Boone's Farm 1: The Great Coup of 92

It was the summer of 92 when I started drinking Boones with "Jim," and my long-ago girlfriend Alethea (for those of you playing a la casa, Alethea is the girl who cleaned out my house while I was off selling acid to military air traffic controllers). I'd had a series of problems with Alethea, culminating in what Jim still calls "The Great Coup of 92," which was so ridiculous that it seems a fitting starting point for the whole tale.

In the late winter/early spring of 92, I was dating Alethea, and Jim was dating an ex of mine named Natalie. Natalie and Alethea got along like cats and dogs, as most exes do, so when Natalie started to move into the apartment, I moved out, and in with Alethea.

This went nowhere fast, and by Memorial Day of 92 both Jim and I were ready to kill our respective females and return to the halcyon days of the summer of 91, which consisted mainly of taking acid and eating skillets full of crumbled up hamburger meat with our fingers.

Thus, we cooked up a plan. The plan was for me to move out of Alethea's apartment and in with Jim and Natalie. Then, once I was installed, Jim was going to give Natalie the boot. This was rather duplicitous of him, but hey, not my girlfriend, and I didn't have a lot of room to maneuver anyway.

Things went according to plan until about four hours in. Jim got a phone call telling him his uncle had died, and he was needed out of town for the next few days. Nothing to be done about it, but it meant that I was stuck in his apartment dealing with a sobbing Alethea and a VERY pissed off Natalie. And a pissed off Natalie was quite a handful, I assure you (when I arrived with my second load of stuff, there were broken dishes all over every floor, a six pack of beer stuck in the wall, and a screaming match like you wouldn't believe going on outside).

That night, after Jim was gone with his brother (leaving his prized 71 Buick Skylark outside) to the funeral, I spent a lot of time pondering my situation. This was interrupted regularly by threatening phone calls from Natalie, pleading phone calls from Alethea, or check-in phone calls from Jim. Towards the end of the evening, Jim began getting cold feet, and before I went to bed that night he and Natalie were provisionally back together.

Now, this wasn't what I had agreed to; Natalie was a nice girl, but VERY aggressive and outgoing, and not exactly an ideal roommate--even if Jim had been a paragon of virtue, which he certainly was not.

So, a couple of days later, I packed up all my shit again and made the long crawl back to Alethea. I missed the girl, don't get me wrong, but I really felt like this had fallen down around my ears because of the instability of the other member of the coup; but given the weird confluence of events, I can't really blame him.

The girl took me back, as you all know from SATMATC, but with a certain number of hoops to jump through in the process. All of these, in retrospect, pertained to what she considered a "normal domestic arrangement," the main one of which entailed moving out of the apartment and into an actual house, halfway across town. Jim helped me with the heavy stuff, and August of 1992 saw Alethea and I living in sin several miles away from the area that had been my home since I arrived in this benighted city.

There were some good times, granted. I don't remember where we were getting acid, but we were getting a shitload of it, and eating it all. Jim became good friends with Alethea, and for the first month or so, the three of us spent weekends on the porch, drinking cheap wine and enjoying the rest of the summer.

We all three had jobs, but not GOOD jobs, and this need to economize coupled with Alethea's sweet tooth ultimately led Jim and I to the "wine product aisle" at the Classen Liquor Store, conveniently located within walking distance of the house. My first and only love in that aisle: Boone's Farm.