The summer of 1998 was one of the most memorable summers I have ever experienced.  My friends and I had just graduated from high school, and were in that sweet blissful period where we had no worries in the world.  We had already received our acceptance letters from various universities, and were well aware that we were going to soon have to transition from our well-worn roles as "obnoxious teenage miscreant assholes" to the new and unfamiliar territory of being "obnoxious college kids that are also miscreant assholes".  But for that three month period between May and September, there was nothing between us and the pursuit of stuff that was awesome except, of course, for our own apathy.

It was during this summer that my good friend Scott's parents decided to spend the months of June, July and August living in a small cabin in the pristine mountains of North Carolina.  This was a family tradition dating back as far as Scott could remember;  when summer rolled around, he and his family passed the time enjoying peaceful solace in the quiet wilderness miles away from the daily bustle of civilization.

However, this summer would be different.  As Scott was now eighteen he was no longer beholden to his parents, and thusly decided that he would much prefer to spend his last summer before college hanging out with his old high school friends, celebrating the times they had and commiserating about what the future might hold for them.  His parents relented.  They turned over the keys to their home to their son, entrusting him to treat their house with the same love and respect they had shown for it.  What followed was the first of many summers we spent enjoying the non-stop three-month-long binge-drinking party that (in honor of Scott's last name) would forever be known to the annals of history as Baur-Rama, for truly all things of this magnitude must possess a suffix like -Rama.

A typical Monday afternoon at Baur-Rama.

The Event

Scott's house, for lack of a better term, was fucking huge.  He had two floors, a giant back yard, a patio, and pretty much all the amenities you would ever want.  Considering that we were all getting our first taste of independence, this was pretty much the awesomest thing ever.  It was like having an entire mansion to ourselves to do whatever we wanted with, provided that we all attended "clean-up day" at the end of August and got everything back the way it was supposed to be before his folks returned and realized how grievously he had trashed the joint.

There are many fascinating tales that came out of Baur-Ramas '98 through 2K2, and I will eventually get around to sharing them all with you.  For now, I want to give you a basic feel of the atmosphere at this event, which generally revolved around two major themes:  booze and music.  After that, I will tell the tale of The Draft - a misguided construction project from 1998 that continued to get weirder as time progressed.

But first, a special treat:

Baur-Rama Interactive Feature #1

This picture shows how the kitchen table looked on a daily basis.  You'll notice in the first picture that it can be even more disastrous than this, since generally we would have to clean it off if we wanted a good surface on which to play Quarters or poker or whatever.  Study this photo closely:

Can you find the following items?

1. A boom box blasting "Led Zeppelin II"
2. A well-worn piece of notebook paper with "The 100 Most Badass Movie Characters Ever" scrawled on it in pencil followed by a heavily-edited list of one hundred and one names.
3. Beer
4. RC Cola
5. Wild Turkey liquor
6. A BB pistol (for shooting sleeping drunks)
7. A paintball gun with a CO₂ canister but no paintballs (for blasting air in peoples' faces and scaring the neighbors)
8. At least two pornographic magazines
9. A screwdriver (the drink, not the tool)
10. Aunt Jemima
11. At least two packs of cigarettes
12. A ziploc bag with an indeterminate, potentially-contraband leafy residue inside
13. A back massager
14. A bandana for covering your face and scaring the neighbors
15. At least three different types of snack food

The Booze

I would be lying to you if I didn't say that we were drunk for about three months straight.  I suppose it's understandable; We didn't have to drive anywhere, we didn't have any other place that we wanted to be, most of us were unemployed, and we were all welcome to sleep on Scott's many couches pretty much whenever we wanted, so there really wasn't any reason not to get completely trashed.  We would usually try to find new and creative ways to do it, such as Power Hours or the Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie Drinking Game, or extended games of Quarters or "Up the River Down the River", but generally we just ended up sitting around playing four-player Mario Kart and drinking ourselves into catatonic stupors before watching fifteen straight hours of gangster films like "Goodfellas" and "Scarface".  Honestly, the entire Baur-Rama experience (all five years of it) has sort of faded into one giant blurry anomaly in the deepest recesses of my memory, with one year virtually indistinguishable from the next.  I'm sure that all of my craziest experiences are the ones I can't remember, and that is truly the sign of a great party.

One thing I do remember is that we would all get totally trashed and play poker, and I don't mean that pussy Texas Hold-'Em crap you see on those poker TV shows nowadays;  I mean the REAL shit - five card draw, deuces wild.  You know, the way poker is supposed to played.  Except that we didn't play it the way it was supposed to be played.  Shit, we didn't even play it for money.  Here's how it worked:  First, we would divide all the poker chips evenly up amongst everyone who was playing.  The main goal was to collect all the chips (duh), but the only way to win the game was to cheat your ass off.  That was sort of the whole point of it... EVERYBODY fucking cheated ALL the time.  In fact, in any given hand at least one person was cheating by either stacking the deck, holding extra cards in their pockets so they could use them later, or even passing good cards to other people under the table and then immediately folding.  The fact that we were all totally drunk off our asses made it so much easier to cheat, but there was a catch.  If you got caught cheating, then everybody at the table got to punch you in the arm as hard as they possibly could.  Some guys would even get a running start for extra power.  However, if you accused somebody of cheating and then you couldn't prove it then everybody got to punch YOU in the arm as hard as they could.  Man that was a lot of fun.  You'd think the natural instinct would be not to cheat, but the fact that you knew everybody else was doing it would push you to do things you knew you shouldn't.  Plus, there was always that driving desire not to lose, which is a pretty unifying factor amongst all drunken men.

There was another time that we got our hands on the FBI's official dossier on outlaw biker gangs.  We browsed through it, and learned that a lot of biker gangs have an initiation rite where a candidate has to drink something like twenty-four beers in eight hours and then they get like a special merit badge or tattoo or something.  I don't remember the details of it... I just remember waking up the next morning face down on the back patio clutching a Roman Candle and then groggily looking over and seeing two other guys sprawled out in various parts of the yard.  It looked like the fucking Jonestown Massacre out there.

Baur-Rama Interactive Feature #2

Check out the iDrink.com recipe for the Baur-Rama, which surprisingly has a rating of 90% according to the 30 or so responses it's received since Mike posted it in 1998.  The Baur-Rama, which consists of Rum and orange Pop-Ice, was originally born out of a horribly failed attempt to make Jell-O shots.  You see, one day we attempted to make Jell-O shots, not realizing that if your mixture is like 90% vodka and 10% water it will NEVER completely freeze into Jell-O.  So as we were never ones to waste liquor we spent an entire week using Dixie cups to scoop shots of strawberry-flavored vodka-water out of an aluminium baking pan.  The Immortal Mike Bustillo eventually came up with the idea to use Pop-Ice, which was already frozen, so that you could get more booze for your buck and still have a semi-frozen finished product.  The Baur-Rama grew to become one of the most-consumed mixed drinks at the event.  For your next fun interactive feature, make Baur-Ramas and get wasted.

Please note that you can also make Baur-Ramas with blue pop-ice as long as you forego the orange juice portion of the recipe.  The technical term for this drink is "The Blue-Stillo", after the last name of it's diabolical creator.

The Music

In the summer of 1996, I used the surplus of money I hadn't spent on my trip to Germany on a new drum set.  Scott already had a guitar, and Mike was an expert at the piano/keyboard, so it only made sense for us to put together a band.  We got together and started playing music towards the end of that summer, using the extra bedroom in my house as our sound stage.  The Band Room was pretty sweet since I had a one of those three-directional ceiling lights and we had put three different colors (red, blue and purple) in the sockets, which left us with a different colored spotlight for each member of the band.  Plus we had one of those barricades with the flashing yellow lights on it, which we had stolen from a nearby construction site, as well as a collection of crazy posters and various street signs we had stolen out of my neighborhood.  Later we moved the entire set-up to Baur-Rama, our friend Brenner joined up to play bass and we had a fully-functional band.

We named the band Bad Mojo, which we later learned was also the name of a computer game about cockroaches.  Looking back on it, "Bad Mojo" is also a good summary of our band's success with women in our high school years - I once had a girl tell me she'd go out with me only to call my house an hour later to tell me she'd changed her mind.  One month later a different girl told me she couldn't go to prom with me because she "couldn't find the right shoes" - but that's a tale for another day.

Bad Mojo was your typical crappy garage band.  We played some original songs and a ton of classic rock covers, including stuff from Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, The Who, Pink Floyd, and The Rolling Stones.  We didn't necessarily play them well, but we would play the FUCK out of them.  Generally the strategy was one of "if it doesn't sound right, just play it louder", which might not be a recipe for a multi-platinum recording contract, but it was fun as hell.  Plus the fact that there was nobody else in the entire house made it so that we didn't have to worry about bothering anybody with our loud music.  Man, I had a blast playing in that band.

I was a drummer, and my strategy with the drums was to buy as much gear as I possibly could to make my set as fucking huge as possible.  My limited income (I was working as a karate instructor for $4.25 an hour) meant that I always bought the cheapest shit available, which essentially left me with an impossibly massive drum set made up of the lowest-quality hardware around.  My hi-hats sounded like metal garbage can lids being clanged together and I don't think I ever changed the heads on my tom drums in the seven years I owned the kit, but daaaamn if you didn't know shit about drums you would think I had the fucking sweetest set in the world because it was thirteen pieces and FUCKING HUGE.

Our set-up, circa Baur-Rama '99.
We had taken all the living room furniture and stuffed it into a closet somewhere. 

So while I was typing this all up I remembered that I still had some old-school Bad Mojo graphics from when I used to run a website for the band back in like 1997 or something.  God, that site was horrible.  It was hosted through my fucking AOL account and was titled something retarded like "XAmazingBenX's Personal Web Page of DOOM!" and had like pictures of druid priests fighting dragons, WAV file sound clips from the Star Wars movies, links to MIDIs of all the songs our band covered and a hit counter that never exceeded 200.  So here you go, for the first time in a decade, the re-release of the official Bad Mojo wallpaper tile, as well as a totally sweet animated GIF (both of which were made by Bustillo;  he also made a MIDI of our original song "Into the Fire", but I can't seem to find that anywhere):

Baur-Rama Interactive Feature #2

Me, Mike, Scott and Brenner are all almost completely deaf now and I attribute it to the fact that we played as loud as possible at all times and pointed all our amps inward so that they faced the rest of the band.  Now you can join the same club!  Simply download these three Bad Mojo classics, burn them onto a CD, stick it into your stereo and play it at the highest volume you can while aiming the speakers directly at your head and sitting as close to them as you possibly can.  This is the only way to experience what it was like to be in the band, since listening to these tunes at a reasonable volume just exposes us for the musical hacks that we were, and doesn't give you any feel at all for what it was like to be rocking so hard that your ears would ring for three days straight and maybe even bleed a little bit.  Honestly.  Nine times out of ten I couldn't hear anything except the horrible crashing of my own low-quality cymbals, but that's what happens when you ROCK!!!!

The Immigrant Song  (MP3, 3.0MB)

Louie Louie  (MP3, 2.1MB)

Into the Fire  (MP3, 3.9MB)

Mike wailing on the keyboard.
All of his solos were completely improved off the top of his head.

The Draft

Sure, we had fun at Baur-Rama, but the construction of The Draft was serious fucking business.  You see, Scott's back yard bordered on a very large lake that emptied out into the Intercoastal Waterway.  Scott had a swimming pool and a patio, but we felt that he needed a dock.  His neighbors all had docks and/or boats, but still his back yard lie naked and dock-less, so we set out during Baur-Rama '98 to rectify this grave injustice.  But whatever could we build a dock from?  After a beer run to his local Publix, the answer to our query became perfectly obvious:

Shipping palettes.

We came up with the brilliant idea that we could drive around to various Publixes (Publices?) throughout South Florida and steal shipping palettes out of their dumpsters, then nail them all together and we'd have a fully serviceable dock.  Well, when we got the first palette home we noticed that it was not nearly as buoyant as we would have hoped.  Perhaps we, in our drunken states, failed to realize that palettes have lots of holes in them.  We quickly found a solution for this as well however - we would buy a shitload of those floating pool noodles for like $1 a piece and stuff them inside the palettes.  We went out and got about five noodles, stuffed them in the palette we had, threw it in Scott's swimming pool, and to our shock it actually held Scott's body weight.  A plan was formed.

For the next two months we continued our half-assed search for palettes, nails and hammers.  Eventually, we managed to find the manual dexterity necessary to haphazardly nail together six palettes and stuff them with enough fun noodles that they would float in Scott's pool.  It was then time to install the dock.

Scott and Mike N. hard at work on The Draft.
The Draft is that thing on the left.
The silver things are beer cans.

Mere seconds after putting the dock out into the lake, we realized we had no means with which to fasten the dock to Scott's yard.  It drifted away.

We decided that maybe it wasn't a dock, but rather that it was a dock/raft.  A Draft, if you will.  We recovered the Draft and attempted to sail into the lake on it.  It sank under all of our weight.  We recovered it, and realized that only one person could safely stand on it, and even then they were standing in ankle-deep water.

We decided it was time to retire the Draft.  We went to the Home Depot and bought a long length of chain and a cinderblock.  Our plan was to swim out to the middle of the lake (which was actually inhabited by at least two different alligators), sink the cinderblock, and leave the raft floating in the middle of the lake as a beacon to passing boats, sort of like a retarded buoy or a piece of shipwreck flotsam.

With supplies in hand we set out at midnight one evening, completely blitzed out of our brains and ready to sink this bastard.  Now when you are drunk and swimming in the middle of the night in a lake which you know has alligators in it, it's very easy to freak yourself out.  When your friend Mike N. is screaming the "Hail Mary" at the top of his lungs, it's that much easier.

So here we were - four idiots dog paddling and pushing this giant shoddily-constructed palette-and-pool-noodle monstrosity out into the middle of a lake in residential suburbia screaming Catholic prayers and toting a sturdy chain and a cinderblock, fearful of being attacked by a gator at any moment.  If that sounds fucking ridiculous, I'm sure that it was.  We eventually managed to set that bitch in the middle of the lake, where it rested for over a week.

Until one morning, when we all awoke to find the draft (and the cinderblock it was attached to) lying in the middle of Scott's back yard.  We never learned how it got there, who put it there or why... needless to say we simply bashed the thing into pieces with a hammer and threw it back into the Publix dumpster from whence it came.

Baur-Rama Interactive Feature #3

Build your own Draft using the guidelines above.  Email me pictures and I'll post them on the wesbite!

Well sadly our time here must come to an end, as I am out of stories at the moment and my fingers are starting to get sore from all the damn typing I'm doing.  Rest assured that in the months and years to come I will have many other sordid tales from Baur-Rama, including the time we all got arrested and the time that Scott got into a barroom brawl with a complete stranger.  Hopefully in the meantime this will provide you with a good background of where I'm coming from when I talk about Baur-Rama, and will give me a good informative page to link back to so I don't have to explain myself eight hundred times.