'Sup, Guys?

Back in Madison—a couple of years ago—my sister and some of the other people that she lived with and I used to play this game.

My sister had learned about, or helped invent, the game when she was in college at Oberlin. She’s a little older than I am, so she knows more about drinking games than I do. With age comes wisdom.

Here’s how the game went:

You and your friends sit on the porch. You drink beer. You place a cardboard box in the road in front of you, and you watch it. You watch the cars that go by interact with the box.

The box can have things in it, but not heavy, dangerous things. At worst, the box can get run over, and you certainly do not want people wrecking their cars by running into the box. You can fill the box with empty beer cans, or plastic bags you’ve accumulated from shopping for groceries. It really doesn’t matter what’s in the box—as long as it’s not hazardous. What mainly matters is that you’re sitting on the porch with your friends and drinking beer and watching the box.

The game is called “box in the road”.

If you’re feeling particularly creative, it can be changed to “object in the road”. This permutation can be played if you have something around the house that you don’t care about very much, like an old, soggy pumpkin or a bag of Olestra-flavored chips. It doesn’t matter much what you’re putting in the road. What matters is the interplay between the drunks on the porch and the things going by the field of vision of the drunks on the porch.

My sister had many entertaining stories about playing “box in the road”. Sometimes, the car slows down. Every once in awhile—this, I have not seen for myself—the person driving stops, gets out, and puts the box in their trunk. Sometimes, the car drives right over the box like it’s not there. Usually, they swerve around the box. What mainly matters is this: you, on the porch, get drunk, while sometimes you get to see something mildly entertaining. This game is not so engaging that you don’t talk to each other while you’re playing it, but you do have something more interesting to look at than you had before.

After all: the cars are going to go by whether you’re out there or not. If you are out there, it’s better to fuck with the cars.

When Sam and Tom came and visited me last month, they were particularly struck by the friendliness of the people here in Lawrence. This street I live on is a little bit too heavily trafficked to be a “box in the road”-able street, so we mostly just drank on the porch without playing any games.

The reason that they thought Lawrence was so friendly was that whenever you walk down the street here and past a house with a porch, a voice comes out of the darkness. A voice that has just looked up from a bong or a bottle of beer. A voice that—through its inflection—is clearly not interested in the specifics of how you are, but still wants to know:

“…’sup, guys?”

We heard this question many, many times while Sam and Tom were here. I live on a college-student kind of street (the University of Kansas is only a couple of blocks west of me) and almost all of the houses in my neighborhood are old, and have porches. We would walk back to my apartment after eating with my parents, down the mowable overgrown brick sidewalks in the dark, under the constant rhythmic buzzing of the cicadas, and once a block that stoned voice would come out of the eternal black:

“…’sup, guys?”

And we would answer something like “’sup” back. What other answer is there, really?

So, I told my friend Erich about this, and he made a game out of it. It’s a game much in the spirit of “box in the road”. Here’s how you play it:

Like “box in the road”, you must have a porch, beer, friends, and a street that is traveled. It helps to have a couch out there, which I do.

You sit and drink beer, and whenever a group of people walks by, you say “’sup, guys?” in the stonedest voice possible. The subtlety of this game involves how far into (or out of!) your field of vision the group of people is before or after you ask the question. Also, they almost always respond to the question, and this is where the game really gets interesting, and where it is possible to lose the game.

We talked for a little while about how we should respond when the people walking by responded to the question. I suggested “yeah, son”, but then Erich suggested (the brilliant and bizarre) “…private…”. A typical exchange under the current rules goes like this:

(Group of people walks by the porch. Right before [or after] the group is out of the parentheses of the wooden columns that hold the roof of the porch up, someone on the porch goes:)

“’Sup, guys?”

(Group falls all over itself to answer the embarrassing and meaningless question. Answers like “yeah!” and “woo!” are common. The person whose turn it was to ask “’sup, guys” responds, unseen but nodding:)

“…Private….”

“Private” is said in the same stoned voice as “’sup, guys?” and generally sounds much like saying the word “awesome”.

It is possible to lose this game. Once, a group walked by and when asked what was up, responded that they were “just looking for a party, man”. That could have been a disaster; if the victims had come over to the porch from the sidewalk and tried to join us, we would all have lost.

Another time, we asked a group what was up, and hours later—still playing the game—accidentally asked what was up again to a guy and a girl who were in that group, headed in the opposite direction, obviously going somewhere to fuck.

“’Sup, guys?” was answered with:

“You guys are still out here?”

The obvious subtext was: “I am taking this hott chick back to my apartment to fuck her. Why are you guys are still sitting on that porch?”

That time, we all lost.

It’s getting colder here in Lawrence, and getting dark earlier and earlier. There are probably only a couple of weekends left for playing “’sup, guys?”. Only time will tell what the staying-power of this new game is, but I think it’ll still be possible to play it during the winter. The problem is that when winter comes, fewer people will be walking by.