5 Years Ago

In the summer of 2000, I was living on campus at Morehouse. Since I was a member of the SGA, my summer plans consisted of living at Morehouse, working on campus, and planning the eventual homecoming. That summer I didn't have a job, so income was sparse and money was sporadically in my pocket. But, I did have my friends.

That summer I hung out with Tash, Seth, Raj, Corey, JC, and the great Jamal Dedeaux. Tash was at Morehouse working on the yearbook for the class of 2000. Seth was in Atlanta, waiting to hear a response from the Peace Corps and working at the college with the National Youth Sports Program. Raj was taking summer school classes. Corey was the homecoming director and seriously bogged down with that. Jamal was the coolest cat I knew, and he was working furiously to edit his first feature film, 'Life's Suite.'

We called it the 'Can I Live? Winning Summer.' Seth and I came up with the name after we realized that time and time again, our way of life was being threatened by the pressures of maturity and responsibility. So, the question always beared asking, 'can I live?'

The summer started like this...
Morehouse graduation was in May, and slowly the fellas left to go on to medical school or law school or Wall St. Memorial Day weekend, I hung out at Mikal and Lenny's. Mikal bought a case of Ice House 22's. Thomas 'TJ' Jones was there, so was Okera. It was a great, great time. We ate, drank, were merry, and it seemed all so fun. We all went to Buckhead where we met up with other Class of 2000 people and did bar crawls all night, back when you could do that with relative ease in Buckhead. Then Mikal left for medical school in Jersey. Lenny left for dental school at Howard. Okera left for medical school at Michigan, and TJ left for medical school in Galveston.

JC was on Capitol Hill for the month of June working for Earl Hilliard (D-AL).

Seth and I started hanging out everyday. Tash started hanging out with us, as did Big Dave Smith and Raj. I tried to put all of their names down on the official SGA summer list so that we could all eat freely in the cafeteria, but that was halted after a week. For my efforts, I did receive a tongue lashing from Dean Phifer.

Every Thursday night we would go to a Buckhead bar called 'Bell Bottoms.' The reason being because on Thursday nights, from 9-10 BB had free drinks and free admission. So for some guys who were broke and couldn't afford drinks, going to BB was a perfect situation, because we could go there for free, drink for free, hang out, and it didn't cost us anything. They even had free food there!

One weekend Seth wanted to go to the movies, so we went to our friend Johnny's house, had a few drinks and headed to the most expensive theater in town, the Tara. At the Tara we saw the film 'Gleam.' A horrible film, but a great deal of fun to be in the theater with Seth, Johnny, Corey, Tash, and Jamal.

There are dozens of stories from that summer from the drinking games and contests to the full contact Trivial Pursuit games, to the times we just turned off the tv and started actually talking about life, and started to become men.

Thanks fellas for the memories and good times.