Weekend Odyssey in New Haven

IT'S 1 p.m. Friday, your last class is over (or you've decided to trash your afternoon schedule), and you're in a friend's car, headed for New Haven, Yale, and The Game. That's the easy part.

Half-way through your two-and-a-half hour ride, and with a six pack left in your case of Molson's, the monotonous drone of the Mass Pike and towns like Natick, Hopkinton, and Framingham begins to promote a sinking feeling along with the beginnings of what will hopefully be a three-day buzz. The Game will last only three hours, at most, and that's if Ron Cuccia takes his time in the Harvard huddles You ask yourself and your friends: What are we going to do in New Haven, which even Yalies call the armpit of New England?

The answer is simple, though it never appears so to the Yale undergraduate. You're going to drink, watch your friends drink, watch post-middle-aged alumni ane their sagging spouses drink, drink some more, may be have a good meal, and then go to a few parties just to prove that Harvard's social scene really isn't the worst on the east coast. And then, when you're through, you're going to drink some more; you may even, if you're lucky, get drunk, and forget that Yale's campus is held prisoner in the center of a city plagued by racial tension, violent crimes, and rapidly decomposing three-family tenements.

The hard part is remembering, amid the incessant bending of elbows for vodka collins, gin and tonics, seven and sevens, and pitchers of imported beer, where it is that you are supposed to do all of this drinking, and a lesser amount of consuming solid fibers. You ask your Yale friends and they shrug their sioulders, and allow their faces to assume that certain empty look you only get while reading the questions on your Economics 10 mid-term. One Yale junior tells you cutely, "If you want sex, or drugs, or rock and roll, you've come to the wrong place. Here we have a library--it's called the Beinecke Rare Book Library--where in case of fire, all the air is pushed out after only 30 seconds. Everyone inside dies, but the books are saved."

But you better. You remember the last Game at Yale, when your roomate rolled out of the car and onto the streets of New Haven dead drunk, stone cold, motionless. And even he, with a minimum of encouragement and pre-happy hour briefing, managed to find a few fun spots. You can do it if you try hard enough, even if most of your Yale friends have found an excuse for risking death by spending their Friday and Saturday nights in Beinecke.

"Most people here realize the trade-offs that come with partying," your friend Norman is saying. "They really would, in the best of all possibly worlds, like not to be grinds, but they will always like to be prepared for class." Norman gives you a knowing smile, perceiving astutely that you, in your three short hours at Yale, have done more drinking in New Haven bars than he has in his two years there, not including the advanced-standing credit the admissions office gave him. "That's right,"Norman's friend Mike chimes in, sensing an easy few points scored in the olde rivalry. "Academics are a lot tougher than they are at your school," he says, never mentioning Yale's favorite unspoken word. "There's academic excellence all around you at your school. I'm surprised it's not contagious to more people."

"But just hold on a doggone minute," a proud Crimson student mumbles, momentarily regaining pseudo-consciousness. "How do you know Yale is harder than Harvard?" Well, this is simply the wrong question to ask. Mike has been waiting for two years to get another crack at this one, and his bathroom mirror has gotten tired of the rehearsed exaggerated gestures, professorial air, and stubborn righteousness. He goes on for nearly 20 minutes of sophistry, ending as you knew he would. "Harvard may be harder to get into," he says, conceding the obvious, only to catch you with a sucker punch. "Yale wants to give its undergraduates a very different experience than Harvard does. The feeling here is that you may as well put your nose to the grindstone and suffer for four years. You can do extracurricular activities for the rest of your life, but you can only study the Great Masters for four years."

YOU suddenly realize that Mike, too, will be a Great Master someday, and may even turn into the next Harvy C. Mansfield. But Mike's claims of intense academic effort by Yale undergraduates are not easy to deny, especially when you go looking for Mike's friend Victor, whom Mike suggests may have a better idea about who serves the best draught beer in town. Amid the hundreds of students frenetically cramming a month before finals, who all give you strange looks because your Converse sneakers squeak ever so slightly, there is no problem finding Victor. Isn't that, you wonder out loud, just a tad strange?

Not really. It seems that Victor has been sitting in the same wooden, straight back chair in Stillman library every day for the past three years, seven hours a day. Occasionally he fools some of his friends by leaving for three minutes to get a drink of water at the "bubbler," or a Doctor Pepper in the automated vending "Machine City," which crazy Victor calls one of the hottest pick up spots on campus. But usually Victor is more than easily accessible, and always ready to speak on the virtues of Yale. "I've talked to a lot of people." Victor says, "and I sincerely believe the academic pressures here are greater than in Cambridge."

Unfortunately there is no room in the Dewey decimal system for New Haven bars, and Victor is for once left dumbfounded by your rather simple query. But meeting him has not been totally useless, for Victor sheds some light on an equally important question. That steeple you noticed on a hill about two miles away from main campus belongs to Albert Magnus, a Catholic women's college which is described by Victor, who has never been there as a silly little school.

Later that evening you learn why Harvard emphasizes extracurricular activities, and why Yale men seem, comparatively speaking, so tense. At a Davenport College party, usually one of the wildest during The Weekend, you meet not one Yale woman, but a host of friendly Albertus Magnus types. Beth, a somewhat typical Albertus student, takes you into a dark corner and, with little prodding, gives you the rundown you have been seeking all day. "The best place to eat, not fancy, but fun, is Gentrees, a little var and restaurant across from Davenport," she says. "And the best place to drink, though it's a little expensive, is the Greenery, down on Chapel St. And you should make sure you go to Toad's place, a concert hall on York St, where they serve drinks till 2:30 a.m. And then there is..." But wait, you break in, not knowing the end is near, "Why do you know so much about the Fun Spots?"

"Oh, all of you Yale guys like to play dumb, don't you." Beth says, a certain twinkle in her eye, awaiting the predictable response. But for you, a Harvard guest at Yale, there is the moral dilemna, based on the olde rivalry. Should you play along, and be a Yalie, just for one night, or will you be true to your school? Be-wop, shaboom.

"The truth is I'm really not from Yale," you begin, and before your Cantab residency may be fully explained, she is gone, for good. Which leaves you, in the throes of your drunken stupor, already beginning to forget Beth's favorite New Haven hangouts, with a moral: Before you leave Cambridge, you must either resolve to concede losing a weekend battle in The Rivalry or to find out for yourself what to do at Yale.

In other words, read on