3 of ?

The brake lights flared as my brother guided his hand-me-down '85 civic to a sure halt, more or less even with the half-assed parkjobs all around us. The four doors opened nigh simultaneously and the five of us stepped out of the car. Gravel crunched and grass rustled as shoes made contact with the ground and twisted so we could hoist our torsos off the seat of the car that had once been my mother's. The vanity plate still read, "Pani D," pani being Ukranian for Mrs. and D being the first letter of her name. It wasn't until later, while playing host to some extended-extended family from the Old Country that we would learn that Pani D was Ukie slang for "fat ass". No, in the predominantly German town we lived in, it was simply the Panty Mobile. Perhaps not so simply. Hmm.

The door to an old farm house swung open hard and John Mellencamp's The Authority Song blared out so loud that you could feel Middle America reach out and tweak your nipples. People spilled out after the sound; some looking for a quick breath of air on the porch; some looking to deposit what would become nitrogenous fertilizer in a few months with the help of some handy soil microbiology; some were heading to cars for music, to fool around, or simply more beer. In a word - shenanigans. Like the restaurant, less crap on the walls. Although, come to think of it, the inside of that house was smattered and smeared with all the stolen and pilfered signage we could get our grubby, underage drinking, hands on.

It was an ancient two-story farm house, with a veranda over the porch on two sides of it. Whatever colour it had once been had long since surrendered to time and the elements. It was the grey of years and erosion, the way driftwood looks toward the end. It was hemmed in by brush and tall trees and was a couple hundred meters back from the highway nestled into a big copse of trees. That copse made the house unobtrusive and kept the cops away. The history of the place was obliterated when the friend who's family farm it was on decided to get the power hooked back up, wrangle up some discarded couches and turn it into a party shack extraordinaire. There were multiple ways in an out, a few empty rooms upstairs for furtive heavy petting and loads of space on the main level for outright, but still small-town, debauchery.

This wasn't the first time my older brother had basically grabbed me by the scruff of my antisocial neck and dragged me to a party, but I think this was actually the last. After this party, I didn't really need more coercion to want to come out and play. So much random shit would go down at this house, but this was the night it was christened. This was the night we caught a goat. This was the origin of The Goathouse.

The trunk was popped, we grabbed our cases of beer, or in this instance the eighteen I was sharing with others, and meandered towards dilapidation and depredation. The autumn air was cool and crisp, a sharp contrast to the heavy, wet, thick and vibrating air that sucked you in and held you in place inside those walls. The atmosphere pulsated with youth, hormones, alcohol and the ten-years-behind-the-times music you find in small towns everywhere. Shouts of greeting and general profanity erupted at the infusion of familiar faces that were fresh to the floor show. Adolescence sat in dense clusters on the couches and floor of the living room, it stood in the open spaces in what used to be the dining room and kitchen, and around the kitchen table, it cheered and trash talked in the way that can only exist between drunk teens who've spent their entire lives around each other and who are engaged in contests of skill to get other people drunk. You know: generally bored people who still think they're invincible looking for a good time. Oooh, look, quarterbounce.

I liked quarterbounce. I was a fucking quarterbounce sniper. I sucked at talking to girls. Actually, I sucked at getting action, girls I could talk to. I just was really terrible at reading body language and picking up on subtle hints to how I was being received, hence no touch the heinie. But quarterbounce? That had rules that were easy. Aim, bounce, point, drink, repeat. For the uninitiated, quarterbounce, or quarters, as I've heard it called elsewhere, is a game with many variations, but the basics of it require you to bounce a quarter off a tabletop into an empty cup and assign a drink to whomsoever you choose, as long as they are also seated at the table and playing the game. You keep playing until you miss, at which point, you drink and then pass the tools to the person to your left.

The evening proceeded as such parties do: loud noises (I don't know what we're yelling about), loud music, new jokes, old jokes, a fair amount of physical comedy, people disappearing and reappearing in tandem with the opposite sex, that sort of thing. All well and normal until Jessie came back in from a piss and yelled, "THERE'S A GOAT OUTSIDE!" To which the general response was Holy Shit, form a search party, Go Go Go! And a lot of surprisingly co-ordinated crashing through the bush ensued. Running around in what amounts to a small forest at night is dangerous at the best of times, but drunk off your ass in the middle of the night, it somehow works out just fine as long as you avoid tree trunks when you bail, ass-over-teakettle, off a tree root. There are lots of tree roots. But to sum up what it looks like? Do you remember The Blair Witch, when they're handicamming it through the trees at speed? That's about right. The important thing, other than that I was wearing an onion on my belt, because it was the style, at the time, was that after fuck only knows how long, we caught a real-live, smelly as hell goat. (note: onion thing may or may not be a reference to the simpsons.)

The first thing you need to know about what to do if you catch a goat is that they don't like it. The second thing you need to know is THEY DON'T LIKE IT. Thirdly, bring some rope. As luck would have it, my brother's best friend was (still is) a human fucking swiss army knife and he had rope in his trunk just in case he ... um .... needed to tie something up, I guess. I swear he's not a sexual predator. Jessie, who had espied the verboten piece of stank in the first place, had actually been the one to tackle it, so he got the honour of hanging on to the rope as we hauled its cloven ass back to the house. That honour was dubious then and it's dubious now, but holy balls, we brought a goat into that ancient house and the smell of alcohol and hormones was cut with the unholy stench that is a goat.

Goats stink.

Goats also spend a lot of their time trying to headbutt people when they're angry. Just a heads up. Also, no matter how funny you think it is, don't try to drink from the udder of an angry, just-caught, goat. I wouldn't recommend standing behind a goat either, at least not in range of its hindquarters, and I mean that in terms of both getting kicked and shat upon, possibly at the same time.

Someone yelled, "Welcome to the Goathouse."

It stuck.

At this same house, my friend Mark self-circumcised himself through excessive dry-humping and an unfortunate zipper design. A douchebag named Lindsey tried really, really hard for a Darwin award, playing "stick the fork in the wall outlet" which was then compromised by an unnamed party holding a breaker closed on him. His hair smoked and he lost a toenail and he clearly deserved it. My good buddy Chris celebrated his 19th birthday by peeing in the kitchen because he thought he was still in the town bar. A lot of people got laid there, we paid for electricity by recycling alcohol-based receptacles, and I really only remember one or two fights. I have a surprising amount of fond memories of the place.

Oh, and I eventually learned how to talk to girls.