The winter of my senior year, we moved into the house that would come to be known, infamously, as the “DBL” and due to the various shenanigans we get up to (and the amount of alcohol we drink), I thought it best to get some stories down before I forgot them completely.
The house had been owned by successive generations of college students, at the very least since I was a freshman, and the main draw for living there was the ridiculously cheap rent and that it was only about a half-mile from the school; as is typical of many houses with a close proximity to campus, it was frequently the site of parties and well-known to be a hub for underage drinking. Much later on, we found out that the reason why the rent was so cheap in the first place was that the original owner had died, leaving the property to her son and he decided to fuel his drug habit by constructing a meth lab in the shed; as can be expected, the lab caught fire, burning the back of the house to the ground and the property was seized by the police and sold at auction. Our landlord, having purchased this hot little commodity, slapped some drywall up in place of the damaged section and, disregarding all state and federal laws, called it habitable and rented it out to poor college students.
At the time I joined the house, the property was in the possession of one of my good friends from school, Cody, who had been living there since he won a lottery to live off-campus his sophomore year. He had gone through a succession of roommates over the following two years, as studies-abroad and personal endeavors took their toll and by late 2006, he found himself with three vacant rooms when several members of the house decided to leave. My then current roommate Max, Cody’s high-school friend Nick and myself secured those rooms and thus was formed the initial band of misfits to be blessed with the nickname of “DBL”.
We had all just returned from our various Christmas breaks, but had a couple weeks before school was back in session and so, like responsible young men we spent most of this time playing drinking games and carousing till the break of dawn. Typically the preferred game would be beer pong (with a table made from one of the household doors we removed from the wall) but the favorite alternate was the dice game “7-11-Doubles” or as Cody called it, “Mexican Doubles”. To play this game, all participants would sit in a circle, usually on the kitchen floor (which was filthy and alcohol spillage tended to improve its sanitary condition) with a mug placed on the floor somewhere nearby and roll dice. The mug would be filled with a small (or large, depending on how cruel you felt) amount of beer and play proceeded to the left, with all the participants rolling in turn until someone hit the numbers 7, 11 or two of the same number came up (hence the name). At this point, the roller picked someone else in the circle to drink and as soon as the drinker's hand touched the cup, began rolling feverishly before they could finish and slam the glass back on the ground; if the roller hit 7, 11 or doubles before the cup hit the ground, the container would be refilled and the process repeated. The drinker could be saved by anyone else in the circle grabbing the mug (thereby reclassifying themselves as the drinker) and play would proceed as before.
Cody was and is one of the luckiest sons-of-bitches I have ever met in my life and if he were on the dice, it wouldn’t be uncommon for him to hit a streak of ten or more winning rolls and as the quickest drinker in the house, this naturally progressed into a minor competition between us and I would frequently jump in to help out the other players, after they had lost a couple rounds in a row, ending his turn as the roller. However, since nobody else in the house could match him for luck and drinking as quickly as I did was difficult without practice, other players tended towards either rolling quickly to keep play moving, or rolling slowly to get a chance at some breathing room. Playing this game, late at night, during that winter, some player (whose identity has long since been lost to the PBR-soaked mists of time) began making egregiously slow rolls, shaking the dice for several minutes at a time and this prompted Nick to yell: “Hurry the fuck up, this isn’t 'take your time at the Douchebag Lounge!'” The moniker stuck and the crew of the house was known as the DBL forevermore.
Next: Winter is Awesome! (We get cut off at Market of Choice)
