A Southern Warning and Farewell

 The cop saw us walking on the side of the road in the dark and burned his reds and blues to get our attention and we walked over to him to see what the story was. He asked us our names and where we were from and what we were up to in the night. My southern girlfriend told him where she lived and then they engaged in that very southern pass-time of do-you-know? Do-you-know is a social game where the contestant mention people they know from an area and then where they live and who they are related to. There are many regional variations of this social dance but unless you have seen the sheer majesty of the art as practiced in the deep south then you have sampled a pale imitation not worthy of mention. After we had figured out which old boy's cousin lived in the house two down from her we got down to business. He launched into a long and convoluted reason why we should not be walking on that stretch of the road. He told us'all that in through this area there were a lot of criminals driving up and down looking for an opportunity to rob, rape or beat some young nice folks like us. He appeared uncomfortable with how he was trying to explain what the exact threat was so he kept finding different adjectives for us and different more specific one's for the potential criminals.

'On through here, nice folk like ya'll may find yourselves in trouble from, um, less nice elements in this here community.'

He went over the same basic formula for his cautionary sentence plugging in those more specific terms like a politically correct Mad Lib. After ten minutes of struggle he finally just said what he had wanted to the whole time, that a couple of nice young white kids like us were in danger of being assaulted and robbed my a roving gang of black marauders. He offered us a ride to a safer area for white folks and we politely declined siting the two blocks or so until we would be back to my cousin's house. He re-warned us by telling us he was serious and then drove off. We finished walking home and told everyone how we had a run in with the law. The next day my aunt drove us to the airport in the morning and my cousins and my sister and I cried and hugged some goodbyes and before long we were in Texas and then home.    

A Few Too Many

 If you have read this blog for a while you may think that I have left some different romantic threads unresolved. What happened to that girl from the Pearl Jam concert and follow up? What ever happened with that girl from UASC? A reasonable assumption would be that I, outside of the scope of these stories, had broken up with them or otherwise drifted apart. That would not be entirely accurate and I will tell you why, because I am a massive jerk. As far as those two girls knew they were still my girlfriends, my exclusive girlfriends. In between camps and trips that summer I had been going out on little dates and hangouts with my local girlfriend, then at other times I would run up and go on dates with my long distance girlfriend. You may be under the impression that two girlfriends is one too many, and that is absolutely correct. If you do feel that way the next bit might not improve you opinion of me or at least of the 17 year-old version of me because I went on and made it three. I have briefly mentioned a girl who was friends with my cousin that hung out with them quite a bit. I had been more or less running a pretty steady flirtation with her because she was cute and cool and the only girl that was around that I was not related to. We hung out almost every day of the almost two weeks I was down there and were starting to really hit it off I thought but nothing much was coming of it. That was until the last night I was in Florida. My Floridian love interest and her sister, whom I remember somehow being romantically linked with my cousin, although that may have been a vague and unrequited thing I am not sure, came over to hang out with my sister and I before we headed back home. She was a little more flirty and touchy for most of the night and when we both sat on the ground side by side to get our equally long hair done she put a pillow on her lap and reached over and pulled my hand into her lap to hold it. I thought that was nice and so I kept on with it. After the hairs were did she suggested we go for a walk, just the two of us. I knew what a girl suggested walk meant and I was a little nervous as I always was before a first kiss. We walked down the shoulder-less side roads in the smothering heat and humidity of a southern night, holding hands and talking about life and what-have-you. We walked according to her direction because I had no idea where we were. She stopped on a little hill that was on the side of the road and we walked over and sat down, talked a little and kissed a little too. I was torn between trying to enjoy the moment and thinking what a turd I was, now a two-time two-timer. I made a motion for a little more then kissing and was stopped in no uncertain terms and we called it a night and started to walk home when we were stopped by the local central casting old-boy southern sheriff and given a warning.  

A Horrible, Horrible Trip To The Beach

 Just south of where my cousins lived was Panama City and just south of Panama City was where they were keeping the Gulf of Mexico. I had been to the beach and ocean many times but had never had such an eventful and horrifying trip. The city was nice and touristy with lots of cool gift shops and even an alligator farm themed one where you could buy real alligator body bits. I, of course, did that. I still have the head of a little alligator in my house. Tacky? mayhaps – Awesome? Indubitably. After I was taken in by the glitz of the glamorous trade in preserved reptile limbs we went to a squeaky sand beach. The sand squeaked like a chewed balloon as you walked across it which was neat at first and then for those that hate that sound it got a little annoying. When we were at the beach bathrooms to rinse off the sand is where the day turned into a memorably scarring reminder of the importance of personal grooming and appropriate clothing. The first jolt came from a very pregnant forty-something Hispanic woman who was wearing the most minuscule of bikinis and had not been overly diligent in keeping her personal fur within the bounds of the garment. It was a good taste massacre that made me a little queasy. Not ten minutes later in the same area while waiting for the girls to do whatever it takes girls forty-flipping forevers to do in the bathroom a dude that looked like he was in his sixties, over tan and over hairy, walked out of the men's side wearing what looked an awful lot like nothing. I gave a quick double look to make sure I had not seen what I thought I had not seen and sure enough there it wasn't. I engaged in an involuntary triple take to discover why if he was naked his private parts were so oddly colored and it was revealed that my free spirited friend was not entirely naked, he was wearing a green condom and was carrying his shorts in his hand. I think this would be one of those times that you would kind of want to know why a guy like that was thusly attired but then when you heard why you may be horrified and want to un-hear it, but it cannot be unheard. In fifteen minutes waiting for the girls I had seen much too much and spent the rest of the day joking about what had assaulted my visuals that day on the beach. In many more trips to the beach in my life I have never in that span seen the equal of those specimens let alone in a quarter of an hour.    

How 'Bout Them 'Noles

 One day my cousin and I rode into the local big city with his dad to drop him off at work and then take his car for a little exploring for the day. The city happened to be the state capitol and the home of the Florida State University Seminoles. When we dropped his dad off my cousin noticed that someone had written 'How bout them noles' in the dust on a sign under the porch in front of the business. My cousin walked up and wrote, 'They Suck!' underneath the original inscription. Southerners take a few things very seriously, they love sport, sports, and watching sports - in that order.

Thou shalt not take the name of the 'Noles in vain. - That's from the Bible.

The response to a silly retort on the dust rallying cry was almost instant and much more fierce than I would have expected. A grown man saw what he had written and ran over to ask him what the hell he meant by that. My cousin said he was just joking around and that he didn't mean anything by it. The aggressive old man was riled up pretty good steaming for a fight when my quite mellow uncle came back outside to see what was the fuss. He figured out the story and began apologizing for his son and he instructed my cousin to erase his inclusion and to apologize. That turned down the flames of rage but the red hot coals of injured pride still simmered and festered as the old canker spent the next five minutes explaining how much the 'noles meant to that region of Florida and the nation. We listened politely and humbly until we could reasonably break away and get on the road and away from the offended football fan. We laughed about almost being killed but I think we were both a little more rattled than we admitted to each other. Just imagine what kind of intellectual juggernaut the American South could be if they put that kind of passion into academics.  

All the Porn and Booze I Could Have

Down in Florida there lives the black sheep of my dad's family. It was not the uncle I was staying with but another brother who looks exactly like my dad just with a mustache. That is the universal shorthand of how to know the wild version from the buttoned-down one. In his youth he had been into various crimes, biker gangs and real legit stuff including onetime getting his residence shot up in a drive by. Like I said, real legit stuff. When I met him he was a little older and a little mellowed down but still a lot more worldly than my absolutely conservative parents. He only lived a few miles away and one day He took my cousin and I on a canoe trip down a river to his cabin and it was lots of fun to see the local deadly snakes and alligators on a leisurely paddle down what may very well be the most cliché metaphor for growing up there could be. When we got to his cabin on the river and were waiting for our ride back to civilization my uncle invited us to have a couple of beers, or some booze or pursue his porn collection. These were all well outside the line of what I was invited to do on my family outings and I was a little uncomfortable. He told me that he wouldn't tell our parents so we didn't have to worry about that. I opted for playing some pool which I thought I knew how to do but I was wrong my uncle had a pool shark level of unbelievable skill and it was not fun to play against him so we decided to just watch him make a series of trick shots. I was not tempted in the least by the beer or the booze, I had never found alcohol that appealing, I was however a little intrigued by the possibility of perusing some adult literature. I was too shy to do that though and I was embarrassed for my cousin to know I would be in to something like that. Therefore, thus resolved to not be observed taking a peek at the lusty ladies of playboy magazine I only indulged in a couple of quick and fervent glances into the one magazine left in the bathroom. I could only look as long as would not be a suspiciously long time to be in the bathroom which was usually two minutes or so. We spent the the couple of hours waiting for our ride watching a VHS copy of Smokey and the Bandit 2 and I taking a couple to many trips to the bathroom. Then we went home without partaking of any more of the available carnal pleasures. Bullet dodged.  

Slang a Gator Up Against a Tree

 There is a cave and nature trail kind of state park not far from where my cousins live and we went there one of our days there for the tour. The cave tour was pretty cool and then we went for the walk around the boardwalk that wound through the swamp and we stopped with the ranger to look at an alligator. There was a teenage hillbilly on the path in front of us and he was telling the group he was with that he was 'fixin' to jump down there and snatch up that li'l ol' gator and slang it up against a tree to bash its head in'. The ranger, who judging from her accent was not from these parts, grabbed him and informed him that he would not be slanging anything up against any trees. The kid was startled and said he was just kidding, but once he got enough distance between us to recompose his bravado started loudly proclaiming how few vulgar words for excrement that he gave about some stupid old ranger. It was such a funny slice of the redneck life that I have often in the years since claimed that I was about to jump down somewhere and slang something up against a tree and dash ts brains out. This is usually when I am experiencing some wonder of the natural world - a seal, a manatee or something else that is living so peacefully that it just begs to be slung up. For some reason my decade old inside joke which is meant to be an ironic commentary on the culture of violence endemic in the hillbilly ethos is misunderstood as just a regular threat of violence and people are offended. Come on people, try and keep up.

Graduation and Segregation

There was a casual racism in the town I grew up in that allowed for jokes and name calling but I never saw any kind of segregation or violence. That could have been because there were only really two races and the non-white race, Hispanic, was segregated. There was one black girl in our school and a girl I thought was black that turned out to be Indian the from India kind. Maybe we were not that racist because it was not all that possible. Now is the part where I establish myself as not-racist legit – My best friend in elementary school was Mexican. Sweet, now I am beyond reproach right? I also thought that there were some cute Hispanic girls so there is that. I establish a general ignorance about race relations in the United States because it so thoroughly blew my mind the constant humming of racial tension that was just under the surface. My cousin's friend that I thought was cute was graduating as Valedictorian or Salutatorian and was speaking at her graduation so we all went. She read Oh, the Places You'll Go!' by Dr. Seuss, which has since become required by law to be read at graduation as a right of passage.

It is not a bad book for graduation the first 13 times you hear it and then you start to think maybe people are just mailing it in. 

 At the time I had never been to a graduation and thought it was a pretty cool thing to do. That was not the thing that drew my attentions however, it was the fact that in this high school gym filled with maybe couple thousand people there was no one sitting out of their de facto race section. I had never seen anything like it a bleacher full of black families, a little gap and the Hispanics and then the white families made up the rest. I searched the crowd and didn't see one person out of place. I commented on it and my aunt, who is southern proud, said that was not racist it was just where people felt most comfortable sitting. I wondered aloud then what would happen if a black family went and sat in the middle of the white section. She said they could go sit wherever they pleased. That I thought may be have been a lie. On my trip I got to see a couple other indications that miscegenation may not be as free and easy as she claimed.   

Of Journals and Jam Bands

As I got reacquainted with my short lost cousins it became evident that we were living in very different realities. The cousin closest in age to me had an odd and time consuming hobby which was hilarious. He was keeping an imaginary journal in the persona of one of his goofy neighbors. He would write comical musings that he imagined that kid would have and as I remember the project was quite extensive stretching over several notebooks. That was some insane dedication to a joke. The next difference was that my cousin was very tall and was actually on the basketball team for his high school which contrasted with my perpetually being cut from the tryout process. On a team of mostly black kids my cousin joked that he was the token white guy. The most dramatic difference in our lives and culture was probably that instead of mocking the band a venerable and cherished tradition in my school, they actually thought it was cool. Whoa. They talked about band in practical terms, they told stories about band and had friends over to jam a little bit on band instruments. I am not talking about the universally cool jamming instruments, such as the guitar, lute, lyre, bass and drums. I am talking about horns. I am absolutely not musically talented and this strange and wondrous paradigm shift was creating internal conflict as a struggled to not try and give into my culture imperative to make fun of the band and what just about everyone called 'band fags'. I just had to accept that we were just a little more advanced as a culture out west and like an anthropologist visiting the deepest jungles of Brazil and encountering the isolated and backwards natives living at one with nature - I needed to pity them not mock them. I think I was polite and didn't make fun of anyone's band related skill, desires, or aspirations and chalked up the behavior to a certain deep swamp delirium brought on by the heat, humidity and the incessant drone of insects. 

Off The Road

 The roads in swamp Florida are thin strips of civilization that must constantly be defended from the constant press of nature pressing to take it back. They are generally winding, thin and absolutely without shoulder. They are often on a berm to keep them out of the wettest and lowest of the bog and the result is that you drive on the tops of long hills with little to no margin for error. The first night of our visit the cousins their friend and I jumped in the miniature van and drove the few miles to the junior college to go and play racquetball. On the way we were overtaken by an ambulance, lights and sirens and my cousin, quite correctly, pulled over to the side which meant into the sloping vegetation which made up the non-existent shoulder. When the ambulance had passed my cousin tried to pull back onto the road but with the wheel turned too hard just succeeded in sliding down the embankment and down into swamp territory. He tried a couple of times to drive up but with too aggressive an attack the van just slid around and deeper into the bayou. A little nervous and frustrated he turned the van over to me to try and get out of the mush. With a few kids pushing to get it started I took a nice gentle line back up the hill and onto the road and soon we were back on the way to play some racquetball. My cousin's friend mentioned that she was impressed at my driving ability and I had to admire her excellent judgment of character. That is when I think I decided she needed to be pursued so I turned up the full force of my over-eager seventeen year-old charm and was a little louder and more trying-too-hard-to-be-funny then even usual.   

Floridians

My dad's family was from Florida, not fun Florida – swamp Florida. It is a strange place which is rotting into the ground and the infrastructure and social conventions seem like they got frozen some time in the ambiguous past. Even at night the heat and humidity is oppressive. The huge sounds of the bugs from the swamp is deafening and barely masks the 'Deliverance' banjos that seem to echo in the steamy darkness. Most of the family had moved out west permanently, intermittently, or occasionally but there was a core of the faithful that maintain a base of operations. One of the families that had moved out to Utah for most of my life had moved back for a couple of years and that summer before my senior year my sister and I flew out for a ten day or so visit. It was the first time that I flew anywhere by myself and in charge of my little sister to boot. We made it just fine and my aunt was waiting at the airport in a minivan with two of my cousins in tow. The oldest cousin from that family was a boy six months younger than me and a foot taller. After we got into the van with our luggage my cousin started talking to me about some of the people of color that I may have noticed here in Florida that I may not have noticed in Utah. He started rattling off a rather impressive, for its width and breadth, list of rude or common nicknames for African-Americans. I didn't really know what to say but my aunt bailed me out by telling him that was inappropriate and we should never repeat such terms. He lightly argued that he was only informing me what I might hear in the wild from people not as classy as us. She told him to shut up nonetheless. We got to their house and settled in got to know everyone again and met some of their intriguing lady friends. We decided to head off into the night to play some racquetball and that almost cost us, if not our lives, some major inconvenience.   

Do You Like Piña Colada?

After Freedom Academy I was spending a fair amount of time traveling the hour and a bit north to take my girlfriend out on a date. She was returning the favor and coming down for a couple of dates and a dance. It was clear that it was not sustainable but it was a lot of fun. I went up there late one evening to go to a party with her after I had worked all day with my dad and then went climbing. It had already been a very full day and I should have gone to bed but any hint of a possibility that I might get some loving was too much to pass up. I showered up and tried to pop an unsightly zit on my chin, that went badly. It was a gooey swelled mess but instead of taking this as a further sign I should just call it a night I cut out a tiny circle of band-aid and covered it up. It looked like I covered a zit with a band-aid but that was better then that festering monstrosity that was the alternative. I drove up there already starting to fall asleep and when I got to the party I was really tired. I hung out, uncharacteristicly quite and calm and ran into the couple of kids I knew from UASC and Freedom Academy and then I went out onto the porch with my girlfriend and fell asleep while I was cuddling her on the love seat swing. She was trying to wake me up because it was only about 11 and there was plenty of party left but I was unconscious with fatigue. She went inside at one point and got some piña colada mush in a little can and she tried to feed me some. It was one of the most miserable feelings of my life being kept out of deep sleep into a half conscious world filled with force fed piña colada. I was trying to tell her to stop but I was too out of it so I had to eat and was so scared that I formed an aversion to the flavor of piña colada that made it impossible for me to enjoy it at all for ten years. Ghastly. I slept the night out on the porch and in the morning I had to head off before almost anyone was up so I woke my girlfriend, kissed her and she walked me out to my truck for one more hug, one more kiss and a farewell.

Sister, Sister

 After the talent show the last day was just a goof off situation and that night there was going to be a dance. Most of the day my new girlfriend's sister who had been friendly the whole time started ratcheting it up on past friendly. I was sitting and talking with some kids when she came up and said she wanted to talk to me. I said that would be fine and we went for a walk. She started telling me how she was always being left out while her sister got all of the best things. I said that could be rough. She told me that her sister had more friends and more fun. Yeah, it's a hard knocks life. She stopped a little way down the path when we were out of sight and grabbed my hand to turn me around. She told me that her sister had the attentions of all the best boys and that she didn't even properly appreciate them. Not like she would. Oh-kay now I knew what was up she was not venting but trying to move in on her sister's spot. I kept up with the 'yeah, that sucks' feigning ignorance and I tried to keep walking when she took my captive hand and used it to pull me down, she was a bit shorter than me, and kiss me. I think I instinctively kissed her back for a second and then stopped. I freed my hand and wrapped her up in a hug and tried in the most gentle way I could formulate to tell her that I did like her quite a bit but that it wouldn't be fair to her sister to pursue this any further. She said that she knew that but she just liked me so much and that her sister wouldn't care as much about me as she would. I told her I was sorry but that was how it had happened and it was too late now. We finished our walk and she went away to be with her other friends. I didn't see her at lunch, or dinner but she was there at the dance. I asked her to dance with me and she did. We had a nice time and I told her I was sorry that we couldn't be together. She laid her head on my chest which was easy for a girl of her stature and she squeezed me a little more firmly then a standard dance hug and we finished up our time together and after that we were cordial but cooler when we met in future.  

A Poem

 I think poems are not unlike a penis in that if some one loves you very much they will pretend that yours is awesome and that they like it very much but most everyone else would prefer you kept it to yourself. To extend the metaphor, there are poems that are so magnificent that they can make a living for the author in the public sphere but those are few and far between. With that in mind I had a delusion of grandeur surrounding my poetical skills, I started writing some pseudo-deep surly and self-righteous offerings when I was a junior. Sometimes I would rattle off several poems and format them and print them out to put in a binder. I would bring my binder around with me and to extend the metaphor even further, show it to girls to try and impress them. Almost to a woman they feigned interest and would leaf through the binder and make the appropriate interested hums and make the necessary head nods. With the benefit of hind sight my confidence in their quality and profundity has faded in re-reading them as a new, older and more mature person. To answer the begged question – no, I don't think that my current writing is sad and pretentious. I will know that in ten years. I rode into Freedom Academy riding some unreasonable confidence in my literary prowess and signed up for the talent show. When the night came for the recital I found out that friends and family as well as local celebrities would be in attendance and my confidence was shaken a little. To top it off I was short of clothes and only had a tee shirt and cut-off shorts left to wear. When I saw the other kids ready to go up on stage dressed like it was time for church I was a little more embarrassed. Right before my turn I looked out in the audience and noticed that my new girlfriend was in the audience as well. I was cold and shaking with a sick stomach but I went onto the stage and read my heavy-hand and preachy poem that chided the listener for being a bigot. I got some polite clapping when I was done but something in my mind connected and I realized that what I had written was not that good and I knew I was not going to be in the running for an award. After the last performance and the awards I got to go talk to my girlfriend and she was very sweet about my writing and I was circumspect in my personal distance with her as she was there sitting with her dad. I never recited poetry again.  

I Think I Am An Elitest Because I Don't Know What That Means

 Based on a misunderstanding of what the word elitist meant, I decided I was one. The official definition is that someone believes that because of their money, status, intellect or social standing they should be entitled to additional benefits and rights. I never bothered to look that up and thought that it meant that I thought smart and charismatic people should be in charge of making the world a better place for everyone as a responsibility of their talents. After spending a week with democratically elected students at UASC who were in general very smart, attractive and nice it was a half step back to reality to be with students selected by school officials based on their leadership ability. The mood was much less friendly and cooperative and sometimes overtly Machiavellian. The sense I got was that many of these were aggressive type-A(-hole?) kids who were leaders because people were intimidated by them and the teachers who selected them thought that was a good thing. In the week at UASC I never heard any sniping, or even sarcasm and everyone was always trying to make things go smoothly and that was bizarre to me. I was used to any group activity having a couple sassers and poop-pants wearers. At Freedom Academy everyone was also very smart and talented but with their 'something-to-prove' attitudes made for some picked fights and some bullying. I was only a few days removed from Elysium and I wanted back in. Sadly, no man can step into the same river twice and so I took up telling people that I was an elitist and obviously to anyone who knew what that meant I sounded a little arrogant or especially clever in my wry social cometary. It was not until I was in college debate when an assistant coach started laughing when I told someone that I was an elitist. He said that was one of the best jokes he had ever heard in that context. It wasn't a joke but my misunderstanding was so great that it had come back around so far as to sound like irony. I looked up what the word meant and realized I was not actually an elitist.   

Prison Is Not Cool, Prison Sucks.

 As part of the camp we got to head a little way up the road to visit our local penitentiary for those men in Utah that we in need of maximum security supervision so as not to harm themselves or even others. We got a tour which convinced me further that I was far too pretty for prison and was in no way cut out for the rigors of resisting the amorous propositions of men not very good at impulse control. It was scary for me and more so for the girls in our group who were getting quite explicit offers for companionship. One of the girls in our group had on some tiny white shorts and they had attracted more than her fair share of cat calls and propositions. They were yelling out 'white shorts' and then saying some sort of thing that they would like to do with or to her. She was trying to hide among a circle of boys but it was not working. It only stopped when we went into a conference room to talk with a few prisoners one on one. We were briefed about how charismatic and manipulative the prisoners could be and told not to believe them or talk to them alone. Three guys came out and told us how they were misunderstood, sorry and changed. One guy said he was in prison because he accidentally killed his friend with a brick. When he was pressed for details it turns out that we had very different ideas about what constitutes an 'accident'. He had hit his friend in the head with a brick 43 times but he swore he didn't intend to kill him. Yeah, bad luck. I came away from prison with that lesson stored firmly in my rules of thumb: never more than twenty hits with a brick if I didn't want to kill my friend.  

A Survivor Among Us

 I generally try and keep peoples names out of my blog in case they would rather not be implicated in my crimes against good sense. This post is an exception because the girl is quite public and nationally known for what happened to her. When we were divided up into our groups they just did it in more or less a round robin fashion and each student got placed randomly-ish. By that random grouping I was placed with the sister of the girl I met at another camp across the state and with a young lady named Yvette Rodier. She was beautiful, smart and cool which made her the focus of lots of proto-masculine showing off and wooing. Liberated by the knowledge that my new girlfriend's sister was with us at every moment I was spared the obligatory flirting that I was generally compelled to do by my chemically sodden teenage brain. I was then free just to hang out with and be friends with the rest of the girls there and that was nice to have girls that were truly my friends that were not being classed as family, friend-pre-conquest, friend-too-ugly, or - God forbid – post-conquest-bridge-burned. After I hit puberty I think those were the only categories that I had for women. I know it is shallow and sad but if you have never been a teenage boy trying to navigate the treacherous internal world foisted upon you by hormones then pump your judgmental breaks. The kids in our group got to be pretty good friends and spent free time as well as structured time together. I will tell you a little more about some of our experiences in prison and whatnot in the next post but what is important to know here is that we were good friends and then camp ended and we went our separate ways promising to always be friends and too always keep in touch in the sincere and fervent manner of summer campers the world over. As per the same tradition we didn't stay in touch. I saw her one more time at a debate tournament and then I finished me senior year, graduated, went to college and was coming home from classes walking through the living room where my roommates had the news on and heard her name out of the corner of my ear-balls and I stopped and asked why she was on the news. They said her boyfriend and her had been up at a lake and an escaped convict came up to them randomly and shot her boyfriend to death and had shot her many times but she was still alive. I was terrified for her, sick and sad. In those days it was so hard to get additional information on a story and the papers were not coming out with more info until the next day. I went to my room and cried a little and prayed fervently that she would be okay. I was too nervous to sleep very well but there was literally nothing I could do to help so I walked around the streets until the police told me to go hole about 2 in the morning. My girlfriend at the time was in my first class in the morning and as we were going to class I told her that a friend of mine was shot several times and was in the hospital but I didn't know if she was going to be okay. She waited for what she thought was enough time to be respectful of the gravely injured woman to ask me if I had been dating her or if I had a thing for her because I seemed more upset then I should be. I told her to go to hell and left class and went home to sleep. Yvette lived and now is a lawyer and victims rights advocate and I have never seen her in person since. 

Her Story.    

The Government Lets Us Play With Their Toys

 To try and lure us into the various officer cores the government thought it would be a good idea to let us play with all of the good toys and get us hooked. It is the oldest cliché in the drug game, the first one's free. They started us out on the machine guns and then we got to shoot some sniper rifles. That was pretty cool but I had shot similar civilian guns so I was not sold. Then they let us drive tanks, armored personal carriers and the Hummer which at the time was a real military vehicle not some plastic looking knock-off for high maintenance soccer moms to drive to Cafe Rio. We even got to shoot sabot, small practice, rounds out of the tank which was pretty cool. Then they got us in the helicopters and that is when I was starting to get interested. We got in a troop transport model and the pilot took us on a wild ride, it must have been just like what Jasmine was feeling on her magic carpet ride that got her into bed with a that street rat Aladdin. To be clear, I did not sleep with the pilot. I was impressed by the speed and power of the equipment but I cannot get over the mental hump I have witch is that when used to their purpose they are for killing people whom are chosen by politicians and if you sign up you do what you are told. I could not get my heart and mind on board with that and even though I was tempted it was not a career I could be comfortable with.   

The Long Fitful Day

 I struggled through the first day's orientations, pep talks, and what I assume was a very fine leadership lesson from the authors of, “Star Trek: Make It So: Leadership Lessons from Star Trek: The Next Generation”. Actually, now that I think about the name of that book I will change my assumption to boring even though and either way as soon as the lights went out in the room I was asleep. The result of not sleeping for the last 40 or so hours and having navigated the teen highs of a kiss consummation and the lows of a dad reprimanding, was that I was wiped right out. I fell into a deep, twitchy and if the reports of those laughing around me when I startled back awake - a sleep wherein I relived the pressures of my flatus both frequently and loudly. Ha, Ha, Ha – Laugh it up you immature philistines. Laugh it up, if the unintentional near scatological humor I was uncontrollably providing would fill the void in your otherwise empty lives. But for reals guys, don't. Guys? Be cool, Okay? I tried to regain my dignity the best I could and I was refreshed somewhat by a power nap and the rush of adrenaline that teenage shame had afforded me. I got to my room which was a private room attached in the middle by a bathroom to the room of my good friend and student body president Joe. It is vital, for the sake of the story that you know that either one of us to visit the other without going to the outside hall. We unpacked and I went down to dinner and the night time meet and greet and as soon as it was at all feasible, sometime around 10pm I retired to to bedroom, an hour before lights out and the sudden and total death I had been promised by the Major and my group's assigned Sergeant. I laid down on the bed fully clothed fully intending to rest for just a second and then pop up to brush my teeth and take off my clothes. This did not happen. The next thing I know is that there is someone banging loudly at my outside door and yelling at me to open it. I was very much palatalized by the depth of my sleep and semi-blinded by the eye scum forming on my left-in contacts. After a few minutes of the pounding I rolled out of my bed and onto the floor to make the journey to the door to see what the fuss was. I tried to walk but my legs were having no part of my ill advised shamble and I was forced to make the journey on my non-traitorous hands and knees. I got to the door and undid the dead bolt and was pushed back into the room by the overzealously opened door. It was a female soldier of unremembered rank who was pissed right off at me. She was asking me a series of questions about where I was and who I with I was laying on the floor wedged in a most undignified way with my back against the chest-of-drawers and the wall with my legs still entangled in the door. She was standing over me yelling and asking who I had been with. I was still somewhat blinded by my gunked up contacts and muddled in my brain while I tried to explain that I had been asleep and alone. She must have finally gotten cooled down enough to realize that the confused mess of a boy on the ground in front of her was in no ways looking like one who had just made a rapid retreat from a illicit nighttime rendezvous. She asked me if I knew where the boy from the next room over had been and I said as far as I knew he had also been in his bed. She told me that I had better be careful because the Major in charge had given special instructions to keep a eye on me and my potential shenanigans. I said I had been in bed sleeping before she started banging on the door, she apologized and told me that a few people had told her I was the guilty party and she was just worried that she was going to get into extra trouble because I was already under scrutiny. I told her I was not going to be any trouble and explained why the Major was upset with me we left on good if not friendly terms. A few seconds later she knocked on my friend's door and he opened it with a contrite look and a scripture in hand to give her his alibi. She was easily mollified having spent her rage on my interrogation and a few moments after I heard hid door close he knocked on the interior bathroom door on our shared room. I answered it and he apologized telling me it was he who had been out doing some kiss-face with a girl from the next floor down and that he had made his retreat and then heard me getting shaken down. He told me that he was going to confess if I got into big trouble. I told him it was okay and there in our shared bathroom he gave me a big hearty hug and thanked me for being a good friend. I thanked him too and I went back to sleep until five in the morning when a rather rude drill sergeant came to remind me of my compulsory participation in PT. I was too tired to even protest and I jogged and chanted about Eskimos and other riming ribaldry.    

Down the Rabbit Hole

 If that coincidence was not enough after the orientation we went to meet with our groups. As we were introducing ourselves the girl who was sitting by me said her name which was one I had never heard but when I said my name she looked intrigued. When I sat down she leaned over and told me she thought I had been on a date with her sister the night before. I was pretty sure she was mistaken because the girl I had dated had a different last name. I told her who I had been out with and she confirmed that was indeed her adopted sister, the product of a blended family - different dads, different moms. The upshot of that was that they were only a few months apart in age and they had been separately selected to go to different leadership camps and meet me. The mind boggles. Her step-dad was not quite done following up with me on my poor punctuality with his daughter and he sent a guy over to our group to break down for me what was not going to happen at this camp. He singled me out and told me that I was never to be outside my room after lights out and that I would be joining the PT (for Physical Torture, I think) group for morning exercise witch was usually an optional part of the camp. He let me know I would be under special scrutiny for the week. I was paranoid and really tired when we went to lunch. The officer attached to our group finally met up with us and reiterated that the commander wanted me watched carefully. Somehow that turned into him talking about punishments and threaten to make me do twenty pullups. I told him I could do that no problem, he scoffed and I bet him. I didn't know if I could do it but I had been rock climbing quite intensely for two years and thought I must be able to. I jumped up on a handy horizontal bar and cranked off ten with no problem, the next five were a struggle and the final were extremely difficult but I finished. The guy was impressed an said he didn't expect me to be able to do it he told me that he could respect that. Well, we were getting somewhere.

Major Dad

 I got home at about three and a half in the morning and I started doing some laundry to have some clothes for the next week of camp. I was making so much noise that my mom came out to see what I was doing and she never realized I was up late and not up early so I was not in trouble. I got all of my stuff washed, dried and packed with only a few minutes left to spare and I headed out to pick up the student body president and make it to camp just in time. We got to the army base where the camp was held just five minutes late. We were walking through the registration line getting our group and room assignments when I noticed that the camp CO was a major with the exact same last name as the girl who I had kept out too late on a date the night before. That seemed odd because it was not a common name and one I had never heard before. As I got to the end of the line where we were to shake hands with the CO, the camp director and a minor Utah news celebrity I realized that the major in charge was my new girlfriend's dad. Let me lay out for you just how improbable this is, I went to a camp exclusively for student body officers, where I met a girl from a school who lived 80 miles north and I had hit it off with her, taken her on a date, brought her home late and got yelled at by her father, then I was selected as one of two students from my high-school to be chosen to go to a camp for future leaders and that girl's dad was the commanding officer who I was 20 seconds away from having to meet for the second time in eight hours. If this was a movie it would be laughably implausible but it is absolutely true and it only gets weirder. It was my turn for a handshake and photo opp when I made eye contact with the dad who hours before was kind of cranky with me about bringing his daughter home two hours late he smiled and introduced himself and then recognized me. He looked honestly and deeply confused as he tried to put together how I was in this line getting signed in for his camp. He shook his head a little and was squeezing my hand over long as he tried to wrap his head around this coincidence. After about thirty seconds he asked me if I was at his house last night I told him I was and that I was still sorry I had lost track of time. He told me He was still mad about that and then said he was going to keep an extra special watch on me for the week. Good, one on one mentoring I hoped. I got my picture and we quit holding up the line and I felt like I had dodged a dad and his wrath, I had not.

I Seal My Fate

 Before I went to the UASC camp I had been selected with one of my friends to be the two representatives from our school to go to a armed forces wine-and-dine camp called Freedom Academy. The idea was that they would try and lure the best and brightest into the officer schools for any of the armed forces. The point is that it started the Sunday morning after the Saturday finish of UASC and that Saturday I was driving up to a town an hour north to have my date with the girl I had a crush on from UASC that meant I would be cutting in very close. She had asked me to bring up a friend for a double date so I called a kid I knew who was tall, blonde and strapping and asked him to do me a solid and go on a date with an unknown but allegedly cute girl. With pictures or everyone available in seconds nowadays blind dates are much less blind but back then it was a real gamble but the dude came through and took the risk. When we arrived he was glad he had because the girl was a solid eight and a half that had dolled up to a temporary nine and that is not a bad sign. We went out to dinner, then to the mall and finally out to a park. My date had been close and cuddly all night and it looked like my friend was coming along nicely as well so when we went to the park we wandered apart from each other to try on our kissy faces. My date was a gentle and clean kisser which was very nice we made out a bit and then she wondered where her friend was and if she was okay. We found the two non-lovebirds sitting and talking on the playground equipment and asked her friend what time it was. She informed us that it was currently two in the AM. That was surprising and unwelcome news because I was supposed to have my girl home by midnight and I was supposed to report to military camp at 7 AM and I still had an hour to drive home and an hour to camp and pack my gear sometime in that time. We hustled up and got the girlfriend dropped off and then I took my date home where her dad was waiting for her so I didn't get a good night kiss. He was really mad so I apologized to him for my poor timing on curfew. I thought I could just hustle home get my stuff and show up to camp in time if I skipped sleeping. Not sleeping seemed like a reasonable plan at the time and I thought I was in the clear but I would find out about a very weird coincidence in about four hours.

Signing Wagons and An Ill Advised Date

The UASC camp wrapped up on a Saturday morning and before we left we were all supposed to write something nice about every other person we knew on a wagon with their name on it. It seems a little non sequitur but it stemmed from a game called wagon wheel that we had played several times in our groups. After the first day we each wrote our names on a paper and handed it around the room and everyone was to write an anonymous compliment on it. After the third day we did the same thing but we signed our names to each compliment. The final day we each took a turn telling each other person something that we liked about them. I know it sounds a little Kumbayah, and in the wild it would be, but with so many truly self-confident, charismatic and talented people it was easy and natural. It was like an automatic car wash of self esteem. Well, the game was only for those in your council and so the girl I was crushing on was not included but her wagon was up in the common area and I agonized over how to write her a magical message that would seal the deal for us romantically. She was quite popular so there were already plenty of things written on her eight-and-a-half by eleven mimeographed wagon. I found a likely spot and wrote something I thought was romantic. I am not being secretive I am really blanking on what it was. The punchline is that after I had written whatever sweet nothing that I did I got too nervous to sign my name and instead signed it, and this is no joke, 'The Magic Man'. Oh man, I still cringe at the unbearable lameness of that. Lame sign-off notwithstanding I found her in person and asked if she would like to go out with me that night. She lived about an hour to the north and we had been at camp all week but she said that she would love to and gave me her number and address. I was over the moon and couldn't wait to get home get showered, napped, find some money, and head up for our date. 

I Corner The Girl

Towards the end of the week there was a dance for all of the students at UASC and that is where I finished making my move. I told you about trying to flirt with the super cute half-Japanese girl with my pathetic use of low-rent illusions. I spent the rest of the week accidentally/on purpose running into her at lunch, dinner and activities. She was nice but there were lots of guys trying to make that particular move as well so there were times where I felt drowned out and shuffled back. Generally I would not have been worried about a little competition but these dudes were top shelf talent. They were, to a man, smart, funny and good looking in that all-American too many teeth, quick to laugh, politician sort of way. What I had going for me was that I was more tenacious and my long blonde un-gelled hair was the only one of that species in the game besides that I had nothing extra. On the night of the dance all of my fellow student councilors brought out all of their best duds and we rolled into the dance looking nice. The girls had done the same and there was a serious amount of teenage titillation in play. I am a unselfconscious dancer and I am not afraid to do a little fast dance participation as well as throwing a little goofing into the mix. I think I may have been incapable of stopping myself if I had wanted to, I just feel the dance and go with it. Then when it was time to slow dance I would never miss the chance to ask a girl to circle hug for three to five minutes. On this night I was absolutely determined to lock this girl up or go down in flames. I asked her to dance every single slow dance and hung out dancing in the area of her friend and her in the mean time. I must clarify that I was not creeping here she was having a good time and talking to me in between dances and actually keeping the distance between us pretty close as well. By the end of the night I thought we were ready to head off for a nice quie walk around a secret place on campus before head count and lights out. But for the last dance a guy, if you can even call him a guy more like a horribly inconsiderate usurper, came shooting in out of no where and asked my girl that I had rightfully cornered for the last dance. She went with him and I was left looking around for a substitute instead of working out a plan for to seal the deal with a kiss. When the last dance wrapped up the lights came up and they announced that we needed to go strait to bed and we would be bed checked in ten minutes. Oh cruel fate! This is worse then the whole of all bad things since the world began, combined. I don't think that now but in the testosterone addled mind of a 17 year-old boy there was little that seemed like a bigger deal than to have a sure thing girl-kiss fall through and the last thing I saw was my crush circle hugging another, in fairness good looking, guy. Boo.       

A Girl Cuts Her Guts Out

 In the pursuit of having a very fun time sometimes kids are not quite as safety conscious as they should be. We were having a water play afternoon break during the camp which included a water balloon toss, water relay races and all that type of stuff. In the relay race they constructed everything was pretty fun including a makeshift slip-and-slide the camp counselors had put together. The only flaw in the slaw was that at the end of the slip-and-slide they had arranged an obstacle in the form of a six foot section of 18” diameter irrigation pipe. Several people had slid down the pipe but no one was doing it well. 

Pro Tip: This type of pipe is best suited for irrigation applications and not for trying to run slide and slip through.

Then one overeager girl decided to attempt the ram-it-home method of relay race competition and slide as hard as she could to make it cleanly through the pipe. She built up speed, flopped to her belly and slid towards the pipe at a reckless speed. She was misaligned and slapped sideways into the pipe which had a sharpish edge. It cut a neat crescent into her side deep enough to see some fat, muscle and some intestines. The insides stayed inside but there was a few seconds where the view was unobstructed by blood then it came in a gush. I still had a shirt so I direct pressured it while some other kids got her laid down and calm. Others ran for help and in twenty minutes the local paramedics had taken over. It must have been not quite as bad as I thought because she was back to the camp with a dozen or so stitches and the yellowing of iodine wound prep covered by some gauze she had to peel back several times to show the curious her war wound. My shirt looked pretty bad-a with bloodstains on it and when I wore it from then on it made for an easy segue into a discussion about how calm I was under fire. The wound was more life threatening and gruesome in those retellings, not to build myself up but to put the scope of my heroism into proper perspective.  

Magic Man

I suffered from the delusion that many nerds do that people would like to watch me do magic. There are fans of magic, but some people eat boogers, so there is no accounting for taste. Most people are vaguely amused for a trick or act vaguely amused for politeness’s sake and then really hope you would stop because they don't want any more but courtesy prevents their escape. If I wanted to impress my captive audience I would break out some slight of hand coin tricks or a card trick. I thought this was a good way to make myself memorable and to have an excuse to talk to girls. I don't think it was as cool as I thought it was. On the second night of the UASC conference there were some girls from one of the other groups that one of my friends was in that came over to our dorm before the leadership would kick everybody out and lock the place down. There was a girl with them who was stunning and I like that in a woman. She had some kind of an ambiguous and slight ethnic flavor in her features which had the effect of making her exotic and striking while understated all smoothed out with the every-one-looks-better-when-they-are-young rule. I was struck by her and was for the first time in a long time intimidated by a girl. I did what every dork boy too deep in the morass of testosterone to stop himself does, I showed off. Lame, so lame. I broke out the cards and the coins for a little razzle-dazzle. In retrospect I think the girls just wanted to hang out with some new boys and relax but I jumped right in making people pick cards and try and find slight-handed coins. The played along and I ended up talking to the girl I wanted too when I had gained enough confidence by being an obnoxious nerd for a bit. She was really smart as well as beautiful. She was also self confident to the degree that she would laugh when I was funny and tell me I was not funny when I wasn't. Her ethnic flair was the result of being half causation and half Japanese which was a really good recipe. A girl like that could get me in trouble and she did. 

Grass Stains

 I have never let the potential for the destruction of personal clothing stop me from having any sort of fun. As it happens that is not a universal help value and there was a girl who is still probably mad at me about some grass stains. She was in my 'K' group and was one of those girls who was cute enough but so very uptight and proper that it ruined the whole vibe. She had actually lived in my small town when she was very young and so we had formed a little bond based on that fact of vaguely remembered childhood interactions. Which is to say, I remembered her because she was a cute and popular girl and she remembered me because I was a stinky nerd. The whole week I was teasing her about how exactly pressed and finished her look was even while we were playing outdoor games. She would just stay at a distance that would keep her in the showroom perfection she worked so hard to maintain. I thought maybe all she needed was some loosening up and if she got tussled she would be like one of those button down girls from the movies who realizes she is a wild child at heart. The third day at camp when she was walking from her dorm to the classroom where we met after breakfast she passed a group of about twenty kids playing kissing tag and I decided to chase her down and tackle her for a joke. I did, but in the process of tackling her to the grass she got grass stains on her pants and lost her damn mind. She pushed me away with the panicked strength of a mother protecting her young and looked at her now minutely stained jeans knees and started yell, scream, crying and called me all sorts of curses at the limit of which her propriety would permit even in the depths of hate-anger-rage. Sobbing she ran across the lawn back to her dorm. To the casual observer it would look like I had broken her legs and then tried to molest her, not playfully tried to tackle her to the ground. Everyone looked at me and I felt like a worm that had to explain to everyone that she was upset about grass stains and noting more serious. I got glares and saw people whispering, I assumed about me. We walked into class and the instructor asked where she was and people told him that I had tackled her and she had run back to her dorm. He looked worried and angry and after he got the class on task he asked me to come with him to go find her. We ran into her on the way to her dorm changed and clean and recovered from the worst of the rage fit. The instructor stopped her and we all three talked about what a monster I was for giving her grass stains on her pants. I was at once contrite and also defensive. I was genuinely sorry for hurting her feelings but on the other hand it was just some stupid grass stains. She told us that she was worried about her pants and so she had run back and got some pre-wash on them to see if they could be saved. I apologized and time went on and by lunch everything was back to normal. After the camp I saw her two years later and she was still mad a bout the grass stained pants and mentioned that before we even exchanged pleasantries and caught up. Even funnier is that my mom ran into her 15 years after the camp at a conference and the girl recognized her last name and told my mom that I had once tackled her and gave her grass stains on her jeans. When my mom told me she had run into the girl, now woman I guess, I asked if she mentioned grass stains, my mom laughed and said that was the first thing she said after she established that my mom was my mom. Some scars never fade.  

The KKK

 I am pretty much tone deaf in my joking to offensive material and that makes for some uncomfortable situations. After we were divided into groups we were supposed to play some get-to-know-you games, we did that. We were supposed to say our name and then give a unique anchor phrase. The only name I remember from the game was Pepper, a easy name to remember in its own right, but she added the anchor phrase 'like's paprika' and that was all I needed. After we played the games we were supposed to choose a leader and was often the case in my youth I sought out, and was selected for leadership positions. I wanted the glory of being the head man in charge but my personality, lack of propriety, and general laziness made for very frequent catastrophes. This time was no exception. After I was elected class president of my new group our first order of business was to come up with a school name and mascot as well as a service project idea. We were group 'K' and we were supposed to work that into our theme. Having been raised on Monty Python's 'The Search For The Holey Grail' I suggested we be called the Kanuck Knights - pronounced Ka-Nig-Etts. After I got everybody on board with that idea and we had made a school logo and mascot. I pitched the idea of our project being the Kunuck – Knights - Klean-up and the initials made for a great attention getter. We made some posters and were ready for the pre-lunchtime presentation. We went last and all of the big KKK signs were a little unsettling to many of the more sensible students and teachers. I am of the opinion that unintentional humor, or fake unintentional humor is the best kind. I had wrongly assumed that a school unwittingly making the initials of of the school and service project spell out KKK would be funny. Many were not amused and I was taken aside after the last presentations and told that it was not going to be acceptable to have KKK iconography as our school's main theme. We had to rework our signs and projects in the time after lunch. We changed the signs to Canuck Knights Cleanup or CKC which is not going to bother anyone.  

UASC

 I had an eventful summer that year, I went on that dive trip, went to UASC, Freedom Academy, and took a trip to Florida all in three months. We got the diving all squared away so we move now onto the UASC. UASC, or the Utah Association of Student Councils, was a summer camp for student councils to train our mind and direct us into, 'Having The Best Year Ever!' There are some really cool and charismatic kids around the state and almost all of them came together at the Snow college campus out in the middle of the boonies. As a loner type iconoclast I was not one who had spent a lot of time at organized activities preferring generally to limit my activities to a small group of friends or just a girl. I think the reason I liked it better that way was that I like to get things done, I get up early, I like to get right after any activity and bite off life in big meaty chunks. Most people I knew were slow-goers, sleeper-inners, homework-prioritizers, they would not want to go where I was going or at the speed I wanted to go so I reasoned that the pleasure I got from their company would be less than what I could get going my own way. That was not the case at UASC, the kids were amazingly talented, smart, funny, friendly and really good at lots of things. It was amazing for the first time in my life to be surround by self confident go-getters I was so used to cajoling everyone to do something a little adventurous but these guys and girls were the gas not the breaks. Everything from check in to group assignments to seating, and eating ran so preternaturally smooth with only well behaved and intelligent kids. After the first day there I was just stunned about how much better everything was with the right people. After we were gender segregated and assigned to the abandoned dorms we all met up in a general hall to be assigned to workign groups for the week. Every group only had one kid from each school in it and with about thirty high schools represented we had about an average class-size worth of kids, all strangers. It sounds like a recipe for disaster but within minutes of getting together as a group the kids had self directed and organized a plan of action to complete the first days tasks. Not in a bossy or officious way but in the manner of a group that wants to do things the best way and has the intelligence to recognize a good plan and to go with it. I had never seen anything so beautiful in all my life and I have never since.

Some Rather Rigorous Dry Humping

 I didn't have a steady clique when I was in school. Maybe that had to do with my irritating personality or that I was not very loyal or something like that. On the weekend, If I couldn't work out a date, which was my preference, I would usually try to play catch-as-catch-can with the various groups of friends that I kept a toe in with. There was a group of friends from Santaquin that my best friend had been friends with since they were little and they would let me come play if I was with him. They didn't seem to like me per se and I was never invited on my own but they were pretty cool for homebodies. One night I was hanging out with my friend when a girl who was well beyond on the wild side for our small town invited us over to watch a movie and we had nothing to do so we decided to go. The other kids where heading over there so there would be five of us guys and one girlfriend. The guy with the girl was a tall spindly dude and his girl was more round making for a perfectly cliché Jack Sprat type situation. Well, that would be exactly what they were like if Jack Sprat and his girlfriend were extremely libidinous and also religiously conservative so as to not do anything to too effective about it. The movie our hostess was showing was the most naughty mainstream movie of the day which none of us could have seen in the theater or in our own homes – Sharron Stone's Basic Instinct. It is a flimsy movie which depends on sex and violence to aid in suspension of disbelief. Early into the movie the couch stated to be occupied by not just my friend and I but the whumpy, humpy convulsions of young frustrated love. They were slopping around each others faces and grinding together which ever bits they could get to align. At first they were furtive but constrained and kept within their two allotted seats on the couch but before long the conflagration of young love consumed them and the concept of personal space was neglected and I was most definitely hit with a hip or bottom and jostled while I tried to see what exactly the nudity in the film was all about. I said something about it in a mildly sassy way and then the friend to the other side got wriggled onto and he fled the couch. I went to sit in the lazy boy recliner with our hostess who took that as a sign that I wanted to make out a little myself, I did not. I gently rebuffed her and tried to focus on the various sexy states of undress Sharon Stone and her co-stars were getting up to while the contortions of lust worked to a slobbery and noisy mess on the now abandoned couch. We finished out the movie and it ended as improbably as it had begun and when the credits rolled the two on the couch looked up for air disheveled and yet unsatisfied. It was horrific and nasty and when there was no more chance to see a naked woman I excused myself and avoided any further nights out that would include those two and their private public romping parties.

Laying Back and Smoking

 I generally find practical humor to be tedious, rude and a little childish but one day my brother pulled off one of the best sight gags in the history of funniness. On the way back from the dive trip my uncle's miniture van had a transmission go home to drive train heaven. We had to get towed to a garage for the repairs to be made and while we were there we were doing whatsoever we could to pass the very long and hot hours. One of the mellow and quite kids decided to catch up on some napping he had been meaning to get to. He laid down in a shady spot of parking lot with the curb for a pillow. He laid on his back, crossed his angles, then laced his hands behind his head, tipped his fedora over his eyes and drifted off to dream of girls he would never have the nerve to approach. While he rested gently, my brother hit upon a hilarious addition to his maximally relaxed pose and that was to take a mostly smoked butt off of the ground and set it in his lips. It doesn't sound like much but the whole scene just really came together to make it look like that dude was laying back for a regular parking lot chill out and was enjoying a cigarette which was so far out of character that it was the most hilarious thing I had ever seen. We were all laughing so hard we were crying someone was looking for a camera when my uncle came out and ruined the fun. He completely ignored the great piece of humor history that was being made and chose to focus in on the one little gross thing about the joke, the manky cigarette from the ground that was in a 15-year-old's mouth. He ran over and pulled the butt out of the unwitting comedy set-piece kid's mouth and told us all that we were jerks for thinking that was funny. Maybe so, but it was still really funny.  

Kim-Burly

Diving makes you incredibly hungry and the dive boat knew all about keeping the passengers fed. There was always food ready or cooking and plenty for all which was quite a feat considering that is hard to do for a group of teenage boys on dry land. The cook who had the whole thing on lock was a rather sturdily built young lady named Kim. If I were told that she was a coal mining, veteran of a foreign war, and a man in a wig I would not have been remotely surprised. As an inside joke my friend, brother and I started secretly calling her Kim-Burly with a growly emphasis on the Burly. She was an amazing cook and really nice so I kind of feel guilty for calling her that, even behind her back. I never saw Kim again but the joke name can be recycled anytime that I see a power-framed woman named Kim. So basically daily.  

Watching Jaws

 There are some ideas that seem fine when you are warm, dry and surrounded by the bolstering of youthful bravado that seem rather ill advised come morning. The first night on the boat someone suggested we watch 'Jaws' as a goof. It is the ultimate ghost story for a camp out on the sea and when everyone was excited by the prospect it seemed harmless. We were all boys from 15 to 18 and no one could realistically express reservations without the fear of something worse than a giant man-eating fish, getting teased. No one wants to risk that so willing or not we all faked enthusiasm and the ships captain told us how to fire up the VCR and TV and we settled in for a fish story. At first everyone laughed and joked when the shark music would come on. Duh-duh Duh-duh, ha ha ha ha, I can't believe some people thought this movie was scary. Ever so slowly the night got darker and the lights of Los Angeles descended below the horizon and the only sound was the engine and the lapping of the waves. The mood settled into a rather intense concentration on the small glowing rectangle that was telling us about the desperate struggle that the grizzled old captain found himself locked into as he matched wits and wills with an exceptional shark. I wish we were lucky like Fred Savage and there was a kindly old grandpa who could tell us that the hero didn’t get eaten by the shark at this time because we did look concerned, even worried. The movie ends and that was going to be that but the nights are long below decks and the next morning we all had to get into the self-same water that sharks, real non-animatronic sharks, lived in and peer pressure couldn't save you under the sea. The next morning there was some definite hesitation to be the first into the water. When the boys were called out about their timidity being related to the previous night's movie they all laughed and denied it but I think it just may have been true. It was for me. Unfortunately for the narrative punch of this little vignette everyone eventually got in the water and dove and no one was eaten by a shark, not even a little bit.   

Smashing Stuff to Kill Other Stuff

 We had a little trouble shooting any dinner so one of the adult dive instructors decided to take a friend and I on a guided tour to show us exactly how it was done. He was a crazy dude in his early forties and within a few seconds of getting down to depth we knew we were in for a different experience than the one we had been taught to have. Good ethical diving means that you should never deliberately or unnecessarily disturb the environment. That means you should never touch the bottom or disturb the wildlife that you are not going to shoot and eat. This guy was like the hunters on Bambi he went strait to a rock and knelt down on it and started smashing everything in site to chum the waters. He was stabbing mussels and crushing urchins and basically laying waste to the seascape and the predatory fish on our menu took notice. 

Under the ocean no tree-hugging hippie can hear you scream.

First though a swarm of Garibaldi, the protected California state fish closed in and even though we had been warned, warned, and re-warned about killing or hurting those fish he started shooting them as quickly as he could reload and to hide the evidence of his crimes he was stuffing them under a rock so they would stay hidden until the dive boat left. After the locals were decimated we had plenty of sport fist to shoot at our leisure. I was still really nervous that we would be implicated in the massacre of protected species as we came up with more fish in one dive than the rest of the boat had managed in the first day and a half. We were never found out and I incorporated a light version of the scorched earth methods we had learned.  

Fast Eddy

 Drugs are bad but sometimes they make a magical alchemy in the mind of a user that makes them pretty dang entertaining. On the boat we had a runner who was restricted to the boat because he was out of jail on probation stemming from some unpleasantness with the consumption of and sale of some chemical contraband. He told us he had been clean for a while but he still had that over fast twitchy urgency of a tweaker. He was pure energy and hustle from the crack of dawn until well after dark. He was pulling tanks, helping people in and out of the water and cleaning puke off of anything it got on. He zipped around the deck until everything was set and then he would go free dive a little and shoot some fish for dinner if the divers were not getting their own. He sat down a couple of times to talk to me and I asked him where he got the name Fast Eddy, it was based on exactly what you would guess. He told me about some of his tattoos which he got in prison and several times he would start in on a story and then look off into the distance and tell me to never try drugs. I wanted to hear more about his life and what he had done but he was busy so I would just catch him once more when he had dived down and shot an octopus and he told me to help him clean it so we could eat it. I had never seen an octopus in real life let alone have eaten one. We cleaned the animal and then Eddy grilled it in butter and teriyaki. It was not good but I ate it and pretended to like it because Eddy was so earnest and hopeful. That is the last time we spent anytime together and after he loaded us off the boat I never heard from him again but I had a much different opinion about drug users and addicts than I had formulated in my small town.  

A Breast is not a Breast is not a Breast

 The kids we were going on the diving trip with were between 14 and sixteen and in the full flower of their adolescent awkwardness. It is that strange time in a boy's life where he has all of the desire and chemical imperative to reproduce and none of the subtlety generally required to trick girls into mistaking lust for love. There were a pair of boys who talked solely in innuendo and in phases like that gem recently coined by Mike Myers as Wayne in Wayne's World - “. . .that's what she said”. That joke probably has never been funny and is on par with finding instances of dirty words in innocuous statements in their appeal almost exclusively to adolescent boys and men who never moved passed that point. They were the two funniest guys that they had ever met and thought everyone shared that opinion, I certainly did not and I am confident I was not alone in that opinion. While we were camping over the night before we were going to board the dive boat my friend Cole, my brother and I were heading over to the showers and commissary when we passed those two goofs in a state of agitated glee boarding on school-girlish giddiness. They stopped us with a couple of “dudes, dudes, come heres” and we did, just to see what had these youngsters all a twitter. They brought it in close for a little conspiratorial revelation and when they thought we were close enough for a secret excitedly told us that they had just seen a woman’s boob, and tit. They actually divided it up like that – specifically, 'boob' for the breast and 'tit' for the nipple. They filled us in on the back story by telling us that they were over at the culinary water spigot when a woman bent over to pick up a bucket, and there it was right there for them to see, the mythical breast and nipple, twice over. When we heard what the news was we were a little less than impressed with the level of excitement a little non-sexual breast sighting had generated in these lightweights but the pay off was just around the corner. The boys looked up and told us that a passing woman in a floral muumuu was the 'chick' whose bosoms they had spied. This matronly and basically shapeless and sexless woman would have even been too old to be in the running for 'chick' when Nixon was president. She possessed those pendulous and basketball-esque breasts that woman of a certain age are burdened with at an age when they no longer add to the figure but still cause back pain. We nearly simultaneously expressed our disbelief that this grandma was the 'chick' who they had gotten all riled up about, “Her?”

“Yeah, dudes, boob and tit.”

We laughed and I laid some wisdom on these young and earnest seekers of incidental nudity, “Guys, a breast is not a breast is not a breast.” I explained that when you accidentally saw a grandmother's exposed bust the more appropriate response would be uncomfortable silence or even minor disgust not triumphant braggadocio. They were wounded and defensive saying that they had at least seen a boob and tit which is more than we had. True enough, and they could keep their undisputed victory in sneaking a peak at an upholstered mound of geriatric breast. . .and tit.      

Scuba Trip With Guys

 I had been scuba diving for several years when my uncle asked if I would come with him and help out with a youth group that he was taking diving in the ocean. We were going to drive down to California, convoy style, camp out and then go on a dive boat for three days and reverse the process. My friend and I still had to pay a little but we got most of it covered n exchange for us helping the younger boys to not get in trouble and to not die. Fair enough. The guys were an okay group but a little goofy in that way that a kid with too much testosterone and not enough sense get when they are in their early teens. The drive down was pretty uneventful, we pushed strait through except for stops in a small town outside of Las Vegas where we were not allowed to do anything but eat at a very cheep buffet and not do anything naughty. When we got to California we went strait to a campsite where we set up to spend the night until we could board our boat the next day. There was another camp nearby that was made up of some kind of christen girls group and there were quite a few flirty girls which seemed like a recipe for mischief but most of our guys were too shy to approach the girls and when my friend and I did they just giggled and didn't talk. We saw them around the campground and at the store and outside of the showers for the rest of the night and the next day and nothing came of it. When they were driving off and in the safety of their retreat they did tell us generally that we were cute and made some other cat calls. I finally knew what women must go through when they are accosted on the street by random strangers; and it was awesome.  

Spear Fishing

There was a warm spring that used to serve as a leaching pond for the silver mining industry a few miles from our house. I wrote before about the time my mom thought that she was going to die by driving into it. When I got older my friends and I loved to spend an afternoon snorkeling and spearfishing some of the millions of carp that called the place home. There were also large mouth bass but we only shot about two of those in the whole run of several years. My friends and I started going when I was 15 so originally we went riding bikes carrying the spear-gun, our snorkels and lunch. Generally there were three of us that were regulars but we would often times bring a fourth or even fifth man along. The problem with too many swimmers was that there was only ever the single spear-gun and proliferation meant less gun in hand time and watching someone else have fun is no way to spend an afternoon. There were four main ponds with the last one being the best for our purposes. It was about a hundred feet in diameter, three feet deep and full of lily pads. The lily pads were the key to our success because it gave the schools of carp someplace to hide that was not around the perimeter. The water was always nice and the first diver would wade in and nuzzle his face in close to the lily pads so that his eyes would be in the shade which allowed him to see much more clearly. Then all you had to do was wait. The schools would come back around after the disturbance of having a new massive thing in the water had settled and the shooter would wait until the fish were in range and then shoot. A turn was based on a pull of the trigger not a successful kill so the diver whose turn it was would choose his shot as wisely as possible so as to not waste it. If a fish was speared there would be some whooping and hollering followed by some comparative tests of manliness because we all know the old wisdom from the sea - the bigger the fish the bigger the man. We spent hours and hours at a stretch taking turns, wading, shooting, trading and repeating. When the lily pad pond was played out we would swim up the joining stream to the next less fruitful pond there was no middle cover so all of the fish would be up under the trees and overhanging banks which made it harder to get to them. This would continue until we arrived at the first pond which more often than not was full of imigrant ad hillbilly bathers and we couldn't fish there. One day though in the second pond we had the most unpleasant but utterly hilarious surprise.  

Not Even the Tenth Best Idea We Could Have Had

 We left the bar and went to another which for some odd reason would not allow children in even when our new sorta cousin begged in her most pouty voice. We were hanging out on the road thinking where to go next when a procession of low-riders – ten or so- rolled up to the curb. They were outfitted with curb feelers, purple under lights, spinning rims (which were kinda new at the time), some rather robust sound systems and were chock full of big black men that poured out onto the sidewalk that we were loitering on. It was very intimidating for a small town boy who had never seen a spectacle like that I didn't know what we were going to do but our newly minted sorta cousin was unphased she just started asking the new arrivals if they had any pull into getting us into the club. They did not, but they did say we should go home because we were in a bad neighborhood for this time of night. I thought that sounded sensible and was ready to call it a night. We did leave but about a mile away we drove passed a park that had the sprinklers on and we stopped to run through the sprinklers. Well, the car stopped and my sister and her new cousin-ish friend disrobed down to their nakies and ran through the sprinklers whooping and screaming, a little loud in my opinion, for naked teenage girls at midnight in an area that a big local man just told us was unsafe. I was standing by the car under a yellow streetlight not joining in and not having fun. I was looking all around to see where our murderers where going to come from. A group of about ten guys came walking down the street and I could hear them talking loudly about the girls in unreasonably deep voices. When they got closer they yelled over at the girls and told them to come over. The girls ran up to the car and got a few skivvies on before they went to talk to the boys. I was imagining ways in which I could run and get help before were were all killed. But all of the houses around looked dark and not readily helpful. Our cousin-in-law ran over and started talking to the boys who she realized that some of them she knew from school. We were 10 miles across town from where this girl lived and went to school but by some magical coincidence the one group of people we meet in the middle of the night in a parking lot was a couple of boys she knew. They asked what we were doing and then to a boy commented that we were in way to bad a neighborhood for white kids to be out goofing off in the middle of the night. We kept hearing that so I was starting to believe it. We talked with the kids for a minute and then I finally got the girls to relent to calling it a night. When we got back into the car our not related cousin got in the backseat with me instead of riding in the front with my sister. She cuddled up against me and tried to start kissing me. I don't think making out with a distantly related cousin by marriage would be strictly illegal but I was not really comfortable with the idea so I gentle deflected her advances and just gave her a chaste side cuddle instead. We went back home and dropped off our new friend and never saw her again.       

Cousin-In-Law Boot Scooting

 I was reminded by telling someone this story that I had forgotten a whole story from the summer when I was 14. My sister was recently sixteen and we headed out to Colorado to visit relatives for some life event or another. While we were visiting we came upon some free time that my sister and I decided to use hanging out with some of my uncles wife's nieces. They seemed a little on the wild side compared to us because their first suggestion for a night out was to go clubbing. We were not of the clubbing ilk and I was frankly freaked out about the prospect. Where I was from the cowboys were a click of rough and tumble high testosterone extra violent kids kids a little on the dim side. I was always saying or doing something like joking or dancing that bypassed that already undersized portion of their brains where they like people and are nice and shot right into their engorged rage centers and they would want to hurt me. I didn't want any of that. We went along to see what the story was and the first place we stopped was a western bar. Our family was religious teetotalers who didn't even drink tea so a bar seemed like a dangerous den of iniquity full of easily irritated drunken hillbillies bent on murder and worse. The bar was separated from the dance floor and it was early in the evening so the floor was empty as the locals imbibed some personality and courage. My cousin-in-law was all about the fun so she took my hand and drug me out onto the floor and we started to dance in the manner she prescribed. We were trying to do the arm pretzel that was the necessary go-to move of that era in couples country music dancing. I was not good at it but I was a good sport and that is half the fun of anything. We learned some line dances and spent an hour or so before all of the middle aged dirt-bags who had some free time for drunken dancing on a Wednesday evening crowded the dance floor and started to frotteurise the girls and get a little handsy in general. We called it a night and headed out for some more dangerous and naughty fun that didn't feel so immanently rapey.  

The Rest of The Night

 The rest of the night was a gentle unwinding compared with what we had done up until that point. After we were ordered by an officer of the law to sit in the front seat we drove out to an abandoned railroad tunnel that cut through a mountain and ended in a precipitous decline. It was a cool view and nice to be hanging out with some cool older kids who were there to lay on us some wisdom about how to deal with some of the stress and rigors of student body officer-ing. I pointed out in a jokey way that we were essentially powerless token participants in the grand scheme of things. Maybe because they didn't want it to be true and maybe because it was true they didn't like my line of thinking and explained all of the real good and difference we could make. They told us we could be the good examples that all of the other students looked up to to model their high school experience. I thought they were delusional. 90% of kids gave not a fiddlers flying fart who the student body council was let alone look up to them but I had learned a lesson from my previously shot down comments and held my tongue. That for me is actually kind of a big deal. We wrapped up our little love-in and headed out of the canyon to go get some hot chocolate at a little greasy spoon truck stop called the Cobble Stone. I went home in the morning thinking of all the awesome stuff we were going to do when we ran the school, having been tricked for the moment out of my knowledge of our inconsequential pull around the old high school. I made a list and brainstormed and got downright giddy. Being young and a lot more adaptable than I am now I was too excited to sleep and I called a friend who was just getting off work at that ungodly hour and we went climbing.   

The Cops Hate Fun

 Being locked in a trunk and driven around in the middle of the night sounds like less fun than it really was. It was a big trunk and my friend, and a fellow student council member was laying in there with me. We chatted and mused while we were driven about to disorient us. That was the plan but when the kid driving sped through a quiet neighborhood in the middle of the night it attracted some awkward attention from officer friendly. The other trunk rider and I heard the sirens come on and the muffled commotions coming from the proper passenger location. We stopped and I heard the officer ask what the hell the kid driving was doing going 55 in 25 in the middle of the night. The kid explained the situation and that made the situation worse. After the dutiful cop heard that we were trussed up in the boot he made the regular passengers open it for him. He got us out and stood us up and asked what we were doing in the trunk. We explained we were getting informally initiated into the student body council and he looked really unconvinced. He told everyone to stand outside the car while he took the other former captive off to the side and talked to him alone for a minute. He returned and then took me aside and asked if I was voluntarily being kidnapped and tied up in a trunk. I told him yes and he had a long searching look at me. He decided we were probably telling the truth and so he just gave the driver a ticket for speeding. He told the captors that he couldn't allow us to ride in the trunk and made them let us ride up front with the rich folks. The mood of youthful hijinks evaporated and we were much more subdued as we drove over to meet up with the other kids.  

Kidnapped!

 There are certain rights of passage that if they were not cloaked in the traditions of youthful shenanigans would just be crimes. As student body officers elect we were subjected to formal initiations and in the middle of the night some informal ones as well. I don't sleep much and never have but what sleep I do require I guard jealously. I am a bad waker upper and nothing sets me off into a festering oozing lesion of rage faster and more thoroughly than being woken up unjustly. The old student council had cleared a plan with my parents that included my late night abduction by them wearing masks to be whisked away to a little light hazing. Taking me unawares and from blissful slumber earned these amateur hooligans a punch or several in the face, head and shoulders. They came masked to my front door in the middle of the night and my mom, sweet forgetful soul that she is, had forgotten the plan to leave it open for them to facilitate their crime. They were reduced to banging on my window and the front door to entice me out. If they were looking for a fight, and by all accounts they were not, they had found one. I started from my bed in a flash of pure foggy hate and delirious anger ready to put a little hurt on whomever was rap-tap-tapping at my bridge. I looked out the window and saw the five masked morons cavorting and I ran from my room to the front door and grabbed the first handy idiot by the shoulder and gave him a punch in the ski-mask. Then I punched another in the guts and then they all jumped off of our low porch and ran to the penumbra of the midnight shadows cast by the porch lamp. I was cussing and threatening to kill when the gut-punched student body president pulled off his mask and reveled it was only the outgoing student council here to simulate a kidnapping for fun. That revelation combined with a few minutes of the sleep chemicals in my brain dissipating made for a dramatic change in my personality and I went and slipped on some appropriate clothing because I had been sleeping in just my nakies and some unders. My mom was also supposed to have had me dress in some jammies to facilitate my abduction but she forgot that too. Clothed and apologetic about the pop in the jaw I had given my predecessor I was bundled into the trunk of a car by my good friend and we chatted in the dark until we were stopped by the cops.