Twitch the Artist

Our Hippie Room

Few know how artistically gifted the Twitch was/is, but I, his devoted sergebutt-year roomie saw first hand his talents.

First, a little background. fish and pissheads had very few privileges - the important ones came with being a sergebutt. Chief among these was the privilege of decorating your room. (That meant that your roommate was actually now a roommate and no longer your "old lady".

I managed to buy some 40-watt blacklight fluorescent bulbs from a graduating zip the previous spring. The first thing we did upon moving in was to replace the standard white bulbs with those blacklights. Then, of course, we had to add the blacklight posters that were so common back in those days. The only one I remember was the one of two buzzards sitting on a dead tree in the desert with one saying to the other: "Patience my ass… I'm gonna go kill something."

I also brought along my prize orchid. I don't remember it being anything special but I had nursed it back to health and I felt pretty paternal towards the thing.

Well, one day Twitch must have gotten really bored so he went out and bought some fluorescent paint. The stuff looked normal under normal light but it glowed eerily under blacklight. He also bought some Murine and Woolite. I had no idea what he had in mind.

A few days later I walked into my room and saw a sickening sight. My beautiful orchid had fluorescent orange dots outlining every leaf. As I looked around I realized that everything in the room had the same dotted fluorescent dotted outline - even the corners on the sides and the ceiling. I couldn't believe what had happened to my prized plant.

The Twitch closed the drapes and turned on the blacklights. It was the eeriest sight you ever saw in your life to see all of those dots glowing everywhere in the room. Then I looked up.

I never knew that Murine glowed gold and Woolite glowed a pale blue under blacklight… but Twitch did. He had painted the moon in Murine and the entire zodiac in Woolite on the ceiling. You couldn't see them in daylight but his handiwork sure showed up when the blacklights came on.

Incidentally. It made everyone on campus suspect we were smoking weed and that was a really bad thing in those days. fish Jones and fish Myers had been kicked out of A&M during spring finals our fish year for smoking pot so it was a really serious matter back then. So, during the Christmas break, someone went into our room and tossed it inside out looking for drugs. It was the biggest mess you can imagine when we returned.

Twitch's Fake ID

My second example of his creativity was his fake driver's license.

All the rest of us used the standard method of buying press type and laying it over the existing type on our license, changing our date of birth of course, and then laminating the whole thing. It worked.

That wasn't good enough for Twitch - he wanted to try his hand at forging. So, he bought a big sheet of poster board and then drew out a large, proportionally-correct outline of a Texas driver's license. He then carefully hand lettered the whole thing. Filling in the large colored background on the top half of the license proved a challenge until he figured out that oxblood shoe polish was almost perfect.

Having finished the layout, design, and lettering, he them turned his attention to the photo. He went through an entire pack of Polaroid film until he figured out the correct distance from which to take the picture of the license to get the size just right. Then he did the same thing (I think I took his photos, though) until his headshot was proportionally correct for the license.

Now it was a simple matter of cutting out the photo, attach it to the fake license and to laminate the whole thing. His fake ID looked better than the real thing.

Twitch's Fake Johnny Walker Red

The there was the time out senior year when Twitch faked-up Johnny Walker Red.

Gonzo and I lived off campus in a mobile home and it was everyone's unofficial gathering place. A non-reg friend named Ron Miori had been out the previous weekend and left a nearly full bottle of Johnny Walker Red. Sometime during the following week Twitch came out to the trailer and got into the scotch. By the time he was finished for the night that bottle was half empty.

Miori called me Thursday evening and said he was going away for the weekend and he wanted to take his bottle of scotch with him, so he would be by to pick it up Friday afternoon. I decided to put the monkey back on Twitch's back so I called him and told him he needed to do something.

The gentlemanly thing to do would have been to buy another bottle to replace what he drank. But he, like most of the rest of us, was short on money and Johnny Walker was nowhere close to being within our budget. So, he decided to improvise.

Eventually, he stumbled on to Coca Cola and something else. It didn't look or smell like scotch but it did look like it and all Twitch wanted to do was to buy time. The whole time I was watching his alchemy and thinking that Miori was going to kill me.

Apparently, he never got into the scotch that weekend and I was thinking that was the end of the story… but no t quite.

The following weekend Twitch and others happened to be over when Miori shows up with his bottle of "scotch". He suggested that we share the bottle since he had no further use for it. Twitch, seeing that the jig was just about up, opted for a more dramatic way of letting the cat out of the bag. He grabbed the bottle out of Miori's hands, removed the top and began to chug it. Miori's eyes got as big as saucers - he couldn't imagine anyone being able to drink scotch that way - or wanting to. Then we told him the story. I don't remember Miori's reaction.

Tom (TE) Schoolcraft