Getting Elected

 The election was held on a Friday and I spent the day getting out the vote and then encouraging people to commit fraud for the vote. I was very nervous because it was obviously a popularity contest and what if I lost? Couldn't face it. They didn't tell any of us who won because they wanted to publicly humiliate us at an elections results dance where everyone could see you when you lost. I went to the dance with my friends and my brother and his friends and we had our regular goofy time at the dance doing funny role playing dances like the lawn mower, the washer woman, the snake killers, and others equally funny dances. In between awesomely stupid dances with the guys I was slow dancing with all of the cute girls which was going well except for this one time when I asked a girl to dance to 'One' by U2 it starts out all slow-songy and then ambushes you with a totally unreasonably paced part which is also much loader. It makes you either abort the slow-circle-hug dance or increase the pace to a ridiculous rate that makes you look a little stupid.

 I was dancing with the one Asian girl at our school when the beat changed and I tried to legitimately take the tempo up realized my mistake and then tried to play it off like I was just joking the whole time and she laughed so I was off the hook. The entire night my stomach was tight and I felt like I was floating outside of my body except for the mouth part which was really dry. At the end of the dance they read the results and started with secretary which was won by the lesser of two evils. Then it was third vice-president with no build up my name was read and a couple of people weakly woo-wooed and some of my friends gave me a high five or two. The rest of the names were read and it was all of the guys I wanted so I was happy for that. I looked around to find the kid I had beat to give him a conciliatory 'attaboy' but he was over getting a face to face hug from his best friend that looked like it might turn romantic at any moment so I just headed out to my car in what was a mighty anticlimax for all of the stress it caused me. I have always hated loosing more than I liked winning.     

2%ers

 I may need to put my conflict with the vice principal into context. I did not hate the guy he was just a guy who was trying too hard to be one of the guys, a skill you either have or do not, and when his every man’s approach didn't work he would flip over into a draconian authoritarian. This would happen a couple of times a day. His favorite metaphor for what types of kids that ruined it for everyone was lifted from a comment made by the American Motorcyclist Association that only 1% of bikers were outlaws. He adapted that for the kids at our high school and doubled it to be the 2%. He would refer to the 2%ers every chance he got, in speeches and over the PA or anytime he had a captive audience. Knowing that he thought we were twice as saturated with real criminals than the American biker gang culture made me happy. Many of the kids at the school began referring to themselves as 2%ers and a friend of mine loved to use it as justification and explanation for his bad behavior.

An example based on actual events:

The Vice Principal: “Who stole the responsibility banner from the hall?”

My friend: “I bet it was one of those 2%ers!”

Another example:

The Vice Principal: “Why did you steal the responsibility banner from the hall?”

My friend: “I can't help it, I am a 2%er what do you expect?”

I loved that he assumed that all high school kids were a little dim and we all just needed to be tricked into good behavior with a little shame and a little “buy in”. Every time we came into conflict over matters large or small I liked to tweak him a little about his simplistic views about child psychology and the problem child. I bet he really loved me for doing that and helping him discover the flaws in his thinking.   

Skitter

 The next phase of our election campaign was to produce a skit for an assembly which would showcase our talents. Once again we were required to write a script, some banal, vanilla, insipid, and inoffensive tripe, and have it vetted before our performance. I turned in a skit had it edited and sent back for a re-write and then resubmitted and approved. We did use that version as a very general outline of what my friends and I actually did. Some of the unscripted jokes were purely physical and therefore legitimately unscripted. To come onto the stage for my skit intro I walked out in a way that clearly mocked the drill team – back strait, chest out, marching while slapping my thighs. It got the ball rolling on what many people was hoping was going to be a more irreverent skit than the others had been. They were not disappointed. I told them I was the candidate who warned them against going to porn and a friend of mine walked onto stage handing out candy from a bucket in a manner very similar to that of our vice principle during class breaks. He even wore a suit and his hair style would even seem to evoke the man himself. We didn't name him as such. When he came by he realized that he needed to sneeze and pulled out a pillowcase sized handkerchief with “Vote For Nate” written on it. I joked off script that he was doing an awesome job tricking the students into liking him by handing out candy and that our brainwashing plan was working to perfection. We did some other campy things and jokes but the meat of it was already passed with that little sequence of jokes. As I was exiting stage right there was my good friend the vice principle who seemed to have something on his mind. I gave walking right passed him a shot pretending I didn't know he was there for me. He grabbed me by the forearm and walked with me down the hall to his office with a firm grip and a sense of purpose in his quick pace. He sat me in his office obviously all a fluster while he tried to get a coherent reprimand together as we both waited for the real principle to join us. The real principle was a pretty mellow dude who seemed to like me personally much more than my captor. The principle said that he was concerned that we went off script and mocked a school official because I was running for a position of great influence and they didn't want to have to constantly deal with stuff like this. I agreed but I pointed out that I had never mentioned the vice principle by name and that I was joking in general about using subliminal messages and candy to buy loyalty and to get votes. I said the joke was not meant to target anyone in particular but rather to be a funny explicit statement of what would normally be a covert tactic. I could see that the vice principal, quite correctly, was skeptical of my explanation and he asked that I be disqualified from the election. The principal said he thought I had meant no ham by the jokes and that I would be allowed to continue. That was quite generous of him but ultimately a poor choice as this by no means was going to be our last conversation on the topic of content control.   

Going to Porn

 Besides making posters and generally speech making and assembly skits the candidates for third vice president had to produce a mornings worth of announcements as kind of an audition for the job. I had been on quite a few times so I had some great ideas for selling my brand but I had some technical difficulties in that the reigning third vice and his protege were unwilling to work the knobs and my friends in the media class had spent all of there time exploring the different colors of the unsupervised wastrel rainbow. They had started out as a little dim to begin with but a few months of doing exactly nothing for the class period but sitting in the studio on playing cards had for some unfathomable reason failed to educate them properly. We were not high and dry because we knew how to turn on the camera and initiate the telecast. What we would not have was green screen special effects and title animation. I was reduced to using just the pure white hot power of my charisma and charm and try and overcome the tragic lack of a animated star field in the background. It was almost time for prom at my school and some hilarious vandals had changed a few of the letters in the signs to make an immature joke. Contrary to popular belief it was not me, I wished it had been - but it was not. They switched the “O” and the “R” and ripped a leg off of the “'M” so that the innocent invitation to prom now seemed to invite the school to porn instead. I decided to use this as my lead and I started the telecast by telling everyone good morning and then informing the school that the signs that read porn were, in fact, advertisements for prom. I said it was okay if they had already bought tickets expecting something else all they needed to do was buy a second ticket and get a date. It was not on my prepared and vetted speech but I could tell from the laughter coming from the library outside of the studio that it was a hit and that got me rolling. I laid down the rest of the schools morning business with the offhanded confidence of someone who had been here before and had nothing to prove. The prom not porn public service joke was not universally appreciated. Many teacher said told me it was the first time they had ever laughed at a morning announcement joke while others were deeply offended for some reason. The vice principle whom I had a very antagonistic relationship with was one of those who were not impressed. He called me into his office and the kid I was running against was in their already when I arrived. They had both worked themselves into a bit of a tizzy by the time I sat down and they were mad because I had not stuck to the approved notes and that I had made a joke about porn. The vice principle got it into his little piggy mind that I had altered the signs for the sake of the joke. Feeling that this little meeting was below my dignity I started subtly mocking them both. I cleared up that I had not altered the signs and I suggested that I went off script to clarify what the signs meant because I thought there were kids who would be genuinely confused. I used my tricky debate words to twist what they were saying and to keep myself just out of the range of the hammer of banishment and disqualification while pretending I was agreeing with them. They knew what I was doing but couldn't figure out a way to hold my feet to the fire and so let me off with a warning, which I disregarded two days later when I went off script for my assembly skit.  

Running for Office

 I had been on the morning closed circuit television announcements in a technical and usurping capacity for most of my junior year and I liked the attention. There was a kid who was in the media class as well that wanted to be in charge, a position that was granted to the person elected to be the student body vice president, the third vice president to be exact. He didn't like me much and had told me that if he was elected he would make sure I never got to be on the announcements again. Well, then my path was clear. I decided to run for office but I did have that one little problem that I very rarely went to school on time or for a full day and that would make me ineligible for school activities and to hold public office. I had to hustle to make up all of the missed days with some detention and some deals and the day we needed to register for the race I was eligible by the thinnest of margins. When I had signed up for the race I went into the media classroom and studio sat down and asked my rival what he thought about the campaign. He was optimistic because he was the only one in the race. I asked him if he was still planning on kicking me out when he ran and he said I could still be in the media class but I wouldn't be able to be on the show. He said he had plans for how he was going to run things and he didn't think I was right for the new style. I told him I thought I heard someone else was running for office and what would he do if they won instead of him. He said he didn't think that was true but that the current third vice president and tech guru with the green screen and real time tittle machine had endorsed him so he thought he would probably still win. I didn't tell him that I was the one running against him for office but his attitude made me not just want to win but to beat him personally. That was not really my personality at all but for this one time I was going to make an exception.     

More Debate

 After the first attempt at debate where I went in blind and confused I figured out what to do and when we got our next topic I wrote my own case. Cases would be more like it because you have to write an affirmative and negative case for each topic. With my newly minted brief in hand I went into my second debate with much more confidence. I knew all of the procedures and the slang so there would be no more having to ask the judges what exactly was supposed to say when I was asked something. During a debate competition there are also what are called speech events which include impromptu, extemporaneous and prepared speech competitions that run alternately with debate rounds so we were encouraged to try our hand at some of those at well. My natural hubris whispered in my ear that I would me amazing at any and all speech events. My hubris thought that was pretty funny after I crashed and burned. As it happens I was much better at debate, getting second place at my second tournament and in this one they only had the top one person get first place unlike the novice tournament where everyone won something. After the tournament they hand back all of your judges notes that they wrote during you presentations. I quickly discarded the positive reviews because those people were obviously already pretty smart and didn't need my scrutiny. The negative notes were almost always were in reference to me thinking I was funnier than I was and thinking I was smarter than I was. I got my feel-bads deeply hurt. I thought I was rolling there with some pretty funny jokes and the whole time I was crashing into the pits of comedy hell being consumed by my own lame antics that were evidently flammable for the sake of this now very convoluted sentence and metaphor. I went through all of the stages of grief, denial ( they wouldn't know funny if it jumped out of a drawer and bit them), anger ( I hope they get bit by vicious snakes somewhere in their home), bargaining ( how much for that sack of vipers you have there, my good man?), depression ( oh, great, they are non-venomous snakes, okay, figures, with my luck.) and acceptance ( I guess I will just have to hope they can feel how much I hate them.). I didn't take their advice and tone down my style so for the next ten tournaments I never did better than third in any speech event while I consistently got first or second in debate.  

I Don't Take The ASVAB

 A few weeks after the Steve Miller band show ended better than I expected all of the juniors at our school were supposed to take the ASVAB test. The ASVAB is a military aptitude test which the government uses to find out which kids would be best at killing people, helping get supplies to a person needing to kill someone, or getting someone else to kill someone. My problem was that I was late that morning and I had also forgotten that the test was that day. Additionally, I was not remotely interested in plunging into the MIS unless they offered me a free trip to a leadership camp with girls, which they actually got around to doing a little later. I turned up just in time to be told that I was being locked out of the test with none other than the girl that I had a crush on since eigth grade. We were told to go away and so we did. We decided to go on a drive in my car up the canyon, over the top and down the other side on a road called the Nebo loop. It was late fall and it was beautiful. She sat on the bench seat with me closer than the outside seat but not cuddly close and I was wondering what a spacing like that might indicate. We talked about school and my sister who had been dating her brother when she ran away and shaved her head. We talked about how she had recently broken up with her boyfriend, a topic I was most interested in. As we drove I started to weigh the idea of making a move with this girl and maybe, just maybe, finally getting with the girl of my dreams. I don't know if it was wishful thinking or if it was actually happening but she seemed to be leaning in closer to me and laughing a bit more than usual at what I was saying. I was terrified. I wanted so badly to give a hand hold, or a cuddle, or even -should I dare – a kiss. I agonized and re-agonized because I could not bear the thought of rejection if I was misreading the situation. I tried to think of a smooth way to put it out there without risking outright rejection but she was the kind of girl who would only respect boldness, or so I thought. We had been driving for an hour when I stopped the car to pretend to look at some rocks that I thought might be good to climb. When I was done pretending some other reason to have stopped the car I got back in and we talked in the parked car for a bit while I tried to work up the courage to bust my move. She just seemed right on the borderline of maybe being into it and maybe not and I couldn't force myself to take the chance. I still deeply regret not even trying, who knows right, who knows? I guess I could just ask her now that we are both married and adults with nothing on the line what would have happened that fall day. But I am honestly still nervous that the answer might have been that she was not at all interested or even worse – that she had been. Maybe I will never know and maybe that is a good thing. She finally told me that she needed to be home by three to go to work and it would take about that much time to get back so I cranked up the car and drove out the bottom of the canyon in a town 20 miles from our high school and we talked all the way home. When we got to her house she gave me a hug, got out and said she had a really good time and that we should hang out more. We didn't, we stayed friends but I never came that close to even thinking about the possibility of making a move. She got a new boyfriend and I got a new girlfriend and the stars never aligned for us to be alone and single again. I may have done better on the military test and had less regrets about that.  

Finding the Groove

 We had been enduring the most tedious display of jam band audience abuse from the Steve Miller band for about an hour and a half. We heard solos from every member of the band and I still had not heard a song that I recognized. I was starting to feel like this may have been a waste of an evening. I was hanging out with my date, the two sober members of our group, still trying to make sure the physical contact and distance was more cordial than romantic when the band left the stage without playing a single song I had ever heard. Boo. The hillside started drunkenly cheering and chanting the band name while they were off having a pee and a beverage. I honestly didn't care if they came back out I was not really digging on the rambling musical masturbation of the dude on the steel guitar. When they came back out though the crowd knew that by the process of elimination they would have to play the four songs everyone came to see. They tuned up a little and then went into a pretty good version of “The Joker”. Whaaa-Whuuu. That I could groove on and I started having some more fun doing what passes for a concert dance at a seventies band concert. Then they played “Take the Money and Run”, followed by “Jet Airliner”. Everyone was on their feet jamming out and loving it. It occurred to me that if this band wanted a captive audience for their jamming had to hold us hostage with the promise of their four good songs or people would just leave during the jam part. The finally was a longish rendition of “Fly Like an Eagle” which I have mentioned before I mush have absorbed enough second hand drugs to find really deep an insightful. By the end of the show I was actually really enjoying it and I was glad I came. I would never go back but one time is a good amount of times to do something like that. I never went out with my date again but we did hang out with mutual friends a couple of times and we ran into each other again as adults and she is doing really well.   

I Go To Watch Steve Miller Band Under False Pretense

 A girl that I had a crush on for a very long time was in a history class with me and always sat next to me so we could chat while we waited for the teacher to stop talking so we could get to work. The teacher was a good guy and a veteran teacher who had a really intense speech impediment that made it impossible to understand half of what he said. He ignored his handicap and insisted on lecturing every day for about 30 minutes. It was an absolute waste of time but at the end of it he would hand out notes that we could read in ten minutes and figure out what he had been talking about. In the meantime I was always trying to work an angle to finally get this girl to take a romantic interest in me. One day, quite unexpectedly she asked me out on a date. Specifically, she asked me if I had ever heard of the Steve Miller Band. I had not, but I said yes. She asked if I liked them and I said I guessed so. Then she asked if I wanted to go to a concert with her. I was elated and assumed she had cracked and wanted to move our relationship on past the barren valley for the friend zone and then on into the dating scene. I was super excited and got home showered, dressed up super pretty and put on some of my dad's aftershave for the finishing touch. When she picked me up at the time she had said there was something very curious, a guy who looked about 20 was driving and she was in the front seat with him and I sat in the back. He introduced himself and I did likewise and that is when I realized I was not going on a date with my longtime crush. We stopped by another girls house and she sat in the back with me and now I got the picture I was a fill-in date for her shy friend who was in need of a date of her own. Dang. The girl was sweet and I liked her okay it was just not what I had wanted to believe was happening. We had to stop and buy a ticket for me because I was a late addition and I offered to pay for it but the girl I had been misled into going on a date with insisted. Now I was obligated and I felt like I had been hoodwinked and was being used to fill up a quota. We drove up to the venue and the whole time my date, who I knew, but not well, was closing the distance to more of a cuddle range than a cordial range. I was being nice but I wanted to give off the 'lets be friends and that is all' vibe. When we got to the hill that we were going to sit on while the band played we met up with about 20 other people who I didn't know at all. They all came prepared to enjoy some mediocre rock with some mind-altering chemicals. There was pot, beer and wine on offer but of the group only my date and I declined. The opener played while it was still light out and the sound was terrible so I was not sad to see them go. My date and I were talking and she was actually pretty cool but I was still not really interested in making this thing a permanent arrangement. The girl I was interested in was indulging in some recreational drugs and doing quite a bit of making out with some other dude for someone I had assumed was asking me out on a date a few hours earlier. My date and I got a little contact high, got a little sway dance going on and by the time the band played the 'Time Keeps on Slipping' song as their finale I was just high enough to think the words were pretty profound. They are not. 

Combining Cowardice and Douchebaggery

 I considered how to write this post to put me, if not in a positive light, at least in one that made me look slightly less like a total butt hole. I have decided that there is no way to accomplish this with any reasonable facsimile of veracity and so I resign myself to telling it like it was and hoping time has healed all wounds. I have told you about my ongoing struggle to find a way to break things off with the girl I was not really that interested in and what tipped the scales was when I thought I may have found a viable replacement. That and my friends had starting making fun of me for going out with her even going so far as to make up pun based variations on her surname that they took pains to repeat just two times; often and more often. When I thought I might have a shot at a girl I liked better that may have been more impressive to my friends I did the honorable thing and explained the situation in a calm and mature manner and did my best not to hurt her feelings. Not really, but that is definitely what I should have done but I am a coward and a jerk and so when I wanted out I did that most turdish of breakups and just stopped calling her and not returning her calls. I timed this to happen over Thanksgiving break so I would have a solid week for her to hopefully get the hint and not see me at school and make it awkward for me. After about five days her best friend managed to get me on the phone under false pretenses and chewed me out and I didn't even argue because I knew she was right but I was also committed to ending this one way or another so I didn't relent. After six weeks it was becoming apparent that what I thought was a sure thing with this other girl was more like a misunderstanding and I was left without either, which served me right. What I did next was the lowest of the low. When I got lonely for a little female companionship I called up my recently ex-ed girlfriend, tried to act like nothing had happened and asked if she wanted to go out. Thankfully, I was rebuffed by the ex who had enough dignity to tell me to get bent. She even laughed at me and asked me if I was serious. That, I know, is generally a rhetorical question but she sounded like she wanted to know so I told her I was serious and she laughed again told me I was an a-hole and hung up. I sat in our laundry room with the corded kid's phone resting against my head and waited for the dead line tone to come on. I felt sorry for myself because that is just how narcissistic I was. I hung up the phone and went for a little poopy pants pity party game of one-on-none at the church until they kicked me out. I didn't really see my ex much anymore because we ran in different circles. The next time I talked to her was about a year later when I was with a new girlfriend and my sister who was down for a visit and we stopped by a greasy spoon restaurant where she happened to be working the window. She knew my sister from work, she had been in dance with my current girlfriend and she knew me from when I was a massive jerk to her. She was super nice and said hi to us all and told us she had some great news – she was engaged to be married when she graduated and she showed us the ring which was too big for her finger because it had not yet been fitted. We all told her congratulations and we drove off with our shakes. When we were back on the rode my sister and girlfriend both laughed at me and made fun of me for ever dating that girl and I said I thought she was nice and I regretted nothing. That was a lie to save face, I regretted being such a tool and I was glad she was with someone who appreciated her.  

I Steal Gas

 In the olden days when you needed gas you would get gas and then pay for it after you had it in the tank. It was the honor system and it mostly worked except for the one major flaw in the system, you could just drive off. One night when I was taking the girlfriend I still had not found a way to break up with yet out to the movies I went and filled up the tank of my sporty two-door 1978 Ford Fairmont and then pulled up to the store to go in and pay and get some gum. I went in, used the bath room got a pack of gum, saw the time and realized I was almost late and there was a line so I put the gum back headed back out to the car and drove off to make the curtain in time. It is a good thing I rushed too because who would want to miss every horrifyingly badly acted second of a Claude Van Dam movie? When I dropped my girlfriend off I went to get a late night snack on my way home and when I went to pay I noticed I had way more money than I should have based on the amount I spent on the movie and gas. That is when it dawned on me that I had never paid for my gas and I got very worried. I imagined that after I drove off the old lady running the till at the gas station was on the phone to the cops giving them my plat number and description and they were now on the lookout for a gas stealer that fit my description. I got very nervous because all I could say was that I forgot to pay, which was technically true, but the most obvious lie in the history of police work. I drove home on the back roads and spent a fitful night thinking about what kind of consequences I might face when I was arrested. I am too pretty for prison. The next morning I rode my bike back to the gas station just in case they were looking for the car. I went inside and looked at the list of people they kept on the register that were wanted for driving off. I was not on it and neither was my car. I was a little relived but then I had to decide to just walk away or do the right thing and pay. I actually walked out and had gotten on my bike ready to complete the theft and had a twinge of what may have been guilt or it could have a little fear that I was just not on the list yet and I was still under the gun. Either way I went back in and told them that I accidentally drove off without paying. The girl that was at the till was a bit of an idiot and was not aware of how to call up what I had not paid and said that if I paid her then her till would be off and so I should just go. Fair enough. It was not long after that all of the gas stations switched to prepay making it lots harder to steal gas.  

We Date a Couple That is Breaking Up

 After we arts-and-crafted our way into a date it turned out that none but your truly could drive so I was required to do so. The couple we were doubling with were some friends of my somewhat girlfriend who I did not know. They were breaking up with each other and this was going to be their last date together so they spent the night in the back seat of my car variously entwined and sobbing. Then we were at a horrible Mexican restaurant where they were variously sobbing, entwined and consuming some of the worst cheese enchiladas ever devised by the mind of man. It was tedious in the beginning and only got worse as the evening wore on. We went to the dance proper and got our couple and group pictures taken and then we hung around sitting next to our sobbingly entwined comrades until enough time had passed to load up and go find something else to do. My date asked to to drive somewhere secluded for a little -wink wink- slap and tickle. That was an idea I could get behind but I had forgotten about our lacrimonious baggage. We drove out to a jetty that people called a levee which was at the foot a hill called west mountain which, in turn, was at a boat dock called Lincoln beach. You would have to cast the old beach definition net really, really wide for anything in the vicinity to be called a beach. Yet there we were, and the geography was not the only thing that was not as it should be. We were sitting in a dark car on a dark road looking out at the lake waiting for the steel mill across the way to make its nightly dump of slag into cooling pond which would make that side of the lake glow a magical orange-red against the plumes of steam that would billow up, I mean, if that is not a magical recipe for teenage romance then check your pulse. Romance, sadly, was not in the air so much as the weeping and wailing of the damned loves in the backed seat of my car. I don't know if I ever knew why two obviously passionate and emotional loves were forced to separate. Was it a unforeseen move, a overbearing parent, pregnancy , or another lover? I didn't and don't want to know I just wanted for them to shut up with all waterworks and drama. We tried to make out for a bit but it is really to get the mood right when there is a snippet or blurb of teenage histrionics intermittently intruding. It bored so deep into my psyche that it placed a white hot poker right on that little piece of brain which is responsible for liking people and generally being happy and burnt it right up. I counted the minutes until we could go home, but what was this? A twist! The lovers didn't want to go home to face their fate and be separated and they begged to stay out for as long as possible. Nope. I told them some story about how I would be murdered and then beaten if I was late getting home and they asked that I drop them off together at neither of their houses. That I could do just to get them out of ear shot. Them gone I took my date to her house and then went hoe and stayed up all night talking ot my brother’s friend about his mold allergies which sounds boring but in contrast to the insipid tumults of adolescent emotions that I had to endure for five hours it was riveting. I never saw our star crossed loved again.  

We Vandalize Our Offers

 I don't know how wide spread the practice of asking someone to a dance with an elaborate arts and crafts project is but in our high school it was all but mandatory. It was considered poor form indeed to just walk up and ask your date out and worse still was to call and ask. It was expected that you would do something like put balloons in their room with notes and confetti, or trash their car with soap and streamers with a note. After someone had been vandalized for the asking a return prank was in order. Maybe to accept a date a girl would stuff your locker full of packing peanuts with a note riffing on the material used to make the mess. Something like ,”I would be “NUTS” to not go to prom with you.” It was good messy fun for those kids involved and torture to see what the cool kids got while your locker remained clean, well – cleaner. My girlfriend was excited to ask me out to a girls choice dance and I was still trying to find a way to let her down easy. She chose to destroy my car with cuteness and it was full of confetti, balloons and candy with a note that asked to to go with her to the dance. I resigned myself to making a reply and purchased a pumpkin and a bag of tootsie rolls. I wrote a note accepting her offer on one of the tootsie roll wrappers and then emptied the rest of the bag into the hollowed out pumpkin. I was not really aware that the hot wet interior of a hollow pumpkin would liquefy the candy into a soupy mess that ran out when the pumpkin tipped over but a little chocolatey pumpkin juice on your carpet probably only makes you feel more special. She never found the note in that train wreck of an answer but she assumed that I had said yes. I had.

Incredibly Generous Offers

 I went to the kitchen got a drink and then had to use the bathroom. I was in way to deep and I needed an escape plan before this girl, quite reasonably as it happens, assumed that I was as into her as she was into me. I really didn't want this thing to get out of hand and her feelings to get hurt but I think it was already to late for that. I took as long in the bathroom as a pee could reasonably take without drifting into the amount of time that could be considered stalling, or even worse - pooping. I came out to the still darkened house where my date was waiting in the kitchen. I tried to diffuse the situation a little by talking a little over-loud, joking and asking where everyone was. They were, horrifyingly out of town for the entire weekend. She told me this in an obviously inviting way and I panicked a little inside knowing that there was no convenient time limit that I might work towards, which had been my original plan. In adult retrospect I realize that what I should have done was turn on the lights and in as gentle way as I could muster apologize and tell her that I was not interested in pursuing this relationship and then drop that classic old face saving lie about wanting to still be friends. If you are familiar at all with the convention of qualifying the next action by offering a repentant ex post facto mea culpa then you may recognize that last bit there as a feeble attempt at justification and rationalization of what I did actually do. What I did do was follow her when she took my hand and led my downstairs to the family room and sat me on the couch and then she sat on my lap with her hands around my neck ready for the kissing to begin. I had a deep twinge of guilt but there she was, ready and willing and such a nice kisser that I thought just a little kissing would be nice after all. After a little of that she whispered in my ear that I could do anything I wanted to her. That is when the guilt got too much to bear and I made a little distance between us an looked her in the eye and came really close to doing the right thing. I told her that I liked her a lot but that we might be moving to quickly and we should take it slow. She was once again her very sweet and accommodating self and said whatever I wanted was fine. I felt let off that particular hook a little and she sat close to me and turned on the television and gave me the remote and told me to pick something we could watch together. I was rolling through what for that time was a huge amount of channels and got into the high number adult ones that we all paid for and un-scrambled; it was a teen boy holy grail. While I flipped though she told me that if I wanted to watch any of those channels it was fine with her. Two incredibly generous offers in a row and I once again declined. Instead I found a movie that was on and just starting and we settled in and cuddled while we watched. She had actually fallen asleep on my shoulder with her hand on my chest by the time the movie ended and I tried to gently extract myself and leave quietly but she woke up and said goodbye and kissed me. I walked back upstairs and noticed the mix tape she had made for me on the table and I agonized over whether it would hurt her more to take it and then break up with her or just leave it. I took it, drove home and tried to decide what to do.   

Our Song

 Two weeks after I narrowly averted some exactly-what-I-thought-I-wanted and I was still not working up the courage to tell my new girlfriend that I didn't think it was going to work out. I had agonized about it and tried to keep it as un-touchy as possible as I thought of a way to let her down easy. She, however was interested in taking it to the next few levels all at once. This was a mess and I was too much of a coward to call it off. She chased me down in the hall more excited than boded well for a quick and easy breakup. She side hugged me and kissed me on the ear and asked if I wanted to come over to her house that night. I mumbled, equivocated, but because she was most insistent and awfully persuasive I agreed. I got showed, dressed and made up my mind that I was going to tell her that we would be better off as friends. When I pulled up to her house I got a little worried because there were no cars in the driveway and no lights on in the house. No one but one very eager girl was home all alone and waiting for me. Flip. I went up to the door and rang and she didn't come for a little too long so I started to think I was maybe getting stood up. No such luck. She opened the door and threw herself on me wrapped me up in a firm head hug and kissed me in the French style. Flip-dang. We went inside and she lead me back through the dark house to her bedroom to show me some stuff. She had some posters and books and a stereo which was cued up on a mix tape. She turned off the lights except for the glow of the stereo display. She pressed play and gathered me up for a private slow dance. As we swayed in a slow-hug dance she informed me that the song that was playing was our song. Oh, no. This was definitely not heading toward a nice, clean, mutually amicable dissolution of our tacit “going out” contract. This was my last chance to try and end this like a rational mature person and true to form I did not do that. I did finish the song and then as she tried to move the party onto her bed for what I would assume was the make-out portion of the mix tape I suddenly needed a drink. Then things got worse.

All Alone and Chicken and Sister Mockery

 A few weeks after we started dating there was a weekend where I had picked up my sister from Job Corps and the rest of my family was out of town. Once my sister headed out for the night with her friends that left me alone, in my house, to my own devices while everyone was away. I called up my new girlfriend and invited her over and she was more than happy, kind of disturbingly, more than happy actually to come over. I went and picked her up stopped and rented a movie and then went back to my deserted house. In my car the bench seat allowed her to scoot in quite close, which she did. I am not a really cuddly guy and I really don't like people squeezing in so close as to limit my range of motion; it makes me claustrophobic, and not in a good way. She was starting to cross the line into a legitimate safety hazard as I was straining to drive the six miles back home. We arrived un-wrecked if not unmolested and went in to pretend to watch the movie we had rented. The movie in the VCR and started I sat on the couch for a the nice leisurely warm up to making out I was used to. Usually with the girls I dated I was the gas and they were the breaks and if I was over ambitious I could ruin the mood and go home empty handed. Not so this evening with this girl. She was at self-immolation levels of gas and I was put in the unusual position of having to be the breaks because I was not quite sure how far I wanted this thing to go. As I mentioned before, I liked this girl just fine; she was cute and into me, which is always a plus. I just didn't really click with her personality and I definitely didn't like her friends. Maybe it was already too late to turn back now and tell her I was hoping for a little light non-committal making out. I was not enjoying the making out or the movie we were pretending to watch as I agonized over how I could stop her without shutting this party down completely. Luckily at that point my sister and her friends, who were usually all night party people, came back home and gave me an out. She came in and opened the door and turned on the lights which is the scientifically best way to end a make out party on the verge of becoming more party. We quickly straitened up and smoothed ourselves and my sister made fun of us a little and I had never been so happy in my life to be caught and teased. My sister and her friends came in and joked about what we were doing and when they left to go do some raising of the hells I invited my girlfriend and myself along to avoid any further possible entrapment and possible misunderstanding about our relative commitment to this relationship. I decided that the next day I was going to call her up and let her know exactly what ground this relationship was on so we didn't have any false hopes or pretenses. I did really intend to do just that, and then I chickened out.    

Exploitation of an Underclass Woman

 After I sort of broke up with my sort of girlfriend from out of town I started trying to find a local replacement. One of truisms of the pursuit of women is that there are a couple of ways to go up in looks and down in effort; you can go younger or foreign. Because we were essentially landlocked and all the foreign girls I knew we spoken for, I decided to go younger. There was a girl who had been flirting with me a little in one of my classes and I decided to call her up and see if she wanted to go out. She did. I set up a classic movie and dinner date. When I picked her up she was way overdressed for a casual evening out and she had a lot too much perfume on but I was flattered that she was so eager to go out with me. It showed good taste. She was clingy and cuddly and eager to laugh at all my jokes which made me feel amazing but by the end of four hours of shameless adoration I was wondering what she was into and what she liked to do. She wanted so badly to impress me that she kept trying to like what I liked, which I didn't like. My problem with women has always been that certain parts of my brain, outside of my control, really like a certain ratio of body parts to each other and it responds positively to that. The more conscious part of my brain, on the other lobe, really wants to associate with strong, independent, and intelligent women. Therein lies the rub, I knew some girls who had great ratios and were very attractive to the part of my brain that was soaked day and night in testosterone – but many of them were idiots who I could not stand to be with. Others were smart and funny but possessed a chassis that for some reason or another my poor, shallow, pig brain could not reconcile into attractiveness and I would be at an impasse. This girl was cute and nice but all she wanted was to be who I wanted her to be and all I wanted was for her to be herself and so we were trapped in a circular logic mess. The testosterone part of my brain was very impressed with her desire to cuddle and kiss and told my sassy over-analytical self-righteous 'she-is-not-very-interesting' part of my brain to shut up for a bit. That bit of brain and my traitorous body were quite firm in their insistence on just a little more of what she had on offer and we would sort out that other business later.   

A Long Way to Go

 After our disastrously boring party date and one more rather sisterly kiss from my would be girlfriend I decided that a two hour drive out to the boonies was a little far to be driving for less action than I could get more locally. Hypothetically, of course, but why let the fact that I didn't have a better option stop me from burning this particular bridge. I did the decent and manly thing and stopped returning my friend's calls until after a week or two she got the hint and stopped calling. She typed me a letter and sent back a school ID card she had apparently stolen from me so she could have a picture of me. She wrote some of the usual things, she asked what I was up to, asked how I was doing, asked if I was still hanging out with the friends that I was with when we met. Then she got to the part that made me feel guilty, she said she was sorry she didn't live up to my expectations and that she was sorry she hurried me out of the house that morning I had to sleep over. She said she should have went with me somewhere after the kid's parents got home but she was so nervous and tired that she didn't know what to do. She said she was sorry for taking my student ID but that she didn't have any other picture of me and she would like it if I would send her a picture back in exchange. She reminded me that I had promised to send her a picture and write her a poem and she hoped that I would keep that promise. She wrote that she was sorry for writing such a short and weird letter but that she had, and I quote, '. . .a dole and borring life.' She ended the letter, “I miss you.” Then she signed off – Love Always Your Most Dedicated, and Obligated Fan and then typed her name. When I read her letter I was overcome with shame for what I turd I was but I didn't call her back and I didn't write her a letter. I am no good at telling people bad news and I knew if I talked to her I would try and cheer her up by asking her out again and just make it harder for both of us. I never heard from her again.     

The Downstairs is Where the Hardcore Kids Are

 Downstairs was one of those late 70's brown carpeted, wood paneled, white stone fireplace jobs that they made by the gazillions. There were about seven kids, two girls and five boys sitting in the standardized weed smoking circle and being too cool about it to enjoy it. They were taking slow and easy tokes passing the joint and then slowly and smoothly exhaling in the measured ease of kids who were not just starting into the contraband game. My friend and I were standing in the the archway letting our eyes adjust to the smokey gloom when one of the girls asked if we were going to just f-wording stand there. Those are the kind of questions that you can only sound like a goober answering. I look at my friend for some direction and she gave a 'I-don't-know' shrug and looked right back at me looking for direction of which I had none. The direction I wanted to go was right back up the stairs, out the door, into the car and find someplace to make-out with my friend. I didn't want to look like I was not cool though and I took my girl by the hand and went to sit on the couch behind the circle. It was one of those couches that had a nice orange-ish pastoral scenes printed on it. I snuggled my girl under my arm, sat down and tried to strike up some small talk. I asked if they were from around there and most of them ignored me except for the girl who wanted to know about my 'F-wording' intentions earlier. She giggled derisively and asked the rest of the room and not me or my date, 'Who the 'Eff' is that guy?' I was not used to such a cold reception, ever since I got into junior high and found my stride socially I was unaccustomed to being big-timed by a bunch of small town hard asses. I would have been intimidated normally but for some reason this night instead of my normal timidity when confronted I just got angry. I told her that she didn't need to be a B-word, I was just trying to hang out. She must had been a pretty widely regarded as a B-word because right as I called her that the rest of the room kind of warmed up and laughed. She told me to preform coitus with myself and asked if we wanted in on the weed smoking. I told her I didn't really smoke weed and thanked her anyway. After our little exchange where in we both growled and barked to see who belonged where everything was copacetic and my girl and I stayed and talked for a while with the hardcore stoner kids who turned out to be pretty cool. It was way better then sitting around and watching that stupid movie with the less adventurous kids.

I Don't Really Smoke Weed

 I don't know if it was my fevered imaginations and for the record, they are quite fevered, but I imagined that there was some cachet with high school kids to having some inside knowledge about drug and alcohol consumption. To try and impress those not in the know I often pretended to have much broader experience with mind altering substances than I could actually legitimate lay claim to. If some one mentioned drugs I would knowingly chip in some slangy-winky kind of implication that I didn't just know what they were talking about I 'KNEW'. I thought that this pretense made me seem more worldly, dangerous and cool. I don't know if it worked but the fact of the matter was I had never used drugs and have still never used drugs so I was a poser in the most clinical and scientific sense of the word. I had been in the house a couple of time when people went into another room to smoke some weed and once at a Steve miller Band concert every one in our group was high but my date and I. That actually may not be entirely true because there was so many people smoking so much marijuana that by the end of the show when they played 'Fly Like an Eagle' I was thinking the rudimentary graphics projected on screens behind the stage were pretty awesome and the song's message was pretty deep. In the cold analysis of sobriety they were not either awesome or deep. That leads to only one conclusion, I had a second hand smoke high of such an intensity as to make the watered down saccharine existential musings of a second tier seventies rock band seem relevant and insightful. 

This is neither deep nor insightful. The only way you could think that is if you were high. 

Besides that I was a squeaky clean teetotaler that was intimidated by the idea of the addiction and spiraling self destruction that would inevitably follow indulgence. Now that I have confessed to being a good boy we come to the point of this story. A few weeks after my snowy brush with death I was back out in Delta to try again with a date. My friend wanted me to come to a party with her so I drove out and picked her up and we went to a house even farther out in the boonies where there were lots of teenagers. There was, however, no adult oversight and there was a serious lack of fun going on in the house. There was some beer and bottles of hard liquor on the counter and a few kids were halfheartedly pawing at a couple of open cans and looking at the bottles. Whooo-hooo par-tay. Some kids were in the other room watching a movie. It was that stoner classic and absolute steaming turd of a movie 'Dazed and Confused'. Oh man that movie sucks, and I am going to say, 'especially if you are sober' but I would have to add 'and not a full blown idiot' to that qualification. After I wandered around the first floor for a bit looking for something even slightly entertaining I went to the basement to see if that was a more fruitful field. It was not.

Le Dénouement

 My friend was pretty rattled by my early morning return and predicament. She was even more worried that the owners of the house and the parents of the children were going to be back the next morning and there was little chance that they would be understanding about a strange boy sleeping in their house. She also could not send me back into the storm cold, wet and tired. She got me some dry clothes and put mine in the dryer, she put me in a unused downstairs bedroom and told me that I would have to leave at six in the morning. I was just glad I was not dead so that seemed like a fair deal and four hours of sleep was more then I had in my narrowly averted past-future; freezing in a car off the side of the road. I was still scared about being stuck on the side of the road even though it was over and I was in a relatively warm bed with a strange man's clothes on trying to go to sleep. At 5:45 my friend came downstairs to kick me out before the kids saw me or the adults came home. I changed back into my now dry clothes and was heading out into the clear blues and purples of an early winter morning. I decided to try for one more kiss before I went but she was not really in the mood for that at the moment and I was kiss dodged and gently pushed towards my sometimes miraculous car. The tough old rattletrap started up and I drove back into town got gas and drove home the safer but longer lowland route to the East. The roads were clear and dry when the sun came up and I considered my situation sighed, smiled and decided that life was not so bad sometimes, not so bad at all.  

Redemption

 Cold and panicked, I got out and looked over the situation. The car had come off the road and slid sideways down a pretty steep embankment and the snow was coming down hard. I hiked up the road and looked up and down in the eerie light of the snowstorm and looked in vain for five minutes for the redemption of some headlights. I didn't really think there was going to be a truck passing in the middle of the night on a deserted road but I was hoping for miraculous redemption. I went back and got into the car and started it to see how much gas I had left, about a quarter of a tank. In that car a quarter tank meant a very long time driving but I was not sure if it would last the six or seven hours I needed until morning. I decided that I just needed to try and drive out get back on the road and drive back to the house my girl was baby sitting in. I got out and cleared the tires the best I could which meant I was now soaking wet and freezing. I got back in the car and said a prayer, turned the car on and then tried to drive up the embankment. I tried to drive strait up it and slid sideways and killed the engine again. I was so cold and tired that I felt defeated and put my head down on the steering wheel and cried. I pulled myself together and reasoned that the angle was too steep to go strait up so I would have to go sideways a couple of hundred feet and slowly crest the ridge. The problem there was that I couldn't see what was in front of me and the snow was still filtering down cutting visibility to just a few feet in front of me. I decided it was too late to have another plan so I once again went with the ram-it-home school of engineering and straitened the wheel gunned the engine and drove like a crazy person hard forward and slightly to the left. After an interminable ten seconds I felt the car crest the ridge and the tires go back to just slipping on snow and not snow and gravel. I drove the six miles back into town and luckily remembered the way back to my girlfriend's. II had been gone an hour and a half so it was really late now and she was not interested in answering the door while she was all alone at night in a farm house. I knocked and knocked shivering and yelling that it was me and for her to answer the door and let me in. she finally got up the courage to look out and see who it was and then let me in. I told her what had happened and I called my mom to let her know I would not be coming home. This would have been the part where I should have apologized and told her I was sorry for lying and that I almost died because I was an idiot. Instead I told her that I when I was driving home from my friends house in the snow storm I had slid off the road got saved and was now back at his house and going to spend the night. The main problem with that story was that on her side of the mountain it was not snowing which made my story just a little bit implausible. I countered her observation that it was not snowing with a clever tale of black ice and a small amount of snow. She sounded skeptical but I told her I was cold and tired and was going to bed and I would be home in the morning.   

A Secret Date and Snow Storm

 The rest of the date was boring, we went to a dance where no one danced and then to a friend's house to not watch a movie while the more committed couples made out and the rest of us sat around awkwardly passing time. I got a single kiss and hug for my troubles, rip-off. She was much warmer on the phone after that and she kind of thought we were a couple. Two weeks after the date dance she invited me to come over and hang out with her while she babysat some young children while their parents were out of town for the weekend. Alone with a girl in the house for the weekend? Yes, please and thank-you. I Wanted to go and hang out but my mother might naturally ask all sorts of silly questions about why a sixteen-year-old was going over to stay at a house with a seventeen-year-old while the adults were gone. I was hoping something moderately to very naughty so I threw her off the trail with that old chestnut of duplicity – the lie. I told her I was going to a town in the opposite direction to hang out with boys. The double switch of place and company was intended to throw her so far off the trail as to keep her safely in the dark. I took the Tercel wagon and drove the shorter but more desolate and dangerous route over the mountain to Delta. I got there okay after a little over an hour and what I hoped would be a snuggly kissy evening turned into helping babysit until 11 when the little terrors finally went to sleep. Now, I thought would be the time. She thought we should just cuddle and talk. Which we did until 1 am when I thought I should head home to keep the illusion that I was safely and unsneekily where I had said I would be. I walked outside only to find that in the time I had not been making out with my sorta girlfriend it had snowed 3 inches. We were in a rural part of a rural town on a weekend night so the chances of the roads being cleared was roughly nope, bordering on laughably nope. I decided to disregard the weather and drive home any way because in the calculus of youth getting home and staying ungrounded is more important than risking death. I got one more fairly chaste kiss and then I was off into the still falling snow. I drove back to town which was dark and abandoned with only a splattering of porch and street lights to color the almost white out snow yellow. I drove out of town and onto the forty mile stretch of basically uninhabited and probably untraveled till morning road. The snow had completely obscured the lines and all I could see was the tops of the sticks that marked the sides of the road that lead to the top of the pass and through a small town and then on through three more small towns and then home. I had only one working headlight and I was leaning as far forward as I could to strain to see the markers and to keep my increasingly unsteady car on the road. About six miles outside of town the road turned and I did not and I drove down an embankment twenty or so feet until I bumped into something that was covered in snow. The car jolted to a stop, stalled and died. I had not seen another car since I left my friend's babysitting house and I was stuck off the side of the road in a snowstorm woefully under-dressed to spend the night in a car or walking to find help. I had on some jeans and a long sleeve shirt because when I had left it was a reasonable warm fall day and no snow in sight. I was really scared it was getting cold, it was very dark and the only person who knew where I was thought I was driving home and would not check to see if I made it there safely. I was in a bad way.   

Fellow Long Hairs Engaged In A Battle of Wits

 After We hit it off at a free for all dance my new romantic interest from Delta invited me to come with her to a date dance at her school. I agreed because I thought it might be a good opportunity for some sexy time and the upshot of having a distant girlfriend is that you can have a local one as well and no one will ever know. What I forgot about was the territorial pissing of the local hillbillies and their shriveled and under-developed senses of humor. On date dances it was usual to go as a group, do an activity, go to dinner, go to the dance, and then do an after activity. Quite a commitment of time and money and there is no guarantee you will have fun or like your date's friends and their even more distantly associated boyfriends. I thought it would be okay and I was wrong. I drove down in the early afternoon in my mom's Toyota Tercel wagon which is basically the ugliest car ever produced in the history of the world. When I rolled up my date came out and gave me a hug and was generally pretty cuddly which I took as a good sign. I met her mom and dad and then she rode with me to meet her friends to go ride some ATV's. We got to her friend's boyfriend's house and the mood got downright chilly when I walked in. I might mention that I had long hair at this point in my life and in deep hillbilly country long hair was supposed to be incorporated into a nice well permed mullet not some faggy surfer look. While we waited for the rest of the couples a few of the guys bolstered in their courage by their numbers started to make louder and louder asides about how I looked like some kind of skater queer and that my car was also homosexual. It seemed like they were hoping to start a fight and I did not like my odds. The trick to avoiding fights when you are a smart ass is to not look like you want to avoid the fight, bullies are easily spooked by confidence. Truth be told not many people really want to fight they just want to stand over someone and bark so that heir friends can see how tough they are. I took the offensive and walked up to the three boys making the asides and introduced myself and acted like I never heard there stage whispered insults. They had no idea what to do when directly confronted and started to squirm and fidget as I engaged them in some small talk. As a subtle jab about the long hair double standard I asked the ring leader about his ramen noodle looking luxuriantly shiny mullet if it was naturally curly or a perm. 

Seriously, his hair looked exactly like this but less delicious.

He was caught off guard and replied that it was a perm. I pretended to be fascinated that guys got perms and followed up with a question about weather he went to the salon for that or if his mom did it. I also asked how often it needed to be touched up to remain in top form. He was at a complete loss seeing that he was not on the gay looking hair high ground and was clearly uncomfortable with the tack this conversation was taking. His two friends were obviously the small fish and with their leader being interrogated about beauty regimens they became so uncomfortable that they just laughed uncomfortably and made weak jokes about how it was funny that he got perms from his mom. They lost interest in the conversation and wandered off and left me to my own devices to chat up the ladies as we waited, in vain as it turned out, for the rest of the crew to show up for the ride. Then we went to dinner.

Picking Up Parking Lot Girls

 One day when my friends and I should have been in class we were tooling around the parking lot instead. The bell had rang so we were going to head back in and go to the next class when we we stopped by a couple of strangers in a beater of a car. I had been told never to talk to stranger in a car because they will kidnap you but these strangers were pretty good looking girls so I decided to relax my caution just a touch and see if they might kidnap me and, God willing, perhaps molest me. It was evident pretty early on that these girls had one thing on their mind, and disappointingly it was getting directions back to the freeway so that they could go home. Not every random encounter ends in a fling, this one had to simmer. We gave them directions but also got their phone numbers so we could chat them up at a distance. Back in the pre-cell phone days we had to all talk on the same land line on different phones or do some party line action. I did not have party line so a friend and I got on the portable and corded phone and dialed up the mysterious strangers. The beautiful thing about hormonal motivation is the prospect of calling a complete stranger with no plan about what to talk about seemed like a reasonable undertaking. I dialed, Delta the town an hour away where the girls hailed from and the cute blonde girl answered. She said she had been hoping we would call and asked which one I was when I described myself she seemed disappointed and asked if the tall one of my friends was there. He was, and I was not impressed with here taste in men. My main problem I think is that I have a high voice and an abrasive manner that usually has a polarizing effect on people who know me. I think calling it polarizing might give the impression that my personality sorts out people roughly equally into like and dislike camps. I have checked the numbers and I think the evidence shows that I am more of an acquired taste and some people don't have the intestinal fortitude to stick out the rather rigorous initiation phase of being my friend. After I was spurned in favor of my deeper voiced, taller friend I became even less nice. If you are familiar at all with girls you know that many of them are inexplicably drawn to jerks, she happened to be one of them and the change of tactic drew her in. When we made plans to meet up with her and her friends at a dance at a town that roughly split the distance she was obviously swayed in her preference and spent the night dancing with me and laughing at my jokes. I guess that I had been incorrect in my original assessment about her defective taste in men. See? I can admit when I was wrong.     

CB James

There was a process of correcting papers in our physics class that saved our teacher even the precious little effort required of her. We would take our tests, homework, or quizzes and pass them to a fellow student who would write CB -meaning 'Checked By'- and then their name at the top so there was a chain of custody so that if there was a mistake the offender could be sought out and beaten. Actually it was just a ruse on the part of our lazy teacher to scare us into honesty and it did not work on me. When I had not done homework I would pretend to pass my undone worksheet to the left and right and then switch my neighbor's papers and as she read the answers I would fill them in give myself a 100% and then write CB James at the top and turn it in with the rest. James had a well earned immaculate reputation and wholly unimpeachable character so that is why I employed his name in my ruse. It was the fact that I used James's name that ultimately foiled my plans for world domination. One day when our sluggard teacher was feeling particularly lazy she told us to read quietly while she talked on the phone in her office. She asked James to come up and take the huge pile of unrecorded homework and input it into the grading program because she had some urgent shirking to do before her dereliction appointment later that day. He must have been surprised to learn that he had corrected each and every one of my homework worksheets, returned a perfect score on each and then crudely forged his own name at the top after CB. He was so interested in this strange phenomenon that he brought it to our teacher's attention. She called me to the front of the class and asked how such a strange thing came to happen. It was one of those cases in which the idea of being caught never crossed my mind so when I was interrogated I went blank and was at a loss for words, which for me was a pretty big deal. The traitorous bullshit center of my brain displayed cowardice most unseemly and deserted in the face of the enemy leaving me to stammer something about it being a joke. She was mostly uninterested so she decided to give me a trial by ordeal to see if I had cheated and wrote three problems from the homework on the board and then asked me to work them in front of the class. Oh, the physics gods were kind that day and had muddled her mind into making a classic blunder, I loved nothing more than displaying my intelligence for an audience and you would not believe how hard it was to get a captive audience in the wild to observe physics and calculus. Chalk in hand I deftly worked every problem to perfection because I hated worksheets not physics and I had this stuff down cold. She was irritated that her plan didn't work and gave me credit for all my cheating which propelled me to the top five in the class. The lesson I learned here, years before Lance Armstrong made it popular was 'Cheat to Win'.    

Do You Think This Hurts Woodchuck?

 In my physics class I was not learning anything, it was an intro class for juniors and seniors and we were learning stuff that my science teacher had covered in seventh grade. I was bored, bored, bored. The teacher was one of those ladies who assumes because she has terrible personal hygiene and has no friends that she must be smarter than anyone else. She was not smart but really officious and condescending. One time I tried to engage her in a conversation about t he fallibility of scientific knowledge and she told me we know for a fact that science is right now even though it had been wrong in the past. I pointed out that there was no way for a local observer to infer universal truths and she said we definitely could. I couldn't understand why she was so ignorant of her own field and may have told her that. We were not friends. She is not the point of this story however it was a little girl who play Woodstock in the school's production of a play about Charlie Brown. She was absolutely and almost cruelly cast to type in that she was petite, skinny and birdlike. She seemed like an okay gal but she sat close to me and a friend of mine who were bored so we would give her grief. I would ask what it was like to play a woodchuck in the play. She would correct me in an exasperated tone and tell me it was Woodstock. She would ask if I had ever even seen a Charlie Brown cartoon or comic. I lied and said no. I would ask her how much wood she was required to chuck for the role and she would roll her eyes. I think she liked the attention. At some point our extreme boredom and young missus woodchuck came together in a joke that caught on more widely. While I was sitting back in my chair the zipper on my pants was curling up into a funny bulge which I started pulling into a more dramatic shape. Out of the blue I asked, “Hey Woodchuck, do you think this hurts?” and then punched my fists together on the fabric bulge over my crotch. She laughed and said I was a retard and then told me to stop. I reset the bulge and then made a big deal of winding up to give it a hard smash. She giggled and told me to stop. At that point my friend started doing it on his pants and then the third boy at the table of four joined in and soon we were all laughing and getting scolded. I demonstrated the joke to someone out in the hall at lunch and told the back story about asking Woodchuck if she thought it hurt. In the communication it was confused into calling pulling up a bulge in your pants and punching it between your fist a woodchuck. I don't know how long it went on for but it was still around when my wife came through the school four years later because she told me that punching a bulge in your zipper was called a woodchuck. My legacy of pseudo crotch punching.  

The Ram-It-Home School of Car Mechanics Fails

 I don't know ho widespread the term 'digging' is for off-road driving but that is what we used to describe what we were up to that day we drove to Forebay. Here is a typical/hypothetical conversation that will put our hillbilly slang into context:

“Hey, you guys go sloughing (to skip school for fun) to go diggin' up to Forebay?”, asks a typical/hypothetical hillbilly who had been left out of the sloughing and digging.

“Yes”, would be the typical/hypothetical response from the typical/hypothetical me who had indeed gone sloughing and digging.

Hope that cleared it up for you.

After we drove up to Forebay and the muffler which was already leaky broke most of the way off and was dragging on the road putting off plenty of sparks. We were drivign down the canyon screaching and blazing so I decided to drive around in a muddy field on the side of the road to try and finish off the muffler. We drove and stuck and unstuck the car for about an hour and that stupid muffler was still hanging on by a tread but some of the guys had to get home so we drove the six miles back home grinding off the muffler slowly. When we got to my friend Jordan's house I climbed under the car with some tools to try and unbolt the mostly loose muffler but the ripping and dragging had jammed up the bolts and they refused my gentle coaxing and prolific cursing. My play devolved from a civilized attempt at that most noble of primate arts, tool use; back to what made us the top species on the planet - the ram-it-home school of mechanics. 

Like Hannibal's elephants or Catherine's horse sometimes you just have to go big and then go home.  

I got a long rope and a ratcheting tie strap and connected the muffler to the telephone pole that was by the drive way and I got a running start at driving downhill out of their driveway to snap the exhaust system off. I don't want to bog you down with a lot of high level physics and whatnot but when I hit the end of the hundred foot rope the tatters of the muffler pipe were more then enough to snap my car to a stop and send me pretty hard into the steering column that bloodied my nose, honked the horn and pissed me right off. The people watching were not so angry more entertained if anything. They were all laughing and telling me to give it another go. I invited them to preform a sex act on themselves and to shut up. I gave it one more tentative yank and then unstrapped my rig and drug my muffler home across town and then cut it off with a saws-all like I know how. When my dad asked how the muffler cam off I told him it just fell off when I drove at a reasonable speed over a speed-bump. Must have been loose.  

Forebay

 There was a trail just up the mouth of the canyon behind our school that was the preferred refuge for the hillbilly caste as the avoided the rigors of academia. The trail has since been closed but at the time the only barrier to entry was the deeply rutted and nearly impassable road that all but required a four-wheel drive vehicle. It was a kind of badge of honor to have ridden there in your truck and spent time that should have been spent in the classroom free and in the wild. One day when some friends and I were out on our recognizance tooling around in the Fairmont we decided to give the Forebay trail a try and see if my car could make the trip. It was painfully slow going and it felt like we were stuck a couple of times but we made it to the top where we found a couple of proud truck owners that we had to take down a peg of two because if a lowly two-wheel-drive car could make it then it was not too hard after all. We got back in and rode down making it in one piece which was better than the car. There was a few of the bits that were supposed stuck to the bottom of the car were a lot less stuck there than they were when we had left.  

Plenty of Room in the Trunk

 The Fairmont was a really big car for a two-door sport model and it had a massive trunk. One night when we were going out we smashed 21 kids in the front and back and while it was not comfortable we did not die. One afternoon my brother, some friends and I were going to make a run to the local thrift store for some light low-fashion shopping and we didn't have room for all 8 people who wanted to go without going laps. For 15 and sixteen-year-old boys there was nothing worse then having to go laps with some dude and risk being labeled gay, so that option was right out. One of the boys offered to ride in the truck if we would get him a pillow and a blanket to lay on. We provided him his accoutrements and he loaded up and we closed him in the trunk and hit the road. The Fairmont was close to twenty years old at that point and its exhaust system had seen better days wherein the gasses produced in the engine were gracefully whisked out the butt end of the car with none going into the cabin or trunk at all. Sadly, and almost tragically, those days had passed. When we arrived at the store we opened up the truck to release the luggage traveler to find him semi-conscious and complaining of numbness in his hands and feet as well as blurred vision. I would bet you anything it had to do with all of the exhaust gasses that had leaked into the trunk while we were driving but with no test equipment there with us there is no way to know for sure. We helped him walk over to some shady grass where he said he needed to throw up but he didn't throw up after about five minutes he said he was doing fine and we went to find some ridiculous clothes to buy. Just to make sure we didn't kill him we let out previously trunk only passenger join us even if it meant going laps. Maybe we are insufficiently committed to appearing heterosexual at all times but this was one time when we thought it was better to be apparently gay then dead.  

I Don't Fix Cars

No, no and hell no I will not fix you in a puddle of ice you spawn of car-Satan. 

That same winter, which was particularly wet and sloppy I had the car break down on me. I pulled the car off the road as it was dying at the time I was most interested in getting out of the flow of traffic and I had not noticed that I had parked right in the middle of a ice filled puddle. In these dark days before cell phone ubiquity I was forced to walk along the side of the highway until I came upon house with a telephone I could use. I called my mom who contacted my dad on the radio and he called me back at the house. This is the kind of ridiculous crap that had to go on before you could just pick up the phone and call whom you wanted. He told me that the fuel pump was the problem and that he had known about it and he had actually bought one and it was on the porch. I called my mom back and had her bring me the pump and some tools. She showed up in about an hour at the house where I was holed up away from the weather. She drove me to the car and I confidently jumped into fixing the car. I do not fix cars so I don't know where my unreasonable confidence came from but I was quickly in over my head, literally. I located the old pump but the bolts and hoses were not coming loose and I was cold, wet and honestly on the verge of tears when I dropped the finally free bolt into the puddle I had parked in. I swore, shivered, built up my courage and then plunged into the four inch deep slush puddle to find the bolt. In the way that bolts are never in the place they fell it was not was not in the place where it fell. I stood up with the bold sodden and spirit broken and not in the mood to finish the job. I thought about having to tell my dad it was too hard for me and that steeled my nerves and I plunged into the job again and the hard part had passed I guess because the other bolt was not so hard. The new pump needed to be wiggled in a little but it was not that hard except for my frozen stiff fingers that would not cooperate. Pump in and hoses on I went and sat in my mom's car for a bit while I warmed up enough to see if I had fixed it or if I would have to admit defeat. I didn't think I could mentally handle failure at that point. Warmed a little I went and pleaded a little that the car would start in the way a shade tree, or in this case an ice puddle, mechanic will sometimes do. The gas was a way back from the engine and so I put a little starter in the carburetor to coax it to life and on the first turn it fired up. Hooray! Just kidding it did fire up but it was just burning the starting fluid. Dry again in sputtered and died. Damn. I turned the engine over dry a few times and when it started to sound like the battery would not give anymore I sprayed in a little more fluid. This time it went longer and then died. I decided to push the battery to start the car or at least a glorious death. It tried valiantly and then whir-whir-whired to a halt. I was shivering, it was dark and my car was dead now and my repair didn't work. I laid my head on the steering wheel and cried. I sat there for a few minutes wallowing in self pitty when my mom opened the door and caught me in a vulnerable moment. I tried to compose myself and look like I had not been cryign but I think she knew and told me we should head home and call it a night. We drove home in silence. When my dad and I went back the next day we hooked the car up to his truck for a jump and when I turned it over it roared into action like nothing was wrong. In the piercing sun of a winter morning I felt some degree of pride but a firmer resolution to never, ever, fix a car again. For the most part I have stayed on that particular wagon.        

The Boys and The Hood

 I had access to a couple of different vehicles once I was able to drive. I had the sporty two door ford Fairmont, a beater work truck with a ridiculous hand painted portrait of an elk on the door and a nicer work truck. I usually drove the car but I would go with the nicer work truck if it was available and the elk truck was the dregs of my high-school rides. If it was a date night I would try and spiff up whatever car or truck I was taking with a little low rent detail work and maybe a spritz of my dad's old spice to make it really fancy. One night a friend of mine and I were meeting a coupel of girls for a movie in the next town over and I took the truck because the weather was a lot nasty and I thought that was my best chance to live through the night. We drove over in light snow and watched some movie and I got to hold some hand which means basically mission accomplished. The girls had to head strait home so we couldn't pursue the game any further. We went out to the truck to ride home loaded up, turned the key and not a thing happened. I discovered that I had not turned off the lights after we parked and the battery was flat dead. The street was pretty desolate as you might expect in a blizzard late at night. It took me and my friend twenty minutes to flag down a rescue truck for a jump and we were off. The snow was made up of huge flakes that swirled and blew reflecting the light back into the cab and making it difficult to see the road and more importantly the side of the road. 

Like this, but not so clear and it was pitch dark and plus I was terrified.

We had driven about two miles from the theater to the outside of town where the street lights ended and I was creeping along trying to make it down the road when a gust of wind blew the obviously poorly closed hood and smashed it up against the wind shield. I am not sure if I screamed, or peed my pants, or maybe both. I tried to stop but on the snowy ice the truck started sliding sideways and I couldn't see a thing. It was a helpless and terrifying feeling to be sliding sideways in a white out waiting to see where we ended. We slid to a stop on the side of the road and we got composed shut the hood and tried to finish the drive home. We got about halfway home and I was leaning far forward to try and see through the snow when another gust slammed the hood back into the cab. That time I am certain I screamed the F-word startled out of my snow trance. My friend Dukes-of-Hazzarded out of window and jumped on the hood to close it for good this time, we made it home with no more lid ejections. My dad asked the next morning how it went and I told an abbreviated version that left out the hood smashing. He said he was glad we made it home okay. Sometime in the next days my dad noticed that the hood of the truck was smashed up like someone had jumped on it and the hood was creased like it had slammed into the cab. Curious, very curious. The mystery was never solved, and I tacitly plead the fifth while my dad raged about who could have done this to his truck.  

Octa. . .Pussy

 There was a time in the Bond franchise that the innuendo got a little less subtle and they just started using the word 'pussy' in the tittles and for women's names. This fact played into one of the best unintentional comedy moments of my life. My friend Cole and I were over in the next town over looking for a movie to rent and when we found one we took it up to the checkout girl and she looked up my account which had a late fine on it. Pretty routine for someone of my impeccable self discipline and responsibility. She scrolled down the list to tell me what movie the fine was for and then she started to read the name of the Bond film confidently, “Your late fine is for Octa. . .” and then she saw what the rest of the tittle was and got really self conscious, broke eye contact, lowered her eyes, and whispered, “ . . . pussy.”

Thank-you unsubtle tittle chooser guys you made my life a little better.

It was one of the funniest things I had ever seen or heard so Cole and I instantly broke down laughing. I asked what movie the fine was for again and this time she whispered the whole tittle, with eyes averted and still with the pause, 'Octa. . . pussy'. I can only imagine that she thought we had somehow found, rented, and negligently over kept the only adult film in the immaculately family friendly establishment. She was now worried that the sort of person who would rent something like that was the sort of person who was a pervert and not to be trusted. I asked a third time just to see how long she would do it and she just turned her monitor for me to read the name myself. I composed myself, payed the fine, rented the new movie and headed out laughing. The whole ride home we recounted and repeated the story to ourselves and were almost crying with laughter when we got back to Cole's house. His mom asked why we were laughing, when we told her she said something to the effect that we were idiots. We did not care, it was still hilarious.   

The Bonds of Shrimp

 besides the pure power and unbridled joy of driving being sixteen opened other doors for me namely solo video rental. My own account and my own choices meant that the fare could be a little less family friendly, in theory. Practically with eight, then nine, then eight people living in a mobile home together with one TV smack dab in the middle of the living room meant that the fare was exactly presentable at all times. The biggest use I made of the rental privilege was for absolutely not gay Bond and Shrimp dates with my best friend where no girls were allowed. I say not allowed but it was a little more like they were uninterested and they would have been heartily welcomed if they had shown the least degree of interest. I am not sure how it all evolved but at some point we had a fairly regular gig where we would find one of the James Bond movies that we had not seen yet in one of the three video rental stores in our town and the next one over and then go to the grocery store and buy a pound or two of shrimp. We would head back to his house because he had only one non-mungy brother who wouldn't even ask for some shrimp. They had a room for the TV downstairs that was ideal for watching a movies without people horsing around in front of you or worst of all having my dad come home and making me work instead of entrophicate like I intended. We would boil the shrimp, melt the butter and then fire up the mindless action and misogyny which is the miracle of James Bond. We watched all of the suave sixties bonds with Sean Connery, the goofy campy Roger Moore stuff and the darker Timothy Dalton stuff. The best by far though for absolute ridiculousness was the one off “In Her Majesties Secret Service' with the awful George Lazenby. There is a scene in the movie where George is wearing a kilt and he walks into a room with a lady friend for a little mommy-daddy fun time and the camera pans to his low ankles and in a cliché turned on its head the man's skirt drops around his wool socks in what has got to be the least sexy moment in film history.

Hard to argue with the fashion choices of a guy with twice as many women as I have. 

We laughed and laughed and actually rewound it to enjoy again and again. In two years we watched all 17 of the Bond films that were on tape and even had a new one to go see our junior year. Good times, good good times.