Jason Rodriguez - The Moose in the Closet: Holiday Wishes and Alcohol Will Destroy You: RJ, College. College, RJ.

Continuing my Holiday Cheer because brother, we need it. So far I’ve given love to Chris Staros, Larry Young, David Lapham, Sam Kieth and Joshua Hale Fialkov. Today I want to give some love to a group of people who, for the past year, had nothing but love to give.

With comics, it’s easy to get caught up with the online community. There are message boards available for whatever you’re looking for where you can talk to anybody you want, fan or pro, establish a base relationship you can expand upon at a convention and you can seek out people who share the same exact opinions as you and have the same taste in books and creation style.

I hated it.

Around January of 2004 I started looking around for local folks to get-together and talk comics. I stumbled across a fledgling group called the DC Conspiracy which was a collaborative of primarily cartoonists who got together once a month and talked producing comics over beers. I joined the group and, knowing I had a slight disadvantaging by being “just a writer”, jumped on the opportunity to make their webpage/blog before meeting them to give myself a bit of weight.

I didn’t need to – these guys are sociable, friendly and full of great ideas they want to share. You know what’s great about a non-online community? When you sit down with them for several hours you don’t have the option of turning them off. You need to listen to an opinion that might be different than yours and, in turn, you usually learn to see things in a different light. I attribute more than half of my growth as a creator over the past year to the DC Conspiracy.

And we’ve had fun. We organized a convention for fuck’s sake. We took road trips and rolled out support for our respective projects. We created an anthology and are in the process of creating two more. We’ve started columns on our blogs that people actually read and learn from, we share the knowledge we build by talking to each other over a pint of Dogfish Head and a plate of Chicken Fingers.

Happy Holidays to the DC Conspiracy, the lot of ya. I know we all have projects we’re putting together for the New Year and I know we’re all going to help each other make those projects the best they can possibly be.

_____________

Well, this fluff week is almost over and then I start my 7 weeks of solid storytelling to essentially finish The Moose in the Closet. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll beg for more (I already wrote the last week and I will say I’m damn proud of it). But for now, lets get this week’s stories over with, shall we?

This story was sort or told once many months ago in the comments section by my cousin RJ, semi-regular poster on this site. I figure it’s about time it gets the proper Moose treatment.

RJ came to visit me sophomore year in college. His first time visiting up in Boston, he came by himself – I remember waiting for him at the bus station and eating this crappy-ass Quarter-Pounder with Cheese at the McDonald’s Express that got me sick.

The first night we just sort of chilled, I believe. We spent the day after walking around Harvard Square, RJ pulled me into some comic shop which, ironically, I found ridiculously juvenile and was slightly embarrassed (my how the times change). He got some Godzilla bootleg and we made our way out somewhere for dinner.

All-in-all a nice, relaxing, weekend in beautiful Boston.

Then there was that second night. I had this blue plastic footlocker thing in my room; I kept it under my bed. This was where I kept all of my liquor in college. The no-frills vodka that tasted like rubbing alcohol, the peach schnapps for “the ladies”, the bootleg rum, the Kahlua, the mixers – every piece of shit bottle of alcohol a college student typically buys.

That night I bust out the locker and everyone on the floor starts having some cocktails. In college, none of us knew shit about alcohol. There were two drinks: a screwdriver with or without peach schnapps and a rum and coke. That was it. So we were pouring up the drinks when I gave RJ a standard screwdriver. He puts it down and complains, told me I made it too weak.

Now, if you had a footlocker filled with cheap alcohol and someone called out your drink – you’d get a little evil too.

“Too weak? Fine.”

Do you know those super-sized plastic cups you get at McDonald’s? I filled one of those up with a drink concoction that was about 9-parts every alcohol I had in my trunk and 1-part orange juice. You smelled this drink and your fucking nose hairs fell out. It was by far the most disgusting drink ever made. I give it back to RJ and he tells me he’s going to my friend Eric’s room to play Star Wars: Tie Fighter. I make myself a drink and go to Max’s room to smoke-some.

There are several of us in Max’s room, having a good ‘ole party, when not ten minutes later RJ fucking BURTS into the room like Kramer from Seinfeld, trips over himself – his hair is fucking wild, his eyes are huge and bloodshot – and asks us (very loudly) “what’s going on”.

“Where’s your drink, dude?”

“I finished it.”

“You fucking finished it?”

“Wooooorrrrddddd!”

“There was like a liter of alcohol in that shit!”

RJ was fucking bouncing off the walls all night – we couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he just crashes, hard, falls asleep on my floor and doesn’t move until the next morning. It was RJ’s first introduction to how we roll in college and I don’t recall him ever letting me mix a drink for him again.

Labels: mitc

Holiday Wishes and Alcohol Will Destroy You: RJ, College. College, RJ.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

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