Beloit

The winter had been cruel and callous, leaving the author teetering on the brink of insanity. Could a simple trip to Beloit – complete with 60-degree weather and a ridiculous house party – finally turn things around, as well as begin to rectify a decades-old sin? Of course it could.

When I was 16 years old, I took a trip with my then-girlfriend to her hometown of Shawano, Wisconsin. We stayed with the family of one of her childhood friends, a family that seemed to be a Midwest version of Salinger’s Glasses – all artistic brilliance and deep-seated neuroses set loose in a picturesque northern Wisconsin town. Appropriately, our weekend was filled with an endless array of off-center adventures: smoking pilfered cigars in a nearby park, cutting each other’s hair in the driveway while blasting the Violent Femmes, trying our hands at hot-wiring a car, getting drunk at a play that one of the family’s older siblings had written. It was one of those improbable, perfectly summer-tinted weekends that stay with you for the rest of your life, and one that I managed to totally cock up at the last minute.

Saying our goodbyes on a bleary Sunday morning, my girlfriend’s friend politely asked how I had slept the night before. For whatever reason, I decided to give her a nasty, semi-sarcastic response, something along the lines of, “Pretty lousy. Thanks for sticking me on the smallest couch you could find!” My incredibly lame sense of humor lost on her, she shot me an icy glare and hissed, “I think it’s time for you to go home.”

Fourteen years later, this inexplicable faux pas rattles through my head as I arrive in lovely Beloit, Wisconsin. Vital’s own Amy Elliott has graciously agreed to spirit me across county lines – and to the home of her alma mater – in hopes of saving me from certain doom at the hands of an unrelenting winter and increasingly suffocating city. Scenic strolls, cocktail parties, and absolutely no benefits for injured roller-girls have been promised (joking!). The weather calls for 60 degrees and uninterrupted, unprecedented sunshine. We’ll be staying with Amy’s friend Lynn, operating under the assumption that my houseguest manners have improved slightly in the past decade-and-a-half.

Having never visited before, I’m pleasantly surprised to find Beloit a charming little getaway of a town, and absolutely nothing like the awful Kenosha/Racine hellhole I had envisioned (not joking!). Checking in at Lynn’s, we decide to take a walk through the nearby campus. Beloit College is everything my 16-year-old self imagined a college would be: sprawling, idyllic, and home to at least one guy named “Davis.” Far from the concrete nightmare of UW-Milwaukee, it’s the kind of place that reminds you that college, in fact, is a good thing. Well-worn student houses dot the grounds, and an on-campus bar/venue – the C-Haus – is busy with out-of-town bands loading in their gear. Amy even points out a dorm tower where all the, um, “indoor” kids live, a place where staging a lightsaber battle on the front lawn whilst kicking a sweet, sweet trenchcoat-and-shorts ensemble is not just tolerated, but actually encouraged.

A few hours and some alarmingly strong margaritas later, we gather a small posse and head to the Bop, a neighborhood bar owned and operated by a woman named Bert. It’s here that I realize just how far from Milwaukee I really am. I know this for two reasons: 1. I’m not sitting at Polish Falcons, listening to Queen on the jukebox and wishing I were dead, and 2. I catch a glimpse of those creepy, low-budget Madison-area newscasts – you know, the ones that look like they’re being taped in a bedroom and everyone’s name seems to be “Scott”.

Leaving the Bop behind, we make our way to a rumored house/dance party, a prospect only made bearable due to the fact that I’m guaranteed to know absolutely no one. I spend most of the party off to side, insanity and ill-advised dancing swirling around me. It’s all quite charming, really: watching these people – most of them a decade younger than me – throwing a ridiculous party, believing they’ve discovered something new, something bold and vital. The truth, however, is that I’ve already seen it – have danced with the same people, have struggled to find the same lousy cup of beer, have been to this same party hundreds of times over. I remember one in particular – a New Year’s party – when my friend Brian ended the evening with an impromptu piano performance of a Talking Heads song, all of us standing around him, screaming and singing along:

“We’re going boom, boom, boom, and that’s the way we lived…”

And then, the ending. A ridiculous swell of drunken voices:

“In a great big room, and that’s…the way…we…lived!”

Back in Beloit, it suddenly comes to our attention that the cops have shown up. Amy and I decide to call it quits and are heading for the door when we’re stopped by a clearly nervous partygoer.

“Hey, the cops are out there! No one leaves this house!”

We just laugh and walk past him, leaving it all behind. VS