazy posters and artwork, and on my side I had a George Foreman grill and Steelers paraphenilia.  For awhile though we were getting all in to our room looking like a basement.  We had a black light and weird drawings on the wall.  A couple girls were idiots and thought it would be artsy to right everyone's names on the wall.  That got gay quickly, not to mention down the road we had to get rid of that shit if we planned on getting a refund of our initial security deposit.  Not the point though.  Point is we even nicknamed our room "The Basement".  Mark and I both had tv's, which we constantly sychronized.  People would always come and watch shit in our room.  It was definitely the hang out room.  Especially if those people also came to smoke...Scavengers.

Anyway in the process of creating this basement-like room, my roommate started to mentioning the effect of having like a tank or aquarium in the middle of the room.  Initially, I was skeptical because I knew it would look cool, but getting pets of any kind would cost money, which I'd rather spend Red Stripe and Wendy's Baconators.  But then my roommate would smoke me out and say lets go check out the pet store.  And then we'd venture out to the bus stop.  Note: before Tempe I'd never rode on a public bus, and it was not exactly the most becoming experience when being high.  Bus stops in Tempe are great places to meet heroin heros with a single bandage around their arm, and very colorful homeless people.  Perhaps I will tell a tale of my homeless encounters in Tempe in a later episode.

But back to the pet store.  We decided to look at snakes, lizards, and fish.  Snakes and lizards were expensive as fuck, which I would constantly remind Mark.  We asked the people working there what kind of stuff we would have to buy to take care of a snake.  It was a pretty big list, which helped my cause of trying not to make this purchase happen.  I mean the tank, a feeding box, heating lamp and bulb, mice, and the snake.  And everytime we went shopping for anything (food, movies, snakes) we'd be in the store for over an hour.  Luckily though, we were there around closing time so we had to make a quick decision.  We decided to wait and check out Craigslist.  Well damn Craigslist and its effectiveness.  Only a couple days later Mark managed to find a really good deal on a snake, tank, etc. combo.  It sounded pretty reasonable, so we split the cost.

It was a yellow cornsnake, which came with the name Nova.  We thought that name was kinda for the gays, so we'd rename it later.  I was in class the day the snake was delivered by what Mark described to me as "a woman with three teeth, who had over 50 snakes, always had the heat on at her house to accompany the snakes, and smelled like someone shat in a coffin and opened it 20 years later".  Graphic I know.  I was actually a little psyched at this point and even told a few people in my class.  When I got home and checked out the snake it was actually kinda cool.  So then we had to come up the right name.

Somewhere along the way we started listening a lot to the 60's and 70's pop star Donovan.  You may know him from such songs as "Hurdy Gurdy Man" and "Mellow Yellow".  I guess we were just like "he's high, we're high, this works".  Then it got real trippy to us when we realized within the name Donovan is "Nova".  Little things like that when you're high just blow your mind, and you know it's fate.  We quickly realized though that not everyone liked the snake as much.  A lot of the European kids liked it, but most girls wouldn't even hold it.  ASU girls afraid of a snake with no teeth?  Imagine that.  These damn yentas would be our downfall.

It really didn't take long before we started realizing we were incapable of taking care of a pet.  We barely had the motivation or money to go get mice for the snake, and it really just became more of something that took up space in our room.  It made our room smell pretty bad and people would stop coming to hangout.  Then one day we got especially careless and accidentally left the top of the tank open.  When we got back to the room we noticed the friggin thing had peaced.  It had gotten out before, but we had always been able to find it right away.  Well this time it had fuckin vanished into thin air.  We looked all over the room and that bastard was nowhere to be found.  We tried to only tell a few people so that everyone wouldn't know how stupid we were.  But of course word got around anyway.

We had a couple high theories about the snake getting into the vents or trash and somehow just peacin from our room.  Unlikely, but everything must have an explanation.  Maybe some PETA homo broke into our room and snatched it.  Then one morning our dorm room had an unexpected to visitor.  Again I was in class, but meanwhile one of the head groundskeepers at the dorm went to our room.  From what I heard he unlocked the door and when Mark got up he asked him "where is the snake?".  Mark denied having any snake, but the guy looked past him and saw the tank.  Mark told me he tried to use the excuse "I was just holding it for a friend for the day".  The guy believed that as much as white people believe a certain...well for legal purposes I'll call them Nojay Nimpson...didn't kill his wife.  So the guy tells Mark that he is gonna be fined for keeping a snake in the room.  The price tag on this fine...$1,000.  Fuck our lives.  (Note: pic is of actual $1,000 fine with actual butcher knife above it).

Initially, the fine was only on Mark's name, but I wasn't gonna be dick about it.  We agreed to split the fine, which immediately depressed us to no end.  It was a financial burden neither of us could afford on our own.  But past of the stress of us being completely broke, was also a mystery of a missing snake, and a rat who had sold us out to the groundskeepers.  A couple days past and then low and behold we found the fuckin thing. Donovan somehow managed to completely entangle itself around Mark's computer chords and had just been chillin there. We were fuckin pissed and realized it was time to get rid of the thing.  We ended up going back on Craigslist and found some weird kid to buy it.  Mark was convinced that the kid would end up eating Donovan.  We sold it for like half the price of what we bought it at, but at least it was gone.  Now just to find out who had cost us this outrageous fine.

We had a few immediate candidates.  The two girls in the room next to us were both deathly afraid of the snake, and were both complete bitches.  One annoying blonde with a sharp nose, skinny saggy boobs, acted like her vag didn't stink, and was accused of peeing on her suitemate's clothes.  Bitch #2, heavy set and big-nosed, acted like she was too good for living in the crappy dorm and would freak out on people.  There were a couple other people we thought could have had a hand in it, but we figured it was between the two yentas.  There was also a girl at the end of the hall who had a retarded ferret that always was running around all over the fuckin place.  That bitch's room smelled God awful, yet she never got busted. 

One of the RA's for my dorm was actually in one of my classes so I decided to have a conversation with her.  I asked about if someone were to get busted with an animal if there was a way out of it.  She said no even if some just had a cat or dog in a room for a few minutes because if anyone has allergies or some shit.  So I said what about a snake?  Once I said that she was like "that was you?".  Apparently it was a big deal around the dorm that someone had past along a rumor that there was a snake on the loose at the dorm.  She pretty much told us we were fucked and there was nothing we could do.  She did tell me one thing, "you guys gotta understand that not everyone there liked the snake".  Basically insuating there was one person that had brought it to their attention.  Unfortunately, we never found the person, but if I found him or her I'd give them a piece of my mind and/or penis.