Every college has one… that guy who seems to be at every party and who takes twice as long to graduate as everyone else. Best of all, he usually has a mascot-like name and his presence at social functions is seen as an honor so he never pays for booze. At the university I attended, that man was known as Animal.
Animal had this tradition of sitting in a corner at a party with a beer-filled metal bucket. He never seemed to leave his spot unless it was to go to another party and being the royalty that he was, people were always more than happy to get his bucket filled for him. Nobody seemed to know much about who he really was, but there were rumors about how he’d been in school for 10 years or someone had ordered a pizza and he was the one who delivered it.
I graduated from college over 10 years ago, but he’s the sort of person you don’t forget even though you hardly knew him. On the rare occasion that I still swap college drinking stories with friends, Animal always gets a mention. I don’t even know his real name, but he gets brought up in those conversations more often than even the people who I considered close friends at the time.
I know that I talked to him on a few occasions and while I remember that he was nice, I was too shit-faced to remember what we actually talked about. I also know that I made several beer-bucket runs for him, especially at places were I knew the people throwing the party and could cut in line. Usually all I had to do was hold the bucket up and they knew who it was for. Yes, I was a “bucket bitch.”
I recently created a new account on MySpace and unlike the old one, this time I listed what college I went to. Just today, I got a friend request from THE Animal himself and I felt like I’d been blessed by the Pope.