Back in computer college days, we’d spend a lot of after-school time at whatever bar was nearby. For the first few months, this was a place called Charlie’s. It was kinda pricey for college students but it was in the same building as the school and we were pretty lazy. 

About halfway through the year, the school moved to a new building and Charlie’s was too far to lazily walk to. 

The new place for lazy students was called The Huntsman. It was a dump but it was next door to the school and had the added bonus of being cheap. 

Some of us started referring to going drinking as going to church. Since I rarely leave anything alone, I looked up the Greek god of hunting (“Huntsman” get it?) and started calling it the Church of Apollo.

The third floor of the school was for the legal and medical secretary classes. While it was possible for guys to take these classes, it never happened. This meant that the guys washroom on the third floor was the loneliest place in the building. 

When a friend of mine, Wendel, turned 19, drinking age at the time in Ontario, we celebrated by knocking back a bottle of wine in the loneliest place in school. 

The label on the bottle said “4 Aces”. We were about to take the bottle out of the brown paper bag but decided to keep the bottle in the bag after all. We weren’t worried about being seen. We just thought that a brand like 4 Aces should be drunk from the bottle in a brown paper bag. 

A few days after patting our backs for finding such a private spot, we discovered that we weren’t the first. Apparently, the legal and medical secretary students had already been up to more exciting hi jinx than Wendel or I had come up with. 

We felt like such amateurs.