Chicken Pox Ruins My Trip to Mexico

C'mon dad, just dress me up like drugs and they will never know.

I forgot to write about the worst part about my bout with the chicken pox. 

I was planning to go with my dad to Mexico about ten days after I got the chicken pox so that was the other reason I wanted to speed up my healing. This was back in the easy days of air travel when you could change your ticket of the name on a ticket with little hassle. My dad decided a few days before the trip that it was not going to work out for me to go. He was worried about a kid who looked as sick as me being turned back at the border. 

He changed the ticket over to my little brother Matt. I knew it wasn't my dad's fault or much less Matt's fault but I was still mad that they were getting to go and I was not. I had my poopy-pants on for a couple of days and remember giving a pillow a few impotent teen rage punches as I rage cried myself to sleep that night. I was a little standoffish because I felt like they stole my trip  from me. 

When they were gone I missed them because my brother was my best friend and I am not good at holding grudges anyway.  

Cod Pieces and Prancing

Big old hilarious buggers, like this one here.

Listen To The Story On Our 'Drink The Sauce' Podcast!

When I was about 10 and my brother was 8 we went to the ballet for the first time with my mom as a cultural experience. The ballet was 'The Nutcracker', so the name alone was funny enough to get us going in the humor department. Our mom was not amused. It was pretty boring except for a part where the kids ran in and out from under a huge dress worn by a twelve-foot tall woman. 

Comedy pay-dirt came with a costume change for the male ballet dancers. They changed into some minimalist tights, fluffy shirts, and some massive cod pieces. My brother and I both remember their crotches gathered and enhanced into six or eight-inch shelves. That was funny enough but what came next was absolute comedy gold. Eight or so male dancers to a side formed a line of two rows facing each other, codpieces in. A magnificent crotch bridge walkway. Then they helped a procession of ballerinas up onto their crotches to prance down the codpiece walkway. The dainty ladies stepped gracefully from crotch to crotch, light as a feather. 

It was much more hilarious than any preteen boys could have ever asked the humor gods for. My mom, mortified by our laughter, slapped at us telling us to quit laughing. It was too late, we were at the giggle tipping point. We couldn't un-see what had been seen and humor chooses her own time and place. 

Eventually, we regained our composure and took our joke home with us. At home, we recreated our cultural awakening with some balled up socks stuffed down our pants.  Then countless hours of jokes about crotch prancing dancers. This is why we must fund the arts, they are full, chock full, of unintentional comedy.

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T.E.Moves and We Party

This is not my friend this is Nick Cage in a Saturday Night Live skit, and this is exactly what my friend looked like.

To be clear, I never called my friend Tiny Elvis, when he could hear me. I am just using it as a pseudonym to throw all but the most ardent sleuths off the trail. When we were in high school he moved to a town twenty miles north and we didn't really stay in touch. One day he called me up and said he was pretty lonely at his new place and wondered if I would like to come and spend the weekend. I actually would like that, I said and we organized a transportation situation. The first night up there we rented a video game and played it until it was beaten which was made considerably easier by the good old Konami Code. In this game it gave you something like a thousand lives. That mission done, we went for a late night walk around the neighborhood and lightly vandalized a open foyer of a bank with a 24 hour ATM. By lightly vandalized I mean that we took a handful of deposit envelopes and threw them on the ground. Bad boys for life. Just a couple of street walking cheetahs with hearts full of napalm sticking it to the squares – take that 'the man'. We moseyed home and called it a night after talking and laughing till 3 a.m., when everything gets much funnier. T.E. And his family were sleeper-inners and I am not so I wandered about the house quietly trying to stay entertained until they decided to roll out. When they finally woke up Tiny told me that his friend had invited us to a party down in the rich part of town and I was nervous to go because I am a smart ass and incapable of not being a smart ass and that gets me in trouble on occasion always. Before the party his friend came over and we started joking and during the joking I made a joke about my penis being named Bill. That seemed funny at the time, because I was 14-years-old. That would have meant nothing except for at the party, where I was actually getting along really well, a kid asked me my name and I told him and I asked him his and he didn't tell me so I said I will call you Bill. I have no idea why I had that name on my brain that night but it proved fateful. I was chatting up some girls who had just asked to see my hair which was as long as it had ever been in my life, a luxuriantly flip-able shoulder length. I took off my Bulls hat and did a 'thank-you Vidal' hair flip and they declared my hair sexy. That was going really well and I had to admire these newly met female's taste in coiffures when I was punched in the back about kidney level. That was unexpected, so I asked what exactly the hell was going on. The no-name kid said he was told by Tiny E's friend that Bill was my personal slang for penis and he was upset about me calling him Bill. I tried to explain that the joke was independent of the name but he was not hearing the context at all. He invited me outside to a more personal space for a beating up party he wanted to throw in my honor. I declined, he insisted. We went out to the side yard and my mouth was really dry from the fear of having to fight in a hostile environment. I tried once again to explain myself but he pushed me hard into the bushes I got up and he asked if I would like to get my A-kicked. I did not want that but I pretended I wouldn't mind that in the least. We had a few more shoulder pushes and then he was whisked away on pending 'running-away' business involving a passing police car that was evidently looking for him. Saved from certain destruction I was relived and ate some snow to calm my nerves. We went back inside where the girls the thought my hair was sexy began apologizing for their friends behavior. I accepted their apologies and later that night I accepted some nice soft kisses from one of the brown haired ones. A good night except for when I had to ride back to my friend's house with his stupid seller-out friend who nearly got me killed. The mood was not friendly.

T.E. Practically Sees a Practically Naked Girl

It is hard for me to recall the extreme sexual tension of my young teenage years. I cannot remember how it felt but judging from the interests my friends and I showed in any borderline remotely sexual encounter it must have been rough. My friend, Tiny E. had, beyond his obvious skill in rendering the nude female form in pencil the benefit of having a girl a few years older than us who was not his sister living in his house. She was a 17 year old that was being cared for by my friend's mom in the foster program and was almost old enough to leave the system. She was not particularly nice or good looking but at some level of testosterone in the blood and confusion in the brain a girl, is a girl, is a girl. One fateful morning T.E. got on the bus one morning with some very urgent news I gathered in conspiratorially close as he was indicating was required for his revelation. When we had given a careful perimeter check to ensure the secret we were about to share would stay secret, he excitedly told me that when his foster sister was getting out of the bathroom post-shower she had been walking down the hall with her towel wrapped tight and she had tripped and almost lost control of her modesty protecting towel. He giddily told me that he had almost seen her naked. This seems at this late date and jaded times like a rather minor thrill but I recall being impressed and not a little jealous. I asked his how much of the naughty bits he had actually seen and he disappointingly told me that he had not actually seen any but he had seen a lot of the neighborhood. Lucky ducky. He told me that he had a plan for a second and maybe third opportunity. The bathroom she used for her bathing had a door that opened into the downstairs family room and his plan was to go and pretend to be asleep on the couch she would have to walk past to go to her bedroom. He would peek a little and hopefully see her practically naked if all of his cards were played right. Genius, pure genius. Unfortunately, as mice and men could tell you not everything will go to plan and after a couple of fruitless attempts he decided to give up on the plan when she started getting dressed in the bathroom instead of her room. Still he had that one experience of almost seeing a practically naked girl and that is still good in its own right. 

Selling a Car and a House For Revenge

 This is not really about me but it is about my friend and his family and it is pretty funny so that is why I include it here. When Tiny Elvis and his family moved into town they moved right next to a family that had a very different opinion about how things and should be done around the neighborhood. They argued and fought and then took things to a magical next level of pettiness. It started with my friend's mom listing one of her archenemy's cars for sale in a local newspaper at an insanely cheep and put their phone number in the ad. The hilarity ensued when a horde of bargain seekers descended like a plague on the neighbors, trying to be the lucky one to get the unbelievable bargain. Figuring that all is fair in turnabout is fair play, the pranked neighbor became the pranker and took this little battle of wits from skirmish to full blown war. She decided to list her antagonist's home for sale at a unbelievably low price as well, but her twist was to list her own number as a contact so that she could set up home showings and send realtors over. The poor realtors and the perspective buyers looking for a good deal were instead met with my friend's increasingly angry mother. To retaliate my friend's mom sent her daughter over to beat up the neighbors daughter. That got the police involved and mixed up with that my friend and his family had to move across town where the neighbors were less hell bent on ruining each others lives. At the time I was horrified by the pettiness but now I think it was a pretty funny non-destructive prank, until the girls fought and then it turned violent - but right up until then though.   

A Wave Device Because I Love Science

 As was the case with all the science fairs projects and demonstrations one was not enough for me so I would usually try and make another one or help on a couple just for the thrill of the build. Tiny Elvis was not anywhere in the neighborhood of my unbridled joy for the exhilaration of science fairs. To please us both I went ahead and built him a wave demonstration device that was actually pretty top notch work. The problem now was that Tiny-E had no idea what was going on with this magnificent device so I tried to teach him about the various wave forms which he was thrilled to learn about. I don't know if you read the tone of that last sentence, it was sarcasm. I tried to bring it up in cool and fun ways throughout the week, but even with my passion and persuasion he only picked up the gist of what we were talking about and that was not enough. I was so proud of my wave machine that I wanted to take credit for it so badly that I could taste it. I was all agitated and fidgety when E brought it in and set it up in the front of the class. We had to wait a few minutes while everyone settled and class business was addressed and then it was time for Tiny Elvis to do my work justice. He did not. He was up there bumbling and stumbling through it and it was getting worse and worse. I didn't want to tip the teacher off that it was in fact I that had been doing the work but I could not watch this excellent demonstration go down in flames so I raised my hand and asked the teacher if I could help my friend properly describe the wave process. She said that would be fine so I ran up and took over one hundred percent and went to work describing the three types of waves that the device was creating as well as describing a little about wave theory. The class was not interested because they were Luddite swine. The teacher eventually had to ask me to wrap it up because I was running over time that was for the other projects. After the class she asked me to stay and talk with her. She had through some preternatural sense divined that it was I that had build E's science project. I tried to tell her that we worked on it together but she was not interested in hearing that because E had no idea what was going on. She told me She was happy that I was so passionate about science but that I needed to let the other kids do their own work so that they could learn as well. She told me that she was not going to penalize either of us because she new I was not trying to cheat, so from them on I just did my own science projects. No one ever said anything about essays so I still would write essays for friends and girlfriends if it was a good topic.  

Hand Drawn Pornography

In the dark times before the interwebs it was actually kind of hard to get pornography especially for 14 year-old's in a rather conservative community. That is where Little Elvis' drawing skills were really well put to use and actually made him a little cash on the side. I don't know where he got his source material or if it was all from inference and imagination but L.E. Could whip out a pretty passable naked lady posed provocatively with shading and everything in just a few minutes. Somehow other boys heard about his skill and a couple of guys were willing to pay for request drawn porn. Long hair, short hair, big breasts or bigger breasts L.E. could do it all. I was much to shy to ever make a request and was too embarrassed to take one for free. I wanted one but I was terrified of being found out if I took it home by my brother who shared my room, or by my mom who would be mortified, or anyone else who were to come upon it. My only option was to coast over on my flash memories of of the sweet sweet graphite and paper beauties and there awesomely seductive posses. I thought that hand drawn pornography was a fairly unique and kind of goofy idiosyncrasy of my childhood but I have mentioned it to several people over the years as a funny story and more then a few have told me that they or a close friend had also dabbled in their own hand drawn smut. Who knew?

'Little Elvis' Draws Shoes

 I had a friend who moved in down the street from me when I was in seventh grade that was a pretty cool guy but had that new kid from somewhere else problem where he seemed a little weird. It actually turned out that he was just a little weird but still cool. He had a hair cut that made him look ever so slightly like 1950's Elvis and was ever so slightly diminutive so he was nicknamed 'Little Elvis'. I didn't have many friends and he didn't have many friends so out of a certain necessity we began hanging out and became friends. I did like him and we did have fun so I don't want to make it sound like it was all barrel scraping and just the dregs of the friend barrel. I mean to say I was scraping the barrel at the time but he was not barrel scrapings  He was not into outside play to much so most of what we did was play video games which was right in my wheelhouse. He also liked to draw and was decent at it so we spent a good deal of time drawing stuff. I was not good at drawing but I did want to learn so I put in the time and got exactly no better. The one most common thing we drew was shoes. I know that sounds a little odd but once again Michael Jordan pops into the narrative of my life to explain my motivations. Tennis shoe culture was getting big and the newest and best basketball shoes were Nike Air Jordans and every boy who knew what was cool wanted some or if he was so lucky, had some. Lil' E and I were not so fortunate so what we got was the fantastic obsession with drawing them and literally hundreds of our own subtle variants. We would draw and color in one after another. Mine were usually very near ripoff's of the real thing almost always colored the Jordan red and black. As with any monomania that strikes me I got really and deeply involved for about three weeks and then in a matter of days I quit and have never drawn a shoe for a shoes sake in all the time since.

A Bag for a Hat

 While I was convalescing with the chicken pox I liked to have something on my head to keep my sores from touching the pillow that I was laying on because that made them itch. What felt the best was this blue and white stripped bag that hung floppy over my head in what I believed was a pretty jaunty way. I have no idea now why wearing that stupid bag on my head made me feel so cool but for some reason it did, and when I had that bag on my head I had a swagger. It didn't end when I got over the pox either so I cannot chalk it up to the delirium of illness. For a couple of months after that when I was at home and wanted to feel cool I would pop the bag on my head and hang out with my friends or cousins or whomever happened to be in audience of my great fashion sense. I have some pictures of me in my bag hat which by the grace of the fashion gods, I never wore out in public, and I look like a young man with a floppy bag on his head with none of the talismanic powers of cool it seemed to convey while it was on my head. I never wish that I was young again. Ever.   

Chicken Pox Look Like Acne

Really? Chicken Pox look like acne? I don't see it.

I had never got chicken pox as a child, I waited until my first year in high school to go ahead and do that. I was in the shower on Monday morning and I noticed spots all over my body and was actually pretty excited that I got to miss some school. I had a plan to speed up the disease and get over it in no time. That was because I had unreasonable confidence and a profound naivete about the power of my will versus a pretty nasty pathogen. 

To start my plan, I switched up the shower for a bath tossed in some salts and thought I would just make the sores come out and then soak them off. Easy. The sores did come out and then they kept coming and I was getting more miserable and itchy by the hour and I started to doubt my plan. I called it a day a few hours into my accelerated recovery scheme and napped the rest of the day. 

By the next morning, I was in full bloom and I thought I would move my plan into phase two and lance a couple of the biggest juiciest ones. This was not a good plan because they still had some growing to do and some proliferation still in the tank. I popped and popped and was not making any headway so I went back to bed instead. Days turned into a week and my sores itched all the time before they finally popped and scabbed over. I was starting to think that chicken pox was not as glamorous a respite from school as I had thought.

After ten days even though I was mushed up scab hamburger I was too bored to stay at home. Teen body image shame notwithstanding I decided that even though I had what looked like a world class case of acne I had to get out of the house. I had convinced myself that it didn't look too bad anymore, but it did, it really did. I knew that about the time I got onto the bus and everyone was looking at me weird. 

It got worse at school and I tried to keep to myself and snuck out to the outside math building. I sat down and a girl, a cute girl, asked me why I had been gone for so long. I told her it was on account of me having chicken pox. She told me that I just looked like I had a bad acne. Oh, dangit. 

As it happened it took almost a month more for all the sores and scabs to heal up. I guess I had to go back sometime. I was only embarrassed about my face for the first day or so, but I am not too hung up on looks so I got over it. As a note on the effectivity on my willing the poxs to stop - did not work.

Sad Roses and Grand Gestures

Valentines was coming up so I thought that would be a great time for my planned grand gesture. It normally would have been but I may need to remind you of my lack of research in to her relationshipal status. I decided some roses would be nice and I knew that a dozen was customary and that was my intended intention until I saw what twelve would set me back. When I saw the price I thought that three was probably a grand enough gesture, I mean, for a guy on a budget. If I know one thing it is that girls love a guy who shows a little fiduciary discipline. I was too young to drive to the local flower shop and make my delivery so I had to ask my mom and she was not excited about me giving out roses but she went along. She was actually relived when she saw I was buying three because she mistakenly thought I was buying them for three different girls. I picked them up and had my mom drive me over to the girl's house and she was a little upset when I was giving all three to this girl. I was super nervous but I screwed up my bravery to the sticking point and willed myself up to the door holding the roses very low and a little behind my back. I was hoping she would answer the door and save a step but it was her dad and I had to ask for her. He invited me to come in and stand in the entryway where, and this is absolutely the truth, the TV was playing a Bon Jovi music video 'Bed of Roses' to be specific. The girl came upstairs looking a little confused but she brightened when she saw me I gave her the three sad looking roses and she was looking a lot uncomfortable. She said thanks and gave me a perfunctory hug and said she would see me at school. I was a little off put by the brush off but it turned out she was trying to save me as I found out latter that night when she called me. I was initially excited that she was calling me and I thought maybe she was interested in hooking up something sometime. Welp, not so fast there constant reader. She was calling to say that she wanted me to knock of the wooing because her boyfriend, who was actually a penumbric friend of mine, was getting upset about it. He had actually been over at her house the night I brought over the roses and was not amused, even suggesting that he should kick my stupid butt. Hmmm, that sounds like a soft no, bordering on firm. I told her I was sorry and then hung up in mortal fear of getting a beating from a boyfriend who naturally felt his territory was being challenged. I laid low at school for a week or so and stopped 'accidentally' running into this girl in between classes. We stayed friendly but never closer until she graduate the next year and ended my shame reminder ordeals in the hall. 

Try Try Again

 I was still in the hunt for a little female companionship and only needed a few quick week to shake off the accusation a 'scamming pretty hard'. I decided to give the younger ladies a pass for a bit because the pure whit attraction of my recently pubescent self was to much for them to take lightly they all, all one of them, ha fallen too hard and tried to go me down for a long haul. If one were to take this data point and extrapolate it out to a general trend one must assume that all girls younger then myself were crazy commitment freaks. Just simple math, just one inevitable conclusion, steer clear or die the slow death of marriage. No thanks. The problem I was having was that my unfathomably pure sex appeal was not really working on the girls a year or three older than me. The same charm that had blown the doors off of the more wise and sophisticated girls a year younger then me was not working on the more sheltered and naive women with a few more miles on them. Curious. I decided to focus in on one girl to see if I could seal the deal and to that end I started stalking her a little. Any fan of Rom-coms knows that the surest way to a woman's heart is with a little light creeping. I found out where she was usually at in different times of the day and started coincidentally being there and then for a quick chat. She was really nice and like many fledgling lovers I mistook schoolgirl congeniality for attraction. I knew soon that I should have done a little research into more than her schedule, into topics like whether she currently had a boyfriend for example. Pro-tip: this is a good thing to know about any girl you want to date. A friend and I went to a school dance she was attending and I asked her to dance six or so times thinking I was getting ready to close the deal but after each dance she thanked me and went back to hang out with her friends. Anyone who was not absolutely socially inept would have sensed trouble, but not I and that night I decided to go ahead and follow the Rom-com playbook to phase two and make a grand gesture. Spoiler alert - Rom-coms are works of fiction and are not full of good ideas for real world romance, unless you like being humiliated then by all means carry on. I know I did.  

Scamming Pretty Hard

 There was a term, 'scamming' , which may have been indigenous to our junior high and high school. No one not from there seems to know what it refers to. I actually didn't know what it meant when I started junior high I just pretended to know what all the kids in the know kids knew. I kept up faking until I overheard someone condescendingly explaining what it meant to some poor naive baby. In the characteristic euphemistic subtlety of a teenage boys locker room he explained that scamming was, 'going up the shirt and down the skirt', classy and it even rimes so it makes it easy to remember. I think the medical term is heavy petting. I have to give you that background into the local lexicon because I was shortly to be accused of 'scamming pretty hard'. After my movie date I had to walk across town to the extraction point and my date walked with me cuddling up close and talking to me about her plans for us. Whoa, plans? She had a song picked out for us to be our song. Oh. . .Oh. . .kay. By the time we had walked the two miles to where I was going to be picked up she had our 75 year plan in the books and on the table. I was looking for something a little more short term and hedonistic and less long-termy. I resolved to tell her that I was not that into the situation and that is precisely what I didn't do. I kissed her good night and waited for my chronically tardy mother and stressed over how to pinch this bud off before it got out of hand. I did the mature and responsible thing and just never called her back. Luckily we were at different schools so I didn't have to see her in the hall but she did call for a week or so which made me feel horrible but I was too much of a coward to tell her the truth and be a man about it. Her friend actually tracked me down outside my bus at the high school and called me out accusing me of using her friend and being a jerk. That was mostly true, actually all true. She had told many people that we were scamming pretty hard and then I just dumped her friend. Now that was not true, we had not been scamming hard, pretty hard or soft for that matter. Furthermore, I had not dumped her because we were not going out. She was not concerned with the exact legal ins and outs of the situation and just called me an effing a-hole and let me get on the bus to hear it from everyone who had seen that go down. It was a fun ride home hearing echos of my verbal beratement. Still that was better than being locked into a 75 year deal.  

A Clever Girl, and Her Audience

 Luckily, or unluckily depending on which rubric one uses to asses the relative benefits and repercussions of our brief fling ours was a fleeting attraction that could withstand a little ersatz brother cock-blocking. Block on Rob, block on. She had me looked up and called by the next mid-morning and invited me out on a date to the local, to her, movies. There was one movie theater in the ten or so small towns around so if you wanted to see a movie without driving 30 minutes you went there and saw what they wanted you to see. One screen, two showings and no frills because, where else are you gonna go? I had a dilemma because I was in high school but I still couldn't drive and there is nothing less cool than riding a Schwinn 6 miles to a date. I had to get a ride without getting some nosy tag along so I came up with a fanciful tale of meeting up with some guy and only guy friends in the next town over for a little not-doing-anything-naughty. It too some talking and sucking up but soon the deal was struck and my mom was taking me to go see Jurassic Park and, on the sly, a certain young lady. I arrived got out and fake met up with some friends to throw my mom off the trail she bit and drove off planning to come back much later to pick me up across town, which in a town that size was not very far. I had been under the impression that this was going to be a one on one kind of date but when I found the girl she was there with two girl friends and one of their boyfriends. No matter, keep it cool and see what happens. We went in and found a nice dark back corner with me in the corner my date next and then her friends. I was working up the nerve to make a move when she grabbed my hand put it around her neck and snuggled up elbow deep with my hand held in both of hers on her collar bone. This is a good trick for a girl to know in that it removes all of the anxiety from the situation and lets the guy off the hook. We were about to the part where for some reason a mathematician, well versed in chaos theory, was going to study a perfectly under control situation on an island. When she nuzzled in for a kiss which landed on my chin and then she started going to work. I had been hoping for a kiss or something at some point but this amount of unbridled passion had me a little unnerved and embarrassed. I was trying to fend her off and also fend her on in a delicate pas-de-bisous that I was trying to keep under control. Her friends were obviously interested because every time I looked over they were giving knowing glances and giggles. The movie was really long it seemed like and this girl was becoming dissatisfied with some basic kissing and wanted to move onto a little more advanced stuff which I was definitely not doing with a gaggle of onlookers looking on. I told her I was needing a quick break to go potty and made an escape. I didn't go to the bathroom but I did spend a little time in the back hall looking at a mural of the towns history that was there. I ventured back in when the time was going to start to seem suspicious retook my seat and watched the end of the movie with no more heavy making out. It was disappointing just like every time I see that movie, I keep hoping they may have edited in an alternate ending where that stupid blonde girl is ripped to shreds.  

Pursuing Younger Women

 I had discovered that when I moved up to the high school that the girls my age were less available because they were being monopolized by the older boys who were looking for younger and dumber women. Well, that was fine because it opened up two fruitful fields for a resourceful young man on the make-out scavenger hunt, older women and younger women. The magic there was that the girls at my school rarely if ever had vertical connections of more than a year or so, meaning if I just pursued a girl three years older than the other one I was interested in I could try for both without getting into that whole , 'why are you trying to date us both?' unpleasantness. To that end I started working on some senior girls and some girls in ninth grade which in our school system was technically in high school but went to the junior high still which added another layer of protection for my scandal. There was a girl I met at an all ages dance who was clearly attracted to me and while if I was to judge her beauty solely off of looks I would have said 6 maybe 7, when one factored in her very good taste in men she started nudging up there to the 8-9 range. She asked me to dance a couple of times and made clear through her dance proximity that she was not shy about physical contact and was maybe encouraging it. Did I say 8-9? Well, I was starting to find this young woman irresistible - lets say, for those keeping score, 9 pushing 10. The dance, which was held on a tennis court was starting to thin out as curfews and rides for all of the respectable people started arriving. The dance was down to the final 20 people or so which made my new lady friend even more bold and she started leaning up against me in non-dance situations and putting her hands around my waist in a side hug with her under my arm. Right about the time I was thinking of making my make-out sequestering move my ride showed up. Rob, Rob, Rob, robbed. He was cranky and in a hurry and was not interested in waiting for me to make my move so I got the girl’s phone number and got in the car with our pseudo-brother and lamented my timing and his as I imagined what could have been on the short ride back to Santaquin.

Basketball Again

Editing note: We are now rejoining my sophomore year in high school already in progress! I wanted to be an athlete, not just one who played games but one who was legitimized by participation in a school sanctioned team. The rational for this was two fold; fold the first, I would get all kinds of attention from adoring fans. This is a common misconception in sports fantasies, everyone imagines being a winner. Fold the second, I would get the women, all of them is how it went in my visualizations. All of them, every single time. This is also a common misconception in fantasies. To achieve my goals I played and practiced basketball all of the time. I was not tall but I was banking on developing ball handling and jumping ability. I dribbled around our backyard court for hours and I jumped up and hit the ceiling fan in may parents room spinning it over and over. I was under the delution that I could work hard and I would get to compeate on equal footing with thte kids who had tried out and made the team last year and that there was going to be some changing of the guard. I believed this, in part, because Michael Jordan was such a big success and he had been cut from his high school team was what we had all heard. He worked hard and made the team and the rest was history as he became the best basketball player of all time. I didn't know at the time that the real story was that as a freshman young Mike was not cut from the team he just did not play varsity in deference to the senior players, he did however start on the junior varsity team and then the next year as a sophomore was promoted to the varsity squad. That is not being cut that is playing three years and not four ahead. I just wanted to play at my grade level and I believed that, with hard work, could happen. I showed up to tryouts which had much fewer kids then there had been in 9^th grade tryouts which I mistook for me having better odds. I out worked everyone came early and left late and it didn't help when the cut list was put up on the door the third day I was once again not on it. That meant no glory, no fame and worst of all no all-the-women-I-want. I was bitter and made it known that I was a better player than some of the kids on the team but I had been cut for political and social reasons. The old refrain of the cast-off in sports, ' He made the team because of his last name' or something to that effect. I now do not know if that was the whole reason I was cut, being 5' 10” and having little experience in interscholastic play may have had more to do with it. Probably the former. 

The Run Around Place

 One more out of order story came to mind about when we were young children. We lived in a mobile home with my grandparents and mentally handicapped uncle so there was not a lot of play room. This was especially true in the winter months when we were going absolutely stir crazy and there was fighting, sassing and destruction over every limited square foot of the smallish house. My mom in an effort to keep some semblance of order would take us out and about town to get us burned down and worn out so peace could be kept. My favorite escape was a field house at the local college which we called the run-around-place. There was an indoor track and field with some really amazing pads that were used to catch pole vaulters which were awesome for us to use for anything we wanted. We would jump on and slide off and wrestle and fight until a student supervisor would invariably come and tell us we couldn't play on that and we would have to stop until next time. We would jog around the track and duck under hurdles, sometimes tipping them over and out of place, and basically just make a nuisance of ourselves. It must have worked or just have been an effective escape because we went back often until we moved too far away.  

Ears Pierced and Dragons Coveted

Is there anything more beautiful in the history of this all combined?

Once again here is a story badly out of order but when I was talking pewter jewelry with my wife recently I remembered the first time I say a dragon grasping a marble – the reason pewter was invented. When my sister was twelve she was going to be allowed to get her ears pierced and to be able to start wearing makeup. This was a really big deal for her because she wanted to be all grown up for a long time and everyone knows that a pierced ear is the first thing you need to be an adult woman. My mom had for a long time held out for twelve years old and was firm on the date of my sister's twelfth birthday as the magical date and not a moment sooner. Her birthday was the vary first of January and that year we were going on our almost annual trip to Colorado to visit my mom's family for Christmas where my aunt had designs on moving up the date as her gift to my sister. My mom agreed and they kept it a secret until a day or so before Christmas and my sister and I went with my Aunt to a local mall on some trumped up pretense where we stopped into a jewelry store where the surprise was dropped. My sister was so overwhelmed with ecstasy and started to cry and hug and carry on in such a way that made me feel uncomfortable. She got up in the chair to get the piercing done and I went on a mill about and had myself a little peruse of the jewelry which was mainly costume tat but in the back corner there was the most magnificent collection of not garbage I had every seen. There were magically cool wizards, dragons, sexy ladies and powerful warriors all rendered with crystals and marbles in awesomely detailed pewter. I wanted one and I wanted all but this day was about my sister and her ears and the hygiene of her ears and my pleas for fantasy jewelry were unheeded. I was devastated and fixated on making my dream of a dragon claw holding a marble necklace come true. I determined to save up the six dollars or so that were required to purchase such a treasure. The problem was my lack of self control and as I would save there was always something more proximal to my gratification and after a few misfires in saving I gave up and forgot about my most deepest and truest desire. I have never owned fantasy jewelry – now, finally, without regret.   

Pee In The Trash Can

 There was a rather rambunctious and precocious Hispanic kid in my drafting class who was not one to get too overly hung up on social niceties. He was only fifteen which was old for ninth-grade but still young for driving a truck to school which he would do on occasion. Once you can drive a truck on a whim taking no for an answer is simply not an option anymore. One day when he was being particularly disruptive and coincidentally, funny, he had already pushed the teacher to the limit when he discovered that he needed to pee and asked permission to do so. Based on his previous behavior his request was ceremoniously denied and he was told sit down and shut up. That is not what a underage truck driving kid was going to do and like a bizzaro world Rosa Parks he refused to sit where he was told. He complained loudly and then took matters into his own hands, literally. He walked over to a floor garbage can and he roughly kicked it into place to receive his golden stream of civil disobedience and commenced protesting. Even though he could see what was going on the same as all of us the teacher asked incredulously if the young rebel was, in actual fact, urinating in the garbage can. The boy flippantly claimed responsibility with a rather testy justification that placed the blame on the teacher's refusal of permission. That didn't go over too well with the teacher and he had the boy collared and quickly but had more trouble controlling and extricating him. Once they were out in the hall the boy broke out and ran for the outside doors and was gone. I only had one class with the boy so when he never came back I didn't know if he was kicked out of that class specifically or school entirely. I heard later that he had dropped out and was working in an auto shop. It is sad but sometime that is the price once courageous soul must pay to resist tyranny.  

Perverted Classmate

 There was a boy from Santaquin I my drafting class who was never a close friend but we were always friendly and he was a pervert. I am not so sanctimonious as to keep all of my humor out of the gutter but I dealt mainly in double and even triple entendre, euphemism and innuendo. This young man's method was much more blunt, crude and crass. There was one girl in my class, I am not saying 'one' in the sense that I am referring to her among many, I mean she was the only one. That is often the case in technology classes there would be one or none girls and plenty of testosterone. So this one girl that was learning to draft with the rest of us and the boy from Santaquin was running a non-stop stream of inappropriate sexual questions and jokes. She was really good-natured about the sexual harassment and was usually just laughing and telling him to shut up. She may have had extra tolerance for that type of thing based on her family situation which was a little less then traditional in that it included a lot more drugs, alcohol and righteous living than is average. One weekend my naughty classmate had been at a party over the weekend with the girl, her family and friends consuming illegal drugs and alcohol and e had observed her making out with an older boy. When the teacher left the room for a tick he started in full bore talking about it making accusations and insinuations much more loudly than usual because there was no oversight of any kind. The teacher who was taking care of some kind of business was listening in over the PA system and came storming back in to put a stop to the shenanigans. I had not really been paying much attention to this boy and his ritual ribaldry so I was really surprised when a pretty flustered and fairly enraged drafting teacher grabbed me by the shirt and under my arm and marched me into the other room and looked right into my eyes. He was staring intently into my eyes and with his rudimentary skills of body language observation saw I was not sure what was going on. He was squeezing my arm and breathing hard from his jog and he asked me, “Was it you?”. I was honestly and without guile confused about what was me. I told him so and he was incredulous.

“It wasn't you?”

“I don't know what you are talking about”, I said and I was racking my brain about my sins and misdeeds trying to think of what he could mean.

He told me to stand right there and that he was going to go ask the class if it was me and if it was I was going to be in double the trouble. I hoped whatever it was, was not something that had slipped my mind and I had unintentionally denied. He went back to the other room and I heard them talking for a bit and then he came back in to where I was standing in the shop and told me he was sorry it was not me and he had made a mistake. He never told me what it was and I went back to class. It was not until I had a second out in the hall after class that the other kids told me that he was talking about something the other boy from Santaquin had said to that girl about her breasts. They told me what it was and I was frankly offended that my teacher was so tone deaf as to not only misrecognize my voice but the material was so second rate that I would never make a stupid joke like that. I was happy though that I had not been implicated in the scandal and received no punishment. Which was a little victory.

Blue Prints Spill

 In the years I was learning about drafting we were still using vellum and making blue prints which were a type of photo reactive paper that you would place your finished drawing and expose to light and then cure in a cylinder full of high potency ammonia solution. The problem with that was that there were thirteen and fourteen-year-old’s fooling around with chemicals that could kill us all. The first couple of times were were curing the prints the teacher did it all himself and then he turned it over to us which is where it went wrong. One afternoon when the teacher was actually out of the class someone spilled the whole gallon of the toxic curing brew. It was instantly suffocating and the students left in the room fled the scene and ran into the hall where the fumes were still spreading. There was only two other classes on that hall – art and technology and in about ten seconds they had gotten wind of the issue and were running outside and the teacher was still not back. There were about a hundred kids choking and coughing standing out on the back patio in the cold with only one teacher trying to sort us all out. The fire department came and sealed off the that classroom and started ventilating. In the calculus of young adulthood a little burning of the soft tissues of the lungs was a small price to pay for a little time on the more or less loose. We didn't have to go back to class for the rest of the day as we were moved around outside until we were taken home on our regular buses. Awesome day, most especially if you happen to like the smell of ammonia and the burn of it in the old breathe bags.  

Drafting a Dream House

 I always liked plans and lists and papers of that sort so when the opportunity arose in junior high to take a drafting class I signed up with all due haste. As it happened the drafting teacher was also the wood shop teacher so I had couple of classes with him. In drafting we learned the very basics and then he turned us loose on the coolest project I may have ever done in school to that point – we got to draft our dream house. That was the whole assignment for a couple of weeks was just to draw whatever ridiculous house we wanted and we would get credit. Well, a class full of thirteen and fourteen-year-old’s mostly just render grotesque monstrosities completely lacking in any design subtly or the basic provisions for indoor plumbing, heating or electricity. Actually that is not entirely true we all were issued a template of standard architectural symbols and one of them was a urinal. There is nothing more alluring to the mind of a young male designer than to pop a urinal in a alcove or nook somewhere near the entryway and also in the den. Our class was, with a single exception, all boys so once the idea was out in the air there was a urinal rush and I think most, if not all, of the final houses had one or ten. Many of the houses where designed to be build over a cliff, underwater, in mountains or any other of various James Bond villain domicile scenarios. The only grading criteria seemed to be nice legible lettering which would normally be my Achilles Heal but for a reason beyond my understanding when I focused on architectural stylized writing I had a decent hand. As a point of fact the one and only time I have been praised for my handwriting was when the teacher was looking for examples of perfectly rendered 6's and 9's and took one of my pages to show other kids how to make really good ones. It was one of my proudest moments. My finished house had a terrarium through the middle of it and a cavern room with a platform and a ramp that I was really proud of designing.     

A Wood Shop Oversolicitude

 Some of the girls in the class claimed that our wood-shop teacher was at turns a little more hands on then seemed appropriate. He would give the boys general directions from a reasonable distance but a couple of our female classmates swore that when it was there turn for a little personal assistance he would take the time to close the gap and get right in there close. One afternoon after school my girlfriend was finishing up her wood-shop project and she had asked me to come and help. When I got there a few minutes late the shop teacher was in there with her standing very close behind her draped over her helping her draw some guide lines on a door she was finishing. When I walked in They both said hi and didn't move until they were done with the layout. I couldn't tell if he was being creepy or if he just had an avuncular but really poor sense of personal space because he didn't seem self conscious of it. When we were alone I asked her if she felt uncomfortable and she said, no that he had just been helping her and she thought nothing of it. To my knowledge there was never any scandal but the scuttlebutt around the junior high was that he was at least a bit cuddlier then average if nothing else. I was prejudiced in his favor because he taught all of my favorite classes and seemed like a really nice guy.    

A Wood Shop Skinning

 When I finished up my chest I was asked by the teacher to help the slower kids do their projects so they could get done on time. I had knocked together a couple more chests and a gun rack or five whe I decided to ask if I could use the lathe which at that point in the class was off limits. The teacher trusted me and let me practice on a couple of things before he had me rebuild some balusters for a lady who needed some replacements for an antique piano. I made her parts and then a couple of bats, because one cannot have two many mini bats. I then decided to make some turned handles for my chest to make it really pop and look more rustic. I got some scrap wood and turned down one handle to the point where it just needed to be sanded. I was using the little sheets that we were supposed to use but it was taking so long I decided to go ahead and put the handles back on the lathe and sand them off there. I got them up to speed and was using a belt sander belt that Seemed to be working really well and I was pretty proud of how very smart I was. Then everything turned bad the belt sanding belt wrapped around the handle and ripped out of my hand taking a fair amount of skin with it and before I could pull away it had spun around and took a sizable swath of skin off of my left arm. I really didn't like that but the thought of being kicked off all of the machines scared em more so I quickly shut off the machine wiped up my blood with a cloth and went into the class room to put my jacket over my arm and the telltale bloody shop rag. I excused myself to go to the restroom but the sink in those stupid bathrooms were out in the hall so I had to rinse off all of the blood and try and stop the bleeding quickly before classes let out a a bunch of nosy looky-loos would start asking a bunch of stupid and incriminating questions. I got the bleeding under control and I kept the rag wrapped around my arm and under the jacket for the rest of the day. It was four days over the weekend before I had to go back to shop class so there was plenty of time to heal and wear long sleeve shirts to keep my wounding a secret. I decided to keep my innovative new sanding technique to myself and I retained my shop privileges.   

Wood Shop Stealing

Thou Shalt Not Steal You Dirty Hillbilly.

For some insane reason I have forgotten to write about wood shop and drafting classes from junior high I guess I was just in a hurry to get to the next stuff and I overlooked some nice juicy low hanging fruit right over here. In 9^th grade students could choose to take wood shop and I very much choose to do that. I love building things and using tools and to do both at school was a dream come true. We had a week of safety and operational instruction and my bit was getting pretty chomped by the time we were to pick our project for the semester. I chose an awesome looking plank chest that looked like it would be right at home in a pioneer home. I was skilled in project management and in the use of tools so I attacked the project with vigor. The job was supposed to take us all semester or about 24 hours to finish but this looked like about a two hour job to me. I worked at a pace that greatly concerned the shop teacher who was naturally concerned for my safety and his liability but I demonstrated my competence and his worries were assuaged. In the first day I had all of the planks cut. On the second I had them all dado-ed and the edges routed. On the third a curious thing had happened all of my ready for assembly boards were replaced with rough cut boards and this lurpy goof of a hillbilly named Zeek or Zane or some other insane Oaky name was much further along with his exact same project. I confronted him about the old switch-a-roo and he flatly denied touching my stuff. After that I started writing my name with a pencil on the work I had finished and started hatching a most nefarious plan. I had finished all of the body parts for a second time and got to work on the lid but I measured wrong on the two side piece of the lid but instead of throwing them away I left them out without my name on them with a virtual 'For Steal' sign on them as bait for that lumber thief ZeeBob. He took the bait and my gambit turned to end game as he started to cut planks to fit the erroneous side pieces. I waited for him to realize his error as I rebuilt mine to the correct specifications but he was in such a hurry he never checked his lid to the box. It just kept getting funnier as he raced to keep pace with me in a tacit competition. On the sixth day I was done letting the varnish on my lid and box dry and proceeded with assembly. ZeeDiddley was a day behind even with the stealing so I got to finish first. The next class period I had been assigned to help the other kids finish their projects when I took some time to watch Zibronee assemble his mismatched lid and box. They were off by a full three inches and he was dumbfounded about how he could have gotten it so wrong. The shop teacher asked him if he measured carefully and he claimed he had. That is when I took the opportunity to remind Zippy that in the future the best plan would be to do his own work and not steal mine because I had made some lid ends which were three inches short that someone had stolen from me so those must be the one he had. He again denied stealing anything but at that point a massively malformed box was all of the proof and apology I needed. Zane somehow found it in his malformed ethics justified to blame me for his thievery which resulted a mismatched lid because I didn't warn him it was a faulty piece he was stealing. I was not sorry.   

That Girl Has a Nice Ratio

 In that same English class where I read every day there was a girl that I had not ever noticed before in the previous two years of going to school with her. I cannot fathom how I had over looked her because she had a superb ratio to all of her secondary sex characteristics. Maybe she had become more womanly over the summer or I had just never had a class with her but it was like she was a new girl who had suddenly become objectifiable. She sat two seats in front of me with only a rather soft and effeminate young man between us. He was either bedeviled with less testosterone or was just more classy but he derived no pleasure from watching her come or go. A couple of times he would catch me in a longer than polite glance and scold me. I worked out a transition to a seat without her guardian in the way and thought I would strike up a little chance to demonstrate my charm. I tried but she was absolutely uninterested. Excuse me young lady but did you notice how very clever I am? Well? Laugh, dangit, this is my only power of persuasion. She found me in no wise interesting and I started to notice she wasn't that cute after all. Some other guys were still susceptible to her prima facia charms but they were not privy to her dark secret – she had no sense of humor and she had terrible taste in me, I mean men. I abandoned the effort as unfruitful but I did eventually go on a date with her, I didn't take her but I was on a group date with my friend who had asked her out. In an assessment that I can honestly tell you is not tainted by sour grapes in the least - she was a bratty, boring and mean which by the end of the night had gotten on everyone nerves. I think we were all happy when she claimed she needed to be home early and we scrambled to oblige. It was a hard lesson for me, I had been betrayed by the deepest part of my brain that tells me to pursue a woman who is shaped a certain way while the top part of my brain was not impressed at all. I was somewhat disappointed to learn that I was unable to objectify women and that I was more attracted to intelligence and personality then hip-to-breast ratio. Stupid brain.  

Thou Shalt Not Spit.

 I am not one put off my too much, I have an adaptable palate and I am not to picky about too much but I have a very strict no spiting rule in my general area and my environs. My younger brother had no such rule and he was reminding me of an altercation we had as kids just today so I thought I should write what I remember and what he told me while it was fresh. My brother had a rather unique friend who conspired with him in a non-stop procession of weird, almost side show-esque endeavors. They taught them selves to chug soda at an amazing rate and they both learned to ride their bicycles backwards for long distance. Those and many others I thought were amusing or funny but basically harmless. The one that I could not stand was when they started a game of card-less solitaire wherein they would spit into the air and then re-catch the spittle. Abso-fricking-loootly horrid. I would beg and threaten him to stop but as is the case with most fraternal antagonism the irritation is the pay and he was making some very good wages. One night when we were in our room that we shared with Rob I on the bottom bunk and Matt on the top and with Rob in a Nyquil stupor in his freestanding bed. Matt and I were both awake and he thought it was funny to spit against the ceiling and then catch the fluid on its decent. I couldn't see what he was doing because it was dark and I was four feet beneath him but the spiting and slurping was driving me insane. I ultimatum-ed him from my Morlockian perch probably kicking the bottom of the mattress but that I do not recall for certain. I told him if he spit one more time I would take his most prized tape, the seminal 'Mac Daddy' by the incomparable Sir Mix-A-Lot, and I would smash it. I don't believe that 'Sir' Mix-a-Lot was ever really knighted officially so he was probably just usurping the title and its attendant duties and honors. Matt took me up on my challenge and spit again so I fulfilled the obligation of my verbal contract and threw his tape against the wall as hard as I could destroying it. But in the immortal words of Miracle Max – it was only “mostly dead”. Matt, probably feeling like the poor heartbroken Rancor keeper who lost his most precious thing in 'Jedi', gathered up the pieces re-spooled the tape and re-installed it into another cassette body and resurrected his album. The poor angels in heaven were probably only really starting to understand the misunderstood genius of Monsieur A-Lot when the tape was given a second chance at life and its soul was ripped back to its new mortal tabernacle with amazing NDE stories for all of the other tapes.

English Class Reading

 I always loved English class because if you are clever enough you can fake your way to an 'A'. Math class was always all bossy about what was and was not a right answer. While in the more touchy feely world of the liberal arts a good line of bull can be just as right an answer as anyone had ever come up with and as long as it is clothed in some nice jargon and baloney. The upshot of all this was that I could take it easy in English class and read what I wanted and then jam out a page or two report and tah-dah an easy 'A'. The problem was that while I was not challenged by sophomore English I would get bored and start disrupting the class and the teacher, who did like me, would be really frustrated at wits end about how to control me in the class. She finally discovered that if I was reading out loud I couldn't be doing anything else. Starting with John Steinbeck's 'The Pearl' and right on through 'The Chosen' by Mr. Silent 'C' - Chaim Potok I read every day for thirty or forty minutes to the class. I liked it, the teacher liked it because I was not ruining it for anyone else and the other students liked that they were getting their reading done for them. I made it through the semester and the teacher invited me to be her T.A. For the next semester and she brought me into the gifted and talented program. We stayed close through high school and I took a total of six classes from her so I must have redeemed myself.