The One Where We Buried an Apartment in News

-- And not fake news, real news! Like real, actual newspapers!

Among the 32,000 things that made college life the very best life -- a statement I no longer feel guilty saying given college was a freaking fantasy camp of sports, girls, unlimited energy, perfect scheduling balance, I could go on -- was an access to newspapers that I’ve never had before and never will again.

I loved the newspaper. In this I am not unique. Many have mourned it’s death. But not as many left early for class so that they could take a specific walking route that granted them access to six papers every morning. The Hub provided the local fare, the Deseret News, the Salt Lake Tribune, and a cinnamon toast to pair them with. Any old building had copies of The Statesman, which I grabbed casually, and the ghastly Herald Journal which I grabbed while checking no one was looking. The business building of course hosted the Wall Street Journal. The final spot was the library for the USA Today.

While some college kids carried condoms in their backpack I carried a pound of newsprint.

Like a prehistoric Tom Haverford checking his social media, the reading of the morning paper was ritual. First local sports, then national sports, then the easiest looking crossword puzzle, then a search for the one cool Times article I thought Brooke would like, then the comics, then the Journal front page summary which I never understood, and finally a jaunt through the USA Today.

Among the 32,000 things that make me feel old is the fact that my reliance on the papers gave me the news on a lag. How crazy is it that when Ron Artest charged into the stands and punched fans I didn’t learn about it til 15 hours later during my breakfast news reading? That I had to call Nathan hoping he saw something on ESPN instead of just watching 30 videos of the event on my phone? Wild times.

The physical paper may not have been timely but it had other powers. It remains a strange and undeniable fact that reading the paper during a college class never once resulted in me being questioned or criticized by a professor for not paying attention. Texting, sleeping, flirting, talking, computering; all these distractions earned a teacher’s wrath. Reading the Times did not. Did professors let the paper slide because they knew it was soon-to-be extinct? Or are newspapers simply sacrosanct?

That second question might explain why at the end of a day I would stash the newspapers in our coat closet instead of sending them to recycling. Ok, ok, the real reason is that I was too lazy to walk to the recycling bin every day, a fact that would have shamed my girlfriend who celebrated Tree Day into dumping me sooner than she did. Instead I thought, eh, I’ll make a six foot stack and then carry the hole thing to the recycling to save time and hopefully impress a girl on the way with my lifting prowess. Yes my hormonal brain had weird plans and expectations back then.

As the paper pile grew to the size of a toddler my roommates questioned if I was creating a fire hazard. But roommate Davis saw potential in the stack of kindling. As the resident newspaper expert I wish I’d been the one to think of it, but credit where credit is due: Davis didn’t watch Jazz games with us, or eat pizza with us, or play Nerts, or participate in CJ and Eric’s jeeping shenanigans, but bless his heart he was the one who said, “Ya know, if we save newspapers at this rate for the whole school year we could crush these sheets into balls and literally bury an apartment with it.”

And so we harvested papers for 8-and-a-half months. A folded paper’s dimensions are roughly 12 inches by 22 inches, or about 2.1 square feet. Given that we had about 8 stacks of papers, each measuring about 4 feet tall, I think it’s fair to say our closet contained 67 cubic feet of newspaper by the time finals week of spring 2009 rolled around.11. I have a hazy memory of some girl trying to hang her coat in our closet, only to be rebuffed by the overflowing stacks. She was not impressed. We had all the ammunition needed to unleash the ultimate prank of our careers.

I loved prank wars. In this I am not unique. I was one of a billion students who found himself waging stupid battles throughout the university years.

There were victories -- smuggling instant potatoes in a Big Gulp to plug a toilet comes to mind, as does dumping a Slurpee cup full of piss on the car boot of an overzealous parking lot patrolmen.

There were casualties -- Platoon the horse disappeared more times than I can count; once my pillow was held hostage for over a month.22. Joke's on them. I had barely returned from Chile where going to bed meant laying on the floor scratching my flea bites with a shoe polish brush. A pillow-less existence was pleasure compared to that past life. Plus the loss was all the rationalization I needed to soothe to my conscience when I relieved the terrorists of their Karl Malone poster two years later. 

There were laughs -- framing Maddie as the consumer of all the Reese's; lifting Nicole through an opponent’s window to scramble their DVDs into the wrong cases while I feasted on the victim’s dinner rolls; photoshopping Jennie’s suitor into her family photo. 

There were suicides -- the time roommate Eric cooked popcorn that smelled like baby diarrhea and gassed our whole apartment (we would later return the favor to Pearspn’s apartment by popping and hiding a bag under their couch, but they just ate it, diaper and all)33. Here's how Nathan described the scent.

It would be the last night that I would be able to call Spencer my roommate. He filled crates with clothes, books, and cans of food that he never touched all year. I took a magic eraser to the wall, cleaning off scuffs from nine months worth of footballs, basketballs, and golf balls. The first wave hit us.

S: "Who let a frieking baby into the apartment?!"

The second wave.

N: "That's diarrhea! It has to be!"

Our faces clung to the window screen as we gasped for fresh spring air. We buried our faces in our shirts and made a dash for the stairs. The smell intensified as we reached the bottom. I could see CJ in the corner. "What the eff?!" he screamed before he began choking.

A dark shadow emerged from the kitchen. "What are you guys freaking out about?" Then we saw it. He had made popcorn again.

N: "Where did you find that! (CJ hid the popcorn three months earlier for this exact reason.) We told you that you weren't allowed to make that popcorn in the apartment. It smells like a baby’s diaper!"

He throws a handful into his mouth.

S: "Eho! How can you eat that?!"

CJ is crawling on the ground making his way toward the door. All of the windows are immediately opened and evacuation procedures are initiated. It would be several hours before we could finish our cleaning.

Note: Years later (probably 2013) Eric gets married near Idaho Falls. We attended the wedding. He served popcorn.

And there were pranks that make little sense years later -- hiring freshman Pearson to cut the stem off a rival’s pumpkin; running through Brooke and Nicole’s apartment in a towel yelling “cold, cold, cold!”

This newspaper prank, which would require maps, man hours, and months to prepare, would reduce all pranks that had come before to mere footnotes in mine and Nathan's history.

We had a solid group of roommates during the 2008 to 2009 school year, but we were rarely a united group. We didn’t form a church ball team. We didn’t sit together at Aggie games, or attend dance parties en masse. But in this prank we became one, a six man SEAL team in passion and purpose, if not muscle or endurance. We added a 7th to our operations unit, Pearspn, a graduate of the West Valley City hood, a veteran of a downtown Philadelphia mission, the guy who stole Pepsi caps from Ian Wright in high school, the zealot who asked in prayer that a sick person die (the LDS version of pulling the plug), a man who was no stranger to shadow ops. He had many skills, but none more important than being our scapegoat in the event of police interference. 

Our roster then was made up of the following:

- Pearson, who if you hadn't heard has been documented here and here.

- CJ Stringham, a ladies man extraordinaire. Jeep owner. Freshman. A musical honors him to this day. Not to be confused with DJ Stringham, my freshman, womanizing roommate the following year. 

- Jonny Harper, he who replaced Colin at the end of first semester. Freshman. Owned an amazing vintage BYU jacket and he didn’t even like BYU.

- Eric, the Pluto to Nathan and Spencer’s sun. Liked watching movies on a laptop. A binge-er before his time.

- Davis, the lad with a girlfriend. This prank represented the first time he hung out with us.

Now to the task at hand. Do you know how long it takes to crumple up a few thousand sheets of newspaper? Long enough to stain our hands black, long enough to require an Arby's roastburger break, and long enough that Jonny bowed out early -- perhaps he carried too many prank scars from the time Nathan snuck a speaker under his bed, trailed the mic out into the hall, and woke him up with the phrase, “Jonny, this is God,” at 3:30 am.

We filled garbage bag after garbage bag while Davis infiltrated the targeted apartment. This was easily accomplished as the targeted roommates included his girlfriend. We requested he stay late executing affectionate moves on his girl until the remaining roommates were driven to their upstairs beds in disgust. In an ideal world he’d be the last to leave the building and could leave the door unlocked (see entry point A on the below map). Otherwise we’d have to go through the peeping window (point B). We knew there were risks of witnesses, so we planned two escape routes. First the neighboring lounge (point C), and second the dumpster (point D), both of which you wouldn’t be THAT shocked to see someone walking towards in the middle of the night with a big black bag of “laundry” or “garbage”.

 

What other connection did we have to that apartment beyond Davis’ girlfriend? Not many actually. Nathan had gone on a date with one roommate as a way of finagling a good Jazz seat but that’s about as far as the web stretched unless you count FHE parents as a meaningful relationship.

As the night hours descended I led the first scouting mission, casually walking towards the lounge, then veering towards the peeping window where Davis had kept the blinds open to provide a means to confirm no one had come downstairs after his departure. I signaled our squad that all was clear, thus sending the first pair of bag carriers while Davis silently entered the apartment. Just as Pearspn and Nathan crossed the field where we once played croquet dressed in our finest while CJ crotch-grabbed in a fashion to make Michael Jackson proud -- still alive at this point in time by the way -- a police car drove through the parking lot. As far as I can recall this is the only time I ever saw a police car in Old Farm. We acted cool despite the acceleration in heart rate, walked toward the garbage can, the cop drove away, and we were back in business.

Inside the apartment the dump was on. Old Farm units are two floored. The first has a living room, kitchen, and mini bath, while the stairs lead up to the bedrooms and full bath.

The first floor was our target. We emptied a handful of bags into the living room, leaving debris up to our shins, and then began the process of burying the stairs to the second floor. We had more than enough paper to fill the entire stairwell, but the higher up we went the more the paper spilled over the railing. Fortunately we had Nathan the engineer on our side. 

We tacked a painters cloth to the ceiling and it covered the stairs like a shower curtain, neatly keeping all the balls of paper trapped. When one of the tacks fell into the ocean of news on the ground -- a literal needle in a paper stack -- we looked at each other, shrugged, and hoped none of the girls would get a surprise shank on their way to a final exam the next morning.

20 minutes later the stairs were gone. Their vacancy was filled in with paper like the Titanic stairs were filled with water. We exited the apartment and I want to know how the girls weren’t woken up by the persistent loudness and the largeness that was Eric and Pearspn. Their single footstep somehow contained more volume than CJ’s crotch-grab screams. 

Normally right about now I’d include an image of our handiwork, a final photo to prove our excellence and put a bow on this memory. But alas the year was 2009. My phone didn’t have photos, it had a numeric keypad for texting. I believe Davis took a snapshot with a real life camera, but if he did I’ve never seen the print. And so this post ends where it starts, talking once again about relics that have faded into the past, and I mean more than just newspapers and cameras. I'm currently writing a blog about an event that happened 12 years ago during my glory years, which means I too am slipping into obscurity. Getting old sucks. 

Thank goodness for the memories.