College Student Causes Halloween Havoc, Gets Tear-Gassed

“Lamont" was looking to be naughty on Halloween night in college. He and scores of other students got what they wanted. Was it naughty? Read on and vote.

I did all kinds of naughty things during my college years. I’m married with three kids now, and I work in management consulting, so the only “naughtiness” I partake in is fantasizing about screwing the secretaries at the office. But that’s for another time. This tale of naughtiness occurred back in 2000, during my junior year. There was this off-campus area known as “the strip.” It was basically a long, one-way street where bars, clubs, and food outlets were clustered. It had been tradition for everybody to pour out onto the strip after the bars closed at 2 a.m., and basically continue the party on the street. Some people just mingled in their drunken stupor, some passed out on the curb, and some tried to procure an after-hours one night stand. Whatever you did, it was all on the strip, where everyone converged. And the cops didn’t do anything to stop it. In fact, they blocked off traffic on the strip at that hour to let the students do their thing. But they hung around to make sure nothing criminal happened.

And on Halloween, the strip was the place to be – but not in my day. During the 1970s and 1980s, people from outside the state would travel there just to party on Halloween. They were nuts about it. According to history, oodles of people in elaborate costumes would hit the strip for a debaucherous Halloween, reveling and rioting the night away.

But before I even arrived on campus, city officials closed the strip on Halloween because we drunken students were just too crazy. In fact, the university got involved and closed the campus on Halloween day and the day afterward, just to make sure nobody would be around. At the time, I was bummed out that I didn’t get to experience Halloween there, but I made up for it elsewhere.

However, 2000 came along and the city decided to open the strip, and the university kept the campus open. All the officials believed that a “more mature” student body was in place, so they decided to give us a shot.

Bad move.

My roommates and I hosted a Halloween party at our house. We had lights, music and all the decorations in our basement, where all the pot smoking and underage drinking occurred. It was a great time. We got nice and buzzed there, and then shut down the operation around 10 p.m. so we could all head to the strip in our garb. It was me and my three housemates, plus our girlfriends, and we were all dressed up. I was the Cookie Monster.

We got to the strip and it was pure mayhem; pandemonium. You could barely even walk in the street. One dude dressed up as a superhero was perched up in a tree near the entrance to one bar, violently shaking the branches and screaming like a drunken fool. Several others joined him until they broke one of the branches. People were bodysurfing. Girls showed their tits. Everyone was drunk, as though it were Mardi Gras. It was great.

And then people started getting crazier. Brawls broke out; cars got turned over; people ripped down the marquee sign at a Jimmy Johns sandwich shop. Revelers threw rocks, lit things on fire and chanted “Fuck the Po-lice” and “Hell no, we won’t go!” The cops were outnumbered. That was when I decided to light off an M-80. The booming “pow!” it made was followed shortly with a “thunk, thunk” coming from the cops dressed up in riot gear. When smoke began to rise from the ground, and a pungent, acrid smell invaded my nose and throat, I knew it was tear gas. I began to choke, spit, cough and, well, tear. I had been separated from my girlfriend, and the only thing I could do was take refuge by running to the nearest friend’s house to catch my breath. It was one of the worst feelings I’ve ever experienced.
I had never been tear-gassed before, and I don’t want to ever be tear-gassed again.

But I’ll tell you one thing: experiencing and reveling in that riotous, naughty Halloween in 2000 was worth every tear that came out of me.