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"\n\nSchool was out for the summer, and Princeton University was embarked on Reunions weekend 2009, a three-day bender amounting to a tribal rite. The institution and I were drunk. The last Thursday in May had just become Friday when a DJ put on Fatman Scoop&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;Be Faithful,&amp;quot; and a rumble of arm-waving club rap echoed through the New Jersey night.\n\nSingle ladies\u2014I can&amp;#39;t hear y&amp;#39;all! Single ladies\u2014make noise! The single ladies made noise indeed, a few by crashing through folding chairs en route to the dance floor. This carnival welcomes all alumni back every single year\u2014I graduated in &amp;#39;96, and this was my thirteenth\u2014but especially those celebrating &amp;quot;major reunions,&amp;quot; the fifth, tenth, fifteenth\u2026 These classes host keg parties on the lawns below the Gothic dormitories, gargoyles leering down at 20,000 revelers. The class of 2004 had rented this particular party tent, but the class of 2009, five days shy of graduation, owned the night.\n\nWho fuckin&amp;#39; tonight? Who fuckin&amp;#39; tonight? Who fuckin&amp;#39; tonight? The single ladies slurped one another&amp;#39;s faces, and my eyes popped at the mileage on my own odometer. It was the case in my time that a scant two minutes of no-frills grinding to a Prince song could provoke a full two days of scandalized gossip. The ladies of &amp;#39;09 had their hands on the floor and their asses in the air, bucking at crotches on the upbeat. My companion, a Dutch photographer, lit up with delight. When he started bounding around like a gun dog, I decided to name him Shooter.\n\nWho fuckin&amp;#39; tonight? Who fuckin&amp;#39; tonight? Who fuckin&amp;#39; tonight? An older guy\u2014identifiable by the pattern of his orangeand-black blazer as an &amp;#39;84\u2014wiggled his head to the groove, bald spot mirroring red light. A girl in a white miniskirt rocked out by back-kicking with a bandaged ankle while swinging on crutches. Behind the cage for the sound engineer&amp;#39;s booth, a kid pissed in a cup, tucked himself in, popped his collar, and briefly humped the nearest girl. This was the warm-up night for an elite bacchanal, the perennial blowout kegger of the Ivy League.\n\nLong before becoming a world-class university, Princeton was an extraordinarily boisterous party school. The college was founded in 1746 by frowning Presbyterians who shortly thereafter issued a ban on &amp;quot;tavern haunting,&amp;quot; initiating a tradition of crackdowns on drinking now in its third century of utter futility. Every time I go back to the campus, I smile fondly at hedges I once napped under, windows I vomited from, astronomy departments I hooked up in.\n\nReunions weekend is probably the largest regular alumni gathering in the world. Historically, the level of alcohol consumption here exceeds that of every other event in America save the Indy 500. The school mascot is the tiger, and Reunions is defined by blackout drunkenness and blaze orange disorder. To be clear, not all of the events directly involve getting shitfaced. The schedules are dense with memorial services and prayer services and community-service projects. But really, the main point is getting shitfaced. Anthropologists refer to this kind of debauchery\u2014bonding by way of getting smashed\u2014as the pursuit of conscious excess. The multigenerational aspect heightens the sense of disappearing into a tradition and a collective identity. The most passionate Reunions fan I know\u2014a &amp;#39;97 who hasn&amp;#39;t missed a year since first sneaking in as a freshmen\u2014opines that the profusion of ridiculous costumes we wear encourage the event to become &amp;quot;a platform for creative absurdity.&amp;quot;\n\nThe valedictorian of Princeton&amp;#39;s great class of 1905 was Norman Thomas, a clergyman and civil rights activist who ran for the presidency six times on the Socialist ticket. He had a theory that Reunions was essentially a beer-tap time machine. &amp;quot;Some things in life justify themselves emotionally, without necessity for analytic reasoning,&amp;quot; he once wrote. &amp;quot;On the whole, Princeton reunions fall in that category. In my moralizing moments, I may regret that reunions are too greatly inspired by the prayer: &amp;#39;Make me a sophomore again just for tonight,&amp;#39; which\u2026with the aid of a sometimes excessive consumption of the spirituous, rather than the spiritual, often seems to be granted.&amp;quot; Throwing himself into Reunions weekend, an alumnus travels to a giddy dimension where his youth never really ended and never really will.\n\nFriday night, after dinner, below a dorm built to imitate a castle keep, the men of the class of 1959 turned their pink faces toward the dessert buffet and resolved to have a bit more cheesecake. Encountering little resistance from their wives and second wives and new lady friends, they pushed away from the tables, uniformly jaunty in their class jackets\u2014creamy sport coats with a pattern featuring the class mascot, Tipsy Tiger, who wears a boater with an orangeand-black hatband and an uneasy expression, panicked that the final drop of beer is dribbling from his stein.\n\nAmong the youngest people at the banquet tables were Alexandra &amp;#39;96 and Meredith &amp;#39;96. (Names have been changed to protect the women from themselves.) Each was representing her late father and receiving an earful of stories she&amp;#39;d never heard. Alex was ved that her dad&amp;#39;s roommates were too decorous to spill the top-shelf beans. Meredith said it all felt surreal, and then her white-wine buzz picked up more momentum and she smacked my ass with a packaged orange rain poncho. A girl-group cover band of a certain age started up on the bandstand\u2014three beehive hairdos, three tiger-print miniskirts, six black go-go boots. Meredith randomly seized a spry geezer for a partner and danced an erratic shag while grandkids hopped up and down and thirty somethings larked into the scene, and joyful ladies did the twist with their artificial hips. To get Meredith to join us on a loop through the other party headquarters, we kind of had to shimmy her out of the gate.\n\nCrossing the campus in the dark green air, dashing into courtyards sectioned off with six-foot-high wood fences, waddling in boat shoes and vamping in platform heels, people chased fellowship and delirium. A student worker zipped past the class of 1969&amp;#39;s Beatles-themed headquarters in a golf cart trimmed in orange tinsel, polyester tiger tail trailing on the fender. Ten major reunions, the fifth through the fiftieth, were at the core; the fifty-fifth hunkered down in the football stadium; the sixtieth and the sixty-fifth and their elders\u2014the Old Guard\u2014held court far down campus at a distance protecting their fine supply of hard liquor from the thirst of the masses. The class of &amp;#39;84 had an especially memorable spread. Here, as at many colleges, the twenty-fifth reunion is a major deal\u2014a fat, juicy target for the fundraising office\u2014and &amp;#39;84&amp;#39;s official weekend schedule included a lobster dinner on the university&amp;#39;s dime. But first they had to play beer pong and jump to the Ramones.\n\nWe lurched around to the most youthful corner of the bacchanal, where the nooks of the buildings, covered in ivy and draped in shadow, witnessed desperate kisses, steaming pisses, restorative vomiting bouts. The dorm entryways separating the fifth&amp;#39;s headquarters from the tenth&amp;#39;s were a border zone of staircase collisions and bathroom absurdity, with the boys taking leaks in the shower stalls and the girls gurgling at one another&amp;#39;s reflections. An ambulance carted a casualty away, flash bars casting red light on chugging contests. The mob on the fifth&amp;#39;s dance floor had gained force and numbers since the night before, and if it weren&amp;#39;t for the metal crowd-control barriers at the front of the stage, it really would have charged the cover band when it went into &amp;quot;Sweet Home Alabama.&amp;quot; The girl on crutches was back in the same spot, oscillating.\n\nSaturday after brunch, with the whole town mobilizing for a parade\u2014the P-rade\u2014Shooter darted off into the spectacle while Alex and I made a beer run with a posse of hard-core Reunions connoisseurs from the class of &amp;#39;97. Passing by the floats and marching bands, we winced as bagpipes competed with a Nirvana tribute, the class of &amp;#39;94 having chosen &amp;quot;Smells Like Fifteen Spirit&amp;quot; as its theme. The queue at the liquor store wriggled out the door like a conga line. We shotgunned beers and coochie-cooed at people&amp;#39;s kids as the parade advanced down the center of campus, the procession a slow stroll through the school&amp;#39;s living history.\n\nIn the P-rade, the grand marshal led the university president, who led the class of &amp;#39;84, followed closely by the tigered-up, pimped-out golf carts of the Old Guard. Chauffeured by a student worker, the oldest returning alumnus\u2014a 103-year-old survivor of the class of &amp;#39;25\u2014carried a ceremonial silver-handled cane and wore carrot-colored pants with quiet bearing. As the cart inched down the route, the younger classes fell in behind, one by one in chronological order so that the procession folded in on itself and flowed gently downhill.\n\nWe wore orange and black, the official plaid monstrosities and dapper stripes and jungle-print jokes\u2014and also everything ever sold retail in peach, pumpkin, screaming persimmon\u2026 Classes saluted their elders with a cheer called the locomotive: Rah-rah-RAH, tiger-tiger-tiger, sis-sis-sisboom-BOOM-BOOM-AH! &amp;#39;25! &amp;#39;25! &amp;#39;25! Loyal dogs tolerated tiger costumes. Children tried teething on tallboy cans. The P-rade filed through the arch of a new building\u2014an arch designed for the purpose of the P-rade filing through, as the announcer on the grandstand said. Sensible people went off to do sensible things, and the rest of us went to the Street.\n\nThe row of mansions housing Princeton&amp;#39;s eating clubs is just off campus on Prospect Avenue. These are the soul of undergraduate social life, with each of the ten clubs currently in business combining the functions of a mess hall, a study hall, a pool hall, and a faithful geyser of thin lager. Let&amp;#39;s say it was four thirty when I strutted into my club, Ivy, and started relying on muscle memory to navigate the scene of many long-ago misdemeanors. I&amp;#39;d fallen in with the posse of &amp;#39;97s, who set the party off by breaking the lock on the stereo cabinet and putting on a dance mix. A clique of &amp;#39;04 girls shook their hips in front of a fireplace, saucy in their orange-and-black prisonstriped minidresses.\n\nI was looping around outside the building when Shooter intercepted me at six thirty. I hadn&amp;#39;t seen him since the middle of the P-rade, when a dripping-wet girl was falling off his big, slick camera. Shouting over sousaphones, the two of them tried to tell me about a drinking game called dunko, but a proper explanation eluded his command of English, and she was proudly incoherent. &amp;quot;How do you win?&amp;quot; I asked. &amp;quot;You don&amp;#39;t win!&amp;quot; she snapped, swinging a bottle of Malibu for emphasis. &amp;quot;You just do it.&amp;quot;\n\nSo when Shooter found me outside Ivy, he was with a bunch of kids, and everyone was jazzed for me to play dunko. The girls clapped like little witches, orange-and-black Mardi Gras beads clicking around their necks. The boys told me to take off my glasses and empty my pockets.\n\nI grabbed either side of a tub, the kind you would use to cool a keg, three-quarters full of water, not too much ice. Two kids turned me upside down and submerged my head, and it turned out that dunko is recreational water-boarding. &amp;quot;Fourteen! Fifteen! Sixteen!\u2026&amp;quot;\u2014the crowd counted off the seconds I was under. I kicked a leg to signal that I was ready to return to earth and chug a beer.\n\nThe beer went down smooth. I tossed the cup aside with practiced insouciance, and the next thing I knew, a blurry young man, class of &amp;#39;08, was having a chat with me. A former president of the club, he&amp;#39;d developed some concerns about Shooter&amp;#39;s conspicuous camera. Polite but dogged, he argued that it could spoil the experience of younger members for Ivy to receive unflattering press. A big fuss might force the club to be prudent and chill out for a while, to forgo serving beer on Tuesdays, say. I would have given his argument more weight had he bothered to remove the sunglasses he wore against the broad daylight on the front lawn.\n\nThe climactic action began at 10 p.m., after a fireworks show that would humble a midsize city&amp;#39;s Independence Day. We dragged forth as if wading through seawater, searching for a second wind. Sand and hay sopped up the spillage at the beer lines. &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#39;t had any drugs all weekend,&amp;quot; one &amp;#39;09 said. &amp;quot;I mean, I&amp;#39;ve done other people&amp;#39;s drugs, but I haven&amp;#39;t had any of my own.&amp;quot;\n\nAll of a sudden it was 1:45 a.m. at the fifth, on a dance floor thicker than a mosh pit. Powered by the nostalgia of dudes in their midtwenties, the crowd banged its collective head to a Dave Matthews cover. I was getting the hell out when an imp leapt from the shadows to spritz me with a garden hose, and I called her naughty, naughty, naughty, and she surrendered the weapon; I hosed her legs down and then met Shooter and Alex and two other female pals to go to the street.\n\nCabs crept up the avenue. Zombies tried the sidewalks. Joining a thin crowd on the plantation-house portico of Colonial Club, we slouched against Ionic columns. Anne &amp;#39;96 appraised the boys at the beer-pong table. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m going cougar,&amp;quot; she said to a friend. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#39;s pretend we know those guys.&amp;quot; They flitted over and flipped their hair.\n\nA smirking kid passed Anne a joint that she dragged on three times hard, as if hurrying a cigarette outside an airport terminal. She was composed well enough for a client meeting when she said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m gonna faint.&amp;quot; She counted it down: &amp;quot;Five, four, three, two\u2014&amp;quot; A bracelet of orange beads dropped from her wrist in the fall. Her friends heaved her dead weight to the curb, and an orange-and-black taxi sped the women to bed.\n\nIt was a chance to walk Shooter over to Terrace, an eating club around the corner, always arty and funky, with a smoking deck on the second floor and a murky basement taproom all the more thrilling in its firetrap quality for the club&amp;#39;s having once caught fire. The club was too packed to get in the door, but we got in the door. General carnage. Sensible Shooter headed home.\n\nIt was whatever time it was. Sunk in a worn sofa, I frowned at the fire extinguisher in the front parlor. Its cover, colored the safety orange of traffic cones, struck me as uniquely unhelpful in this particular context. Swiveling to check the exits, I sighted an intensely pretty girl in a little plum purple dress. She wasn&amp;#39;t so much crossing the room as flowing around the building, and eventually she flowed down to the basement and glided up to perch on top of the bar.\n\nIt was late enough at this point to get a half-decent look at the taproom, with Maurice Sendak&amp;#39;s Wild Things making a rumpus on a mural opposite the tap. Little Plum lounged beneath a speaker, and the woofer buzzed her body while beers got served down by her ankles. She slid down supine, and a boy drummed her stomach. She sat up, turned, and crouched, and the boys behind the tap massaged her feet as she tossed her curls.\n\nIt was 4 a.m. when Le Tigre&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;Deceptacon,&amp;quot; deliciously synthesized dance rock, rushed from the speakers, and she popped like a cork. One! Two! Three! Four! You got what you been askin&amp;#39; for.\u2026 Knees on the sloppy bar, hands on the low ceiling, ecstatic eyes sparking, she was a one-girl go-go riot. The boys behind the bar flung beer like confetti. She sank back and kicked like a chorine, incidental trickles of beer catching the disco light as they traced down her light brown legs.\n\nIt was brightening outside. By the top of the taproom stairs, a kid in a polo shirt watched the girl he&amp;#39;d been talking to walk off by herself. His eyes staggered after her as far as the vestibule. He snapped to and asked me the time. It was 5:02.\n\n&amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s time to get the party started, dude, know what I&amp;#39;m sayin&amp;#39;?&amp;quot;\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nTroy Patterson, Princeton class of 1996, is currently writing a book about the history of carousing. At left, the author demonstrates that some collegiate skills\u2014like pulling all-nighters and chugging cheap domestic beer\u2014never fade away."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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