Adam

Delta Chi House, 4 AM on a Saturday in February in 1999. I'm trying to pass out on a couch in the foyer but I can't, because everybody who isn't passed out is either hooking up or playing loud music or both. The walls are cheap as shit so I hear every moan and every jam-band bassline. Some of the moaning is coming from the room I share with Stinky Pete, so that's how come I'm on the couch in the foyer.

Loud Ken appears at the end of the hall. "Yo, Adam," he whispers. "Come with me." I get up and follow him, because what else am I doing besides listening to Stinky Pete make out with the girl I told him I liked.

"Dude, Ken, it's kicked." We're standing over the keg in the laundry room which had Beast in it until an hour ago. I gesture to the red keg cup upside down on the tap indicating it's empty.

"You'll learn," he says, "that it's never kicked."

"Dude, seriously--"

"Shh." says Loud Ken. "Be quiet." He squats down next to the keg tub. He takes the tube in his hand, opens the valve. "Hear that?" he asks, holding the valve up to my head. It blows air into my ear, which is incidentally the way the girl I brought to the party communicated that she wanted to go hook up. But unlike the keg, she blew in Stinky Pete's ear, not mine. And unlike the keg, she was FULL of beer.

"Yea. It's just air. I told you, dude, it's like beyond kicked--"

"You're HEARING it," Loud Ken says, "but you're not LISTENING to it." He puts the valve against his ear, and turns away from me. Like six and a half minutes go by. I know it's six and a half minutes because I hear the entirety of Pink Floyd's "Money" playing in Spaced Tim's room, and I know how long that song is because during Hell Week we had to shotgun half a case each of Natty Light before that song was over.

After six and a half minutes I go "Ken!" and he goes "Shhh..." and then he brings the valve up inches from his mouth. He starts mouthing words, and at first I think they're the words to "Us and Them" but his lips and the lyrics don't match up. I know the lyrics because if you didn't shotgun all your beers you were punished by getting the first couple lines of "Us and Them" shaved into your chest. Luckily I had enough chest hair, because if a guy was too hairless to do it, they just made you drop your pants and gave you what they call a Shine On You Crazy Diamond, and you don't want to know what that is.

"Forward he cried..." I hear from Spaced Tim's room, and Ken stops mouthing words into the tube, closes the valve. He takes the cup off the tap, gives the keg a pump. He opens the valve and beer gushes out.

My eyes involuntarily fill up with tears, like Young Mike's did during Hell Week when he didn't finish the half case and he didn't have any chest hair and he knew what was coming next. But unlike Young Mike, these are tears of joy, and unlike Young Mike, I will not become known in proctology circles as "The Fratboy Buttrocket."

"You're lucky," Loud Ken says, handing me a perfectly poured beer. "I only get to teach one."

So now I hear it all. Every gurgle, every sputter you hear and think "Well, this party's over, it's time to grab the nearest girl Adam has a crush on and go hook up with her on his bed." Kegs. Each one has a story. The isolation of being born in a factory in Milwaukee, the fear of being loaded onto a truck with fifty nine identical brothers and sisters, lazy delivery men who drop you down flights of stairs, careless sorority girls who pump you 'till you want to burst but you can't: all you can do is foam, foam, foam.

So yea, Stinky Pete got some. But I got something better: I got inducted into the Secret and Ancient Fraternal Order of Keg Whisperers.

It's funny they call it Keg Whispering though, 'cause pretty much all you have to do is listen.

My name is Adam. And I Keep It Fun.