After
the old insulation and axles were out from under our previously
mobile home my dad required me to re-insulate and but up some nice
permanent skirting. He gave me vague instructions and left for the
day. Cole, my brother Matt and I went right to work under my
direction cutting boards setting posts and screwing on panels. I was
so proud of how much I had gotten done and how good it looked I could
not wait for my dad to come home to show him that the job was about
two-thirds in the bag. He rolled up after about ten hours and
immediately started complaining. My dad is a constitutional
contrarian by heart and feels most validated when he is correcting
someone and setting them strait. I discovered this at an early age
and to keep from having to redo major jobs I would usually leave an
obvious flaw in the work that would be easily repaired and them let
him catch it fell validated and then we could be done. In my
excitement to show him what a good job I had done I forgot the decoy
problem and he started scrutinizing the whole project. He immediately
told me I had done it all wrong and the the boards should not have
been parallel but have staggered joints. A specification he had never
mentioned before he left. He started right in with taking off boards
and complaining about how the whole day was wasted because I
couldn't follow simple instructions and how I would not be paid and
that I would have to take it all down and start over. I had plummeted
from the tippy tops of pride right strait down into the deepest
depths of sulfurous pulsating rage. I had a hammer in my hand and
wanted more than anything in the world to bury it in my dad's fat,
stupid, ungrateful, wrecking-my-whole-days-work, head. He was
kneeling in front of me turned away unscrewing the panels and ranting
about some part of the not-done-right he had not covered yet and it
took all of my will power to set the hammer down and walk away for a
good cry. He came to talk to me a couple of hours later and told me
sorta-sorry with a blame-pology that consisted of the fact that he
was sorry I had not listened and that I had screwed it up and he had
to yell at me. Thank-you? You're welcome? What should I say? I didn't
know at the time that the proper response to the absurdity that is
the blame-pology is to say something even more absurd as a
forgiveness. For example, I should have said I accept your apology
for being a massive a-hole and an insensitive jerk. What I did say
was that he could put the rest of the F-Wording siding up his own
self. Somehow that didn't smooth over the situation and he grounded
me for a week for saying the F-wording siding and back sassing him. I
wasn't sorry. I am not a person that is good at staying mad though so
the next day when I had simmered down I helped him put on the siding
the way he wanted and got paid for both days.
More Insulation
After gaining somewhat of a reputation for top notch insulation
removal from under mobile homes my dad offered Cole and I another
job. It was to remove the insulation and axles from our mobile home.
There is an old saying about how a word to fooling me once is a shame
to a wise man again – or something like that that means you should
learn your lesson. We had not. We saw that sweet cash dangled and
once again opted to shave a couple of months off of the tail end of
our lives by inhaling a good amount of fiberglass and animal parts,
hair and urine. The funny part of this story was when we loaded all
of the refuse into a little trailer of my dad's we hooked it up to
the truck and solicited my mom's help in driving it to the local
dump. Cole and I had not had a lot of experience hooking up trailers
and when we were driving to the dump my mom hit a pot hole and the
trailer came off the hitch and passed us to the right upended in the
ditch and vomited a load of dirty insulation onto the lawn of the kid
who had been multiply kicked from the school bus from my previous
stories. I joked that we should just gather up the trailer and leave
the insulation and tell them that they could keep it because we had
plenty still at home. We righted the trailer and quickly gather up
the insulation and loaded it for the second time because the kid and
his family were a lot a bit crazy and we didn't want to get yelled at
or roughed up. We finally got it to the dump and dropped of made it
through another day removing insulation from under a trailer and I
called it a career and have never done that again.
Whoops, I Forgot a Part of the Last Part
So, Cole reminded me after he read about this concert experience that
I had left out some rather major details and some follow up
experiences. It was not just Cole and I that went to the Areosmith
concert We actually were there with a third kid, the consensus
coolest kid our age from Santaquin Mark. Not the goofball Mark from
my previous stories but a heretofore unmentioned Mark. He was a cool
kid who was also a very good athlete and had been Cole's friend for a
very long time and he and his brothers were the ones who actually
were the really big Areosmith fans. All of us being much to young to
drive ourselves we relied on a threefold delivery and pick-up scheme
that was able to inconvenience every one of our parents. First, we
had Cole's dad drive us up to the concert and on the way up he got a
speeding ticket for trying to get us to the show on time. After the
show Mark's parents picked us up on their way to a family get away up
at a local ski resort. I was not a friend of the family so they were
taking me along as a favor to Cole and on his recommendation. They
had a room for the parents up at the resort and one for the kids
which included Mark's older and two younger brothers Cole and I and
one bed and a hide-a-way. The two little boys slept on the bed and
the four of us teens tried to all sleep on the convertible couch
without touching each other while all sharing a single blanket. I was
on the outside edge and not complaining but in the middle of the
night Mark's big brother rolled up in the blanket leaving me without
any covers in a meat locker environment. I was intimidated by his
brother but I was still really cold so I tried to gently apply
pressure to the blanket to get me back a corner without waking him
up. I had enough to half cover me when Mark's brother mumbled
something about the covers in his sleep and took back a good swatch
of what I had passively tried to recapture. I decided to just suffer
through a little half shoulder covered fetal position shivering to
generate heat as I made it through the night. Morning came with not
enough sleep between setting down and picking up and I was sore from
my sleeping position and my shivering. So I was grateful when we were
able to tuck into one of those wonderfully scant offerings from the
Continent that the joker hoteliers try to passe off as breakfast.
After breakfast we happened upon a basketball clinic that was being
run by some coach of something and he was not really impressed with
Cole and I but he was salivating over Mark's basketball skills and
the space between where his feet touched the ground and where his
head left off. Later that morning my mom was finally completed her
leg of the inconvenience trifecta by driving up to the resort to
shuttle Cole and I home after our adventures.
The Main Event
I was not really an Areosmith fan but my friend Cole and his friends
were big fans so I figured I should like them as well. I didn't
dislike Areosmith it just wasn’t something I had searched out and
not something I ever got a hankering for but there I was at my first
official concert seated behind the gold-flake hefty rockers. We had
endured the musical stylings of the tragically inept Jackyl and we
were watching the roadies set up and tune up the real bands gear and
I never having been to a concert before was not sure what kind of
time we were looking at. The tune up roadie picked up a guitar and
sound checked it with a little Led Zeppelin and I thought that was
cool and then he played a little AC/DC on the next guitar. Ironically
they were both bands that I guess, if pressed, I would have preferred
going to see. The lights went down and the smoke came up and we were
treated to the dulcet and memorable opening riff to 'Sweet Emotion'
and in that instant, with their much greater musical skill and vastly
professional production crew then the opener, I understood the appeal
of live concerts. Everyone stood up and cheered which meant that I
had to stand up if I still wanted to see. The Goldy ladies started
twitching arrhythmically in what they must consider dance in their
culture and Cole and I got a really big kick out of there awkward
lurching. As the concert went on I was getting into the mood more and
more and the highest praise I can offer the band was that they played
the songs just like on the album without a lot of musically
masturbatory and self indulgent solos and flourishes. The show
wrapped up and Cole I were getting our stuff together because as
concert virgins we were not aware of the fake ending thing but were
clued in because everyone else just kept cheering and chanting and
yelling but definitely not moving or leaving. Sure enough as I later
found was pretty much concert ritual they came back and played three
of their all time greats for everyone to sing along to and leave
fully satisfied. We headed out and Cole bought a tee-shirt then we
found our ride and recounted the evening to a long suffering mother
who got all the pleasure of hearing a concert recap. My ears rand for
a day or two and I had the concert bug especially when I was able to
see how jealous all the non-concert people got when I told them I had
gone unchaperoned to a gig. That was worth more to me then seeing
Areosmith live.
We Give Our Insulation Money to Stephen Tyler and Jackyl
The saw in this is about twice the size as the one he used live but even in this production version he still cuts the cushion off the bar stool.
We took a good bit of our earnings and rolled them right back into an
investment in the music industry. Cole and I both paid about thirty
bucks for an private concert with Stephen Tyler and his band
Areosmith. We we pleased to invite about 6000 of our closest friends
to the intimate little gathering and by the time we had all gathered
around Cole and I ended up sitting about 200' feet away from the
stage behind a couple of rather robust middle aged ladies who were
both dressed in gold foil shirts and rocked out to every song in the
deranged manner of a lobotomy outpatient. Before we got our semi
private audience with Mr. Tyler he treated us to a little set by a
lesser known band by the name of Jackyl. I think the reason why the
creatively misspelled Jackyl was less popular then Areosmith was
because they sucked. Bad. He lead out with a tune that for some
reason had not gotten a lot of radio play on the top 40 stations my
the charming name of 'Mental Masturbation'. A not catchy little tune
that must have been before its time because to me it sounded like the
cacophonic death rattlings of a garage band being run over by a
bulldozer. After a few more forgettable butt rock offerings came
their piece of resistance – 'Lumberjack'. The chainsaw in the song
was a carefully cloaked metaphor for the lead singers penis and he
was able to work in a surprising number of unsubtle saw and lumber
related double ententes. For the song's finale he brought a standard
looking bar-stool out on stage and then cranked up what looked like a
toy chainsaw which he placed in front of his hips while he gyrated
and thrust provocatively while revving the pitiful sounding engine.
While the band ramped up into a musical frenzy he gunned the motor
and attacked the bar stool in a comically under-powered display of
futility. The saw was unable to even cut through a single leg in a
reasonable amount of time so the Jackyl lead man decided to teach the
stool a lesson of an entirely less rigorous sort and cut the cushion
off with a measured motion. By this point Cole and I were laughing
pretty hard at this unintentional comedy and that got us a poopy look
from the gold plated hefties who were there to enjoy a little hard
rock and not listen to a bunch of smart-asses laugh at a little
impotent rock pageantry. When Jackyl was done abusing some furniture
they headed off to clear the stage for the roadies to do their magic
in preparation for some real rockers with expensive perms and
androgynous styling to sing to us.
Cleaning Insulation
There was a time in my life that a hundred dollars sounded like a lot
of money. It sounded like so much that I thought I only really
needed half of that so when my dad found a bit of dirty work for a
hundred dollars I offered half of the money to my friend if he would
do the job with me. The job was to remove the cat and cat piss
infested insulation from underneath mobile home for a older couple
and then load it onto a trailer and haul it to the dump and unload
it. Easy money. Cole and I headed over there one morning bright and
early full of hope and the dreams of what a crisp fifty would buy
us. We quickly found out why we were being played so relatively well
for a couple of teenagers it was because this job was absolutely
bull-crap. The insulation was hanging down in tatters and the air was
full of cat pee and dander and dust and fiberglass particles. It felt
so bad in our lungs that it seemed like we should take up smoking to
clear our lungs. After a couple of hours my friends mom came by and
checked on us and made fun of us a little for how terrible we looked.
We worked about seven hours before we had the last of the infectious
and carcinogenic mess loaded into a trailer ready for haul away and
my dad came and drove us over to the dump where we still had to
unload our cargo under the watchful eyes of our majestic
garbage-eating state bird. We got home dirty and with our eyes
swollen and irritated and exhausted but fifty dollars richer. That
was not nearly enough I concluded as I laid in a tub of scalding
water trying to soak the fiberglass our of my tender skin. You would
think that deciding that we had been underpaid would cure us from
further enticements but when a second hundred was dangled we were
back under the same mobile home removing the axles and that money was
more in line with the chance of long-term damage to our lungs and
psyches.
I Abuse my Jacket
I got my prized jacket for Christmas after waiting for the horrible
knowing weeks of having it in the house and having to act surprised
on Christmas morning. I was assisted in my acting by actually being
really, really excited to finally have my strait up legit Chicago
Bulls gear. I was only frustrated that school was out and no one
could see how awesome I looked in my sweet new threads. I waited out
my time until school blessedly reconvened. I wore by jacket to school
the first day back and it got a fair amount of respect and that was
the first time an article of clothing of mine was impressive and I
liked it. I decided to wear it the next day and not leave it my
locker for one moment. I wore it all day and all week and then all
month. In the second month of my owning this amazing jacket it was
actually getting to warm many days to legitimately be wearing a
jacket in the heat of the day but it was the coolest thing I owned so
I pushed through the discomfort. One morning I was actually unable to
find a clean shirt and instead of doing the sensable thing of washing
a shirt and going late or not going at all I decided to go to school
just wearing my jacket zipped up with only my bear nakedness
underneath. As it turned out we were having one of those unseasonably
warm February thaws that Utah gets on occasion and by the time I was
at school I realized I had made a tactical error as I was already
sweating and the slick liner of the jacket was not doing any of the
absorbing that I liked my shirts to do. I was wearing the zipper
quite high and tight to not give away the fact that I was shirtless
and it looked a little weird to everyone who was enjoying a rather
balmy day in the sunshine. A couple of people had asked me why my
jacket was zipped up all the way and I just tried to change the
subject. I was getting hotter and sweatier and more and more
uncomfortable as the day wore on. I was cursing myself for making
such a dumb decision. At lunch I cracked and decided that something
had to give I was all soggy wet and boiling in my own juices so I
broke out. I started walking home and let my jacket loose a little to
let out the swelter and had made it about two miles down the highway
towards home when I was stopped by the cops. He flipped on his lights
and then popped out to see what I was up to. I told him that I was
feeling really sick and that I was walking home because no one would
answer at my house. He had me come sit in the car as he had dispatch
call my mom who was actually at home. He told he I was sick and
walking home and skipping school and asked what he should do with me.
She said to bring me home and he took me I got a lecture about being
in school and checking out and being safe and whatnot but I was just
glad to head home and take off my plastic lined sweatsuit jacket and
put on a shirt without being terrified that someone would find out I
was not wearing any clothes. I wore the jacket less and less and lost
track of it when I went to college. I have abuse outer clothing since
then but usually only to run t the store or to answer the door or
something short term and never a all day charade again.
Psychologist and Not Me
I had mentioned that my girlfriend had a rough go of it before we
were going out but I was not really sure how bad it was. She was
evidently having a lot of trouble coping and her parents took her to
see a psychologist. The problem with that was that she told her
psychologist about me and her doctor told my girlfriend that it was
probably not a good idea to have a boyfriend. She didn't tell me this
for a while and she was just growing more distant and standoffish. I
was concerned that she was mad at me or something so I asked her over
and over what was wrong and she wouldn't tell me. I would ask how her
counseling was going and she would just say it was fine. We hung out
less and less and she started avoiding me pretty obviously then. She
finally told me that she was avoiding me because she had told her
doctor that she was still going out with me and she had gotten in
trouble but she didn't want to break up with me but she didn't want
to get into trouble again so she was conflicted and really sad. We
were still going out when the school year ended but we only saw each
other once or twice a week for the summer and never really were
together again. Curse that stupid pseudo-science.
All I Want for Christmas
We didn't have access to television at all let alone cable growing up
but I was going through junior high at a time when basketball was
becoming really mainstream on the talents and marketing power of the
consensus best player of all time Michael Jordan. Everyone was
talking about him, even non-fans knew who he was and about his
transcendent talents. I had to get on board with something that cool
but in the pre-internet world television was your only real option to
see Michael in action. My trick to be able to fit myself into sports
conversations was to listen carefully when people were talking about
the game or highlight that they saw an d I would pretend from then on
that I had seen it myself. My dirty secret is that I had never seen a
Bulls basketball game in my life but I wanted so badly to be into
what was cool that I would talk like I was a Jordan expert. This
would get me in trouble whenever a person who had actually seen
whatever sporting performance I was referencing would either ask me
about a specific moment or correct my erroneous retelling. I was so
caught up in the hype that I pent a good deal of my hard earned cash
on Jordan and Bulls related paraphernalia. I had posters, a bulls
basketball, shirts and hats but what I really wanted was a leather
bulls jacket that was in the window at the sports store at the mall
but it was a totally unattainable 250 dollars. I told my mom that I
didn't want anything else for Christmas or my birthday combined then
that one jacket. I hoped, perhaps irrationally, that she would get
the money together somehow and make my Christmas wish come true. A
few weeks before Christmas when I knew that my mom had locked all of
the presents into a unfinished bathroom in the add-on to our house I
jimmyed the lock and took a peak at what was in store for my holiday
surprise. The small room had no lights so I had to look at everything
from the light that would filter through the door. I carefully
searched some of the bags on the ground and didn't find my coveted
prize but then I looked up and hanging from a nail on the wall was a
Bulls Jacket, not the all leather one I had really wanted but a
Letterman looking one with leather sleeves and a big embroidered mull
head on the back. It was awesome, my heart was beating fast and I was
overcome with pure joy as I slipped into the garment and it felt
amazing. I sneaked out to the other bathroom to properly appreciate
my reflection in the three-way mirror, and it was even better then I
had imagined it could be. I reluctantly put the jacket back where I
found it and arranged the bags and boxes the best I could to make
them look undisturbed. It was killing me to wait the couple of weeks
till I could wear my jacket and I was genuinely overjoyed when
Christmas morning came it was not a surprise but there was pure joy
in my reunion. I thanked my mom most copiously and gave her and my
dad a hug, almost in tears about my great fortune. The one great
thing about being poor is that when you finally get something good it
is really good, rich kids just getting one more thing for the pile
cannot understand what having one good thing feels like. I have had
other good Christmas gifts but never one that pleased me so
overwhelmingly.
Science Far – Part The Fourth – The Dim Kid Cometh
I wish this was the day I got to tell you about how my massive
intellect and production capabilities catapulted my friend,
girlfriend and I to places one through three in the state science
competition. I cannot, because a dim kid won. I thought the
competition was about cool stuff but it turned out to be all about
butt kissing and cheating. As is the custom in award giving they
started out with some lame speeches while we all ate out our insides
with anxiety. My friend got honorable mention, which was good because
that left the other honorable mention and third through first wide
open for me. The other honorable mention got mentioned and it was Mr.
Mad Scientist. That's fine we're down to the real prizes now. Third
place went to my girlfriend which was nice for her because she was
going to get some recognition for my work and there was still, not
second because they announced that, which was a girl who's project I
hadn't seen. Just the big daddy left and I was starting to worry it
might not be mine. It wasn't. They called up a eighth grader with an
unbelievably magnificent project. I mean that it was not within the
reasonable realm of probability that he constructed his project. It
was a massive 8'x8' map of the United States with thousands of color
coded flags witch showed where major electrical plants and
substations were and other flags showing statistical clusters of
cancer cases with some analysis that demonstrated no correlation
between cancer rates and electrical infrastructure. Wow, I guess.
The kid is called up on stage to explain his electric company
vindicating offering and when he is given the mic it is instantly
clear to everyone that he was rather dim and clearly not involved in
the conception, researching or execution of this project. He was an
idiot who went on vaguely describing what he was seeing in front of
him on the project he purportedly made. After about a floundering
minute his dad took the mic from him and spent 10 minutes explaining
the science and the implication of the project while his kid cried on
stage. I was mad that I lost but I was more mad that I lost again to
a kid who didn't do his project. I was sick to death of competing
against adults and the idiot judges who gave prizes to projects
clearly not made by kids. I vowed that was never going to happen to
another kid who honestly competed under my watch. Any chance I got
after that to judge a science or art or anything contest, which was
several times a year I took it and used my powers of persuasion to
get all of the judges to vote for the passionate smart kids who did
their own work and I would leave nasty notes on the judging papers
for projects that were clearly built by adults.
Science Fair – Part the Third – The Day Of.
The morning of the state competition we loaded up our projects and
drove the twenty miles to the community college that was hosting the
affair. We each had a table space and chair assigned to us and told
to set up because the judges were going to come by any second. We
hurried, they didn't. I thought for some reason that the judges were
going to be people who knew something about electricity or science in
general but they were just the Governor, the mayor, some suit from
the electric company and another official looking pantsuit woman who
was ushering the judges around and reading off the names and schools
of the participants. Not a scientist or engineer in the bunch,
pathetic. They were schmoozers and I am not from that tribe and have
never picked up the nuances of the dialect with its strained
over-chipper bullshitty tones and meaningless facial expressions
which usually include too many teeth and not enough substance for my
taste. They were working up and down the isles and I had to sit next
to the kid who had won the eighth-grade state science fair
competition last year with a rather nasty looking Jacobs ladder mad
scientist looking thing. The contraption was magnificently load and
dangerous looking and made the whole room smell of ozone and I knew
we were not in the same league with this kid. I thought that because
I would have voted for him if I had a vote because his was the most
awesome. But who knows what a bunch of business and political types
would think, who knows indeed? They came to our row and Cole
demonstrated his and explained the science but had to admit unless
there was some need for static hair there was not a ton of practical
use for his machine. My girlfriend was up next and she did an awesome
job of explaining what the concept of tidal and wave generation was
all about. It was all I could do not to jump in when I felt the
information was a little inaccurate but these yahoos didn't seem to
notice that the way she was describing the process was not very
practical. When it was my turn I explained the hydro electric pros
and con and showed them my working model but knew they had no
interest in my project so I wrapped it up and let them go on to Mr.
Mad Science. He fired up the machine and produced a magnificent
lighting bolt when the voltage difference was sufficient to jump the
gap and far from being properly impressed these morons jumped back
and told him to turn it off and not to turn it back on in the
building. A scientist in his own country, amaright? They moved on
and the minders told us we were free to go until the awards ceremony
in a couple of hours. We went to the mall up the road to hang out for
a bit while I waited nervously to see if by some miracle I would be
called up to the podium. We went to the arcade and window shopped and
then my girlfriend tried to molest me in a public place as was her
custom and we ran out of time and we headed back for the big news.
Science Fair – Part the Second – Undersea Turbines
I decided my girlfriend should take on a project that was at the time
fascinating to me undersea turbines and elliptical wave generator. I
built the models in an aquarium with a motor to generate waves and
currents. My girl friend didn't really know what I was building but
she would sit by me and talk to me while I put together a rather
snappy looking project. Her job was to learn what the diorama
demonstrated and to make really good looking posters for the fair. I
am no artist or even a handwrit-ist she had the easy flowing poster
script that girls seem to be trained in at a very young age. She did
a really good job of all of the signs and she could cover the
highlights of the technology being demonstrated so we were in
business. The only problem, at this point, was that I had spent all
of my time making Van de Graaffs and undersea turbines that I only
had a day and a half to build my project. I made a hydroelectric dam
with a pump and generator that was honestly not quality work but I
had not planned well. All that was left was to get them to the school
and go through the obligatory trumping of the locals at the school
wide science fair. It was a massacre, there were three spots from our
school to go to the state competition and the kid to the left of my
friend and girlfriend and I was shocking a He-Man figure in a model
electric chair. The other paint eaters around the room had posters or
crude models and my nervousness about not being the three selected to
go to state dissipated and we just waited to get our awards. We were
all three selected to represent our school at the state finals and so
we did.
Science Fair – Part the First – Van De Graaff
 |
| One of these bad mamma jammas, some boys don't like science like this - but some boys do. |
About this time in ninth grade they announced the science fair. Okay
everyone calm down, I know you are excited as I was to hear the news.
I started planning while the amateurs didn't even read the entry
rules and deadlines. Hold up, did you all get the same handout I got
here? Science fair? Put on by the electric company? Prizes and
possibly, but not really likely, glory? Why is no one but me putting
down preliminary sketches? Lucky for me I had a friend who was on board for a little hardcore unsupervised power tool action and my girlfriend liked to be with me so we all worked on some really
cool projects. My friend, Cole, decided to build a Van De Graaff
generator which is a static electricity generating shocking machine
for you lay-yokels. We decided to make a rather big one and started
out by sawing a Freon bottle in half for the collector dome. We took
a few hours to saw it in half with a saws-all because it was such an
odd shape and size to try and hold down. After we had liberated the
mostly round hemisphere we popped it in into the vise to hold it steady
while we sanded the powder coated finish off of it. It was some
really good paint and our belt sander was barely touching it. It was flopping all over the place and jumping up and down like a chicken on a hot griddle but by
taking turns and sticking to it we relived the half-cylinder from its
covering. With a dome in hand we built a motor into a wooden base box
and put a pulley and extractor at the top and then tried to find the
best belt material to generate static and stay on the pulleys after hours and hours of trial
error and trial again we found that underwear elastic band did the
best job of staying on and generating sparks. We tricked it out
really pretty and then went on to build my girlfriends project.
Drive 80 Miles
It is hard for me to remember exactly what the weight of overflowing
hormones constantly pushing up against my brain was like when it has
faded into the resignation of adulthood. There was a time in my life
that I would drive 80 miles, each way, for the chance to make out.
Well, in honesty that is not a accurate statement, I would have
driven much more than that it was just that was how far away my
girlfriend was staying all by herself at a relatives house for a
couple of weeks. Also, it was not me who was driving but my sister
she of the recent driving endowment. I bribed her into lying and
driving far far away. I figured that my girlfriend was frisky anytime
we were not alone together so naturally alone together would b e even
better because I would not be constantly anxious about being caught.
I thought that because I was young and naive and didn't understand
women. I had, in error, applied standard mathematical principles to
my logic, if-this-then-that type of stuff. Oh, I have to
chuckle-cringe at myself now I am older and naive and don't
understand women, because from this vantage point my error was
obvious - I needed to use a subtler calculus to get the correct
conversion factors. She liked teasing me physically while we were in
the presence of others precisely because it made me uncomfortable and
it couldn't go to far, she didn't want to really have some time to
ourselves because that had worked our rather poorly for her in the
past with the other guy. She was however, flattered that I would come
all the way out of my way to spend time with her. There she was,
happy to see me but not really excited about having her bluff called.
I came into the house ready for some smooching and maybe more and she
was all of the sudden really interested in putting together a 1000
piece puzzle in the living room with my sister. I was irritated
because if we were in the back seat of a car that her mom was driving
all she wanted to do was make-out but in a house practically to
ourselves she wanted to find all of the sky pieces. This went on for
hours and I was getting increasingly frustrated with her defense and
was wondering why I even bribed my sister to come down here, full
disclosure I would have instantly driven 80 more miles if she was
that far away at that moment, but still. My sister had a thing or
something to get to and so a few minutes before zero hour my
girlfriend asked me to come look at something in the bedroom and then
got all kissy kissy on me with a firm time limit in place. At the
time I really didn't have any idea what had changed I was just glad
to be getting to the point of this trip. We had to leave really soon
for my sister to make it back in time and I, still not understanding
what had taken so long, was happy anything got underway but wished it
had happened sooner so we had more time. Still I went home happy 160
miles poorer but one kissy-face richer.
A Night At the Movies
As is the case with many a young love my girlfriend and I didn't get
to always choose when we would spend time together. We could hang out
at school but we usually had to wait for the weekend to go out to do
something and then the constraints of having no transportation would
weigh heavily on our plans. My girlfriend came from a big family,
even bigger than mine and so there was not much chance of her getting
in the getting driven somewhere rotation and if Rob was not available
there was almost no chance I was going anywhere so many times I
would, of an evening, walk up to her house and hang out. We would
listen to music or talk with her brothers and sisters. She had, as
her prized possession a rather large stereo that had a remote control
that when the volume button was pushed actually made the knobs on the
unit turn. Her mom, knowing that her daughter was vulnerable usually
kept us in view or close to it to make sure there was no funny
business going on but I didn't mind I thought her mom was nice and I
really wasn't that comfortable with the level of physical intimacy my
girlfriend seemed to be heading to. I was not entirely unworldly;
heck, I knew my way around a standard make-out, a tongue kissing
make-out, and even a little light petting but my girlfriend was
always hinting that she had done 'IT'. I didn't want to establish
parity and for that reason a little chaperoning was not unwelcome in
my opinion not unwelcome at all. We would usually end up in her
basement great room watching movies with her little brothers and
sisters while her mom did craft projects in the back half of the
room. Her craft table was turned to see the back of the couch while
we watched TV which I guess she thought would keep me honest and if
it was me she was needing to keep honest it would have worked a charm
but it was her daughter who was the gas, I was the breaks. As soon as
the movie would come on my girlfriend would throw a shared blanket
over us and immediately cuddle too close and start nuzzling me and
putting her legs over mine while her mom glued and sewed ten feet
behind us and her younger siblings reposed on the carpet in front of
us. Sometimes she would even start to kiss me and try and take it
from some light cute kissing to some make-out level stuff while I
squirmed to keep her at bay. She thought that was hilarious so she
would do it more. At one level I was a regularly wired young man who
would normally really enjoy the physical attentions of a young lady
but on the other I am a irregularly wired hyper-anxious sort that is
not really a huge fan of getting caught and possibly humiliated. One
night when we were watching 'Fern Gully' she was getting particularly
handsy and loud I started looking for a way out so when Robin
Williams made a joke about a rapidly transforming animal by quipping
'Oooh, Darwin's grab bag.' I laughed over much to get her mom's
attention. It worked and her mom remarked how she was impressed that
I got that joke I took that opportunity to go and have a quick chat
with her mom about my love of science and stuff in general. My
girlfriend knelt backwards on the couch watching us with a scowl
while I tried to keep a lively conversation going. As the movie was
ending I came and sat back by my girlfriend but on top of the covers
and then walked home as the credits rolled. My girlfriend was a
little testy about the situation the next time we talked on the phone
but seemed like she was over it at school.
A CD Recorder
We were fairly poor growing up and didn't have the nicest or newest
of anything. I wanted nice stuff and to impress kids and make them
jealous but with six and sometimes seven kids at home we had
sufficient for comfort but not much more. My one friend Cole was in a
much smaller family, just him and his brother, so he had a few nice
things that I coveted. They had a Nintendo with some games, he had a
TV in his room, a water bed and poster of Shaquille O'neal which
said 'FUTURE SHOCK' on it and looked awesome. When we were in junior
high though he got the coolest thing I had ever seen, a five disk CD
changer. It was part of a stereo system that still had a duel
tape-deck which was great for copying the best albums tape to tape
with speed dub but the best thing was that the five disk changer had
a program that would figure out from your selection of songs how to
best organize them onto tapes for a flawless mix tape. Up until then
my mixology was limited to quickly7 pushing record on the tape-deck
when a song I really liked came on the radio or I could dub a single
song off of an album and then que up another. The work was tedious
and often times error prone but that is what we did because that is
what we could do. This new system was amazing it selected the disk
you had programed stated the recoding paused it to go to the next
song and cut right in with robotic precision. This was the future we
were promised and it was as good as I could have hoped. It turned out
that a machine that could make really good copies of CD's onto tapes
had a very limited useful life and I have not listened to an audio
cassette for at least ten years, it has actually been about that long
for a CD for that matter. But there for a few glorious months I had
some really great mix-tapes, some real top shelf stuff that the
ladies really appreciated.
Purple Pants
Rob wanted to rebel a little but only a very little because he liked
living with us and working with my dad and kissing my dad's butt
whenever he could. He wanted to show he was no lock step conformist
so the way he did that was to go to church. I know you are thinking
not very rebellions to go to church every week as was expected from
all of the occupants of our home but here was the coup – he wore
sandals. Embrace the chaos, because he was coming at you all
non-conformist all Sunday long right there in your face if your face
happened to be right near the ground. Not many people's faces were
right near the ground so he was not having the boat rocking effect
that he was hoping for. Ideally, I think he wanted people to be a
little shocked and a little disturbed and in response he wanted to
play it all cool like he didn't mind ruffling a feather or ten. No
feathers were ruffled and that made him disappointed being judged and
looked down on by the pious is the payoff to most rebellion. When you
are left there with inappropriately clad feet and no indignation the
only logical choice is to raise the stakes. He upped the ante by
investing heavily in ridiculously colored pants, specifically some
gawdoffle purple rayon monstrosities that he was banking on to draw
the appropriate attention to his devil-may-care badassery. Most
people just made funny remarks about how ridiculous they looked. One
particularly funny member-joker made a
do-not-look-directly-into-the-pants joke that killed. Being judged
and being mocked are two vastly different things a nice judging can
generate some much needed validation and vindication but being teased
is just humiliating. Well, it is to most normal people, Rob
misinterpreted it as him blowing there little parochial minds and
wore that as a misguided badge of honor for the rest of the time he
lived with us.
Damn Glued Coins
My brother, always the practical joker, constructed a practical joke
in the bedroom that we shared with Rob that drove me crazy for years.
He had artfully super-glued a stack of coins to the top of the
dresser in such a way that made them look to all the coin gathering
world like they had been tossed there carelessly. A couple of times
a week for years either Rob or I would glance over, see a pile of
likely looking coins and make a grab for them only to remember, too
late, that they were a prop. We would curse and move on and promptly
forget that it was a set up and repeat the process in a few days. I
don't know why the urge to collect coins was such an overwhelming
drive in my subconscious that I couldn't just leave them alone but I
could not. One day though my little sister fixed us up and cured the
joke with a little unfettered greed, some free time and some elbow
grease. One day she had had enough and pried the coins up off of the
dresser and separated them and spent them. That is some hard earned
money that I remember my brother being really mad about her stealing.
She also left a odd shaped scar in the plywood top of the dresser
where she cleaned up the joke. I believe my mom still had that
dresser today and it still has an ex-joke mark right in the lid.
Rock Climbing
About this time my friend Jordan and his brother started getting into
rock climbing and they took Rob and I along one day. That got Rob
excited about it so he invested in some climbing equipment that he
didn't use as often as I would like, so to make sure that the gear
was getting the proper amount of attention I decided to pitch in and
use it for him whenever possible. It was pretty much always possible.
After we caught the bug Cole, Jordan, and I were up the canyon that
was near our houses climbing several days a week. When we started out
the resources were pretty thin consisting of a few carabiners, some
carabiner and strap sets called quick-draws, or just 'draws if you
were bad-A, and we were bad-A. We had a rope, a belay device called
a figure 8 and a few harnesses and that was about it but that is all
we needed because we were young with time to kill so having some
fancy shoes that would help you climb the rock better didn't seem
like they would be worth the $80 investment. At first we would go up
and climb a group of three routes that were right off the road and
then maybe go do some rappelling off of the aptly named rappelling
wall. As the years went on most of the other guys stayed somewhere
between mildly and somewhat interested and Cole and I were the only
ones in our group of friends who stuck with it and eventually bought
some real gear and actually worked at getting better. I have, in my
more robust and pasty dough like body of adulthood given up climbing
and I think Cole is the only one of my contemporaries still in the
game. I tell you all this as a framework for what we got up to for
the next four years always seemed to have climbing involved or
related somehow.
We Blow Crap Up
There are long days when you are a kid and in the early nineties
there were not that many options in small town for entertainment.
Once when I was over at my friend Cole's house without any adult
supervision we were hanging out in his room when he mentioned that he
had some firecrackers. Firecrackers you say? Well then good sir, let us have a
gander at them. Firecrackers and pornography were the two types of
mythical contraband that many boys claimed to have but not everyone
who could talk a big firecracker could demonstrate their ownership
when pressed. Cole not only had the goods he had a huge string of them
and was willing to do a little exploding for a diversion. Like all
frugal boys with a string of crackers we took the time to dismantle
the chain so that instead of a long chain we had hundreds of individual
ordinance. It was a cold and icy day with that over-bright and long
shadowed dimness of a winter afternoon when we went out to find
something to blowup. We fooled around with some snowballs and action
figures until one of us decided to place a cracker inside a pile of
dog poop. When it exploded and spread poop all over the place it
struck us as really funny. We invented an impromptu game right there
on the spot, we were going to play dog poo explosion escape. Cole went
first and he buried his cracker in a fresh pile, lit it and ran across
the icy driveway sure he had avoided the poo-splosion and was standing by the
porch laughing when a few seconds after the blast a piece of crap the
size of a marble it him right in the face. He started hollering and
ran inside to wash the fresh manure of his face and came back outside to
make sure I got mine. When I was up I placed my charge and lit it but
as I turned the excrement blew up all over my back. Cole and his
brother were both laughing really hard about my misfortune and now
all that was left was to see if we could get his brother to loose the
game. His brother was in a bit of a cowboy phase and was wearing some
authentic cowboy boots with smooth soles which made walking on ice
all but impossible. He had on a billowy western shirt and tight pants and looked like the least likely person on earth to outrun the crap-tastrophe we were planning. We gave him a firecracker and he placed and lit
it and then slipped around comically trying to make his escape while his fuse slowly smoldered
for the longest time I have ever seen a non-dud burn. He got back in
plenty of time and watched the show with us from the gallery. Undaunted, Cole
and I both took our uneventful turns and then we tried to set his
brother up with a artificially shortened fuse. Still he lit, slipped
and came back un-pooped. We set him up a second time and still no go.
It was dark and cold and we called it a game with Cole's brother technically winning, I guess, but when you blow up poop isn't everyone a winner? The next day at school Cole and I were relating what
we thought was a hilarious experience to a cute girl who sat by us in
geography. In spite of the obvious entertainment value and funny
outcome the girl looked at us while we laughed our way through a
recounting like we were brain damaged. I didn't care what she thought, blowing up dog crap with my friend was one of the funniest things I
had ever done.
Listening to a Little Guns and Roses and Taking a Walk
As is the case with young romance we were not the masters of our own
destiny's. We were not able to hang out again outside of school for
more than a week but then my girlfriend was able to come over. In the
intervening time my pure altruistic love for her had slightly
devolved back into y testosterone driven motivations. When she came
over we talked and hanged out and I was trying to figure out someway
to bring up the moment we shared post breakdown but she was not
interested in talking about it so I was trying to find my angle and
then I hit upon it - Guns and Roses. I had both 'Use Your Illusion'
albums and I knew just the thing for showing sympathy and building
intimacy, the 7th greatest rock ballad of all time 'Don't
Cry'.
How can this not work to build a deeper relationship? Thanks Axl, I did have to give you 20 bucks but it was worth it.
I popped in the disc and skipped to the song I needed and there
I was sitting with my emotionally vulnerable girlfriend listening to
a great tune that showed my sympathy and emotional depth and I knew
this was working. I ran into a little bit of a backfire when she did
exactly opposite of what the song instructed and started crying. I
had to work fast to keep this from devolving into a situation where
making out would be inappropriate. I suggested we go for a walk and
she agreed. We walked down towards the dump which was about a mile
down a relatively secluded road. As we walked she cuddled up close to
me and as we were away from all of the houses she pushed me over to a
patch of grass in an apple orchard and started kissing me. We sat and
talked and kissed until it started to get dark and then we headed
back home. I thought things were going really well but after that
night nothing ever went so well again.
Nervous Breakdown
My girlfriend, prior to being my girlfriend, had a really rough go of
it with a older boyfriend who had been abusive so she was many times
on the emotional edge. If anything set her off she might start crying
out of the blue or say something like she was starting in the middle
of a thought that was really rather dark. The night that Rob had
driven us up to go to the dollar movies the car was having some type
of electrical problem and we broke down twice and had to be jumped
once before we even got to the theater so we decided it would be a
good idea just to head home and skip the stranding. The events of the
night were really just mildly inconvenient but the stress of it
coupled with whatever was going on in my girls troubled mind pushed
her over the edge and she started getting really panicked and
hysterical. Rob was starting to get very worried because she was
freaking out and he was trying to get us home and into someone else's
realm of responsibility while I was in the back seat with her trying
to calm her down and tell her it was okay. When we got home I stayed
in the car with the now calm girlfriend while my mom took the other
two boys home in her car. I stayed in the back seat with her head on
my lap stroking her hair and talking to her for about an hour. She
didn't say anything back to me but I just told her over and over that
she was safe and that everything was going to be okay. I didn't feel
like I was sure if it was going to be okay but maybe I was telling
her and hoping myself. My mom, naturally nervous about me spending so
much time alone in the backseat of the car with a girl in the dark
hovered between the front door and the car just to make sure she
didn't become a grandmother I guess. At one point before we took her
home I told my girlfriend that I was really worried about her because
I loved her so much and I, for the first time in my life, really
meant that I loved someone for no other reason then I wanted them to
be happy and safe with no ulterior motive. We had to take her home
eventually despite her protest of wanting to stay. The next day was
Saturday so we didn't see her at school but I called and her mom said
that she didn't want to talk to me right then. I was crushed thinking
of why she would not want to talk to me. She came by my house a
couple of hours later carrying a bouquet of white flowers and I was
so relived and excited that she was not trying to avoid me for some
reason. I assumed that the flowers were for me and was flattered but
she had actually brought them for my mom. I was a little sad that she
was giving my om credit when I did all the comforting but then she
asked if she could talk to me and she did thank me and told me that
she loved me too. She went home and I was about as happy as any kid
can be.
Rob Drives
The really good thing about having Rob live in our house was that he
could drive a car which is something my brother and I were legally
prohibited from doing by reason of age discrimination. There is
nothing more damaging to the dignity of a wanna-be player then to
show up at the party, dance or shindig being dropped off by one's
mother. The shame and the horror of proving to the world that you
were not old enough to drive and not cool enough to have a older
brother, sister or friend to ferry you about. When people wax
nostalgic for the freedom of youth forget the feeling of having to
sit around and wait for a ride. If I were to relive my youth I would
want more money and a car or no dice. If I am presented with the
actual opportunity to relive my youth I may back off these demands.
Rob had another great benefit besides being recognized by the state
for his ability to operate a motor vehicle, he had virtually no
social life. This was in large part because he had moved into a new
small town at the exact wrong time to try and make new friends and
the night life would need to be hit with a defibrillator to get back
to dead. The upshot of all that was that he was available most night
to take us somewhere and then at the end of the night be there to
pick us back up again. He wasn't scoping out the joint as he rolled
up seeing if it looked like a boy/girl party he wasn't double
checking to see if the parents I firmly swore were there to chaperon were actually there. It was a very one sided situation though and
there were many times that Rob would get sassy about having to drive
my friends and I around – and then he would, more often than not,
take us any way. It was one night when he had driven two of my
friends and I to the medium sized bigger city 18 miles to the north
to watch a movie at the dollar theater, that my girlfriend had
breakdown and made for a exciting night for all involved.
You Turn Me Right Round
Two Days of This - Two Whole Days. The Horror, Oh The Huge Manatee.
Rob was caught in that hormonal no man's land of late adolescence and
early adulthood where he was trying to be bold and manly but still
have tastes that caused one to question his manliness. He worked out
and liked to get his shirt off to display his newly developed muscles
whenever possible. He had a assault rifle that he would break down,
oil and clean about once a week. He was quick to flip off and
threaten if there was not a good chance of being observed. All really
manly things right? Dang right they are. But then there was those
paradoxical behaviors that were fun for my brother and I to tease my
dad's kind-of young charge, which he loved. He really like
euro-invasion techno pop music that made me want to explode with rage
when he would turn up the tunes and put it on repeat. He would be
getting fired up on a little Depeche Mode or something equally horrid
and my brother and I would tell him to shut if off. He would decline,
we would insist and battle would be joined. At first it was a
physical confrontation but turned into full blown sonic warfare when
Rob bought a more sonorous radio then we owned with money he had
earned working for my dad. Then when he wanted to listen to INXS or
the Cure he would do so to his hearts content and he would just
drowned out our Guns-n-Roses, Metalica, Sir Mix A Lot, Nirvana, or
Beastie Boys with a little volume from his musical arms race nuclear
bomb. In a most unmanly display one day he got the bug for a little
Dead or Alive – You Spin Me Round (Like A Record), so much
of a bug that he took the single he had recently purchased and put it
in powerful CD player and not just played it in our room at high
volume but played that repulsive tune on repeat for no less then two
full days. No Joke. Every second he was awake and in earshot he was
playing that song over and over and over and over. I hadn't minded
the song that much at first but by the 50th and 500th
trips down the banal paths of late eighties techno-pop insipidity I
was ready to destroy anything of beauty in the world. Every beautiful
thing. We started making disabling sorties risking physical harm to
keep what shreds of humanity were still left in the tatters of our
minds. Rob would angrily restart his ritual of sonic horror and
threaten death and dismemberment on anyone who would stop his tribute
in kind to spinning right around like a record. . .baby. The issue
was finally resolved by my anti music dad saying that no one could
listen to anything at any time from the moment of his decree until
the end of time. The mandate was not strictly followed but it did
break the spell of the Dead or Alive repetition and Rob lost interest
in the song and I had not heard it again until I found the link for
this story. I still hate it.
Rob
Right around this time a kid came to live with us because he was a
problem for his family. His family had lived right through the block
from us in the mobile home park Where we lived when I was four. They
had moved to Colorado but we had remained friends with their family
and exchanged visits every couple of years. The parents were a great
big tree of a man that was a cop and twisted faced termagant that seemed like a witch to us kids. They had a crew of kids who got into all kinds of weird
trouble probably because they were home-schooled and were not really
aware of the socially acceptable methods of rebellion and acting out.
After a youth spent home schooling Rob had graduated high school
early at a young 17, tried a local junior college and dropped out
after one semester and started acting out. To help him get some
direction his parents asked my parents if he could come and live
with us learn a trade and get straitened out by my dad. That is how
when I was in ninth grade I got an older brother for two years who
was a pretty okay guy for someone who liked to have power struggles
with 12 and 14 year-olds. My brother more than I loved to power
struggle back with him so we had an arrangement of conflict that kept
a low level of hostility always in the air. We only had the four
bedrooms and my mom and dad had dibs-ed the largest one for them
selves so my little brother and I shared a room with Rob while my
older sister and younger sister shared a room and the two
'babies'(what we called my youngest brother and sister) shared the
fourth. There was always a little territorial battle going on because
Rob wanted to be king-boss of the world and we didn't recognize his
authority. He would carve out rules and regulations for his side of
the room and the room in general and then try and lecture us on what
is was like to be grown up and responsible and obey his rules. We
would impolitely decline his offer to run the joint and antagonize
him for entertainment. I think that is enough intro to know who Rob
was and how hit fits into many of the next stories so we'll fill out
the details as we go.
Checking to See if They Read It.
Speaking of reports, I always hated doing these long projects and
putting in all the work of plagiarizing to turn in some really
quality piece on a state or country and not knowing if it was being
really deeply and truly read and appreciated. To this end I started a
game where I would put in a really funny but never distasteful phrase
or comment into the body of the text to see if the material was being
thoroughly reviewed. The paper would read something like:
Washington’s state song was inspired by the fact that gerbils can
not only be taught to fly but to derive existential meaning from it.
Then right back into some blah blah blah and heretofores and whatnot.
I always expected to be caught and marked down but I learned the most
important lesson anyone can from a formal education - proper
formatting and a great folder make up about 90% of perceived value in
this world. Most especially when you have to grade 30 of them and you
know what kind of work you will be getting from every student before
you start. I ran this little joke with every long paper from junior
high on through my first year of college and only had one teacher or
professor ever mention it. I even had a philosophy professor ask to
use my essay on the importance of cultural context in aesthetic
judgment, joke and all, as a prototype of formatting for midterm
papers, I had received an 'A' undiscovered joke notwithstanding. I
told him sure, I mean it wasn't an ethics class after all.
Reports Going Well
When I was in ninth grade we were all assigned a country to do a
report on in geography class and in those dark days before the
widespread availability of the inter-webs we had to plagiarize from
actual books, like poor people. There were no books in our small town
library on much at all let alone a given countries major exports and
cultural touchstones.. The solution was to get a ride up to the
college library twenty miles away and do some research (copying)
there. My mom was willing to take my friends, Quin, Garret and I and
best of all my girlfriend, up a couple of different times. My mom
would drop us off on campus and we would heard to the library. While
we were supposed to be researching my girl friend liked to find
secluded spots and make out with me. I say she liked to do that
because I am actually uncomfortable with PDA and terrified of
'getting caught' so I was never enjoying it fully. I was always just
looking around, ready to get my lifetime ban from the college
library. We spent all of our time making out and then when we about
to leave we would get some books on our country and copy the pages on
the Xerox and head home to get some work done. My girlfriend was
insatiable though and the whole way home sitting in the back seat she
would be still trying to make out with my mom driving us home. I
would actually be relieved to get her dropped of so I wouldn't have
to be scared of getting kicked out of something or getting caught by
my mom. After my friends and her were dropped off I would head home
and retype the info I copied from the books and fill out a report
outline our teacher had provided. We went a total of three times and
I ended up plagiarizing so well I got an 'A' and a bonus for letting
the teacher keep my report to show other students what a good report
should look like.
When I Ask Her Out
I think I maybe played it too cool because my girl's friends started
asking me why I hadn't asked her out. Did I not like her? Was I
leading her on? Was I a jerk? I made up excuses and rationalizations
to explain why I had not but the real reason was that I was too
scared. One day I resolved to do what had to be done and I told her
in between classes that I wanted to ask her something when we went
home. I was doing this so that if she didn't want me to ask her out
she could avoid me because I figured she would have to know what I
needed to ask her. She did not avoid me but gave me a hug then and
then sat really close to me on the bus, like PDA close which made me
a little uncomfortable. We got off the bus by a park that was a bout
equal distant from our respective houses and we started a leisurely
stroll up the road while I tried to hammer out the proper phrasing in
my mind. She leaned gently into my side nudging me toward a nice spot
of grass and a tree to lean against. My heart was racing my hands
were soggy and my throat was dry I sat down with my back against the
tree and made some small talk. When I went into the actual asking
out, I farted, which came as a surprise to me and her. I had no
warning no chance to hold back and I was mortified. What I did was
not acknowledged it and she did me the dignity of returning that
favor and we went on with the formality of asking out. When I got the
words out she excitedly said yes and leaned forward, grabbed my face
with both of her hands and kissed me on the lips. It was a warm fall
day and the sun was warm and over-bright, the temperature was just
right and I was so excited to have a girlfriend who wanted to be my
girlfriend. After the initial warm glow though all I could think
about was farting, I mean, what the hell? I was and still am
embarrassed about that but she never mentioned it and because it is
only she and I that know anything about it and she has probably long
long ago forgotten it all I need to do now is keep it super secret
and no one will ever know my shame.
I Write Her Name In My Hair
I had the same floppy bowl cut hairdo from the time it was long
enough to look like a floppy bowl cut until I was 19. It was an easy
look and easier to maintain because all I had to do wash wash it,
condition it and boom - hair did, done, do. I wouldn't cut it until
it was to my chin or there about and then I would lift it back over
my ears with a snippy snip and done. Int the meantime I would shave
the underside quite short with a buzzer so that the hair would lay
flat to my head and no look so puffy. This hairdo did me fine except
for it looked like I was a skater and that made cowboys boil over
with white hot visceral rage to see someone with long hair that was
not subtly coiffured into a luxuriously permed mullet. Like a real
man, you know? Once in an attempt to be sweet and cute I had my
sister carve my possible girlfriends initials into the hair under my
flop. I don't really know why I thought that was a good idea but who
knows when love in in the air and a poor dumb boy with more
testosterone then miles on him is trying to impress a girl. I was
really nervous to show her what I had done so I just hinted at it for
a bit and then I finally decided the time was right so while we were
waiting for the bus I told her I had something to show her and pulled
up my mop to show her where I had her initials in my scalp. The main
problem I think was that she didn't know what she was looking for and
I had really light skin and really light hair and there was very
little contrast between regular hair and initial carved hair so she
just looked confused. I tried to get her guess a couple of times and
then gave in and told her it was her initials. She was confused why I
did that but said it was nice in a weird tone and then she changed
the subject. I had the distinct feeling that this girl and maybe
girls in general are not terribly interested in having someone carve
there monogram in their hair. I took the lesson to heart and have
kept all of my protestation of undying love verbal so there is no
paper trail, or hair trail as the case may be.
Key Chains and a Shared Locker
When I was in ninth grade I started collecting key chains for some
reason I cannot recall. I think I may have acquired one by
happenstance and then decided to run with it until I had hundreds in
a huge ball. My passing fascination with key chains coincided with a
fascination with a girl from my home town that I had not really
noticed before but all of the sudden started paying a lot of
attention to me and that can make anyone more attractive. She had
just broke up with an older boyfriend who was a little abusive and
she had the easy physical contact of a kid from a large family that
is used to sitting really close to someone and not thinking anything
of it. I really liked the way she smelled, like warm vanilla candy,
and I really liked all of the attention she was paying me. She
noticed I was collecting key chains and every day she would bring me
another one for my collection. She did this for weeks on end and
where she came up with them all I don't know and maybe don't want to
know. After several weeks of sitting next to each other on the bus
and getting key chains I felt the relationship was ready to go to the
next level and we should move in together. I didn't have a
locker-mate and she was not really interested in keeping hers so we
moved all of her stuff in and started doing annoyingly cute sweet
things. Between every class whomever got to the locker first would
hold it open and wait for the slower partner and have a cute little
chat and then walk as far to the next class as we reasonably could
together. At some point our locker was overflowing with a volleyball sized clump of key chains and it was time for the ball to move on so I
took it home and decided I should ask this girl to be my girlfriend
for reals. This is how tragically anxious I was though, I was still
too nervous to ask her out because I was not sure what she would say.
I decided to take it slow and see what happened but my plan was to
'ask her out' which was junior high jargon for not much changes.
Bus Driver Almost Takes Us All With Him
We had to ride the bus to Payson most days and which
meant that we had to get up pretty early and get ready and then go
stand in the dark and cold until the bus rolled up. That was the easy
part of the trip, when I was in junior high our bus driver was not
cut out for work with children. He was constantly on edge and that is
no way to deal with children. Kids are like vicious wolves and if
they scent blood you are in a world of hurt. They have nothing to do
all day and when they see they got a funny or dramatic response from
a adult in authority and not get in trouble they will do it again and
again until someone has to intervene or just kill all the kids. Our
bus driver had a hard route full of hard kids who were biding their
time until they were sixteen and legally allowed to drop out of
school. They were the types that had weapons and lighters and used
them. One kid was melting and cutting up the back seats which the bus
driver told us one day came out of his pay to repair. The oldest and
most sacred rule of bus ridership is that hard kids sit to the back
furthest from the watchful eyes of the driver. No normal kid would
dare to challenge the seating order because we liked to not be
punched and a kid with a knife might even put your guts on the wrong
side of your body. This bus driver thought that he could mess with
the ecosystem of the bus without causing an environmental break down.
He started placing good kids at the back of the bus and making the
hellions sit in the first two rows. The poor nerds who got put to the
back where caught smack in the middle of their two worst fears, the
fear of disobeying or disappointing an adult and the fear of bullies.
What was a good nerd to do? The tough kids were also caught in a
double bind of having to sit at the front and obey. What was a good
bully to do? After two days the levy broke and the bullies revolted
in mass and just went to sit where nature intended and they kicked
the nerd out of the seats they never wanted to begin with. The bus
driver stopped the bus a couple of blocks from the school and tried
to control the situation but when it spiraled badly out of control he
had to call the cops to come and arrest the bullies and take them
away. We were late getting home but it was worth it for the story of
the cops on the bus. The police action cooled the situation down for
a few weeks but after the initial shock wore off the bad kids started
to raise hell again. One day on the way home smoke started to fill
the bus and the bus driver pushed to the edge for the last time took
more drastic action. There was a deep ravine about a mile from the
school and when the driver scented the smoke he told us he was
pulling the bus right the fetch over right fetching then but he
wasn't saying fetch. What was more troubling then his use of the
'eff' word, in my opinion, was that he was looking backwards in the
big student watching mirror and not watching where he was going. He
pulled off the road into the soft gravel shoulder without slowing
down first and we were only a few hundred feet from the ravine when
he realized his mistake and fought to control the bus to a stop. We
finally skidded to a stop about thirty feet from the edge of the
slope down into the dry riverbed. We were all quite relived to have
not died and I think the bus driver no more so than us and he must
have decided this was not the job for him, he told us to sit tight
and that help would come soon. He called the dispatcher and then
opened the door walked out of the bus and walked away. We sat in
stunned science fro a little bit and then started talking about what
happened. A new driver showed up in about twenty minutes and we were
home safe soon. Our replacement driver was a no nonsense 50ish woman
with nothing but hate in her heart and a very calm bus. I never heard
anything about the driver again.
The Battle of The Sexes
My older sister and I had one great big fight to send us on out of
childhood for good. She was a budding athlete and had made the school
basketball team twice already and I had not and that was a sore spot
for me. She was the kind of sister who wouldn't mind touching you
right on the sore spot if that was what she thought needed to happen.
One day when she was in high school and I was still in junior high we
had a disagreement over who was tougher, physically and mentally,
boys or girls in general and she and I specifically. Christy's best
friend Summer was over and she was pitching in here and there in the
verbal portion of our argument and when we were unable to come to
agreement we conjoined the physical contest to determine who had the
right of the argument. We tussled back and forth and forth and back
without making much headway until we ended up on our knees in a
double side headlock stalemate and both in tears. We both were
cranking down as hard as we could on each other's heads and crying
and cursing. Summer had stopped cheering on Christy and was now just
taking in the spectacle of our indomitable wills. We stayed locked in
mutual side headlocks torquing away for a very long time and I don't
remember how or why we were broken up but it was not by the
capitulation by either of us so insofar as our family was concerned
on that day the battle of the sexes was a war of attrition that ended
in a tie.
I Dance Around Like Some Kind of Fagot
The thing I always wanted, and to a large degree still want, was to
be cool. I wanted to be able to just look cool, act cool and hand
back and let the ladies flock to me and my mysterious bad-boyishness.
My brain, my traitorous brain, would never allow me to do that and I
would always loose interest in being cool and start goofing, and
clowning. Sometimes I would catch myself and try and dial it back but
usually it would just spiral out of control and soon I would be in
trouble of one sort or another. I have written about the lame
attempts at having a dance at our middle school but in junior high
more people danced and it was at night and there was a real - realish,
DJ. What drove most of the dancing, actually all of the dancing in
Junior High dances were the girls and the levels of testosterone in
the boy's bloodstream that were finally sufficient to overcome early
teenage social timidity and would at least get them on the floor for
the slow dances. We lived in a rural area and gender roles were
fairly well respected in the community and most families except mine.
When I saw the girls all out dancing to the fast dances my coolness
decayed with the half-life of one of those exotic quantum particles
and I was out and goofy dancing without realizing that boys didn't do
that. Luckily, there were a bunch of hillbillies with plenty of
testosterone sitting on the stage steps and along the wall there to
point out my faux pas. They indicated to me that in their
opinion only girls were allowed to dance to fast dances and that my
participation was indicative of my homosexual tendencies. One kid, a
star of the football team and overall tough guy, remarked quite
loudly that I should quit dancing around like some kind of fagot. He
sounded threatening in his tone but he was able to clear that up in
his follow up remark when he promised to kick my queer ass if I
didn't stop dancing with the girls. That terrified me. I really don't
like being punched, kicked or actually physically abused in anyway.
However, I did really, really like girls and it seamed like the best
way for me to maybe make out with some, one, most or all of the girls
here at the dance was to keep dancing and pretend like I didn't hear
my nemesis. He saw that I was not stopping and pretending like I
couldn't hear him so he picked up the volume and intensity of his
requests for me to discontinue my gay dancing. It was becoming
increasingly improbable that I could not have heard him so my plan to
ignore him was becoming less realistic and I needed a new tack. I
choose to pretend I had some pressing business unrelated to the
threats of homo-cide from the redneck real manliness committee
chairman. I asked a girl a year older then me that I had been
interested in for a couple of months if she wanted to go for a walk
outside for a bit and she said sure so we headed out through the
doors manned by teachers so I would not be followed and beat. We got
out under the homo-patrol's radar and went around the south of the
building to the same place where the girl got shot and participated
in that most homo-erotic of behaviors, of kissing someone of the
opposite sex. I guess it turned out all that gay boogieing worked
directly to plan. A fact I pointed out to the psycho when he asked me
where I went during the dance when he had scheduled me for a punitive
thrashing. Knowing that I left to make-out with a girl somehow
deflated his rage entirely and he never bothered me at dances again.
New Girl Shot In The Face In Drive-By Intended For Me
I don't want to prematurely reveal what happened to this poor girl on
her first day in our school too early so you will just have to wait
like everyone else. We were behind the gym starting to walk to the
East when the car with the miscreants came by for the third time but
this time they were driving really slowly and I noticed, too late,
that one of the boys in the back seat had a rifle out the window and
he shot as they went by. I thought at first that they had missed but
the new girl started screaming and there was blood pouring down her
face from a tiny wound in the center of her forehead. There was snow
on the ground and I grabbed a handful to try and stop the bleeding it
held it back a second but it didn't stop. When I pulled it away there
was a swollen fleshy volcano with a perfectly round BB hole in the
center which was still spurting blood. We were in a real pickle here
we had a girl with a air-rifle wound and we were not where we were
supposed to be so we had a problem, do we get help and inadvertently
reveal our naughtiness, or wait for a break and the girl could just
bleed while we covered our own butts. I am ashamed to say we opted
for some butt covering and waited the thirty-five minutes until the
bell rang to report the assault and get the girl medical attention.
In the meantime we snuck back into the building and tried to get her
cleaned up a little in the most remote bathrooms in the building.
They were not terribly remote or private because in an attempt to
shame more kids into washing their hands and to keep water messes to
a minimum the sinks were one huge semi-circular sink and it was in
the hall. She was still bleeding and mopping when the bell rang and
students quickly noticed that there was an abnormal amount of blood
in the region of the bathroom and the principal was already on his
way when we went to meet him. Right away he asked me why I was always
involved when something crazy happened, I told him I was just walking
to class when we were shot at. I told him who the boys were and what
they were driving as they got the girl some medical attention. It
turned out that the BB popped right in and hit her skull and bounced
right back out. So all she had to deal with was a huge swollen red
round wound on her forehead on her first week in a new school. The
shooter boys were picked up by the police in about half an hour and
they were genuinely sorry that they had been caught. They were also
sorry that they had shot a girl who's only crime was poor taste in
friends. They explained that they were trying to shoot me and hit her
by accident. Fair enough, the authorities say and send the boys on
their way. Just kidding they had to go to court and they had to
apologize to the girl and her family and I am not sure if it was
court ordered or some kind of arrangement between the parents but the
boy actually came and worked for free for the girls dad for a little
bit as restitution. Her forehead was only really bad for a week or so
and then through the magic of ritual face paint common in the
American teen she was able to conceal her war wound. I think she only
lasted in our school a few months before she runaway and went on the
road with a friend.
A Girl Moves Into Our School
I didn't loose my train of thought about the guy wanting to do me
grievous bodily harm for a little light mockery and a little heavy
beating this story is absolutely relevant for reasons which you will
soon see. Or perhaps for reasons which you will never see because you
will, by forces quite beyond your control not be able to read the
next post. Or perchance you are reading on a semi-daily or longer
basis and you read the effect before the cause and this disclaimer
seems superfluous. You may say to yourself, 'This story must explain
where that girl who got shot in the head came from.' Indeed it does,
but we must keep that on the hush-hush for a moment so as not to ruin
the surprise for those of us who do not know the rest of the story
yet. To get back to this story and leave all other guns unjumped; for
the sake of narrative clarity we need to establish that there was a
girl who came from a blended family who had one branch of that
family, the biological-paternal side to be exact, that lived by me.
Her biological-maternal family lived in another city but she was
often visiting so I knew her pretty well in fact I had once chickened
out on kissing her if you need to know vaguely who she is there is
that. She was a little to wild of a child and her mother sent her to
come live with her dad to see if he could straiten her out. He could
not but let's not ruin that surprise either. She was going to start
coming to our Junior High and so I thought I should do the right
thing and show her around, By show her around I mean that we went to
one class and then my friends and I decided to show her how we
skipped school to go hand out at their houses. We got all rounded up
and headed out the un-monitored south entrance and around the south of
the building to wait for all of the good boys and girls to go to
class so that no one would get any ideas about ratting out the
naughty kids who were making a run for it. As we were walking around
the south side of the building a car full of high school kids, who
looked exactly like the high school kids that had wanted to beat me
up the night previous at the basketball game (because they were the
boys from the game) drove by on the road that separated the junior
high from the high school. I didn't realize who it was until I had
made good long eye contact with them and they abruptly slowed the car
drove on a little way and then turned around. Uh-oh. They didn't
stop the second trip through either just drove by slowly and pointed
at me from about 100 feet away. I don't usually mind pointing but
this had a rather ominous feel to the point and I suggested to my
friends that we go the wrong way to get to my friends house. They
asked why and I said no reason just wanted to go to the West to get
to a house four blocks to the East. They were not buying it and I
just hoped that the pointy boys from the car had driven on and
forgotten about me. They had not.
Church Ball Fights
On more than one occasion my non-stop onslaught of verbal abuse got
me in more trouble then just a simple assault. Once I kept implying
that the way that a guy, who was two years older than me and quite a
bit more violent than me, was playing in a way that may indicate his
preference for the company of men. I kept up that theme of abuse for
the hour making note of every time he touched tried to touch my butt
or anything along those lines. He had stated fouling quite hard which
sent me to the free throw line and helped us pull into the lead. He
was the other team's best player so when he had fouled out we really
opened it up and ran away with it. He was on the sideline seething in
white hot anger and plotting ways to kill me when the game ended with
us in the lead. I was trying to time my exit to be nonchalantly
walking with the two toughest kids I knew the two crazy brothers Ryan
and Justin. My plan worked well because when I was ambushed in the
parking lot I had a secret weapon, pure unfettered rage embodied in
my emotionally unbalanced friends. They waded into battle not so much
in my defense but for the chance that they could cause someone
grievous bodily harm and possibly taste blood. I was left completely
unscathed from a conflict I think most people would assume that I
had, in some small way, initiated. My big concern now was that I was
now not only on the run because of my smart-assery but also from the
beating my lunatic friends had laid on my enemies and his buddies. I
had no idea how ridiculous this story was about to get I just thought
I needed to steer clear of this dude and his friends for a bit until
they forgot why they wanted to maim and disfigure me. Turns out that
they had a little of the crazy in them as well and an underdeveloped
part of the brain that keeps things in the proper perspective.
Church Ball Assaults
When the older boys had moved on from youth basketball I got a more
featured role and because we didn't have a very dedicated coach I
also ran practice. The main problem with church ball is that it is a
very casual group of basketball players and I wanted to drive them a
little harder to develop then they wanted to most times. They would
humor me and run a drill or two but then there would be mutiny and we
would just play ball the rest of practice. They would all show up for
games ready to go though and that is when we really needed them so I
would just say passive-aggressive things and let them off if we won
and if we didn't I would throw in some - 'we could have pulled ahead
there at the end if you would have drilled that in practice' type
stuff. A typical game for me was running the point-center position. I
was the tallest on the team at 5'11” so naturally I played center,
and I was also a ball hog so I needed to bring the ball down the
floor every time. My third job was to talk a non-stop stream of trash
so that the other team lost focus on basketball and just tried to
assault me. The free throw was my best and most consistent offense so
the more the merrier. Every time I brought the ball down the court I
liked to be singing a little beat-'A' hair band rock in my head to
get the mood right. I was really big into Gun's and Roses, Metallica,
and AC/DC so it was not uncommon for me to be mentally humming a
little Paradise City, Sad But True or Back in Black. Once the mood
was right I would survey the court and make a little plan for the
play and the pass or fake pass. Finally as I engaged the defender I
would begin the chatter in earnest. Weather we scored or not when I
went down on defense I turned up the abuse and really went to work.
“That was a great pass, there was no one where you threw it but it
was a good pass.”
“Shoot! You're good from there, oh dang you missed, you were not
good from there, crap!”
“(I would pretend to say this to my team) Don't worry about the his
left, he can't go left, his left hand might as well be painted on.”
- This most often resulted in the poor guy being baited into
switching to his left hand which really was not a good move for most
casual basketball players and I would be there to steal it. Once I
used this technique on a boy who was a little more violent them the
average hard foul retaliator and when I had stolen the ball and was
driving for a lay-up he just tackled me from behind so I fell strait
back onto my head and was knocked out. He was kicked out of the game
and while he was leaving he was yelling that I had brought it on
myself with my non-stop smack talk. I got up and shot my two and
because they were without their best,and most violent, player we had
no trouble putting them away. If I know anything it is that a win in
a youth church basketball game is worth a little coup and heck, it is
even worth some contra-coup.
Crashing the Boards
There were basketball courts in all of our church houses and that is
where we would go to practice and play every week. One week one of
our big 6'8” monsters was showing how he could dunk and it was
pretty cool to see him bring the power. He decided on one of his
dunks to give it little extra sauce and really rip down on the rim.
He ripped it and the rim shattered out of the backboard in a
magnificent shower of glass. The poor slam-dunker fell flat onto his
but and the crystal rain fell all around him while he laid there
trying to catching his breath. He stood up, rim still in hand, his
face white with terror. I have seen guys dealing with pregnant
girlfriend news with more equanimity. His family was not well off and
the cost of a glass backboard was all that was on his mind. In a
quavering voice he asked no one in particular how much a basketball
backboard costs. Someone offered the number 200 and it looked like
that poor guy was going to vomit. He sat back down, cross-legged, in
the glass and contemplated his fate with a depth of sadness I had
only seen when someone had lost a beloved pet. As spectators we went
from amazed to confused in just a few seconds we wanted to talk about
the awesome destruction but our friend was clearly not feeling the
joy so we were not sure what to do. We settled on cleaning up the
glass and telling him it would be fine and then talking about it
while we walked home and all the next day at school. It turned out it
was only about eighty dollars and someone better off paid for the
replacement but there was a new strict no dunking rule in place which
gave me a good excuse never to learn how.
Church Balling
 |
| Are you telling me that you are honestly saying that there is really a more beautiful vehicular manifestation of art in the history of the whole world? Ha. Ha. |
When the Junior Jazz season was not in swing I played a lot of church
ball. Church ball is like basketball except it is more violent and
more vicious. The teams were organized by the congregation, or ward,
you were in so depending on who your neighbors were you could have a
really good or bad season. My neighbors happened to be pretty good at
basketball so it was a good season. We had two really tall guys for
church ball and a good shooting guard that were on the older team.
They needed a few more guys so my job was to bring the ball down and
give it to one of those good guys. That plan worked really well
because the two tall guys were much bigger then almost anyone else we
played and If I didn't shoot it worked out fine. We got to go to the
regional tournament which I was not allowed to play in and we lost in
the first game. We were all ready to ride home with the youth leader
who brought us and in those days there were a lot of faux-wood-sided
Oldsmobile station wagons in the big family region of Utah where we
lived and we had trouble finding the right one. As it happened our
leader's key didn't work very well in his door so he had trouble
opening the locks. I knew a thing or two about B and E and offered to
open the car for him if someone would be so kind as to lend me a
knife. Weapon in hand I proceeded to jimmy open the triangular vent
window that many cars had before the ubiquity of air conditioning. I
slipped my small arm into the vent and unlocked the door and we were
all loaded in when it was discovered that the reason why his key
didn't work too well in the door was because this was, in actual
fact, not his car at all. We all scrambled out and re-locked the
doors and found the right car a few stalls down and behind one of
those huge 15 passenger vans. The key worked quite a bit better in
the right car and we headed home for real.
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