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The Legend of TsoLong
It was August, 1993.
The fifth floor of Stevenson North, D-Tower was designated alcohol free. I'd chosen it because I'd seen Animal House one too many times and feared an inability to escape college drunkenness. Tso, a year before my entrance, had chosen it because he was looking for the Animal House on the NIU campus. I remember hauling my bags into my room, taking a dismal look around, and thinking wistfully of my friend Mike's room, located in a dingy, beer-smelling, babe-populated floor where the RA was already mixing up a batch of Welcome Back grape Jello shots.
Our RA, Kim, came bouncing up cheerily. "Have you found your room yet?" she asked in that professional tone cultivated so well by undergraduate authority figures.
"I'm in my room," I pointed out.
"That's good. It's always good to find your room when you're looking to move in, isn't it?" she chirped, thrusting a damage report into my hands and bouncing back out the door. "Did you find your room okay?" I heard her ask somebody down the hall.
"Piss off," whoever it was grumbled back. I made an immediate vow to make friends with that person once I got settled myself and started looking for a place to throw my laundry bag of t-shirts and socks for about a month or so.
That was my introduction to Stevenson Towers, and I wasn't immediately enthralled. I was even less enthralled at the first floor meeting of the year (one of dozens, I might add), where it was immediately apparent who the new people were and who was thinking of taking a mortgage out on their room. Kim had a lot of important issues to cover that night, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much. We spent about a half hour regaling each other with stories from our summer vacations, then moved on to "floor issues."
"If you need a new light bulb," Kim was saying, "just ask Bill, the janitor. He's got 40 watt, 45 watt, 47 watt..."
Around me were the pallid faces of the newly-arrived who'd thought they were moving into a dormitory and instead had found themselves in a youth camp-like atmosphere. These were the people I'd be spending my year with: the dorm rats, socialites, underage drinkers, tired seniors ready to graduate. Their faces reminded me of a blank wall with about a pound of graffiti scrawled over it.
"Bill's got some 50 watt bulbs left over but he might be out by now. If you need a 50 watt bulb, you can always get a 45 watt one for now, but there's a form to fill out..."
Next to me was Dale, a friend from high school who'd foolishly agreed to live with me. He would last exactly a month and a half. Beside him were the Reed brothers, Chris and Ed. Ed had lived on the floor since shortly after Nixon had resigned from office, but Chris was a new arrival, just like me. Across from us was Todd, from Rockford, who had delivered his little billet doux to Kim in the hall moments ago. We soon became friends, but at the time I remember being irritated that he wasn't bothering to conceal the fact that he was looking at his watch every five minutes. Later, when I saw his girlfriend waiting in his room, I understood. I almost asked her if she wouldn't mind killing some time with me instead.
"The form for the 45 watt loaner is in duplicate and triplicate. The first form is yours. The second form goes to me. If I'm not there, give it to the senior hall manager. If he's not in, give it to the junior hall manager. If she's not in..."
Across from me was Tso, who wasn't even bothering to pretend to pay attention, but was in fact staring out the window avidly. A deck of cards was clutched in one of his hands as if it were a bottle of beer. His attention seemed completely focused on something.
"That's it for your light bulbs. As for closet handles, if you're missing one, we've got plenty in stock. We've got round ones, oval ones, ovular ones, square ones--"
It took about twenty minutes before the meeting was finally over. At that point, I sidled over to where Tso was, just to see what was so damned interesting. I had no intentions of speaking to him, and as far as I could tell, the feeling was mutual.
Below us was the shimmering August heat reflected from the campus sidewalks. On the sidewalk I could barely make out a flash of skin against a swath of white T-shirt. "That's Julie and Eileen, from downstairs," Tso explained. "They're flashing me. They want me."
I blinked.
"For a spades game," he added, unperturbed, as if there was no other way I could construe his comment. This pissed me off a little. Usually, I'm the one who delivers statements such as those with a straight face.
"Spades? That some sort of dumb drinking game?" I asked testily.
He shook his head, but brightened almost immediately. "It could be."
We then parted company without a backwards glance. I wasn't a drinker myself, but I was already wishing somebody would ram a bottle down my throat and empty it. This whole floor reminded me of a boy scout meeting, even when you threw in the girls.
Four hours later I was stuck in a room with several other people, one of which was a guy by the name of Anthony. He'd flunked out the year before, but couldn't stand to be out of the loop. He was holding court about the wild heyday of last year's floor. "We'd order six pizzas...and not pick 'em up!" he'd howl, slapping his knee in hilarity. Ed Reed laughed, remembering. (But then, Ed would laugh at anything that managed to hold his attention for more than a few seconds.) Chris Reed grimaced in remembrance. Dale and I, most of the time, grimaced at each other in boredom. It was pushing one in the morning and, while too wired for sleep, I needed some kind of release. Spades was the furthest thing from my mind.
"Sometimes we'd even order seven pizzas!" Anthony exclaimed.
Ed laughed.
Chris grimaced.
Dale retched, but managed to look amused.
I'd just about decided that the evening couldn't possibly get any worse when the door flew open and two girls bounced in, followed closely by someone they called So-Man. Whom I realized was Tso, from the meeting. Julie and Eileen had been on the floor before, and were easily the best-looking girls around. (Which, considering the other candidates, doesn't say much for them, but what can you do?)
"Are you guys actually listening to Anthony?" Julie asked us, not even bothering to note the vapid, tortured faces staring back out at her. "Why do you egg him on?"
"I guess we just couldn't help ourselves," I responded, hoping the sarcasm in my voice would be noticed.
It wasn't. "They want to do the old pizza trick!" Anthony jeered, his eyes moving all over Julie's chest. "Just like you guys used to."
Eileen wrinkled her face. "Come o-n!"
That was a great trick those girls had. They could put special enunciation on the final syllable, believing it would add weight to any argument we could put to them. You had to translate it, and weigh it against the comments you made. There was a definite progression: the bigger the enunciation, the higher their level of appreciation of the joke. But sometimes it backfired on you. As in:
ME: "Hey, wanna go out some time?"It's amazing how much power an extra syllable can have. I've always wanted to do a linguistic study on it. But I digress.
JULIE: "Come o-n!"ME: "Well now, you've got to admit I'm the best-looking thing you've seen all day."
EILEEN: "R-ight."TSO: "Why don't you two strip to bra and panties and play Twister together?"
JULIE/EILEEN: "What-e-ver!"ME: "No really, let's have sex."
JULIE/EILEEN: (Hysterical laughter)
Tso produced a pack of cards. "We need a fourth player for spades. Anyone interested?"
I immediately jumped to my feet and was out the door, leaving Dale to fend for himself. I could feel his glare burning me in the back, but he followed soon after, leaving Anthony talking to an empty room. It was at least a half hour before he left himself, so we figured nobody was hurt.
I only go into detail about the sordid aspects of our undergraduate days to try and give a sense of how TsoLong was born, and under what conditions our philosophy evolved. The game of spades is something we rarely play today, but it has significant overtones, as you will see.
Crap on that. It just led to a cool name.
The game of spades was something entirely new to me. I'd played marathons
of poker in the past, but I'd never heard of a game like this, where you had to
trust your partner to know what he/she was doing without actually knowing their
hand. It's a game that's easy to cheat on, but also easy to be
caught. Tso was a master cheater--you had to really watch him closely, or
else he'd sneak by a three of clubs when he was supposed to have been out of
them five rounds before. Eileen and Julie were almost telepathic when it
came to reading each other's hands, but all too often you could distract them
and take the trick. Still, to accomodate the "new guy" (the
status bristling inside me all the while), we alternated teammates. I
played with Julie first, who was trying to figure out whether I had a girlfriend
somewhere else, and Eileen next, who was wondering if Julie was looking into my
girlfriend status. Tso was probably wondering why they were wondering, and
he was also wondering where the Twister mat was and whether he could get both
them drunk and myself gone before everyone fell asleep.
That night, a small, patient addiction was born. Nobody realized what a funny team name TsoLong was until maybe March, which doesn't speak well of the intellectual caliber of NIU students overall. Once it did, however, we used it as an excuse to play together. I won't say we kicked ass during the spades tournaments or anything, but we learned to read each others' subtleties pretty well. For most of the players in the tournament, it wasn't hard to bend the rules a little. Tso would actually go so far as to knock somebody's drink on their lap, at which point he would flash his hand at me, where I would see two or three royal cards, grinning up at me like the Crown Jewels. I personally found more subtle ways to do this sort of thing; often, if the other players were engrossed enough, all I had to do was stretch my arms upwards with my cards face-out, and Tso was usually able to catch this.
Our opinions on when to cheat and when to play fair were usually neck-in-neck, which came in handy during other difficult decisions to be made.
You see, the mix of people on this floor left something to be desired. By the end of the year, Kim, our RA, would be in tears because of our raucous and miscreant-like behavior, which mystifies us to this day. Keith, one of our so-called cohorts, would angrily refer to us as a bunch of "fucking faggots" after our repeated efforts to disturb him enough to move off the floor. Eric Wittmeier would think the same thing after our efforts to just rile him up and make him forget about studying. And Anthony himself would have a few choice words to direct towards most of us specifically, and those words were not "Happy Birthday."
Each spasm of outrage was usually triggered by a poem, usually written by yours truly. They would usually take the form of one popular song or another, with the words conforming to the tune. Case in point: Steve, my roommate after Dale, was dubbed TV-Man because of his incessant TV watching. I never met a guy take more pains to dud himself up in a tucked-in shirt, combed hair and neatly-tied sneakers just so he could sit on the edge of his bed and watch Family Matters nonstop. I hated this, I hated the stink that emanated from his unwashed body (the kind of stink that only comes from long inactivity inside an enclosed space), and I decided to write a song about it. To the tune of James' "Laid", I give you:
This TV is loud with passion and love
Vaseline on with his hand in a glove
The Nintendo blaring, he can't get enoughMy therapist says I shouldn't live there no more
I locked him out, he kicked a hole in the door
He doesn't buy groceries when Hustler's at the store
Oh he thinks she's so pretty...eeeeeeCaught him hiding under the bed
Between his legs he's got his head
I chose a hallway bed insteadHe might't dress up in women's clothes
Doesn't even have a gender role
Hope he don't think I'm pretty...eeeee(refrain)
He can't clear 5'6 without a whore on the mat
Has a remote control to find his itch to scratch
Thinks we respect him, that's why he's coming back
Oh he think's Barbie's pretty...eeeeeT-Veeeee
T-VeeeeeeC. Long
4/18/94
Of course, this was just a side project that more or less everyone was involved in. Another was the compilation of our own Top Ten Lists, most of which centered on ripping on one person or another. The only copy I have surviving to date is this one:
Top Ten Things You'll Never Hear at 740 Regent Drive, DeKalb, IL
10. After we do all these dishes, let's call home and tell our parents we can't wait to see them again.
9. It's just a woman in a halter-top, for God's sake. What's to get excited about?
8. I don't know; I just don't feel like drinking tonight.
7. Turn that dumb porno movie off already.
6. I guess I should probably start studying.
5. Maybe we should ask Dale if Sarah* can come.
4. I hate beer.
3. I hate alcohol, period.
2. There's a frat party on Hillcrest. We're there. Where's my flannel and baseball cap?
1. Isn't it time we graduated?*Sarah was Dale's girlfriend/fiance at the time. I can't say I meant anything but disrespect. Sorry Dale--I know it made your life harder.
Tso and I took particular pleasure in the idea of using art to deface a personality, but the evolution of the TsoLong team didn't really pick up until the fabled walk, which placed us into some sort of alien category that actually saw pleasure in walking 53 miles over a day and a half and staying in some fleabag motel. That night, resting for the trip home at my house, we watched Reservoir Dogs, which my brother had just seen while at some college trip and had been raving about ever since.
To that day, I don't remember paying particular attention to the way a film
was put together, although I'd loved movies from just about day one. That
night we must have watched key scenes half a dozen times, and couldn't stop
talking about them. We rented it immediately upon our return to DeKalb,
and soon, half our "clique" was engrossed in a limping yet
hotly-diverse debate on what made a film a film and what made a movie a movie.
First Round, August, 1994Tso: Ace Ventura sucked.
Me: No it didn't.
Tso: Yes it did.
Me: Well I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. (end of review)Second Round, November, 1994
Tso: Mary Shelly's Frankenstein was awesome.
Me: I thought the plot was a little contrived.
Tso: What are you talking about? It had a clear good/evil conflict.
Me: Yeah, that's real original. It was contrived.
Tso: You don't even know what "contrived" means, do you?
Me: No. Do you?
Tso: (curses, walks off) end of reviewThird and Final Round, March, 1995
Me: The Curse of the Demon has a perfect good-within-evil struggle. You never know which way the heroine can go because there's never really any clear direction for her.
Tso: But the ending left too many plot holes unresolved. You walk out of a movie like that remembering the last five minutes, and it just doesn't stock up to the rest of the film.
Me: Well that's true... The chick had nice tits though.
Tso: Uh-huh. (end of review)
It went on more or less like this up until 1995, and beyond. We discovered
alcohol and found that these debates were more fun when fueled by Aftershock; we
discovered that the Reeds were almost as entertaining as a couple of toked-up
Muppets movie when you got a few beers in them. Then, one night, inspired
by the recent release of Pulp Fiction and Tso's COMS 101 assignment, we
set pen to paper and wrote our first radio script.
It was a disaster. The hero (me) rescued Dale's bride-to-be (Sarah) from the clutches of the bad guy (Tso). When Dale and everyone else finally arrived on the scene, Dale decided he didn't want her any more. This was supposed to underscore the uncertainty of where the film's sympathies lay and the subjectivity of the protagonist/antagonist roles. What it actually did was give any potential audience a headache as they waded through a confusing mishmash of characters who all walked and talked like something out of a Martin Scorcese movie on valium. In short, it sucked. But it spawned two more radio programs and a movie scene in which two guys (TsoLong, once again) break out of prison by using the brilliant tactic of flicking a lit cigarette into the guard's eye and taking his keys.
The dialogue was unbelievably wannabe-ish, as if we thought we could be Quentin Tarantino or even Jon Favreau overnight, where you've got extraordinary people talking about mundane events in the midst of a heist or something. Our regurgitated tripe didn't even come close--I'm almost proud to admit it:
From "Broken Dishes," a radio program by Chris Tso and Craig LongME: This soda is really good.
TSO: Let's kill someone today.
ME: Sure. You want any of my soda?From "The Strikeout," a short script by Chris Tso and Craig Long
DALE: That asshole Murphy has my woman. I want my woman back.
ME: Why? S he's just going to marry you anyway.
(LAUGH TRACK INSERTED HERE)
DALE: Let's go to town and get my goddam wife back.
ME: Do we have time to grab a soda on the way?
TSO: Yeah, before we kill anyone?
It's not hard to see the influences present. But it was interrupting the
cycle of class-work-beer-work-sleep that we'd been inuring ourselves to for
three years then. However, before any further projects could get off the
ground, college was over and we had to start working for real.
Most of the time, when we weren't bitching about our jobs (mine would eventually take a turn for the better, just for the record), we were trying to figure out an award-winning formula for a screenplay idea, but we usually resorted to opposing ideas on the quality of a screenplay versus movie versus novel. Most of our discussions were fruitless, resulting in an enjoyable argument, but little in the way of actual productivity. Consider this debate, which took place in Clearwater, Florida, during Christmas of 1998:
"Seems to me writing movies is easier than writing books," (Tso) said.Then, an interesting blend of events happened (this is capsized in the Dooley's Retrospective essay, by the way). First, I had the semester from hell and decided that I wanted to get out of, if not teaching, at least the particular high school I was in. Tso started coming to work later and later, being fed up with a job that basically meant going in circles, and found more and more time to explore the Internet and collect movie information. Our meetings at bars and movie theaters became more and more frenzied, with each of us searching for a way out, something, anything, only break me out of this hellish routine, will you? We landed on the idea of commemorating a set of songs in the Dooley's Pub jukebox, an idea which quickly expanded into a full-length movie soundtrack and then a web page. Hence, Thursdays at Dooley's was born. The movie centered around the concept of former-comrades-turned-bitter enemies, martial arts (which neither of us cared a fart in a phone booth for actually doing), and genetic Darwinism, with a slew of references, internal jokes and overall appeals to the audience's (imagined or otherwise) taste for story.
"No it's not."
"When you're writing a movie, all you have to do is show what's being done, or said. In a book, you've got to describe everything, but in a movie all you've got to do is show it. Hell, a lot of it is up to an actor's interpretation anyway."
"Maybe, but not all of it. You're talking individual strengths here. It might be easier for one person to write within the confines of one particular genre or another, but that doesn't make the genre inherently easy or hard."
"Yes it does. If Joe Blow is angry, all I have to do as a director is show him breaking some guy's face, is all. If I'm putting him in a book, I've got to explain why and shit."--from the notebooks of Craig Long, Volume X, page 3
The funny part was that my theory was both validated and useless. I
confronted Tso about this during the making of the CD:
"So we've got an idea."
"Yep."
"For a movie."
"Right."
"So it's all easy right? So come up with the script."
"Hey, I'm burning the CD, motherfucker."--from the notebooks of Craig Long, Volume X, page 65
| 5:30 a.m. | Get up | Sleep |
| 5:45 a.m. | Weep | Sleep |
| 6 a.m. | Eat breakfast, shower | Sleep |
| 6:30 | Out the door | Feed cat |
| 7:00 | Look over lesson plans, wonder what the hell you were thinking | Sleep |
| 7:40 | Start class | Sleep |
| 8:30 | Class settles down, you begin to teach | Wake up, do some light textbook reading |
| 9:10 | Steal cigarettes from kids, smoke half of them in teacher's lounge | go back to sleep |
| 9:30 | Fend off "what does your girlfriend look like" questions | Wake up |
| 10:15 | Wake up Stan in front row | Get up |
| 10:17 | Remind Stan to wake you in half an hour | Eat, shower |
| 11:00 | Lunch duty: break up couples making out with hands in each others' clothing; break up fight between two limp-wristed freshmen; duck in time to miss bottle thrown at head | Walk to campus at slow, leisurely pace |
| 11:30 | Start lunch | Go to office. If grading isn't done finish. Swap dirty jokes with other instructors. |
| 11:40 | Finish lunch, start looking over lesson plans for next day.Will be so tired, 40 minutes to review rules for using a period will seem completely acceptable | Go out to lunch. Or, if no money, go home and heat up can of leftover cream of mushroom soup. |
| 12:10 | Hall duty. Same as lunch duty, only kids can escape your wrath easier because of all the damned fire exits | Go back to campus |
| 12:40 | Committee meetings on school improvement. Discuss relative merits of school baseball caps versus pendants. Someone brings up morale problem--remind them we'll be planting flowers outside the school on Saturday | Prepare for class |
| 1:00 | Last class. Have magic trick to settle students down. If it involves chopping a finger off, so much the better. | Teach class. Look stern whenever students look like they might fall asleep |
| 1:05 | Retrieve stolen knife from magic trick off front row student. | |
| 1:15 | Offer to show video if class can not swear for rest of the hour. One student asks for Full Metal Jacket. Your best student tells him to "F**k off, we're supposed to be good today." | |
| 1:30 | Cry under desk; take swigs from hidden flask of bourbon | |
| 2:15 | Introduce textbook students have been using since August. Count how many have lost theirs. If it's under 50% of the class, offer them a candy reward. | Go to class. Look stern if snore escapes when you fall asleep--blame on someone else |
| 3:00 | Class leaves | Class--see above |
| 4:00-5:00 | You leave | Class |
| 6:00 | Get drunk, watch TV | Class |
| 7:00 | Don't remember | Class |
| 8:00 | Grade papers | Class |
| 9:00 | Grade papers/continue drinking | Last minute research/dirty jokes |
| 10:00 | Have asprin; fall asleep on couch in front of bad straight-to-cable movie | Go home. |
| 12:00 | Sleep | Do homework or grade. If offer comes to go out, eat first. |
| 2 a.m.-5 a.m. | Sleep | Work/grade/read |
You can see how, while you keep busy, creativity is a bit more inspired.
Just for the record, here's how Tso managed to accomodate his work on Dooley's
and other such projects:
| 8:00 a.m. | alarm clock goes off | sleep |
| 8:20 | hit snooze button | sleep |
| 9:00 | gel hair down to presentable appearance; leave house | sleep |
| 9:45 | sneak in back door to work | sleep |
| 10:15 | check e-mail; send dirty jokes | get up, go to bathroom |
| 10:45 | compliment boss on tie to cover for lack of productivity | sleep |
| 11:00 | lunch | sleep |
| 1:00 | file miscellaneous paperwork. Just keep shuffling papers around in desk. If anyone's going outside for a smoke, now's a good time | eat breakfast/lunch, depending on mood |
| 1:30 | Make any phone calls to east coast, so everyone will be at lunch and you only have to leave messages | surf Internet. Check out latest fake pix of Brittany Spears and Bill Gates in the elevator together. Forward to everyone |
| 2:15 | Ask accounting if books are balanced, just to piss them off | watch TV |
| 3:00 | Sneak out for round of golf | go play golf |
| 5:00 | Have dinner | Have dinner |
| 6:00 | Meet at Dooley's pub | Meet at Dooley's pub |
| 8:00 | Go to movie | Go to movie |
| 10:00 | Back at Dooley's | Back at Dooley's |
| 1:00 | Go home, go to bed | Stay at Dooley's |
| 3:00 | Lie awake, staring at ceiling and thinking of how much you don't want to go back to work tomorrow | Go home, watch movies. Call around, see if anyone's up. |
(Actually, that wasn't even worth the amount of space it took up. But anyway...)
This was how we managed to not only burn a few lousy CDs, but take a bunch of
pictures and fit them into a format that would both look good and convey the
sense of unreality and adventure we were looking for for the Thursdays at
Dooley's Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. I was more or less writing a
book at the time (which got tossed out the window when I was halfway done with
no story to boot), which got in the way of producing a finished script.
I'm currently working on it, though--I have pretty much the entire scenario in
my head as to what happens, and I'm not even sure it'll turn out good. But
it will turn out. And that's another big attitude of TsoLong.
If we were in high school ourselves, we'd be telling the teacher: "Look, I
may not have done it right, but I did it, okay? Isn't that
worth at least a B+?"
We don't expect some movie critic or artsy-fartsy reviewer to stumble upon our work, crap his/her pants with delight and run to a phone to offer us a multimillion dollar deal. We don't expect the women to gush over our badly-scanned photographs, and we don't expect the masses to take even momentary notice of us. We just want our stuff to be out there. Finished. Somewhat polished. Rip it apart all you want, fair reader. Just don't expect anything but reciprocal consideration when we get our claws on your pathetic little life story.
You see, we had the balls to put our actual names to this. How many other 20M or Geocities users can claim the same thing?
Craig Long
July 14, 2001
DeKalb, Illinois
Copyright 2001 Tso Long Productions ©