Those of us left behind know that Ames is at its best in the summer. The bars are conspicuously free of the jackass element. There is an air of free-thinking among the free-drinking masses left behind to while away the hot and humid months while the more adventurous pursue hiking trips across Europe and internships in major metropolitan areas like Omaha and Butte.

I like to think of the summer as a natural filtering process for eliminating impurities from the campus. The dormies, fratboys and off-campus types that decide to stick it out are virtually guaranteed to be up to 75 percent less annoying, ill-tempered and ignorant than the average lot that goes here during the fall and spring semesters.

In fact, I don’t even like to go to the bars during the year because the atmosphere is one of such desperate drunken debauchery.

Who can relax when even getting served is an entire production?

Forget about the usual Friday and Saturday night mayhem. Give me a casual Wednesday night at Cy’s anytime.

Everyone left in Ames feels a kind of comraderie as if they were all battle-scarred veterans of the regular year finally getting some well-deserved R and R.

I haven’t had a tense night in the bars since my old, English roommate Daryl went back to Blighty.

This guy was a charmer. I had to feel for him though. He was home in England until mid-July when his girlfriend called him and asked him to come back to Ames. Like a fool, he jumped on a plane to reunite with his honey under the impression that she really needed his companionship.

Within an hour of his deboarding, she revealed that the reason for her desperate need for a face-to-face was not because she wanted some sexual healing.

She wanted to dump him and thought that to do it over the phone would be cruel. As if making the guy leave his family in England so she could feel better about ripping the heart out of his chest was the RIGHT thing to do.

So for the next month, I had to babysit Daryl, who I hadn’t met until he came back from England. Ironically enough, Daryl turned out to be the same guy I mentioned in a previous column about the Veishea riots.

You may remember I complained about some limey running off with my Jim Beam? That’s him. We could laugh about it by that time but the heartache of lost liquor lingers still.

Daryl was one of those guys who gets a deathwish whenever a woman dumps him. But rather than threaten to kill himself or talk things out, he would just get loaded and start fights with the biggest guy in the bar.

Daryl was on the cross-country team and maybe weighed in at eight stone soaking wet. So we would go out and, luckily for Daryl, a 240-pound member of the rugby team would show up for Daryl to screw with.

Luckily for me, he used a lot of English slang so these guys rarely knew they were being insulted before I could intervene. How many Americans do you know who go ballistic when someone calls them a wanker or a git? They even say twat like hat so it is often impossible for anyone but the staunchest anglophile to know what just happened and even then, they are so glad to be insulted by a real life, honest-to-God Englishman that they don’t care WHAT he calls them.

Eventually they would catch on that Daryl was looking to get his ass handed to him, but because he was such a tiny dude, I could usually persuade them to ignore him. It was kind of funny, really. “He doesn’t want to mess with the ISU rugby team,” they would tell me.

“Indeed he doesn’t,” I would say, “So let us pity him together as brothers who have also known the scorn of women.” Then they would slag off and Daryl would start something with someone else.

His other bar trick was eating coins and bits of broken glass. The ladies loved that one and would often cry out for larger denominations.

“Do a quarter!” and “Does anybody have a silver dollar?” The REALLY funny part was Daryl never remembered swallowing anything but his first three beers. After that it was nothing but darkness.

When we woke up in the morning around 2 p.m., it was my job to give him the total. Luckily, it wasn’t usually over a buck fifty and he ate enough grains to make the experience almost painless. I say almost because Daryl would never admit to it, but on several occasions I distinctly heard him weeping in the toilet. I think it was the dimes. Of course, I probably could have stopped him if I really wanted to. So the obvious moral to this story is, don’t ever steal my Jim Beam because sooner or later, I will just watch as your girlfriend dumps you and eating change is all you have left.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily. He don’t want no scrubs.